This evening, like every evening, you settle in to listen to a song from Cole Porter’s songbook. There is nothing like the sharp lash of Cole Porter that assures one of American ingenuity. There is nothing like the affirmation of Cole Porter that reminds you that it is beautiful to be alive. You tune the radio. “You’re the Top!” starts playing. You haven’t heard this recording before, a special treat, sung by Britons. You picture the English martyrs of the Great War. What noble people. The song proceeds as usual, and all is well. With each lyric, you interpose your immediate thoughts. “You’re the top!” That I am! “You’re a dress by Patou!” Modern, elegant, chic! “You’re the top!” Don’t I know it! “You’re an Epstein statoo!” Bold and daring, a statue by the innovative sculptor Jacob Epstein, who has, I hasten to add, no relation to the American financier! “You’re the nimble trail of the figure Fred Astaire!” And thank you for saying so! “You’re Mussolini, you’re Mrs Sweeney, you’re Camembert!”
You shut the radio off. You are experiencing profound psychic shock. Gaah, you say. Could it be, that Cole Porter has insinuated that not only are you the infamously promiscuous Margaret Campbell, but that you are also the brutal and hated fascist dictator Benito Mussolini? Is that the top? You have no strong opinion on being compared with Camembert. You are not aware that you were listening to the 1935 rewrite of “You’re the Top!” by P.G. Wodehouse. You are reeling. In violent pangs, you reach for the radio and turn the dial. You turn it to the jazz channel. “Welcome back to the jazz channel,” announces the radioman in fascinating sync, “next up — an autumnal treat.” Soft drums and an electrical whine lead us in. “Autumn Leaves” is the number. The easy tones of a Rhodes piano juggle the tune. Here is peace on earth. You are in the realm of groove. The tune vanishes in a splash of cymbal. “Classy stuff,” — the radioman — “give it up for Romano Mussolini on the keys!” You shut the radio off. You are experiencing profound psychic shock. Gaah, you say. Could it be, that you have spent the last four minutes grooving to the rhythm of Benito Mussolini’s jazz-playing son? You turn the dial. You turn it to the channel that only plays songs that are mostly sung in Japanese. Here is the safe haven; the nuclear bunker; the contingency plan. You are hit by a wave of city pop. Caged serenity. Japanese, interspersed with English. You weep, quietly. It was never meant to be this way. You breathe. The song ends. A Japanese voice springs out. “Ano uta wa aressandora mussorīni no ‘ tōkyō dorīmu ‘ datta!’” No comprehension of Japanese is necessary. You have found sanctuary in an Italo-pop record by Benito Mussolini’s jet-setting granddaughter. The radio is destroyed. Television will be your salve. You click the box on. A title card stares at you. M: Son of the Century. At last, a television show about the letter M.
I.
It is perhaps unnecessary to express the true subject of M: Son of the Century (titled Mussolini: Son of the Century for its MUBI release). His monogram was famous in life: a document read by Benito Mussolini would be marked by an M at the bottom of the sheet. There is something colossal and something solitary about the image of Mussolini made letter. That is the character that emerges by the close of Joe Wright’s M. A man who has merged with his iconography; a man who has carved out his viscera in search of marble. But the essence of Mussolini, and of M, is to find that neither is marmoreal in quality. That each instead succeeds in their elasticity; in being so many things at once. Several critics (to name them: John Powers, Jeff Ewing, and Chris Vognar) have noted the similarities between the series and Richard III. This is largely a superficial reference, insofar as these critics are noting the basic stylistic quality: in both M and Richard, we follow a crooked villain, and are frequently addressed by him directly. In this respect, M is equally close to either version of House of Cards. The characters are not dissimilar: Mussolini and Richard have a diabolical tendency, in such a way that they tread on mischievous, impish territory. They provoke us from the very beginning: Mussolini looks into the camera and promises that he will make us each a fascist; Richard tells us, “therefore, since I cannot prove a lover | I am determined to prove a villain.” Both characters, however much they will be faceted in the coming drama, introduce themselves as the smirking Machiavel. We do not witness their fall, per se, but rather follow them into a predetermined perdition. And it is not misery but a morbid kind of joy that marks their way. An electric, fiendish passage. It is the Grand Guignol of history. We do not wonder what horrors this man will achieve; we ask how it is he managed them. So in each work the man himself will guide us through, exiting the drama every so often to address us directly; these are men whose infamy oversteps the bounds of drama.
