ABSTRACT
Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist leader, started his political career as a revolutionary socialist. But his preening, narcissistic personality was drawn to the dictatorial possibilities of a new Roman empire and he strong-armed his way to power by forming a gang of “black-shirt” thugs, who marched on Rome and effectively took over the government in 1922. When the war was all but over in 1945, his followers turned on him, killed him, and hung him upside down. There was an artistic movement associated with Italian Fascism called futurism. The Conformist, the Bernardo Bertolucci film examines Italian Fascism and attempts to explain it as a kind of hallucination of a man insecure in his very presence in the world, in his sense of himself as a man of action, in his own sexuality. So insecure that Bertolucci joins the fascist cause to prove that he is a heterosexual man of action, even if it involves the violent destruction of others.
