[COLUMN] Mussolini: Son of the Century Understands the Void at the Heart of Fascism | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Mussolini: Son of the Century, the eight-part miniseries now streaming on MUBI. It’s really good, compulsive viewing. Director Joe Wright is very firmly in his Anna Karenina mode, postmodern and self-aware. It’s worth checking out for anybody with an interest in the subject matter. Also, spoilers for the history of Italy, I guess.

Joe Wright’s Mussolini: Son of the Century begins with the birth of fascism.

The miniseries opens on 23rd March, 1919, as former socialist politician Benito Mussolini (Luca Marinelli) founds the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in Milan. It charts the ascent of Mussolini as a man and fascism as an ideology in 1920s Italy, culminating in Mussolini’s famous address to the Italian Parliament on 3rd January 1925, in which he took responsibility for the murder of socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti (Gaetano Bruno) and challenged anyone to stand against him.

Mussolini is as concerned with the political movement as with the man, charting the years of scheming that took the fascists from a bunch of thugs on the fringes of Italian politics to the corridors of power. The show is not subtle in its contemporary parallels. Wright has acknowledged the decision to film the series entirely in Italian was informed by the election of right-wing politician Georgia Meloni, although Mussolini does make a single English statement: “Make Italy Great Again.”

However, one of the more interesting aspects of Mussolini is the show’s engagement with the politics of fascism. The series is generally very historically accurate. It spends a lot of time on the mechanics of governance and the peculiarities of Italian politics. It offers a snapshot of a nation in turmoil after “the Mutilated Victory.” It charts the tensions within Italy between the various competing factions, including the liberals, the Catholics, the socialists and more.

The show devotes a great deal of attention to the inner workings of the fascist movement: the tug of war between Mussolini and Gabriele D'Annunzio (Paolo Pierobon) for control of the party, the sadism with which Italo Balbo (Lorenzo Zurzolo) conspired to employ castor oil as an implement of torture and humiliation against the party’s enemies, and schisms within the movement as Mussolini peeled away allies-turned-rivals Cesare Forni (Daniele Trombetti) and Cesare Rossi (Francesco Russo).

However, there is an absent center at the heart of the series. Mussolini doesn’t ever really seem to nail down the ideological underpinnings of fascism as a political movement. Facism is never as neatly defined as a set of core beliefs in the same way that socialism is, even as Mussolini positions fascism as the alternative to socialism. This is a historical concern. It is very difficult to cleanly articulate what fascism actually believes in a meaningful sense. This causes real issues confronting fascism today.

In the finale, Mussolini offers a definition of fascism to his former lover, Bianca Ceccato (Cosima Centurioni). “Fascism is violence, Bianca,” he explains. “Fascism is the rule of force. It’s the will of a few imposed on the will of the many. It’s oppression, it’s free will, it’s the law of the strongest. It’s hatred, it’s mass excitement, it’s anger, it’s contempt for weakness and doubt, it’s the order of the club against the chaos of the mind! It’s decision versus mediation, it’s the refusal to compromise! It’s the new versus the old! It’s being always, always against something or someone! And whoever gets in the way. That is fascism. Or it’s not.”

Set against the electronic score from Tom Rowlands, one half of the Chemical Brothers, the sequence can’t help but feel like a dystopian take on the iconic “choose life” monologue from Trainspotting. Of course, there are several levels of irony at play. Fascism is the rejection of choice. It is also, perhaps, a rejection of life. Mussolini’s rant includes multiple contradictory definitions – fascism is both “oppression” and “free will”, “the will of the few” but also “mass excitement.”

However, Mussolini’s definition mirrors that Trainspotting monologue in one bleak way. It is an embrace of nihilism. The irony of Trainspotting is that the characters’ heroin addiction serves as a sort of bitter negation of choice, freedom from the burden of having to choose life. “I chose not to choose life,” narrates Renton (Ewan McGregor). “I chose somethin' else. And the reasons? There are no reasons.” Similarly, Mussolini ends his expansive definition of fascism with a cynical, “Or it’s not.”

Mussolini suggests that fascism is not an ideology, so much as it is a bleak rejection of the idea of ideology. After all, Mussolini is clearly a man without a guiding set of principles, who shifted from socialism towards something oppositional as soon as he sensed a clearer path to power. “I’m a consistent animal,” he tells the audience towards the end of the third episode. “I betray everyone. Even myself.” He betrays the socialists. He betrays his fascist followers. He betrays Italy.

Throughout Mussolini, there is a recurring sense that the central character is unmoored in space and time. He breaks the fourth wall to address the audience. He makes on-the-nose allusions to Donald Trump. At certain points, he seems to travel back through his own history, revisiting his speeches as a younger man. He seems haunted by visions of how his reign will end – hung upside down, beaten and urinated on. “Do you think we’ll only last twelve years?” he asks his followers at one point, before breaking the fourth wall and looking at the audience in something approaching terror.

