There is a scene, near the end of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970 masterpiece The Conformist, that is as haunting and horrific as anything ever filmed. In it, a man sits idle in the backseat of a car on a lonely mountain road. A woman — someone who we have been led to believe that the man loves (or at least lusts after) — is pounding on his window, pleading for her life as armed men approach to kill her. The man stares her straight in the eye. He does not move. There is no emotion on his face — not fear, not hatred, not even pity. The woman, realizing that she has been betrayed and is being left to her fate, turns and flees into the nearby woods. The killers follow, guns drawn.
The man is Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a modest civil servant turned volunteer assassin for Fascist Italy’s secret police, and how he came to be at this terrible moment is the story that The Conformist tells.
Released in 1970, when Bertolucci was only thirty, The Conformist was an immediate hit with critics (its screenplay was nominated for an Oscar in 1972) but was also regarded as something of a cinematic mixed blessing. Early reviews often fawned over cinematographer Vittorio Storaro’s stunning visuals, while in the same breath lamenting the perceived weaknesses of the film’s plot. Pauline Kael, writing in 1970, was typically evasive, calling it “the best film of the year” and “a sumptuous, emotionally charged experience” but also pointedly stated that it was nonetheless “not a great movie” and was instead “a triumph of style” without much substance.
Kael regarded The Conformist’s script as a little too pat, arguing that its “just-so” examination of how an otherwise intelligent and respectable man could be drawn into the employ of a Fascist government was reductive to the point of banality:
“I think we may all be a little weary — and properly suspicious — of psychosexual explanations of political behavior; we can make up for ourselves these textbook cases of how it is that frightened, repressed individuals become Fascists.”
Bertolucci, mining the 1951 novel of the same name by Italian writer Alberto Moravia, certainly makes little effort to disguise his protagonist’s motivations. Clerici himself states that he wishes to “build a normal life” — a project that involves both settling down with (and settling for) his artless but beautiful fiancée, Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli) and — somewhat more radically — offering his services to the state secret police.
If you’re wondering what might drive a man to make such choices, you needn’t guess: the film is explicit — almost didactic — in its explanation of Clerici’s obsession with “normality”: he was sexually assaulted as a boy and, to add to the horror, murdered his abuser shortly thereafter (or so he believes). Unable to come to terms with this tragic event, Clerici feels tainted, and he has sublimated his trauma into a near lust for the ordinary — not so much a place of anonymous refuge as a quotidian lye in which to dissolve his tortured identity.
The film, in common with Moravia’s novel, traces a poignant — if not overly complex — line from this incident to Clerici’s ultimate transformation to Fascist stooge. Feelings of deep shame seem to fuel Clerici’s quest: shame for his assault, for the apparent murder he’s committed, for his own repressed longings (the film hints strongly that he has latent homosexual desires) and for the debauched material excesses of his upper-class upbringing. Kael, seeing this as too simple a thread, is rightly dismissive of any attempt to define a Fascist as a convenient amalgam of past traumas or repressed sexual desires — a history of abuse, feelings of inferiority, or even racial hatreds do not, of course, inexorably lead one toward a susceptibility to Fascist ideas.
Even so, I would argue that Kael’s desire for nuance is misplaced. Clerici’s doomed attempt to forge a normal life lacks complexity for the same reason that Fascism itself does: it is not complex. Clerici might be a “textbook case” of a Fascist — an oversimplification that elides empathy or even audience introspection — but that doesn’t make his story any less instructive, or horrific. Kael’s desire for a sophisticated character arc speaks to her role as critic, to her appreciation for incisive narrative, but America’s (sadly) intimate association with Fascism fifty years later reveals it to be a system somewhat closer to Bertolucci’s portrayal: a brute force which amplifies, and preys upon, the most elemental aspects of the human material.