But I would go further. Not only does M resemble Richard III in form, but also in its substance. Indeed, there is something of Richard, or at least Shakespeare’s Richard, that resembles Mussolini. The aptly named R. J. B. Bosworth, in his biography of Mussolini, makes the association offhand. We might begin the comparison as Richard begins his opening monologue — “Now is the winter of our discontent.” — and after some ironic celebration of the Yorkist peace, Richard will clarify: “Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace, | Have no delight to pass away the time.” Immediately, we are thrown into the biography of Benito Mussolini, a man who was ejected from the Socialist Party in 1914 for supporting Italy’s entry into the Great War, and who found his post-socialist ambitions hobnobbed quite substantially by the emergence of peace in our time. This incident, referenced in M via flashback, creates a mold of character. Mussolini, like Richard, is a man who thrives in the chaotic swirl; disorder makes room for a new authority.
And it is disorder that characterizes both M and Richard III. Each work begins with a fundamental irony: we open in the aftermath of glorious victory. Liberal Italy and Yorkist England have defeated their Austro-Hungarian and Lancastrian foemen. Mussolini and Richard have won the wars they so enthusiastically partook in. But the end of war signals the end of clambering ambition. Mussolini, the petit bourgeois newspaper man, must return to his presses; Richard, a disfigured third son, can but “descant on mine own deformity.” In M, the winter of discontent is instead defined, in the phrase of Gabriele D’Annunzio, as the vittoria mutilata, the “mutilated victory.” Nominally this is a complaint regarding peace negotiations, in which Italy was not granted certain Balkan territories that irridentists considered integral to a “greater Italy.” But this phrase has a national resonance beyond such peccadillos as the sovereignty of Fiume. Following a newsreel prologue, M opens with Mussolini’s 1919 speech at San Sepulcro, at which the Fasci di Combattimento are founded. His audience is mostly made up of veterans, many of whom Arditi — shock troops accustomed to brutal violence, many of whom are broken, mutilated. Crutches, scars, amputees are frequent; we meet Amerigo Dumini, who will become the Sicario del Duce, and notice his withered hand. These are the forgotten men, shredded by a war of abstract and nationally disappointing (even embarrassing) proportions. These are the “bruisèd arms hung up for monuments,” scattered about a shabby hall, listening to a man who promises to restore all lost esteem.
The mood that follows, in both cases, is then one of insecurity. Each country appears to return to its normative state, the constitutional liberal democracy in Italy and the feudal monarchy in England, and yet in each, there are appearances of unnatural strain. In Richard, we immediately encounter the bizarre imprisonment of Clarence, and the contradictory orders regarding his fate; the king does not trust his brother, and fears the letter G. Richard, revealing to us his means and intentions, assures us that all is unwell. As the play develops, the castle walls crumble: feudal oaths are sworn with forked tongues, royal marriages are made vulgar, low men are sent to murder high personages. The securities and assumptions of the feudal system are each undermined by a man who has, through abject kinslaying, injected himself into the line of kings. According to Shakespeare, this may account for the long arc of justice, redeeming the unlawful deposition of Richard II with Richmond’s victory in the final act. But within the sole frame of Richard III, the feeling is apocalyptic. Those institutions around which the Wars of the Roses had been fought prove themselves paper models, reinforced not merely by strength but by faith. If one does not believe in the sanctity of kings, then the king is no more than a sickly man. His heirs are no more than an impediment to personal glory.
