Mussolini: Son Of The Century Review - Spectator Surrealism On Steroids

  "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters..." ~ Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks 

 

In a ferociously conceived, back to the future insanely embellished cautionary tale, Joe Wright's simultaneously delirious and calculatingly crafted dramatic series based on Antonio Scurati's works and airing on Mubi, Mussolini: Son Of The Century  sidesteps traditional biopic and historical pageantry for something much more - and far less as well.

Reigniting the persona of the notorious Italian fascist dictator and his combo crafty and maniacal seizure of power, actor Luca Marinelli is nothing less than brilliant, terrifying, and somehow a dangerous and daffy buffoon as well. Add to that the early 20th century backdrop bathed in the period coarse brown and tinted hues of early photography back then, and the 'you are there' captive audience point of view - signaling a deliberately conceived hypnotic, repulsive and somehow involuntarily conspiratorial entertainment as well.

And in what will play out as repeated inescapable audience complicity in the ensuing political horrors playing out historically, Mussolini tears through the fourth wall continually to proclaim, once with an in your face scary, seductive lure, 'Follow me - you'll become fascists too.' And like the masses who could not resist his hypnotic charisma, you've become one of them as well, out of spectator on steroids irresistible curiosity's thirst for more. Not to mention, could Mussolini, and Hitler as well, have been inflicted by PTSD maniacal rage and resentment - both wounded in WWI.

But while the mastery of this production is undeniable, conceptual issues loom - and not just related to how the potent dramatic momentum is inevitably diluted by artificially thinning out the repetitive content over the prescribed eight hour series. That narrative padding could have been infused with, say, the actual, tremendously revealing background history of the time - and that flows, not through arbitrary timelines defining the artificially imposed beginning to end style of Hollywood storytelling, but the endless momentum reality of world events. 

And what could have been that driving force giving rise to both that traumatic period in Italy along with the impact on Mussolini in seizing that moment opportunistically - the Russian Revolution. Signifying the influence of that revolution on the subsequent imploding uprisings. Though to grab that powerful moment as his own rather than as an ideological follower, Mussolini chose fascism instead, manipulating those WWI physically and mentally destroyed, bitter veterans with an illusion of power that ironically only he held over their rage, directed to his advantage. Along with the powerful capitalist class, in need of the antidote he can provide to potential social upheaval threatening their existence.

And an offscreen irony never acknowledged in Son Of The Century, the communists who in the end brought the historical proceedings full circle when publicly hanging the executed fascist leader upside down. A significance intimating the presence of that other son of the century surviving elsewhere to this day - Lenin.

And an unintended real world fourth wall breakout moment indeed, for both history and this film as Mussolini declares as one point, “I’m like an animal, I can smell the times ahead. And this is my time.” While in a further irony, a brewing communist revolution crushed, not by the fascists, but by the arriving American troops in Italy.

Prairie Miller

 

 

“John Steinbeck stole his best friend’s wife — and then wrote her into his novels.”

Before The Grapes of Wrath made him America’s conscience, John Steinbeck was a struggling writer in California — and a scandal magnet. In the early 1940s, he began an affair with Gwyn Conger, the wife of one of his closest friends. He pursued her obsessively, broke up her marriage, and then married her himself. The betrayal rippled through their small circle of artists and friends, many of whom never forgave him.

But Steinbeck didn’t stop there. He turned Gwyn into his muse — and his victim. He poured their fights, her vulnerabilities, and their sex life into his novels, reshaping her into characters the public devoured. Gwyn later said being married to him was like living under surveillance: everything she said could be stolen and twisted into art. When their marriage imploded, she wrote bitterly in her memoir, “He didn’t want a wife. He wanted material.”

The scandal was how cold Steinbeck could be. He won the Pulitzer, the Nobel, the adoration of the world — but his family paid the price. His sons later accused him of neglect, saying he treated them as “distractions” from his work. His third wife, Elaine, once joked that John was only faithful to one thing: his typewriter.

And his feuds? Legendary. He despised critics who dismissed him as “sentimental,” lashing out in furious letters. He feuded with fellow writers who thought he was a sellout. Even his Nobel Prize acceptance speech sounded like an attack — more defiant than grateful.

John Steinbeck’s scandal wasn’t only in his novels being banned or burned. It was in the betrayals behind the words — the lives he cracked open for material, the friends he discarded, the women he consumed and then immortalized on the page without mercy.

He wasn’t just writing America’s pain. He was writing his own — and making sure everyone around him bled for it.

 

 

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