Mamma Roma - Ending Explained

The tragic arc of "Mamma Roma" is sealed when Ettore discovers his mother's true profession. His pimp, Carmine, returns to blackmail Mamma Roma, demanding money and forcing her back onto the streets by threatening to tell Ettore her secret. When Ettore eventually learns the truth, he is shattered. This revelation destroys his already fragile sense of identity and his relationship with his mother, pushing him completely into delinquency. He rejects the respectable job she blackmailed a restaurant owner to give him and commits a petty theft at a hospital.

Ettore is arrested while sick with a high fever. In prison, he is treated inhumanely, tied to a wooden bed in a restraint cell. It is here that he dies, calling out for his mother. Pasolini films his death as a secular crucifixion, a direct visual homage to Andrea Mantegna's "The Lamentation over the Dead Christ." This elevates Ettore from a simple delinquent to a martyr, a Christ-figure sacrificed by an uncaring modern society. When Mamma Roma learns of his death, she runs home in a state of primal grief and attempts to throw herself out of her apartment window but is held back by neighbors. The final shot is from her perspective, looking out at the dome of the church, a symbol of the salvation she could never attain. The ending reveals that her struggle was always doomed; the societal forces and the weight of her past were insurmountable, making her son's death the inevitable price of her attempt to defy her fate.

While the primary reading of the film is a socio-political critique, other interpretations exist. Some critics have focused on a psychoanalytic reading, particularly regarding the intense, almost incestuous relationship between Mamma Roma and Ettore. Her desperate attempts to control him and the tango scene they share can be viewed through an Oedipal lens, where her smothering love contributes as much to his destruction as any external societal force.

Another interpretation views Ettore not just as a social victim but as a metaphor for a pre-modern, poetic Italy being destroyed by the soulless consumerism of the new era. In this view, his passivity and eventual death represent the death of an authentic, rural culture that Pasolini cherished. His final pose as Christ is not just about religious suffering, but the crucifixion of an entire way of being. Furthermore, some analyses have read Ettore's alienation and "disaffection from reality" as a subtle metaphor for homosexuality within a repressive society, a theme Pasolini would explore more overtly in later works.