In M, we are swiftly introduced to a moribund liberal democracy shackled to an impotent king. The first electoral embarrassment of the fascists is simultaneously the triumph of the socialists, and if Wright’s series is perhaps a little light in defining the social context of 1920s Italy, we understand this triumph to be a rejection of the status quo. As the series continues, each subsequent event makes dubious the pre-eminence of the democratic state. Gabriele D’Annunzio conquers Fiume with a private army, where he rules for over a year; agrarian capitalists fund the fascist intimidation, bludgeoning, and massacre of leftist organizers and organizations (as state police turn a blind eye); successive liberal prime ministers form electoral pacts with Mussolini to defeat the socialist opposition, despite paramilitary violence throughout Emilia-Romagna; the government eventually cedes to a Mussolini premiership on the (feigned) threat of a march on Rome without a shot being fired; the Chamber of Deputies then votes for anti-democratic electoral reform at the behest of their new prime minister; and just alike to Richard, men esteemed will stay silent in the wake of murder. As the veteran statemen, and culpable party Giolitti said: “this chamber has the government it deserves.”
So it appears that in either work we encounter a charismatic deviant who unscrews a failing hierarchy, revealing not merely his own ingenuity, but the phantom he is forced to reckon with. But I would go further. We might, for instance, cite Mussolini’s close confidant, Margherita Sarfatti. In M, she is depicted as the socially legitimizing arm of Mussolini’s enterprise; it is she who taught him (a man of meager beginnings) the airs and politics of high society; it is she who brought him to futurism, and to D’Annunzio, and to rooms of influence. Her love for him — her “savage” — seems somewhat incongruent. In the penultimate episode, Wright will suddenly make emphatic her Jewish heritage (previously implied only by her name); in emphasis, it’s both an exacerbation of incongruence and a foreboding. The contradiction of her strange delight reaches a critical mass. She is described aptly by Shakespeare:
Poor painted queen, vain flourish of my fortune,
Why strew’st thou sugar on that bottled spider
Whose deadly web ensnareth thee about?
Fool, fool, thou whet’st a knife to kill thyself.
Here Margaret describes Elizabeth — otherwise an enemy of Richard — who gladly plays along with his wordplay against the bedraggled once-queen. But perhaps Sarfatti is herself better paralleled by the Lady Anne who, encountering the man who murdered her husband, finds that “in so short a space, my woman’s heart | Grossly grew captive to his honey words.” She becomes Richard’s own legitimizing token, to be discarded — as Sarfatti was discarded — when her use expired. Or we might look to the first scene of the second act, in which the ailing king calls for Hastings, Buckingham, and then Richard himself to swear an oath of amity. Here is an ancient prerogative of kingship, the mending of broken state, by which the recurrence of violence can be quelled by in reverence to the crown. But Hastings, Buckingham, and Richard pour out a casserole of lies, a great theater of practiced blandishments, all of which hollowed out. This is an oath of fealty that makes a mockery of oaths and of fealty, however earnestly the king intended it. Mussolini’s various electoral pacts — and his entry into parliament — speaks to a similar disingenuity. He will practice the theater of state but in no way honor its bones. Here is the anti-democrat elected to parliament; the anti-monarch bowing at the foot of a king; the anti-clerical kissing the ecclesiastical ring. And so, much like the Yorkist monarchy, the Italian state vanishes beneath its own ceremony. Having lost moral authority, there is no system and no precaution that can overawe the malcontent.
Mussolini’s most infamous crime finds a sort of double mirror in Richard’s first and last murders in the play. Richard first has his brother, Clarence, killed by two incompetents; and at the last, he has killed the two young princes in the Tower. These murders ensured his ascendency; though the killing of the princes, given his arguments for their illegitimacy, might also be a superfluous evil. It is described as such:
The tyrannous and bloody deed is done,
The most arch-act of piteous massacre
That ever yet this land was guilty of.
