Defending Mussolini
A Critical Review of M: Son of the Century
Euronews ran a headline: “A new mini series about Mussolini threatens to deepen Italian divisions.” They’re talking about M: Il Figlio del Secolo (M: Son of the Century), adapted from Antonio Scurati’s novel by British director Joe Wright. We know Wright from The Darkest Hour, a film whitewashing Winston Churchill. It was a breathless, over-stylized piece of image-making. By portraying Churchill as a grumpy old man, it supposedly knocked him off his heroic pedestal, humanizing him — only to make him the liberator of Europe anyway. It only humanises his personality and reproduces his heroic myth in social memory.
These high-quality image-making films have one thing in common: they never lie! But what’s the harm in Pinocchio’s nose growing? He was innocent. These films don’t have growing noses, but they are steeped in sin from head to toe. They understate some things, overstate others. On the scales of reality, they fill one side to the brim and leave the other empty. They do it with such slick swagger that you can’t help but believe. They’re smooth-talking con artists, luring the audience not to a street brawl but to a poker table.
M: Il Figlio del Secolo isn’t confined to a tight timeframe like The Darkest Hour, but it’s the Italian version of that image-making. I feel bad for the novel’s author, Antonio Scurati — he’s an anti-fascist. His book doesn’t glorify Mussolini or the fascists. But the series’ aesthetic choices twist it into something different. Scurati himself admits in an interview: “There were moments of disagreement, even conflict. I did not agree with some of the directions that the story took, which in the series veers towards dark comedy tones.” Though he praises Wright’s work for its “high artistic value,” I suspect “high art” here just means stylish. We can agree on that — Wright has a decent technique, and his direction in the series is undeniably cool, but that’s where the problem starts.
Benito Mussolini becomes a rock star
In an interview, Mr. Wright declared: “To demonise these characters absolves us of moral responsibility.”
This pissed me off. Dude, I thought, dude, Mr. Wright, your series lets Mussolini speak for himself! That’s fine. I’d give ten years of my life to interview the guy. But an interview has two sides: you ask questions, get answers, push back if needed. Wright hands the stage entirely to Mussolini. The irony? By doing so, he dumps the moral burden back on Mussolini’s shoulders, framing him as a rebellious rock star.
I didn’t pull the “rock star” comparison out of thin air. Wright builds a glittering, electrifying, spectacular concert stage ready for Benito Mussolini’s show. With an outstanding soundtrack by Tom Rowlands, the series sometimes stops feeling like a proper film and morphs into a dizzying, disturbing “industrial rock” music video. You leap from face to face, action to action, breathless. In a euphoric haze, you almost want the Blackshirts to crack another farmer’s skull. Violence, after all, has its allure. Wright doesn’t demonize Mussolini — he turns him into an anti-hero. A kind of Anakin Sykwalker, Tony Montana, or Michael Corleone.
A chaos of individual moments
The relationship between art and reality is a tricky one. Revealing naked reality doesn’t always work. A storyteller is also a researcher, dissecting reality within its historical context, contradictions and interrelations. Antonio Scurati does just that in his novel, properly exposing the ideological, cultural and class structure of fascism as part of a coherent narrative. Joe Wright, unfortunately, chops Scurati’s research into a collage. Hence, the narrative is overtaken by a collage, giving way to a chaos of individual moments.
He doesn’t hide anything — he doesn’t need to and he can not. Because the narrator is Mussolini himself, there is no way to tell in words how bad fascism is. So it’s all about the use of the camera and the editing. In the first two episodes, for example, he shows — but only shows — how the capitalists and landowners take up the fascists against the strikers. For a moment. Like a two-minute viral song that’ll be forgotten in a few years. Then he shows something else: Mussolini f*cking like a stallion, Mussolini having dinner at a rich man’s table, Mussolini in his poor home, Mussolini trying to rein in the Blackshirts only to let them loose again, Mussolini doing sports. There is no narrating, it’s all showing.
It’s as if Wright serves us a Mussolini stew. Tasty, but heavy on the stomach. Images of swinging clubs, exploding heads, and executed men flash by like lightning. In the end, M: Son of the Century doesn’t explain reality — it commodifies it. If it reaches a large enough audience, tomorrow’s social media will be flooded with its viral clips. And we’ll see a herd of teenagers squabbling to defend either Benito Mussolini or Italo Balbo. But not a single one of them will ever honour Giacomo Matteotti. Because he’s not the rock star of the show.
Who should watch this series?
M: Son of the Century feels like a production seduced by its own hype. Wright is obviously not a fascist — his intention was to condemn fascism without demonising historical figures. That’s for sure. But the result is a stray bullet.
For history buffs, it can be a visual masterpiece: slick production, a gripping soundtrack, Luca Marinelli’s stellar performance as Mussolini and a solid story. This series will win countless awards, with critics all praising Mr Wright and the cast. It’s showbiz, after all.
But its narrative is so fragmented, its aesthetics so fast and chaotic, that it accidentally glamorizes fascism. I’m sure Wright detests fascism. Yet his stylistic choices risk making teens and neo-fascists sympathize with at least one fascist. According to M: Il Figlio del Secolo, Blackshirt leader Italo Balbo isn’t so different from Norwegian black-metal church-burners. But the truth is Benito Mussolini wasn’t a rock star, and the Blackshirts weren’t stage performers… They were the worst creatures of capitalism. To hell with them!
