I remember having fun trying to unpack that one through wild speculation. Not sure how accurate my reading was (review from blog below), but here it is for posterity.
Marco Ferreri’s Dillinger is Dead is the kind of movie that’s probably more fun to pick apart than to actually watch. The plot is very basic. A man (Michel Piccoli) comes home from work, kills time, kills his wife and begins a new life. That’s about it. Most of the runtime consists of the man roaming around his house, finding ways to pass the time. He makes dinner. He disassembles, cleans, reassembles and gives a new paint job to a gun. He watches home movies. He seduces the maid. To put it glibly, not a whole lot happens. But that doesn’t mean that the movie is boring. Ferreri loads the proceedings with so many symbols that their meanings beg to be unpacked.
The monologue delivered by the man’s colleague in the first scene provides a few clues. The man is a designer of gas masks and works in a factory where they are built and tested. The testing chamber, full of poisonous gas, is a metaphor for the modern industrialized world, his colleague argues. The man’s home, like the testing chamber, is hermetically sealed, isolated from the outside world. The colleague proceeds to criticize the conformity imposed by a consumerist society, specifically mentioning the objectives of film, radio and television, forms of media that the man later enjoys later that night. He also mentions that this consumerist society snuffs out individualism and replaces one’s natural urges with its own, and the man does satisfy a few urges, both polite and profane, over the course of the night.
Is this shaping up to be a consumerist satire, where the poisonous gas of the testing chamber parallels the harmful pressures of a society obsessed with consumption? It does seem that affection for material objects has replaced affection for fellow humans. The man and his wife barely talk, but he spends all night playing with a gun and consuming all kinds of media, while she smooches a fishbowl and pops pills in the few moments she is awake, and their maid dances for a poster of a matinee idol. Playbacks of home movies and audiotapes reveal a further absence of compassion of the man for his wife, as if these forms of media and the tools to create and enjoy them enable a lack of empathy. What little interaction the man has with others over the night is characterized by much less engagement than he shows when interacting with those objects and pieces of media, and his humorous flirtations with suicide betray a lack of appreciation for human life.
The suppression of urges that the colleague spoke of earlier combined with the dependence on consumption and the enclosed, antiseptic quality of the house evoke a lack of potency, which could explain the hero’s fascination with the gun he comes across (the discovery of which is punctuated by newsreel footage of John Dillinger) as well as the bullfighting movies he watches. These objects and images of violence might suggest a more potent form of masculinity that his neutered consumerist life does not afford him. Eventually he does achieve that potency through sex (bedding the maid) and violence (killing his wife) and escapes to the open sea to pursue a new life as a ship’s cook. Cooking is shown as the primary creative act that the man engages in, which might make it a more admirable pursuit, but his painting of the gun and designing of gas masks also quality as creative acts, undermining the wholesomeness of the cooking by association. Further irony comes from the fact that the man’s realization of potency is largely aided by material objects - the gun that kills his wife and the jar of honey that finds its way into the tryst with the maid. And while it seems at first that he escapes his purgatorial existence in his home to the heaven of the open seas, the look of that paradise seem informed by common commercial imagery, and the red tint of the final moments suggests that it might in fact be hell.
A lot of this is extrapolated from the film rather than explicitly argued, and I wouldn’t be surprised if others arrive at completely different, possibly opposing meanings from their viewings. The lack of action and poker-faced style make it difficult for me to confidently reach a conclusion as to what the film is about, and I’m not sure the movie intends for that questioning process to be part of what it’s about. An argument could be made that the meaning of the film could be speculated just as easily from reading a synopsis of the movie as actually watching the movie itself because of how little happens, which puts its cinematic value in question. While I do feel the movie lets the viewer do much of the heavy lifting, I think it’s still worth seeing. The house makes for an engaging space, the symbols have visual power, and the movie works as a cryptic, curated tour with a bemused Piccoli as our guide (he allegedly received little other than blocking directions from Ferreri, and one wonders if he was as baffled by the proceedings as a viewer might be at first). So while I do wish the movie stretched its muscles a little more to draw the viewer in, I can’t say it bored me.