These same words could be pinned to the murder of Giacomo Matteotti, a socialist politician and chief opposition to Mussolini in the Montecitorio. This murder is the climax of M’s penultimate episode. Amerigo Dumini and his tawdry gang engage in what might be the worst executed murder in political history; there is something in their staggering incapacity that seems to mirror the gallows humor of two assassins squabbling over who should kill Clarence. Certainly Dumini lacks the moral qualms of Shakespeare’s murderers, but the weight of the murder, and its psychological consequence, resembles better the killing of the two princes. The final episode, in particular, dreams of a Mussolini haunted by pangs of real guilt — he sees, like Richard sees, ghosts in his apartment. Mussolini speaks to his enormous marble bust; he speaks to himself, like Richard speaks to himself. He is reckoning what kind of a man he is. Italy reckons what kind of a country it is. Throughout the series, Wright, following his source, depicts a seesaw in Mussolini’s mind. He is both drawn to the effect of direct action and to the seal of legitimacy; he is not entirely aware whether fascism is his line to power or whether fascism is itself power. Does he dismiss his Blackshirt squadristi or enshrine them? Which is to say, Mussolini cannot discern whether violence is a means or an end. The killing of Matteotti and its fallout is the ultimate expression of this question. Is it a disgrace, to be denied and temporized, or is it policy? Richard, on the eve of battle, is himself beset by all the ghosts of men he slaughtered, or had slaughtered. On waking, he also has a crisis of conscious, or of identity. Who, in the wake of all this murder, is Richard? Like M, the tale begins with a cheerful, comic bastardy. Like M, it closes the loop with a suddenly intense psychology, by which our playful devil must encounter the substance of himself. Richard monologues as such:
O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!
The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight.
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by.
Richard loves Richard; that is, I and I.
Is there a murderer here? No – Yes, I am.
Then fly. What, from myself? – Great reason why:
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? – For any good
That I myself have done unto myself. –
O no, alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself.
I am a villain. – Yet I lie; I am not.
Fool, of thyself speak well. – Fool, do not flatter.
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain. –
Perjury, perjury, in the high’st degree! –
Murder, stern murder, in the dir’st degree.
So the man who introduces as a villain now contests his claim; he resists his own accusations. Perhaps we see, therefore, in the opening monologue a performance — he is playing a part for his crowd. Certainly, as the play moves along, Richard’s asides to the audience become less frequent. What he actually believes — what his true heart feels — might be in some way departed from his early strutting. Wright’s Mussolini seems to descend similarly into self-reflection. Following his 1922 address at the San Carlo in Naples, literary scholar Luigi Russo described Mussolini as a “histrionic actor”; this performance is replicated in the series, with Mussolini taking the stage just after the performance of a Puccini aria. Prior to the March on Rome, Mussolini delivers his lines to the camera: that he must “pretend” to march, knowing that an “actual” march would result in calamity. But the best way to pretend is to make the pretense actual. This is a subtle line. But he knows, himself, that the march was never actual, however physically real it appeared to be. In this final episode, then, the performer must wonder at the gap between pretense and actual. How much has his method become his reality? Is he a fascist, or does he wear the costume of a fascist; is it possible to be a fascist, as Mussolini variously defines it, without it being a costume?
I am reminded somewhat of Renato Bertelli’s Profilo Continuo, a sculpture of Mussolini’s profile in 360 degrees. It is a face that cannot be looked at directly; it is Mussolini’s head spinning around at extraordinary speeds. Following Richard’s night of terrors, the final scene — in which he appears to rally his spirits and fend at Bosworth — creates a problem of interpretation. Do we read this scene (as I prefer) as the final spasms of a cornered tiger, who must fight himself into the earth? Or else is this a genuine revival of character — the benighted man free of shadows? In 1700, Shakespearean actor Colley Cibber printed his own adaptation of Richard III. Among its various differences was a certain line, situated between the ghosts and the battle: “Richard’s himself again.” While Cibber’s aberration is no longer performed, this line has long survived in productions of Shakespeare’s play. In Laurence Olivier’s 1955 film adaptation, he places the line neatly between the original Shakespeare, as a whisper — Richard speaking to himself. Here is the revival of his mighty spirit; here Richard has cast away those feeble doubts to embody that singular character he had made himself up to be. No longer does he pretend to be the king — in his final ignominy, he is truly that. In M, Mussolini’s crisis of confidence is depicted in rapid montage — a sharp interchange of cuts between Mussolini himself and his marble bust. He becomes the statue of himself. We then see him at the Montecitorio, on January 3, 1925. He delivers his infamous speech — the speech by which the beginning of his dictatorship is marked. “I declare here, before this assembly and before all the people of Italy, that I and I alone assume the political, moral, and historical responsibility for everything that has happened.” Mussolini makes his choice: to die on Bosworth Field.
