Mussolini: Snub of the Century?

An urgent review.

Collage illustration by @loureedsnephew.

Conspicuously missing from the Golden Globes this year was recognition for Mussolini: Son of the Century, the riveting eight-party Italian mini-series that made its way to the U.S. last fall. Based on the first book of Anthony Scurati’s “documentary novel” pentology—the English edition was published by Harper, where I used to work—and directed by Joe Wright, the series is the Italian entry in the inter-war reflection World Cup, which thus far includes Boardwalk Empire (2010), Peaky Blinders (2013) , and Babylon Berlin (2017). (If there have been French or Russian entries I missed, send them along.) Those three used the crime genre as a way in, weaving war and politics in as a backdrop. Mussolini, on the other hand, is directly political, has had the worst distribution—which may or may not be a coincidence—but is the most historically detailed and cinematically realized. But the big streamers passed on it—it landed at Mubi—and it received no Golden Globe nominations.

This is a shame on artistic grounds alone. Luca Marinelli gives a riveting performance—arguably the best of the year—as the charismatic and conniving Duce. He conspires with the viewer. He seethes with rancor. He falls to pieces and regathers himself in soaring oratory. He is terrifying.

Wright, who directed Atonement (2007) and the Winston Churchill biopic Darkest Hour (2017), told the Times, in one of its handful of cursory notices, that he took visual inspiration from ’90s rave culture, Dziga Vertov’s early Soviet film Man with a Movie Camera, and “every gangster movie you’ve ever seen.” The industrial score is by The Chemical Brothers’ Tom Rowlands, which—in contrast to Marty Supreme’s crowd-pleasing but gratuitous ’80s needle drops—makes total sense.

It is a shame, furthermore, because no other movie or series—perhaps since Year And Years—addresses our current moment with more detail and relevance. Adolescence and Bugonia offer timely (if very different) takes on online brainrot while the two big swings at how we live now—One Battle After Another and Eddington—failed to elucidate very much at all.

The write ups of Mussolini give knowing and obligatory nods to the Trumpian subtext, which—in a moment of weakness—becomes text. (Marinelli looks at the camera and says, in English, “Make Italy great again.”) But the series—and the book—is worth your time, not just as a trite “Trump = Mussolini” meme, but as a primer on how fascism came to be and how it actually works.

I am no scholar of fascism—of which there are now many of earnest, alarmist, and obscurantist varieties—but Scurati’s work seems adequate as a guide for the concerned. As a “documentary novel” it tells events in chronological order, with dates, and quotes at length from primary documents. The copyright page declares that “every single event, character, dialogue, discourse . . . has been historically documented and/or authoritatively witnessed by more than one source.” Its biggest critic found eight errors in its 850 pages, and the book completely satisfied neither the Italian left nor the right.

So what happened in Italy? How did fascism come to be, and how did it consolidate power? As right-wing memellectuals never tire of pointing out, Mussolini began as a committed socialist, the editor of the socialist newspaper Avanti! This is supposed to prove that all evils—including Nazism—arise from socialism, which is like saying that the Garden of Eden itself—and not what happened there—is the root of all evil.

Fascism, in short, arose as the result of a disagreement, a resentment, and the presence of someone who both felt and could transmit this resentment with maximum power.

I think it is very difficult for us, today, here in America, to imagine 1919. As many as 22 million people had just died in World War I and everyone—socialists and capitalists alike—believed capitalism was on the ropes, that the Russian Revolution would spread, now that the war was over. Marx’s prophecies appeared to be coming true.

Lenin’s policy was “revolutionary defeatism” or non-participation in the war, which was the line followed by the Italian socialists until Mussolini and others backed the government in joining the triple entente in 1915 and were subsequently expelled from the socialist party.

