Confronting the Plutonic Void via Antonioni's "L'Avventura"
Canadian politics is a dumpster fire right now, so I decided to just nerd out on Michelangelo Antonioni's Plutonic masterpiece L'Avventura, instead.
“Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.”
— Simone Weil, from Gravity and Grace.
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
— “The Archaic Torso of Apollo” by Rainer Maria Rilke
There is so much to unpack, astrologically, in the swarm of this moment. Except, the coordinates keep shifting, like a murmuration of starlings unspooling what is a secret aesthetic pleasure. As soon as you perceive a figure, or motif, it melts back into the decentralized sprawl. This is Jupiter in Pisces, but also the rusted machinery of Pluto in Capricorn, bleeding out in plumes of squid ink. So much to purge, release, and seed in those last, volatile degrees of Capricorn.
A couple months ago, when Jupiter first ingressed into Pisces, I began to write a piece on the transit (and never finished it). Nevertheless, I wanted to reproduce a couple paragraphs here, partly because I’m touched by their wonder at the first stirrings of this auspicious transit:
I finally felt the shift of Jupiter returned to its watery domicile — its lively, spangled pond water — during a wander on a rare sunny day. Snow kept falling in sudden plumes from branches, leaving fleet scintillations in the air. Something between silk, smoke, and photons: cheerful sprites that threw an over-the-shoulder glance, then were gone.
Somehow, there were wind chimes everywhere too, as rushes of bells heralded the sun before it was swallowed by the mountains again. Even the frozen snow felt spring-loaded, tensile — absorbing and returning my footfalls in endless, sensual loops.
The erotics of these brief veils of snow, performing their vanishing so coquetishly. This to me is Jupiter in its femine domicile: a brief mirage, or insight, or coup de grâce that is gone as soon as it’s registered. We lead with mystery, bewilderment, and a fruitful curiosity. We perceive a golden thread of loss that tethers all peak experiences. We are awed by this evanescence: the impossibility to grasp, bottle, possess, or comidify that which makes life miraculous. Even in this clenched, Saturnian epoch.
Admittedly, the Saturnian grind of another sober, blue stocking winter has diminished some of this sprightliness (though I have faith it will return in Pre-Raphaelite Girl spring). I have never felt so blocked, as an astrologer — even as a poet — in offering commentary on the incoherence of these times.
Perhaps this blockage also has something to do with the North Node’s hungry ghost roving the cosmic hinterland of my 12th house now. This is a place where language’s hieroglyphs warp and bleed. It’s also a space of considerable psychic debris. To top it all, I’m also experiencing the once-in-a-lifetime transit of Neptune squaring my AC-DC, which has made crisp, Mercurial declamation rather elusive.
However, I’ve also noticed an uptick in the synchronicity of poems, films, (even the TikTok algorithm) serving up collieries for the perplexing astrological weather. Neptune presides over the magic of deep image, the collective unconscious, and the film medium after all. I’ve been making steady inroads into the Criterion Collection, and what follows will be an attempt to unpack the archetype of Pluto through one of my all time favourite films: L’Avventura.
This is the planet, as you know, which has provided the backdrop for the peregrinations of Venus, Mars, and Mercury through the haunted plinths of Capricorn — Ozymadius’ great works levelled by the sand. We cannot address the cosmic lover’s extended quantum entanglement without considering Pluto’s entropic dismantling of the Capricornian status-quo. If Pluto in Capricorn’s thesis statement was the 2008 banking crisis, then covid (unleashed by the Pluto-Saturn conjunction) has shaped, and accelerated, its increasingly volatile coda. Note how these times seem to rhyme.
If it feels like we’re in a particle collider of every dystopian plot ever, blame Pluto cleaning house at the end of its long sweep of Capricorn, and preparing for the singularity it will usher in through Aquarius. Whatever Mars and Venus want to achieve in the coming weeks, they must confront the void first. Our impulses now, in both love and war, may be driven, (however subconsciously), by the siren call of thanatos. An irresistible death drive. Or the dangerous game of sunk costs.