II.
But I would go further. Not only does M resemble in some way the dramatic flow and mood of Richard III, but in fact it mirrors Richard III’s manner of composition. Beginning at the foundation: both are, naturally, works based on history. But more specifically, they are adapted from particular texts. In the case of Shakespeare, the primary source is Sir Thomas More’s incomplete history of Richard III, abetted by Holinshed’s Chronicle. M is based on the “documentary novel” of the same name by Antonio Scurati. The term “documentary novel” deserves some scrutiny: Scurati has not merely indulged in historical fiction, but proposed a form of novel which is almost completely historical, with certain psychological interludes to blend the fact with the fiction. Such were his claims than Corriere della Sera reported, with some trumpeting, eight historical errors found in the text. None are more significant than an error in dating, or a misused title for a passing historical personage. Most historical fiction would envy such a low count. Scurati’s novel is structured with rigorous chronology, each chapter provided a date or date range; these tend to be vignettes of just a few pages, each one concluding with a series of “clippings” from contemporary newspapers, diaries, speeches, typically repeating or reinforcing the subject of the chapter. Perhaps More’s history could also be described as a “documentary novel,” insofar as its style is more dramatic than typical of chronicular accounts, and its bearing to history is in fact considerably less meticulous than in Scurati’s work.
Both are works with clear agendas. More intended both to, specifically, reinforce the Tudor hegemony currently in ascendence and, generally, to obviate tyranny in all its forms. Scurati intended both to, specifically, demonstrate the myth of Mussolini’s “promising early years” common in Italy and, generally, to pose an antifascist position in a period of fascist resurgence. Neither work is, whatever its content, immediately appropriate for stage or television adaptation, and yet both extract from quite serious, intentional works an often electric, direct, even comic style. It may surprise some who have enjoyed Joe Wright’s M to find that Antonio Scurati’s M is not a funny book. It is not laden with humor; it does not feature frequent direct address; indeed, it lacks even basic dramatic scenes. The tone of the novel is straight-faced, and the composition is broad. It spends a great deal of time around Mussolini, among the fascisti, and even with the socialists. It is a book not merely of the man, but of his party; and not just his party, but his nation. And yet I would argue that Wright, with veteran TV writers Stefano Bises and Davide Serino, has achieved an enviable adaptation of a novel that might resist such a treatment. They have done so by appealing to the medium. Much as Shakespeare finds in his Richard a specifically theatrical invention, who plays upon boards, so too have Wright and co. filtered the abstract mass of Scurati’s novel into a film object. Wright has cited Vertov as an inspiration, but the mood is that of Soviet montage more generally: of sharp cuts, associative objects, and canted angles. Tom Rowland’s score gives these retro images their contemporary fire: whirring and descending electronic tones, bassy ostinatos, splashy drum sets. Wright nudges at mixed media: sometimes the shot is a vignetted digital, or a celluloid-overlay monochrome; other times he introduces Old Hollywood back-projection (with New Hollywood Volume panels), and less successful front-projection. Stock footage is interwoven; scenes are acted against projections of Caravaggio; stop-motion appears for one brief huzzah. It would be somewhat pat to recognize this blitz of expression as unusual in television, even in the post-golden age we are supposedly inhabiting; but certainly it is unusual for Joe Wright, whose style might generally be defined by its tendency toward classical beauty, both in light and composition. Mussolini is a lightning rod for extravaganza.
