Inside the movie Baarìa by Giuseppe Tornatore we can find a superb example of what Nietzsche used to call passive nihilism, a thought that many other philosophers discussed (from Weber to Heidegger, up to Sartre) with different terms and conclusions but with similar approaches. Somewhere around the second part of the movie, Nino Terranuova (brother of Peppino, the main character of the movie) goes into a drugstore asking for something that will make him die. The chemist asks him what happened, why he wants to die, and Nino says, “Nothing, that’s why I wanna die.”
Now, it’s worth taking a moment to better understand who Nino Terranuova is. Nino is a 40-year-old man who struggled for years against hunger, poverty and fascism, and who fought World War II as private soldier. He had survived all this, but just when all this was over he decides to die. Why? The answer concerns the nothing. The nihil, the uncanniest of all guests, as Nietzsche once put it, or the delicate monster, as Baudelaire used to call it. But, what does nothing stand for? I mean, Nino spent his all life surrounded by nothing. No food. No money. No job. No freedom. No life. No time. Nothing at all. Nevertheless, he never thought of committing suicide. He never thought of saying no to life. He always dealt with the nothing and he always did it with a big smile on his face.
But this time, things are completely different. Because this time the nothing was not out of him but inside of him. It wasn’t something external, visible, clear, perceptible. It was something inner, invisible, hidden, intangible, and for all these reasons, more frightening than war, fascism or hunger. Nino’s “no” to life didn’t concern something other from him but something inside of him that he wasn’t aware of. An unconscious grief (as Freud would put it) that Nino could feel in all its heavy weightiness but without being able to perceive its object.