In understanding Pluto’s archetype it’s helpful to consider the synchronicity of world events during its discovery in 1931. The Great Depression, the heyday of gangsters, and the rise of Hitler’s nazi party all swirled around Pluto’s birthing into the collective consciousness. Mass media also became more prevalent after Pluto’s discovery, as we shifted from radio into a culture of glittering images designed to tweak our most primal drives.
The neutron was also discovered in 1932, which gave humanity both incommensurable power and the ability to destroy itself. Richard Oppenheimer, who helmed the Manhattan Project, had Pluto prominent in his first house in the sign of Gemini: the splitting of the atom is echoed in the archetype of the twins. He would later remark that the nuclear bomb brought to mind a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”.
Richard Tarnas, in a recent appearance on The Astrology Podcast, discussed Pluto’s strange synecdochal warping: the nesting of incredible power, or forces, within the infinitesimal. That we all now carry a super computer in our pockets, is just one example. Nuclear fission is another. Gain of function research, and lab leaks, surely fit within the category too. Pluto, as the god of ore and precious metals, also presides over the concentration of vast riches within compact gemstones (or a handful of billionaire elites). In fact the glyph of Pluto — a crescent placed above the cross of matter, suggestive of spiritual reception to transformational forces beyond the material world — resembles the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb itself.
Death, decay, regeneration, evolution, contagion, waste, obsession… these are just some of the cookbook terms that apply to Pluto. However, I want to unpack an overlooked, but in my mind crucial key to its archetype: that of absence — particularly the felt presence (and even seductions) of the void.
James Hillman provides some useful intel on the invisibility of Pluto:
“Hades was the wealthy one, the giver of nourishment to the soul. Sometimes, he was fused with Thanatos ("Death) of whom Aeschylus wrote, "Death is the only God who loves not gifts and cares not for sacrifices or libation, who has no altars and receives no hymns..." On vase paintings when Hades is shown, he may have his face averted, as if he were not even characterized by a specific physiognomy. All this 'negative' evidence does coalesce to form a definite image of a void, an interiority or depth that is unknown but nameable, there and felt even if not seen. Hades is not an absence, but a hidden presence-even an invisible fullness.”
Friedrich Nietzsche’s oft quoted “battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you” further speaks to the invisible, but no less potent, power of Pluto to compel, impel, and even energetically dismantle. Nietzsche has a very tight Sun-Pluto opposition, as it turns out.
Indeed, something compelled me this past week to revisit the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian auteur who created a startling new film language with the controversial premier of L’Avventura in 1960. I rewatched the film as Mercury-Pluto was perfecting, struck anew by the cold, clarity of its vision and the palpable sense of emptiness — the sickening void — that the film orbits around.
Sure enough, Antonioni has a strong Pluto signature in his chart. The lord of the underworld is placed a few degrees from his AC, in Cancer (he’s famous, after all, for his luminous muse, Monica Vitti who died just days after Venus stationed direct). Pluto also tightly squares his chart ruler, Mercury. A planet on, or near, the ascendant will be strongly expressed, shaping Antonioni’s cinematic eye and thematic concerns: existentialism, negative space, alienation, degradation, the swallowing of ancient cities by the sporing of 1960’s brutalist architecture, and the dwarfing of his film subjects by bleak, modern landscapes, (to name a few).
Mercury itself is combust the Sun, in the 5th house of pleasure, which doubles down on the Plutonic dismantling of meaning, dialogue and narrative structure. Befitting the House of Good Fortune, many of Antonioni’s films follow a drifting class of bourgeois dillitents whose capacity for delight, or human connection, seems to have curdled. The dazzling, washed out vistas of L'Avventura echo his Mercury, scorched and swallowed by the Sun. Planets that are combust will behave Plutonically: they liaise between liminal realms, and concern themselves with processes of breakdown and transformation.
The iconic opening shot of L’Avventura (itself microcosmal of his entire film language) sees Lea Massari, as Anna, emerging from an immaculate Italian garden into a barren field of half-finished modern apartment blocks. The dome of a magnificent cathedral flickers in the heat-shimmer of the middle distance. Her father comments that these vestiges of the old world will soon be swallowed, and there’s no outrunning it.