But it seems Mussolini escapes us. Not the figure, who has slalomed his way through this article with dexterous skill, so much as the performer. Luca Marinelli, who gained the weight and lost the hair, is Mussolini. He is immediately and entirely captivating. He has a reckless charm — there is something of the picaresque hero in him. He is round, stupid, despicable but — like any great Richard — he is delicious. He stalks around an Italy built of violent maniacs and dusty politicians and seems to dance on their toes. But Marinelli is not just delectable; indeed, the quality of his performance (which might stem from the quality of Scurati’s quite different characterization) is in its appeal to genuine empathy. Sometimes he will glance at the camera with fiendish anticipation, a knowing wink; other times his glance is an appeal, or a less scrutable thought. His Mussolini is not just gurning majesty, and not just Italian bombast, but a confessional. Therefore he plays the first episodes with a certain gleeful luster, but can convincingly bring low this furor; he can convincingly swing between triumph and disaster, and then into the identity breakdown of the final episodes. Again, like Richard: we do not simply witness the victory of a self-conscious villain but — and M stretches this process out considerably — the point at which this villain comes to know himself, and finds himself not entirely pleased with the image he sees. And yet Marinelli is convincing in these frequent about-faces; it is the boundary between erratic or elastic behavior. Just in the way Mussolini is himself at the boundary of ludicrous and conniving. His great defeats seem, in these early days, to metastasize into his great victories.
Marinelli dominates but is not, himself, alone. Francesco Russo’s Cesare Rossi is not so clearly defined — he is positioned less as a historical personage (as in the novel) than he is as a general foil to Mussolini; he must be there to bat against whatever mood the Duce has currently taken. He has a good, even quite endearing presence — despite his frequently avowed fascism — though the moment of his being betrayed is undermined by his generally functional role in the narrative. He is not so much a character as he is an extension of Mussolini’s psyche; he is the cantilever. A series of strong players in small parts are also notable: Vincenzo Nemolato as a feeble, withering Victor Emmanuel; the eyes of Barbara Chichiarelli as Sarfatti, or the scorn of Benedetta Cimatti as Mussolini’s wife Rachele. And though he is a little old for the part — a part made more tragic by youth — there is an extreme dignity in Gaetano Bruno’s Matteotti, which should perhaps be the only requisite. These parts are characteristic in their volume: loud, physical, and archetypal. Wright and co. reduce the cast somewhat: Farinacci’s role is largely folded into Balbo (each one of Mussolini’s leading Blackshirts), and Arpinati (a significant point of view character in the novel, though rarely in the same rooms as Mussolini) is eliminated completely. The focus is therefore narrowed; specifically upon Luca Marinelli, and around him his orbit of influences. The idea is to be dazzled, and to be energized, and to be exhausted. Mussolini says that the only doctrine of fascism is action. This is also the doctrine that Wright adopts for his adaptation. Loud music, fierce montage, brutal violence. It must be in constant motion.
This requirement of motion therefore warps the backbone of Scurati’s novel. There, the author’s structure is a strict chronology — date by date. Wright and co. squeeze history and, maintaining a commendable fealty to historical material in particular, reorder this historical material to make certain dramatic arguments. The most radical example of this comes in Episode 5, set between 1922 and 1923. It begins with the newly premiered Mussolini being surprised in the street by Ida Dalser, with whom he had a relationship and a child in 1915. Later, we learn that his son, Bruno, had been suffering from diphtheria without his knowledge. After this, he challenges God to strike him down before the church (as he “used to”), before making a deal with church authorities to enable his new electoral reform. Finally, Dalser is committed to a mental asylum. However, the true chronology is rather different. The Dalser appearance is in fact dated to 1919, as is the diphtheria of Mussolini’s son (an unrelated incident); Mussolini famously challenged God, for a continuous five minutes, to strike him down in a debate in 1904 (Scurati invents a two-minute challenge in 1923 based on this incident, though in a different context); the deal with the Vatican state secretary is reached in 1923; and the removal of Dalser in 1922. Yet these events, in the series, are immediately consecutive. So what is the purpose of mixing the facts but keeping the details? It appears that Wright’s version is rearranging Mussolini’s life to express certain fundamental facts. Dalser is inserted at this later date to create serious tension with Mussolini’s dealings with the Vatican, his bigamy made public; Mussolini is made unaware of his son’s diphtheria to represent his falling out of family rhythms and his obsession with his new triumph (“the best days of our lives,” as he was said to repeat); Mussolini’s anti-clerical past must then be revived in order to make more ironic his deal with the Church, hence the challenge to God; the deal itself maintains its historical position (something must); and then the banishing of Dalser becomes a metaphor: Mussolini will kill his past, and lock up the mother of his son, in pursuit of cynical power. This is a portrait of mixed history, pointed to an artistic truth. In such a way, Scurati’s novel can be compressed without the loss of its longitudinal effect.