The created an enormous fault line between former comrades—the resentment—that played out after the war. The returning veterans saw the abstaining socialists as draft dodgers who were continuing their attempts to overthrow the government in what should have been Italy’s finest hour, while the latter saw the former as traitors to the working class and useful idiots of the bourgeoisie. It is in this environment that Mussolini founds the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (roughly “Italian fighting leagues”) out of disaffected groups of veterans, Futurists, and nationalists, all quietly backed by industrialists who feared a socialist revolution. (Mussolini himself initially evaded military service by emigrating to Switzerland in 1902. He returned to take advantage of an amnesty for deserters in 1904 and served two years in an infantry unit well before the war.)

When comparing original fascism to our current case, one is overwhelmed by both the symmetries—the alchemical conversion of resentment into populist energy—and the complete divergence in material proportions.

If Italian fascism was driven by a resentment rooted in the loss of 600,000 Italian lives in World War I, in what is America’s current right-wing resentment rooted? Vietnam is still a factor, for sure—a contributing if not immediate cause. Scurati describes a post-war scene in Milan that could easily be transposed to 1970’s America.

That memorable day forty thousand striking workers had marched to the arena accompanied by the sound of thirty bands, waving thousands of red flags and holding up signs cursing the victorious war that had just ended. A sadistic saraband in which the wounded were displayed as horrific living proof against a war willed by the “padroni” in command. The socialists spat in the face of the uniformed officers who until the day before had ordered them to attack, called for a division of land, and demanded amnesty for deserters.

To the other Milan, the nationalist, patriotic, petit bourgeois one, which in 1915 had given ten thousand volunteers to the war, to Benito Mussolini’s Italy, it had seemed as if “the monsters of decadence had been resurrected” in that crowd of demonstrators, as if the world newly restored to peace “had succumbed to an illness.”

Mussolini and those like him had been particularly struck by the fact that the socialists had made women and children march at the head of the parade. Political hatred shouted from the sensual mouths of females and kids still wet behind the ears was shocking, disconcerting and unsettling to the kind of adult male who’d wanted the war. The reason was very simple. To that type of authoritarian, patriarchal and misogynistic individual, the anti-militarist and unpatriotic shouts of women and children presaged something terrifying and unheard of: a future that did not include him.

Flash forward to the Reagan revolution through such eyes. Jane Fonda and “her monsters of decadence” have been routed. But the ’80s, it turns out, are short. The fall of the Soviet Union is not sufficiently celebrated. (Though everyone I knew who could went to swing a hammer at the wall.) A hippy takes the White House, and a new “illness” arises that synthesizes decadence and prestige.

I am talking, of course, of Boboism.

This synthesis, from which I would be hard-pressed to exclude myself, was trenchantly articulated by David Brooks in his 2000 book Bobos in Paradise, where he argued that the hippies and yuppies had merged in an unholy alliance of people who had money but also aspired to have—or to appear to have—taste. While I think this formation is real and the book worth a lifetime of dealing with David Brooks, I don’t find it all that damning an indictment. It was a least, in part, an attempt to recuperate certain old money values to which the corporate raiders of the ’80s—let’s call them the Gekkos—laid waste. It was a simulation, if you will, of the moderation and noblesse oblige that Paul Fussell identified at the higher end of the class ladder, where the more wealth accumulates, the less it is seen.¹

Gordon Gekko, of course, was meant as a cautionary tale, as played by Michael Douglas in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), an indictment of the corporate raider ethos embodied by figures like Ivan Boesky and Carl Icahn. But, like The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and Alec Baldwin’s “coffee is for closers” speech in Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), the grotesque is adopted as aspiration by a certain segment of the population. Trump did not serve in Vietnam. He was a flashy, local, and small-time player in the greed of the ’80s, yet has emerged as the champion of all of that against the hypocritical Bobo hordes.

So there it is: the disagreement, the resentment, and the gifted resenter. The subtitle of Bobos in Paradise was “The New Upper Class and How They Got There,” and you can imagine Trump’s rancor at the rules changing in a game he had not yet won. Compared to the stakes in 1919, this seems pathetic and small, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t serious. If there is a trick to thinking about our current moment, it is fully accepting that total catastrophe can result from trivial causes. The tragicomedy of it all.

