Call Center Blues: Italian Cinema and the New Economy

Abstract

Grounded in theories of workerism (operaismo) and post-workerism (autonomia and post-autonomia), this paper examines how Federico Rizzo’s Fuga dal call center and, more extensively, Paolo Virzì’s Tutta la vita davanti, both films from 2008, register the shift from material to immaterial labor in the twenty-first century. In both films, the call center replaces the factory as the space of labor; it is the privileged site where relational and affective skills, once not considered economically exploitable, become a source of surplus value, one that is gendered feminine. Against the exterior backdrop of a postmodern Rome and with interiors that mimic the non-spaces of the airport and television studio, Virzì stages work in the world of the hyper-real, which has become reality itself. Though they are works of fiction, heirs to the tradition of the 1960s commedia all’italiana, both films engage with an “ethics of the real” as Lucia Nagib has theorized it, and are concerned with addressing the socio-economic condition of a twenty-first-century class-in-the-making, the precariat, and its uncertain future.