The effect is doubled with violence. Like the novel, Wright intersperses his series with frequent explosions of brutal frenzy. This, alongside the charisma of Mussolini, is the animus of fascism. The power to effect immediate change upon the world; the strength of arm; the domination of lesser wills. The weakness of Wright’s adaptation is its relatively sparse definition of the lay of the land — how the agrarian retaliation against workers’ movements grew up and was then enforced by the fascist squadristi. It often appears as though the violence against socialists, or anyone, is random and sporadic. It was sometimes that; but not always. The violence in Scurati’s novel is frequent and consistent, layered into its chronology. Wright therefore collapses the timespan, for several gratuitously violent interludes that combine many of Scurati’s historical incidents. For instance, the first spate of strike-breaking Blackshirt violence (1920) includes the assassination of Spartaco Lavagnini (1921); Wright treats the event of fascist violence less as a particular campaign with a particular end, and rather as an expressive punctuation mark in their rise. The purpose of the violence is almost irrelevant, insofar as the presence of the violence itself contains the essential information. These are men, shock troopers, an army, whose unifying cause appears frequently to be the lack of a unifying cause; they are a socialist splinter who have therefore defined themselves as anti-socialist; they are anti-capitalist until they are given large wads of cash; they are anti-anyone who attempts to stop their violent passions. Even Mussolini, in his frequent attempts to tame the beast, is occasionally set upon. Movement is the metre. Action is the only doctrine.
III.
Much in M resonates with Shakespeare, and much else reshapes Scurati. But what of Wright? The most frequent note among critics is the simple recognition that M is a clear left turn in Wright’s style. They are not entirely wrong. One persistent comparison, if only for its generic similarity, is between M and Darkest Hour. Both are partial biographies of 20th-century titans, and both center on enormous actorly performances. But in all other ways, they are dissimilar. I will concede the basic facts. Darkest Hour is a hagiographic puff piece on one of Britain’s national myths; a very conventional British prestige picture about bravery and heroism to the last. It has nothing of the savage, rancid content of M; it has nothing of the cynicism, nor the bite, nor the stylistic vim (though it does have style — the Commons chamber has never before eked such drama). Indeed, in Darkest Hour, Britain’s own impotent king is given a moment of grace; here it is those unelected by the people (Churchill; George VI) who make Britain safe from democratic weakness. Perhaps there is, indeed, a strain between M and Darkest Hour. Giuseppe Bottai, a minister in Mussolini’s later government, writing in 1977, mused: “Wasn’t Churchill just a Mussolini made over by English society, but not made over too much?” Those uncharitable to Churchill note his diplomatic complements to the Italian, a “Roman genius”; “the greatest law-giver among men”; “no doubt he is one of the most wonderful men of our time.” Both share a voluptuary attitude (though Churchill abstained from Mussolini’s skirt-chasing obsession), both are political turncoats (Mussolini from the socialists to the fascists; Churchill from the Conservatives to the Liberals, and back to the Conservatives), and both made their reputation on words. And it is here that Darkest Hour and M truly find some thematic consonance.
