The mental cracks of an unstable mind loom over Michelangelo Antonioni's first color film. But although the protagonist Giuliana (Monica Vitti) is parallel to the film, she is not her student. Red Desert is too unresolved, too contingent, too confusing to be reduced to a purely psychological reading rooted in Western cinematic norms in which expression is distinctly and unambiguously a refraction of the protagonist's mental geometry. The common reading that Giuliana is “mentally ill” mistakenly clarifies and pacifies an instability that the film intentionally, beautifully, fails to quantify. The incorrect assumption unduly emphasizes the individual, the protagonist, as a “special” or “unique” case study who is different from or tangential to the world around him. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay By contrast, Antonioni is the great director of the relationship between the world and the self, particularly of the impact of the world on the self, rather than a bard of the solitary individual at odds with the world (American cinema loves this last). The minds of his protagonists extend expressionistically across the film's physical exterior, but the space of his films projects a mental consciousness that exists outside of its characters, a consciousness locked in dialectical tension with those characters with no obvious answer as to whether the world or the world the character is the primary agent. Antonioni's worlds do not justify their presence by prostrating themselves at the feet of the characters; instead they affirm, question, even demand the characters. And when the character isn't enough, they leave the frame and the film is too fascinated and intoxicated by the world to refuse to follow the protagonist into their new setting; the restful pace over the physical space denies the audience's desire to gift a film to its individual characters and to find catharsis in those characters' actions alone. Antonioni's film is not a portrait of an arbitrarily dissonant individual, but of a dispassionate world with disaffected individuals who bleed into that world like offspring. Antonioni's films are therefore neither argumentative nor conclusive; they interrupt and explain themselves rather than stitching together the loose ends for a solution, a "point". His films do not work according to conceptual edicts on themes and symbols; like a whirlwind and a trance, Red Desert is too unstable in structure and jarringly unbalanced in its lush, brooding color scheme to fit our categories of indexical meaning. A motionless hurricane of inertia, Antonioni evokes something we can only consider, something we can never compartmentalize. Though meditative and languid, Antonioni never dwells on metaphors that connect the dots for the world. It never undercuts unknown covert violence with a literate emphasis on concepts and themes that can be mapped, traced, and explained. Rather, Antonioni's films, like those of Malick, Murnau, Tarkovsky, and many others, are experiential and lyrically evocative rather than mathematically structured to achieve a set goal. Red Desert, though a startling commentary on the apathy of modern boredom, is untainted by the obvious, not eclipsed by fixed meanings. Always eluding us, it asks us not to clarify but to observe, to interact, to float within its mysteries, abandoning its characters and its audience within patterns of light and movement that ultimately resist purpose or identity structured. So, as Vitti stumbles in a state of mental intoxication around an indecipherable fusion of hostile dust and warped modern industry, the overwhelming sensation is decidedly ambivalent. Insurface, the world of the film is trapped in the dialectical tension between the elusive, capacious and repressed nature and the resulting disorder of modernity that violates nature (factories in full operation and polluted smoke violate the landscape and suffuse it with a putrescent green). Yet this forced dialectic between the modern and the old-fashioned or natural is merely a chimerical surface ground for a more metaphysical sense of disequilibrium found in the act of searching the world, acclimating to it, exploring it, rather than compartmentalizing it along specific prefigurations . paths of “nature” and “modernity” or “artifice” Mental categories are not simply analyzed but confused in the way Carlo Di Palma's lush, searing fire-and-brimstone cinematography casually immerses itself between natural deserts and industrial geometry, the all photographed as a wasteland of enormity and intimacy, ecstatic beauty and deadly, infected clouds of horror that are, for Antonioni, inseparable from each other. The cliffs of rocky social outcrops overlooking beaches, the domes of the human head and the industrial, Bauhaus, corrosion of modern human architecture are all photographed in unison to suggest superposition in each, to bleed flesh, earth/stone and concrete, to conceptualize each as a world of beauty and malevolence. Certainly, the film ties boredom to the changing contours of technological development (a change that is, for Antonioni, destabilizing rather than specifically positive or negative) not coupled with a corollary advancement of mental states that can address the flowional and destabilizing nature of progress. But Antonioni's goals are more lyrical than a mere privileging of the past over the present; the plastic beauty of super-saturated reds, yellows, and oranges somehow injects life into this world and only lies about life, erecting a false and overly mediated scheme of artificial beauty that elides something deeper and more sensual. At the same time, for Antonioni, these man-made constructs and the realm of beauty are not mutually exclusive. Exultation can flourish from within the modern world (Antonioni's camera is undeniably fascinated by the corporeal energy of physical spaces, both built and natural). But energy is also disfiguring because modernity redesigns the world and forces people to perceive it in a new way, to keep up, to acclimatise to new spaces. Fantastic, otherworldly wonder and frigid alienation swirl in the collective narcosis of contradiction, where the only apparent solution to a world adrift is to wander adrift in a liminal state between waking and sleeping. A liminal state that is Giuliana's destiny, her stasis syndrome, even during her temporary escapades with her husband's colleague Corrado (Richard Harris). It is left to struggle between the rust of modernity and humanity oxidized by the rhythms of existential editing (the shots exist in a perpetual crisis over where they will end up, what to follow, rather than proceeding along a presumed narrative path). Red Desert, like many of Antonioni's fables of the 1960s, externalizes destruction not in a diegetic event (a hurricane, a meteor, a giant lizard) but in the poisonous paralysis of a formal visual collapse as the camera distinctly refuses, or struggles to do it. , locates humanity more in the frame. By drawing attention away from people while hinting at the lethargy of their very souls, Red Desert evokes the characters' wavering, dormant, and even unnoticed desires and suggests that emotional fulfillment should be located not from within the human being but from without , from the physical. world and perception of it in which Antonioni's cinema is like this..