The appeal of Mussolini’s Italy to Clerici, or rather the effect of its poisonous creed as it comes to infect him, is precisely that. It is Fascism’s rejection of nuance, it’s contempt for subtlety, it’s transformation of artistic and intellectual endeavors into dismal means of glorifying and justifying its continued existence, that so captivates a man who is haunted by the disorder of his own mind. Fascism may indeed lack complexity, but that doesn’t mean it lacks sophistication of a sort. Where simple autocratic governments crudely demarcate the people from their leader, in effect othering an entire population and making potential enemies of them, Fascist governments invite the masses to share in the false sense of power that comes with easy answers, to participate in the alienation (or even eradication) of whatever “out” group is most accessible, to adopt a crude Manichean mindset of Good vs. Evil, Us vs. Them, to internalize a fear and hatred that exists always elsewhere, that can be fixed and identified as a tangible thing out there in the world — a country, a race, a sexual proclivity. These simplistic explanations, borne of Fascist ideology, are seductive, and not only among fools: they relieve the true believer of the burden of thought and the confusion of history — both the world’s and their own. Is it any wonder that such an arrangement would appeal to the self-loathing Clerici?
It may in fact be the only appeal for Clerici, a man who, sent by the secret police to Paris to first infiltrate the circle of and then murder his former professor — who has fled Italy and turned political dissident — proves himself to be both a half-hearted spy and an incapable assassin. He promptly falls for the professor’s wife, Anna (Dominique Sanda), or at least the idea of her (in one of the many Brechtian flourishes that highlight the film’s artificiality, Sanda plays multiple bit roles) and he cannot bear to follow through with the assigned murder — not from any moral qualms of course, but from an acute cowardice, a defining attribute that informs nearly all of Clerici’s choices in the film.
Indeed, the only emotions Clerici seems to feel are fear and lust. Fear of himself, and lust both for the young and uncultured Giulia, whom he seems to casually resent (the trope of the bored intellectual paired with the guileless ingenue might be funny if it weren’t such a tragic indictment of historical patriarchy, which, in true Right-wing style, creates the conditions it professes to despise) and especially Anna, who to him represents not just a potential sexual conquest but the sexual freedom, intellectual independence, and self-assured pride that he finds so lacking in himself. To be with Anna is, to Clerici, to become her — to be rid of himself — and not just to share in the freedom she represents but to claim it for his own. Clerici loves Anna no more than he loves Giulia, for real love requires a self-abnegation of which Clerici is utterly incapable. He merely sees her in the same narcissistic way that he sees everyone else in the film — as a reflection of himself, a means to an end, a possibility he hadn’t considered, another mask to wear. He is perhaps not quite this sinister, mistaking his own inner longings for outward physical desire, but the end result of this fatal flaw proves no less destructive to those around him.
Sex is everywhere in The Conformist — its thrill, its shame, its promise of liberation, but most of all its ambiguity. Most readings of the film see it as the story of a repressed homosexual who, unable to accept his forbidden urges, transmutes his inner pain to outer violence, but Clerici is perhaps closer to Anna in his sexual fluidity. This is perhaps why she holds such a fascination for him — she is another possible future; the antithesis of Fascistic rigidity. Anna appears to be bisexual (her evocative dance number with Giulia is, rightly, the stuff of cinematic legend) and through her Clerici’s eyes are opened to his own mutability. He is so disquieted, in fact, that for a moment he flirts with real change, refusing to murder Anna’s husband and even returning the murder weapon to his brutish handler from the Secret Police, Manganiello (Gastone Moschin). But by now, of course, Clerici is in too deep. As Manganiello reminds him, leaving the “war” now would make him a “deserter” — and we all know what happens to deserters. Fear, again, wins out over desire.
Clerici is, quite literally, a man apart, and the film shows him, again and again, physically separated from desire, from truth and — finally and most tragically — from his own humanity. He is always the outside observer, the voyeur, engaging with the world only when forced, and only then as a kind of show. He witnesses a prostitute splayed upon a Fascist leader’s desk through a curtain, he watches from a doorway as his wife and Anna undress, he confesses to a priest in an effort to pacify his bride-to-be, but his confession is not an absolution but a kind of game, ending when Clerici almost joyfully reveals his ties to the Secret Police. And of course, there are the final moments with Anna, high on a snowy country road. Clerici’s alienation is immanent, bred in the bone. Unable to connect with anyone, including himself, he is forced to seek his freedom in chains — in the freedom from moral responsibility and the hard work of self-examination that the Fascist state allows him.