Another thing that distinguishes our moment from Mussolini’s—apart from scale in both stakes and consequences (thus far)—is how hard it has been to reach that catastrophe, despite every reckless attempt. Call it “fascism with postmodern characteristics.” MAGA has a fully articulated “digestive tract”—to steal a line from Bugonia—of finely articulated ideologies and deviations, yet “the fighting leagues” have failed to materialize. Their greatest turnout was January 6, which would have been just another weekend in Bologna for the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento. If Mussolini were alive, he would have certainly experienced the non-molestation of last year’s No Kings protests as something of a defeat.

The administration has tried everything to spur these keyboard blowhards into action. Rabble-rousing, pardons, immunity, and now jobs. His only hope is to professionalize the fasci as ICE, as if his movement—its energy exhausted in memes—cannot muster the violence he craves.

That he craves this has never been in doubt. It was as clear as day in March 2016 when he cheered on a neo-Nazi as he assaulted a protestor in Louisville. His brand is violence and he does everything he can to attract violence to him. That so little has actually occurred, relative to early fascist Italy, suggests something about the vanishing of material life into the online world, but still the asymmetry of the events in Louisville has steadily grown into the asymmetry of the events in Minneapolis.

As Scurati describes the events of April 15, 1919, in Milan, when the Fascists disrupted a socialist rally and went on to burn the offices of Avanti!, the paper from which Mussolini had been expelled as editor four years earlier.

For a moment the two factions face one another on either side of the cordon of carabinieri which has blocked the outlet from Via dei Mercanti. At the head of the socialist column are once again women, holding high a portrait of Lenin and the red flag. Unrestrained and joyful, they are singing their songs of liberation. They’re calling for a better life for their children. They still believe they’ve come to march in their parade, to dance their minuet of revolution. At the head of the other cortege, much less numerous, are men who for the last four years have coexisted with killing on a daily basis. The discrepancy is grotesque. A different association with death creates an abyss between the two groups.

Yes, as we’ve all seen in the videos from Minnesota, the discrepancy—between women with cellphones and masked men with guns—is grotesque.

The eight-part series ends with Mussolini’s 1925 speech to the Italian Chamber of Deputies, in which he claimed responsibility for the murder of socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti and challenged anyone in the assembly to bring charges against him. No one did, and so began Italy’s two decades of dictatorship.

Matteotti’s offense? He had published a book, A Year of Fascist Domination—detailing incidents of violence and intimidation—and questioned the outcome of elections conducted under such threats. The Democrats of the House Oversight Committee launched such a record of ICE abuses, almost exactly one year ago. There are 408 entries so far.

We won’t get to see how it ended for Mussolini. At least not on screen. The second volume of the pentology is slated to appear in English this fall, but there are no plans to shoot a second season, since the expensive production failed to attract a major U.S. streamer.

But we do know how it ended historically. Mussolini overplayed his hand. He led Italy into World War II on the side of the axis, driven by dreams of Italian expansion on both sides of the Mediterranean. This adventurism brought such misery to the Italian people that they turned against him. The spell he cast for two decades was broken. He was removed from office by King Victor Emmanuel III in 1943, with little public resistance.

Have you seen the show or read the book? What are your thoughts? There is a lot there, and I’m sure I haven’t gotten to all of it. Let’s discuss in the comments.

1. Boboism is also attacked from the left as what we now call “performative,” J.L. Austin be damned. On that, two notes. First, Boboism at least encourages performances that are likely to be marginally more pro-social than Gekkoism, up to and including altruism and effective political engagement. Second, the ridicule of female-led Boboism on the left is something it shares with reactionaries like Bari Weiss. This has had bad consequences, not least of which is the total dismissal of the 2016 Women’s March and constant clowning on the “pussyhat” movement, the continuing energy of which is now on full display in Minnesota. Hopefully Renee Good’s death will serve as sufficient evidence of this cohort’s seriousness.