It’s interesting to note the predominance of trains, boats, hotel rooms, even a crumbling shepherd’s hut as the film progresses, its drifters unable to outpace the film’s devastating, and haunting central loss. Antonioni’s locations — which are often more expressive than the actors themselves — linger on these architectural sutures between the ancient and modern worlds of a scarred, and haunted Post-War Italy.
Richard Brody describes the “formation and deformation of the modern mind through a media-infused industrial aesthetic”, as a central theme in Antonioni’s work post-1950 (recall the emergence of mass media during Pluto’s discovery). He goes on:
“Antonioni captured a new bourgeois society that shifted from physical to intellectual creation, from matter to abstraction, from things to images, and the crisis of personal identity and self-recognition that resulted. Vitti was the perfect embodiment of his coldly luminous vision of profundity without depth, of intellect blocked from emotion.”
What would Antonioni make, then, of the endless march of images Plutonically packed into our smartphones — a portable panopticon and box of mirrors that may just be picking our souls apart? I’ll let Chris Gabriele, of the brilliant Memes Analysis, expound on the Plutonic seductions and entropy of algorithms (this digression loops back to themes in L’Avventura, I swear!):
Befitting Pluto, (and that molten, combust Mercury), the exposition of Antonioni films is driven more by what isn’t said: the gaze that isn’t met, and the inability of its characters to articulate their inner landscapes, or to express genuine emotion (but in bursts of brittle pantomime). Shots of the backs of heads dominate, and oblique camera angles unsettle the viewer with their uncanny lack of focus (or, perhaps, the subversion of where we expect the cinematic gaze to be centered).
Truth is uncovered slowly in an Antonioni film — if revealed at all. Any sort of catharsis or emotional payoff is often subverted, and the questions posed remain open. Pluto can represent unspeakable, even horrifying truths whose black holes we can only speak around — to the point of wilful blindness, compulsive distraction, or deflection.
In fact, the etymology of Pluto echoes this sense of drift and distraction: from the Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to flow, float, drift, run.” Antonioni’s Plutonic eye (honed in documentary and steeped in Italian neorealism) often drifts from the vectors of the narrative. It strays from more conventional shots that foreground the action of the plot, or the emotions of its lead actor.
His protagonists are often framed in long shot, dwarfed by expressionistic tessellations of modern architecture, or the sun-washed crags of a desolate island. The camera often has a restless, scanning quality — as if an alien sentience were harvesting data from the whole of its environment— quite unmoved by the petty, human dramas of the characters who happen to be in its field of vision. Pluto cares not about your plans.
Martin Scorsese, in his wonderful review of L’Avventura (one of my favorite pieces of film criticism), picks up on the fractal-like movement of Antonioni’s narrative structure, which seems to whorl and digress — the classic arc of narrative progression constantly collapsing then splintering off into new, unsettling patterns:
“The more I saw “L’Avventura” — and I went back many times — the more I realized that Antonioni’s visual language was keeping us focused on the rhythm of the world: the visual rhythms of light and dark, of architectural forms, of people positioned as figures in a landscape that always seemed terrifyingly vast. And there was also the tempo, which seemed to be in sync with the rhythm of time, moving slowly, inexorably, allowing what I eventually realized were the emotional shortcomings of the characters — Sandro’s frustration, Claudia’s self-deprecation — quietly to overwhelm them and push them into another “adventure,” and then another and another. Just like that opening theme, which kept climaxing and dissipating, climaxing and dissipating. Endlessly.”
I’ve been skirting around it, but the most subversive narrative move in L’Avventura, (spoiler alert), was Antonioni’s decision to vanish the actor positioned as the film’s lead — Lea Massari, the cast’s biggest star. (Hitchcock would attempt something similar in Psycho, released around the same time). As a group of friends sail a yacht to a bleak, volcanic island off the coast of Sicily, the lovers Sandro and Anna have an argument from their perch on the rocks. Sandro falls asleep after, under the soporific weight of the Mediterranean sun, and when he wakes Anna is gone — one of cinema’s long-standing mysteries. Even the search for Anna, which dominates the film’s first hour, feels distracted — unfocussed.