That Clerici, through Anna, comes to realize how empty that negative freedom is, and yet still lacks the courage to reject it, is the last testament to his utter cravenness, his final non-act of shuffling diffidence on the lonely road to damnation. The Fascist operative Manganiello may be little more than a beast, but he at least has the courage of his nightmarish convictions. And he also has Clerici pegged — “make me work in the shit, sure, but not with a coward” he says, after watching Clerici, who is faced with the opportunity to either kill or save Anna, do neither. Instead he simply lets her die, lacking even the resolve to become the soulless monster he so desperately wants to be. He is content to betray, to do whatever is asked, to be carried along, but — again and again — never to act, never to pull the trigger, never to step out into the light.
In his failed spy fantasy, Clerici subsumes another aspect of the Fascist enterprise: a desperate need for gravitas, built upon vaporous credulity. The Conformist, like Fascism itself, is constantly blurring the boundaries between fantasy and reality; it is always in a state of illusion and elusion. Fascism, of course, thrives on such misinformation and confusion, and it implants this uncertainty at the level of thought. As Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, put it:
“The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that . . . one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
Such psychological contagion is potent. Those immune to it are in (often physical) danger from those who aren’t, and as a result everyone must flee within themselves or be destroyed. Those, like Clerici, who find themselves infected, may lack either the will or the critical apparatus to recognize their own internal repression, which may have existed long before the external control imposed by the state. To them, repression is not a tether to writhe against so much as it is a gentle yoke, restraining any “dangerous” impulses and limiting the world to a set of constrictions in harmony with their own. Thus, the diminution of human possibilities without comes to mirror the self-imposed bondage within, and with it comes a sort of psychic relief. One’s internal tyranny (self-imposed or otherwise) becomes favorable to admitting the possibility of nuance or ambiguity, or to honestly examining or confronting feelings or impulses within oneself. And happily, the ruling elite share this view, and reinforce it. It is the vicious circle of an oppressive society played out in microcosm.
Naturally, such a fractured mind cannot long survive. It is sooner or later undone by the crushing weight of its own hypocrisy, and in the final scenes of The Conformist, Clerici learns the limits of this psychological balm. It is 1943, and Mussolini has just been deposed. Clerici goes out after dark to meet an old friend and fellow Fascist (who, in perhaps another example of Bertolucci’s disdain for subtlety, is blind). As jubilant anti-fascists parade down the streets, Clerici — up until now so passive — explodes in panic. He turns on his friend, loudly accusing him of being a Fascist to the passing crowd. Next, in a kind of cosmic happenstance, he shuffles by the man who assaulted him as a boy. His terror now at a fever pitch, he blames his abuser for the murder of Anna’s husband (again, one does not have to dig too deep for the subtext here) causing the man to flee into the night, terrified.
Clerici, confronted on all sides by the living ghosts of his past, offers them up as sacrifices to what he perceives to be his latest master. He is now, of course, the outsider he so desperately feared becoming, and his carefully constructed persona, so lovingly crafted, is now useless. He is something worse than a chameleon, or even an amoral pragmatist — he is a creature who has denied his true self so completely that there is nothing of his true self left to deny. One imagines that his accusatory outbursts are the mere prelude to a faithful adherence to the new official order, whatever it might be. Clerici’s mind is again in confusion, ever malleable, and his yearning for normality is not something political — that would require conviction.
What’s worse, The Conformist leaves us with the distinct impression that he is but one of many, and that, even as governments change and freedom of a sort prevails once more, those like him have not suddenly vanished from the earth, but are merely lying in wait.