Mussolini, the march on Rome, 1922
by Jon Baldwin
Mussolini: Son of the Century is an eight-part historical drama biopic which has just completed its run on Sky Atlantic. Based on M: Son of the Century, the first of four ‘documentary novels’ by Antonio Scurati, it recounts the rise of Benito Mussolini. The series covers the founding of the Fasci Italiani in 1919, political and violent machinations, the assassination of socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti in 1924, and Mussolini’s speech to Parliament on 3 January 1925. Here fascism was met with silence. The series ends as dictatorship is established.
There are typical biopic conventions on show, with a focus on individual charisma and drive, composite characters, and the ‘great man of history’ thesis. This marginalises much historical context such as the internal backing for Mussolini from the King, Church, industrialists, landowners, capitalists, politicians, and people of Italy, as well as international support and American Sinclair Oil Company interests. Flashbacks are employed, as well as surreal sequences and fantasies in telling the psychodrama. Some liberties are taken, in episode three Mussolini is shown crowd-diving into the mosh-pit of a mob of his supporters at a rally and being carried along by them.
Mussolini and fascists, 1924
The series is also necessarily about toxic masculinity with endless jibes about ‘jerking off’, flaccidity, penis-size, ball-breaking, and Mussolini’s intercourse is typically rough, quick, and forced. He is akin to a mafia don, a more sombre Tony Soprano. Luca Marinelli, as Il Duce, gained 44 pounds for the role and provides a captivating performance. The violence of the Blackshirts is quite rightly foregrounded as they crush opposition, the trade unions, and socialist movement. But it is also heavily stylised with slow-motion and montage sequences.
There are fascist aesthetics and Tarantinoesque exaggeration. Witty and knowing asides to camera afford an uneasy intimacy with Mussolini. Anticipating such objections, English director Joe Wright, whose work includes Pride & Prejudice (2005) and Darkest Hour (2017), argued that “Mussolini was fascinating, he seduced a nation and many others. If I hadn’t shown that charm then people might have thought that all Italians were idiots.”
An energetic, pacy score is produced by Tom Rowlands of The Chemical Brothers and this is interspersed with socialist songs, fascist chants, operatic offerings, pieces of Verdi and Puccini, and a hint of Wagner. Wright revealed that his vision for the series was a “crossroads between Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, Scarface and the rave culture of the 1990s.” This vision, appropriate or not for the subject matter, is certainly realised.
There are numerous rallies, discussion with advisers and lovers, and inner monologues which have been drawn directly from Mussolini’s journalism and speeches. The onscreen Mussolini describes himself as a ‘quick-change’ artist, and we see this staunch atheist and translator of Nietzsche promise to put the Church back in schools and education. He betrays his ideals for Catholic votes.
Capitalist cash for fascism
Another example is a key scene in episode two with a demoralised Mussolini on the brink of losing everything and seeing his newspaper go under. Adviser Cesare Rossi announces he has met with a collective of capitalists. “Why on earth would we side with the vampires?” asks the former socialist Mussolini. Former socialist Rossi lifts a bag above his head and out flows bundles of lira. The cash from the capitalists, attempting to stem a socialist ‘red flood’, is a catalyst for fascism, used to fund the newspaper, as gifts to the poor, bribes to the powerful, and arms and hospitality for the Blackshirts. Capitalism funds the bourgeois reactionary revolution of fascism.
Indicatively Mussolini reveals in episode one, that “We are not monarchists, republicans, socialists, democrats, conservatives or reactionaries. No! We are a synthesis of all affirmations and negations. Yes! We fascists have no preconceived ideas. Our only doctrine is action!” This makes fascism a slippery target, as it negates and affirms, scapegoats ‘them’ and celebrates ‘us’, is on a loose footing but mobile, and is contradictory and inconsistent while being a pragmatic synthesis of whatever happens to work in order to obtain and maintain power.
Publicity shot for the series
Episode two ends with Mussolini claiming, “I’m consistent. I betray everyone, including myself.” And the climatic crescendo in the final episode has Mussolini reveal to Bianca Ceccato, mother of one of his illegitimate children who stands in for his many victims, the notion of rule by might:
But fascism is violence, Bianca.
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.
Two out of three Italians voted for Mussolini at this time, while German fascism emerged without a shot being fired against it, Trump has been voted in twice, and current variants of the franchise include Putin, Netanyahu, Erdoğan, Le Pen, Farage, et al. The Mussolini of the series accounts for this mass support: “Here they are, my lost people in need of strongmen and simple ideas.”
Of course, the series speaks to the present moment. In the opening monologue Mussolini looks back and declares, “You loved me madly…Look around you, we’re still here.” Later he breaks the fourth wall, with a thumbs up, and smirks “Make Italy great again!” Contemporary analogies are invited but we know that fascism mutates, and each form is a unique configuration of contradictions, trajectories, forces, events, times, and places.
Likewise, the critique of fascism must follow. But if there is a lesson it is in episode six where Mussolini claims, “I tamed everybody…The Left has fallen apart by dividing itself into unitarians, maximalists, communists and third-party internationalists.” The virtue of the series is to reveal the incoherence, contradiction, violence, class exploitation, and opportunism of fascism, as well as the necessary opposition of undivided collective action and a united front.
