A .38 Colt Cobra revolver, carefully wrapped in newspaper like a profane relic or a freshly caught fish. The object emerges from the darkness of a closet, a spectral residue of an era that no longer exists, if it ever did. The inscription on the grip, "To John Dillinger from his admiring gang," is an ironic epitaph, the seal on an emptied-out myth. Thus begins, with the discovery of a necrophilic fetish, the silent implosion of Glauco, an industrial designer played by a monumental Michel Piccoli in his impassive disintegration. Marco Ferreri's 1969 work is not a film in the narrative sense of the term; it is an autopsy of the everyday, a phenomenological essay on the paralysis of modern man, boxed in by his own well-being.

Glauco returns home. His home is not a refuge but a mausoleum of good taste, a contemporary art installation in which every design object—from Castiglioni's Arco lamps to Le Corbusier's chairs—screams its own aesthetic function, having lost its practical one. It is a blindingly, surgically white environment, a space that seems pre-furnished for absence. His wife, an ethereal and catatonic Anita Pallenberg, lies in bed, ill, almost another piece of inert furniture. Communication has been nullified, reduced to monosyllables and mechanical gestures. The silence that reigns in this bourgeois apartment is not the peacefulness of quiet, but the deafening roar of a pneumatic vacuum, the same void Antonioni had explored with metaphysical melancholy. But where in Antonioni incommunicability was a sickness of the soul manifesting as an elegant existential drift, in Ferreri it becomes a grotesque farce, a physiological breakdown of the system. The man-automaton is no longer sad; he is simply broken.

The central body of the film is an algorithm of gestures. Glauco is hungry. He begins to cook. What follows is one of the most extraordinary sequences in the history of cinema: a long, meticulous, almost documentary-like culinary preparation that transforms into an obsessive ritual. There is none of the convivial joy of Babette's Feast or the sensuality of La Grande Bouffe (which Ferreri would direct a few years later, taking these premises to their paroxysm); there is only the mechanical precision of a self-imposed task to fill the time, to ward off thought. While he cooks, Glauco disassembles, cleans, and reassembles Dillinger's revolver with the same, identical, methodical alienation. The weapon, a symbol of violent, anti-systemic rebellion, is domesticated, demythologized, reduced to just another design object, a complex toy to be handled to kill the boredom.

Into this solipsistic ballet, Ferreri inserts a brilliant metatextual short-circuit. Glauco projects old 16mm home movies. On the white wall of his domestic prison, the grainy images of seaside holidays, of a past life that seems irremediably more authentic, are superimposed on the present. Piccoli watches his younger self, a phantom smiling at him from a lost time. It is a device reminiscent of Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape: contemporary man is condemned to confront the recordings of his own life, incapable of living a new one. History—both the capital-H History of Dillinger and the personal history of amateur home movies—has become a spectacle to be passively consumed, a museum artifact projected on the wall of a cell. Glauco is no longer a historical subject, but a curator of his own failure.

The year is 1969. The echo of global protest, of the French May '68, of Italy's Hot Autumn, resounds outside the windows of that apartment. But inside, everything is motionless. "Dillinger Is Dead" is the most ruthless and lucid diagnosis of the crisis of the intellectual and progressive bourgeoisie when faced with the possibility (or impossibility) of revolution. Glauco is the man who has read Marcuse, who has furnished his home according to the canons of modernism, who possesses the symbols of culture, but who is incapable of translating any of it into action. His only possible form of revolt is not political, not collective, but a purely individual, gratuitous, surrealist gesture. A senseless act of violence that stems from boredom, not from ideology.

When Glauco, after painting the pistol with red polka dots (a Dadaist act that strips it of its final aura of menace, transforming it into a piece of pop art), points it at his sleeping wife, the film reaches its apex of ambiguity. The murder, if it happens, is shown with a glacial coldness, devoid of any dramatic catharsis. It is another action in his repertoire of empty gestures, the equivalent of turning off a light. It is the logical conclusion of his journey of dehumanization: the elimination of the Other as a final, desperate attempt to affirm the Self. Or perhaps it is just a fantasy, a hallucination, the fever dream of a trapped man. Ferreri, a master of the grotesque, denies us certainty, because in Glauco's world, the difference between the real and the imaginary has ceased to matter.

If the homicidal act can seem like a rupture, a liberation, the ending negates it with sublime cruelty. Glauco flees, reaches the sea, and boards a yacht bound for Tahiti. The horizon seems to open up, promising an escape route. But it is the supreme deception. His escape is not toward freedom, but toward another cliché, another consumerist myth: a Gauguin-esque exoticism, the artificial paradise of tourist brochures. On board, he meets an enigmatic cook who speaks to him of an ideal life under the tropical sun. But her expression is vacant, her words sound like an advertising slogan. Glauco has simply swapped the white prison of his apartment for the blue prison of an imaginary ocean. The revolution has failed before it even began, reabsorbed and neutralized into yet another consumer fantasy.

"Dillinger Is Dead" is a terminal work. It is cinema's point of no return on the crisis of modernity, a film that manages to be a sociological treatise, a work of video art, and a thriller of the soul all at once. With its circular and asphyxiating structure, it anticipates the existential geometries of Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, but charges them with a black sarcasm and an iconoclastic fury that is quintessentially Italian. It is a radical, irritating cinematic object that refuses any pandering to the viewer, forcing them to stare into the abyss of their own well-being. Marco Ferreri does not judge his character; he merely records his movements as an entomologist studies an insect under glass. And what he sees, and shows us, is the rigor mortis of a civilization that, having satisfied all its needs, has discovered it no longer has any desires. Except, perhaps, for the desire to pull the trigger. At whom, or at what, has become irrelevant.