Morgan Meis ponders it after viewing Rossellini’s 1954 film Journey to Italy, which follows an estranged couple through the ruins of Pompeii:
The real journey in Journey to Italy is a journey toward death. Ingrid Bergman’s character is confronted by death as soon as she comes to Italy. Death comes toward her from afar. First, death comes in the form of ancient statues in the museum. Then it comes in the form of a funeral procession that passes in front of her car. Death comes again in the form of the cult of death, and the people who live among the skulls and skeletons of the dead at Fontanelle Cemetery. Finally, death comes out of the ground, in the penultimate scene of the movie, as the calchi [plaster casts].
After Bergman’s character and her husband see the calchi, something unexpected happens.
The estranged lovers are able to see one another again. Their eyes are opened. Death, in the final scene of the movie, is transformed into love. This is not a romantic love. It isn’t born of passion or high feelings. It is a love between two people who have come to hate one another, and who have shared a shocking encounter with death.
The implication of the final scenes of Journey to Italy is, therefore, that genuine love has something to do with death or that death makes it possible. Love, in Journey to Italy, does not happen because two people are attracted to one another or find they have similar interests. Love happens because two people who are already married, and antagonistic toward one another, confront the full reality of death. Death opens the door to love. The calchi open the door to love. There is something, Roberto Rossellini suggests with his movie, about confronting the immediacy of death that makes a person, paradoxically, more alive. The person who is shocked into life by death is capable of love, since love, as Rossellini portrays it, is not a feeling so much as a commitment, a commitment to another human being made under the eyes of death. The calchi, surprisingly and finally, are not only emblems of death; they are the promise of love.
Meis’ passage brings to mind the following song from the Mountain Goats, from the album Tallahassee, themed around a despondent, alcoholic couple on the brink of divorce:
The Dish 