He is untethered. He has nothing anchoring him. In the world of Mussolini, fascism is less a coherent ideology than it is a gravitational force. “Voting fascism has to be the solution to all evils,” Mussolini explains to Rossi at one point, the closest thing that he presents to a political platform. Throughout the show, Mussolini’s politics are a reflection of his appetites. His reaction to every victory or defeat is to engage in clumsy and rough sex with the nearest woman. Marinelli put on 20 pounds to play the despot, his pauch looming large. Flies buzz around his office, as if sensing the moral rot.

“Man is a beast,” Mussolini articulates to Forni at one point. “Unable by nature to be content, he wants more. He forgets the common good for personal interest, he’s overwhelmed by his worst instincts: lust, greed, individualism.” He concedes, “I believe it has to do with… death. Fear of death.” When he drifts away from the body of the party, his mistress Margherita Sarfatti (Barbara Chichiarelli) reassures him, “It’s not you betraying fascism, Benito. Wanting more and more, until you take everything by any means: that is fascism.”

Throughout the series, Mussolini demonstrates an understanding of and contempt for those same base desires as they manifest in the populace. Even after the murder of Matteotti, citizens line up to appeal to the dictator. “Don’t they disgust you?” he asks Rossi as they make their way through the crowd. “They all think I killed him, but they still come looking for a job, a recommendation, a promotion. Now more than ever, human beings repulse me. They repulse me.”

Mussolini weaponizes this contempt to prey upon those impulses. Wright repeatedly emphasizes Mussolini could not have succeeded without the complicity of opportunists, from the industrialists who funded him to oppose the socialists to the politicians who jumped on the bandwagon when he earned popular support. Early on, Mussolini realizes that his fascist followers are unelectable. “I need respectable people to stand for Parliament,” he complains. “Respectable and possibly capable.”

Defectors from other parties are asked to “renounce their original party, swear an oath of absolute allegiance to the Duce, and total dependence on his will. Rossi notes that they attract “an entire population of opportunists lined up to hop on the bandwagon with the most likely winners.” Mussolini counters, “Do you realize what this means? They deny their ideals and splinter their parties to make themselves available. It’s a huge act of political and moral destruction, don’t you get it?”

“It’s genius,” Rossi observes. “It’s tragic,” Mussolini counters. “And from this tragedy we will build our triumph.” When Mussolini courts the Catholic Church, he initially appeals to them ideologically, vowing to “restore the crucifix to classrooms” and assuring “the requirement of instruction in the Catholic religion as the foundation and crown of elementary education at every level from teachers chosen by the ecclesiastical authorities.” This does not move them. It’s only when he promises “no more taxes on seminary assets” that the Church concedes.

In Wright’s framing, fascism is less a political ideology than it is a mechanism for laundering the worst and most cynical impulses of human nature. The show is deliberately Brechtian in its construction, with Wright employing many of the techniques of silent cinema: rear projection, iris transitions, speed cranking, black-and-white imagery, stock footage. Wright has acknowledged Brecht as an influence, inspired by his adaptation of Life of Galileo, and it creates a compelling “alienation” effect.

However, this aggressive visual style gets at the idea of fascism as an aesthetic as much as a belief system. Throughout the show, Mussolini’s greatest political accomplishments come with his ability to shift the boundaries of the conversation – to render previously unthinkable ideas open for negotiation. The early episodes place a great deal of emphasis on Mussolini’s ownership of a newspaper and the way in which he uses that platform to steer public opinion.

The dictator argues that the ability to reframe a narrative is more acceptable than deploying clubs in the street. “Nobody busts your balls,” he reflects of the power of an editorial. It’s civilized. In the finale, sequences of fascist torturing, burning, looting and killing are cut against Mussolini paring his pencils in preparation for a speech that he will deliver fully legitimizing his rule. After all, the public are suitably horrified by reports of violence. It’s the narrative and the myth that sanitize them.

“It takes boldness to change history,” Mussolini explains to the camera. “You have to violate what is inviolable, cross boundaries that no one has dared to cross. There will be those who shout, who say that it’s unheard-of and we can discuss that. But at that point, the hard part is over. The inviolable has been violated. We could talk about how, but the boundary has been crossed. And a crossed boundary is no longer a boundary.” Even getting the opposition to engage becomes a fascist victory.

In Mussolini, the power of fascism lies in its capacity to render brutality and violence “reasonable and respectable.” The miniseries doesn’t really try to explain or justify the beliefs held by Mussolini or his followers, because those beliefs are carnal and basic. Power as an end unto itself. Instead, the show explores the way in which these ideas creep into the mainstream, legitimized by greedy opportunists and cynics, by narratives and myths, and by the passivity of a broken political system.

In the show’s closing moments, Mussolini stands before the Italian Parliament and notes that his rule can be legally challenged by a single member of the assembly. “Only one of you needs to request it,” he challenges the elected officials. “Only one. One, and I’ll be finished, forever.” Instead, there is nothing. “Silence,” Mussolini utters, the last word of the series before Wright cuts to black and holds on stillness and silence and darkness. The absence of light, morality or righteousness.

That right there, Mussolini suggests, is fascism.