After the climax of Darkest Hour, Halifax despairs of Churchill: “he just mobilized the English language — and sent it into battle.” In a significant way, that is the subject of that film. The importance and the effect of rhetoric. The film is punctuated by Churchill’s speeches to the British people. The early speeches are dishonest; they sugarcoat the war effort to bolster morale. These speeches may or may not be convincing to the British prole, but they are certainly demoralizing to the political class, who are distinctly aware of the lie in Churchill’s expedient speechifying. So the axis of the film turns in an unusual manner: Churchill must find a way to defy parliamentary democracy (which is to say, to take a position that his party opposes), and he must do so by recourse to language. The brief aside in which Churchill visits the London Underground to chat with the masses is as fabricated as it is unconvincing (utterly); we ought not to understand Churchill as the secret bannerman of the public flame so much as an ambitious and (it must be said) heroic leader whose singular will overpowered the defeatism inherent to Chamberlain’s ministry and party. The film climaxes on his “We will fight them on the beaches” address to parliament, in which the recalcitrant Chamberlain finally relents; it is remarkable that Chamberlain’s change of heart does not appear to relate to any real change in the facts, so much as the exact manner in which Churchill states his case. It is not argumentation, but rhetoric. It is a performance upon the stage. This is how one man leads others against their inner will; this is the strength of personality that seeps through Wright’s Mussolini.
In his review for Collider, Jeff Ewing draws reference between M and Plato’s Republic, a bold if not exactly convincing sally. However, perhaps he is on the right track — Mussolini did, after all, keep annotated copies of Plato on his desk. Better we look to Gorgias, Plato’s great excoriation of rhetoric and rhetoricians. He describes rhetoric as a breed of flattery, distinguished from philosophy by its irrelevance to the truth. Great rhetoric does not require accuracy for efficacy; it is merely the way something is said. In the dialogue, one of Socrates’ interlocutors, Polus, interjects, suggesting that rhetoricians possess great power, and therefore, rhetoric is the path to a good life. Polus compares a rhetorician to a tyrant, in that they may do as they please: they master over men by the word, and the word can be whatever it is they want. If Churchill wants Britain to remain at war, his word will make it so; if Mussolini wishes to cow the browbeaten and the dismayed, it is the turn of his tongue that suddenly makes real his frenzied appetite. These are men of great power, are they not? Men who bestride the narrow world, like colossi. Socrates disagrees. “And I tell you, Polus, that rhetoricians and tyrants have the least possible power in states; for they do literally nothing which they will, but only what they think best.” This is an initially perplexing response — is not doing what one thinks best also doing as one wills? Socrates clarifies: “If a man does something for the sake of something else [as a man takes medicine to be well, or goes on a voyage for business], he wills not that which he does, but that for the sake of which he does it.” Therefore, a rhetorician only does that which will convince his audience, and a tyrant only does that which will maintain his power. They may believe themselves free actors in a world at their heels, but they are in fact slaves to their power; they can only do what they can only do.
In this meeting of designations, Mussolini is the exemplar. Throughout M, we see his shifting policy — he is not ideological per se, but rather elastic; he has no strategy, only tactics. He will shift his language and his party; the only constant is the direction of power. Fascism is an “anti-party, without a constitution and without rules.” Whatever his Ricardian insinuations, Mussolini begins the program as a character who can freely operate; for whom large proclamations are simply a tool in an arsenal. By the end of the film — by which time tyranny has descended upon his rhetorical shoulders — this impression is no longer apparent. Instead, Mussolini is a man reactive, making any decision that will secure his position. What this position means becomes strictly secondary; the dictator is most of all subject to himself. In the final episode, Farinacci appears with a gaggle of Blackshirts, who surround Mussolini in his Roman office. It becomes clear that Mussolini’s rise to power cannot be distinct from the power itself; he cannot distinguish the violence of his rise from what must be the violence of his rule. “Uncertain way of gain, but I am in | So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin.” King Richard dies much as he lived: steeped in the blood of monarchs. M may conclude with the beginning of Mussolini’s dictatorship, but in its prologue, we are afforded a hint of Mussolini’s future: shots of the real Mussolini hanging upside down, brain matter leaking on a Milanese piazza. In his biography, R. J. B. Bosworth describes Mussolini’s death as “normal” and “traditional.” He has gone the way of ancient despots. Before Richard meets his maker, on that field called Bosworth, he defines his rule, and the rule of all such men:
Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.
Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.
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