Then the plot takes a jack-knife turn as Sandro gathers Claudia, (played by Antonioni’s muse, and then lover, Monica Vitti), into a passionate kiss in the lower cabins of the yacht. Claudia’s betrayal of her close friend Anna is never explained. However, it’s the further violation of genre expectations that truly shocks, and unsettles — even to this day. What we think will be a detective story mutates into a film centered on a love affair, though we will see that even that generic center will not hold. The Plutonic, Anna-shaped void that Antonioni claws into the film early on, haunts the relationship at every turn. This central, unspeakable transgression taints their passion with disgust, shame, and a pathological hunger.
The initial screening of the film itself was met with an uproar at Cannes. There were boos, hisses, and walkouts, devastating both Antonioni and Vitti. Again, I think this speaks to the Plutonic force of the director’s vision: perhaps these characters, in their distracted lurch from pleasure to pleasure — unable to connect, but hungry for simulations of intimacy all the same — cut too close to home for the audience. Antonioni’s black-pilled, scrying mirror sent its audience spiraling rather too deep into the shadows of their own psyche.
Consider the lush, technicolor spectacles that dominated Hollywood through the fifties: in the post-war period, cinematic escapism was the ticket. However obliquely, Antonioni dared to address the nihilism, and complete collapse of cultural meaning, in the wake of mechanized warfare.
Pluto-Saturn, by the way, opened the portal to both World Wars: WWI (and the Spanish Flu) dawned with the conjunction in Cancer and WWII with the fixed square in Taurus and Leo. The Second World War, in particular, was a Plutonic point of no return in terms of the horrifying efficiency with which human life could be dispatched. How to wrap one’s mind around the shadows of vaporized humans painted onto the walls of Hiroshima, like the voids of images burned into film celluloid itself?
There’s so much to say about this film, but I want to remark on L’Avventura’s final sequence. The lovers find each other once more, but in the shadow of a further transgression. Sandro sits on a bench, broken, in a garden encircled by the ruins of a pastoral arcade. It’s late … it was always late.
The film’s final betrayal (which feels inevitable given the transgression that seeded the affair), is miraculously forgiven. Antonioni communicates this final moment of simultaneous grace, and searing soul-clarity, with a shot of Claudia’s hand trembling, in close-up, against the void of Sandro’s suit. You never see their faces in a shot together, though both are masks of agony: Sandro is openly crying and Claudia is white-faced, stricken.
As she moves her hand to the back of Sandro’s head, it’s with the violence of a jerk: a rigid, involuntary motion — somehow inhuman. The music swells, a flurry of chimes and strings — as it finally rests on Sandro’s nape with the force of a binding pact. The chimes recall an earlier scene, where Claudia and Sandro wander the belfry of a church, and start ringing its many bells. Miraculously, their call is answered, by a distant church, though the human ringer cannot be seen.
Anna’s ghostly interlocutor impregnates the scene, anew, with her resonant absence. I’m reminded of the W.S. Graham lines that open Denise Riley’s poetry collection, Say Something Back: “Do not think you have to say / Anything back. But you do / Say something back which I / Hear by the way I speak to you.”
The Plutonic archetype is so often revealed in the ways that we deflect, displace, and project our agony — forestalling the painful work of sifting through the shadows within. The ruins that set the backdrop for the film’s final scene are a visual corollary to the entropy of this love affair. Though not explicitly stated, the romance feels like a displaced form of mourning: a way of keeping Anna alive, as her absence becomes the centrifugal force around which the lovers circle.
A further echo of Antonioni’s spiralic narrative pacing (the spiral being a key into the archetype of Pluto itself), is found in the lore of the volcanic island that swallows Anna, without a trace. The Aeolian Islands, off of Sicily, are named for the Greek god Aeolus, the divine keeper of the winds and sovereign deity of the archipelago.
The hero Odysseus visited the island, in book 10 of The Odyssey, and was entrusted with a bag of the storm winds — a protective talisman to ensure his safe voyage home. However, Odysseus’ companions, intoxicated by rumors of the island’s hidden treasure, opened the bag searching for gold. Of course, there was no putting back the careening winds, which blew Odysseus’ ship back to the Aeolian shores. Therein lies the rub with Pluto: the more we try to bury, subvert, or deflect its often inconvenient (even gruesome) truth, the more we’re drawn irresistibly back to the site of the wound. In this way trauma will seek to repeat itself, especially if we’re blind to the pattern.
Though never confirmed by Antonioni himself, I’d argue that this myth provides a narrative vessel of sorts, underpinning the film’s eliding of any clear, emotional pay-off, as well its circuitous pacing. The shocking kiss in the yacht, as scuba divers trawl the island for signs of Anna’s body, could be imagined as the opening of the bag of winds. The lovers choose immediate satiation (and comfort), instead of gazing into the abyss of the film’s central, devastating loss.
It’s a narrative pivot that’s as shocking as it is deeply, and searingly human. There’s certainly the sense, in that final scene, that despite Sandro and Claudia’s distracted wandering across the film’s 2 plus hours, Aeolian winds have carried them back into the belly of the beast all the same. Anna is still gone, her death is still a mystery, and the fates of these lovers have been ambiguously entangled. Whether they support each other’s healing, or self-destruct together, is a question that’s left hanging. However, to end this film on a note of forgiveness was perhaps Antonioni’s most daring narrative stroke.
Speaking of those Aeolian gusts, a sudden cold front has careened into Nelson today on the blades of bitter winds. It’s going to be minus 18 tonight, while the emergency act (essentially martial law) is voted in here in Canada. To say that I’m troubled by my country’s swift descent into authoritarianism is an understatement, but this will be fodder for another post. It’s also the USA’s exact Pluto return tomorrow, on 2/22/2022, in the second house of finances, but I’m sure that’s not news to you. Perhaps its kraken tentacles have seized Canada too.
To end these rather circuitous ruminations, I’d like to share an old Polish saying that a friend of Dark Moon recently revealed to me (which I loved). It goes, Najciemniej pod latarnią: “the darkest place is usually just under the lantern”. I’d encourage us all to reach for those quiet, unsung flickerings of joy. They are always closer to hand than we think. For me, the scrolled vellums of birch bark, and the “clean brain” smell (as my Virgo friend describes it) of crushed pine needles on my daily walk.
And yes, we have never been closer to the edge of that Plutonic abyss (I have never seen Canada more viciously divided). Perhaps the bag of the Storm Winds was opened when we were promised the dazzling treasure of vaccines — an unambiguous way out of the pandemic. Salvation, if we followed The Science with the blind faith of the converted. Many sheltered under the banner of being “on the right side of history” and derived meaning from the sense of a communal (and heroic) war effort against covid.
Now, as the Jupiter in Pisces tides pulls out, to reveal the sheer scale and mess of its oceanic detritus, many are realizing now that the lines were always blurry af. The lockdowns never really worked. The Plutonic wealth transfer from embattled small businesses, to the coffers of our Metaverse overlords, continues apace. The World Economic Forum does a little “penetrating” in Trudeau’s cabinet. Follow the money as always, says Pluto.
We find ourselves, after two years of what has indeed felt like war times, without any clear sense of progress. The vaccines are leaky. The virus’s brilliant swiss army knife possesses tricks too fast for our technology. The full extent of how profoundly our elected officials bungled the pandemic response is becoming clearer by the day, as the inner planets all take counsel with Pluto. Frankly, I believe it’s this betrayal — this systemic breach of institutional trust — that is breaking many people’s minds right now. The desire to construct a shadowy proxy, to absorb the despair and bewilderment that all but overflows, is understandable.
As dark as this day feels, I’d offer the reminder that even as we’re dashed against those volcanic jetties of the wind island again (and again), we have a choice to do it differently this time around. Instead of the immediate dopamine rush of othering, or scapegoating, (or martial lawing), Jupiter in Pisces reminds us that we can choose nuance. We can dwell with the uncertainty and incoherence of this moment, and be humbled by it. We can approach our so-called enemies with curiosity. We can, like Claudia, choose to believe in the soul’s ever-renewing capacity for human connection. And forgiveness. (In other words, take the Jupiter-pill!).
Or, to quote Scorsece’s marvelous review of L’Avventura once more: “And in the final scene, so desolate, so eloquent, one of the most haunting passages in all of cinema, Antonioni realized something extraordinary: the pain of simply being alive. And the mystery.”
Let’s end on a Jupiter in Pisces note: