Amarcord (1973)
dir. Federico Fellini
“Where am I? I don’t seem to be anywhere. If death is like this, I don’t think much of it. Everything’s gone: people, trees, birds, wine… Well, up yours!”
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What do fascists need? Is it:
A. affection,
B. authority,
C. sex,
or
D. a good spankin’?
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Eighty years after the second world war, and we still don’t have a working definition of “fascism.” But the word is undeniably useful. You know what a fascist is. I know what a fascist is. We all know how to identify a fascist on sight, and our instincts are pretty much always correct. Is it the way they walk? Is it in their eyes? What about the funny way they talk about happy memories, as if they don’t even matter, as if all the love they got meant nothing to them? No, the word must have a definition, or else it wouldn’t be so damn useful.
Fascists usually don’t have compelling reasons for becoming fascists. You expect some kind of childhood story, some horrible anecdote confessed only after a few strong drinks, but most of them don’t have one. Sure, there’s your pet torturers, your precocious perverts, your kindergarten bullies—but for the most part, it’s mechanics, it’s farmers, it’s your nicest neighbors. It’s even teachers. Why? What drove them to such bleakness and hate? You won’t find the reason in their medical records or home movies. You won’t ever find a reason, because there isn’t one. I don’t need any special reason to place my right hand over my left breast before the morning bell. I don’t need a story worthy of an exposé, girl I don’t even need a reason to make my bed in the morning. The Fascist Utopia is just like our own reality, except with some lightly revised rituals, niftier uniforms, and less of those people. The fascist does not aspire to much; the fascist will make do with what you’ve got.
Forgive me, Il Duce, but I can’t help but notice your eyes are soooo big and your claws are sooooo long. What’s that, my Duce? You want me to marry my crush? Aw, Duce. You shouldn’t have! No, don’t apologize to me, it is I who must apologize to you. For my wavering loyalty—for my flaccidity and shame—for touching my dick until it popped during Mass. I was scared, dear Leader. Will you forgive me? Si, you will. Si, si, si, si, si, si, si, si, si, si…
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They think the answer is B. A lot of the time, it seems like answer C. Only a sympathizer would pick A. But we always end up having to pick D.
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The difference between “life liberty and happiness” and “god country and family” is only a few words. Ever notice the similarity of fascist interrogation and a visit to the principal’s office (castor oil aside)? Direct authority has a beautiful simplicity to it. Those who understand its contours can easily avoid it, game it, and exploit it; those who cannot predict it will suffer its punishments for the entertainment of the rest. Only violence can buy influence here. You won’t woo the honest, earthy people of the north with compliments and perfume. None of that gay shit. The masculinity of our time is the final masculinity—the final masculinity is the one your papà respects—like when your cool zio shows how to hate women properly—like when you roll your eyes at your mother for the first time.
There you have it. A working definition of fascism. No more of this Umberto Eco, more like mumbo-jumbo, and Hannah Arendt, more like totally irrelevant. Timothy Snyder, if you don’t get out of my room this instant, you are toast, young man. The fascist state absorbs all, so it can disguise itself like a snake sharpening its own head to resemble one that kills. “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State”—Mussolini said that. Here’s another alleged Mussolini quote, although he probably didn’t say this one: “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” Sketchy provenance aside, it sounds true, doesn’t it, my fellow Americans? Our federal slice of the Intel Corporation will have dividends pouring into the national slush fund, which we shall spend on golf courses and super-duper-bombs that go BAM. The party of small government thinks the State should have a stock portfolio. The party of small government thinks Congress should invest in crypto. We’re going to put the GDP on the blockchain, folks.
Pet theory: fascism isn’t about any fixed constellation of principles, but a symptom of a population that’s given up on the future. On the individual level, it’s about people who have stopped trying to improve themselves against people who have managed not to give up, despite it all. Conveniently, I’d put myself in the latter category, which calls my theory’s fairness into question. Here I am, despairing over America’s sad march to dictatorship while the Indo-Aryans of Idaho or whatever dance in circles around the icon of a New York real estate mogul. Which one of us has “given up,” really? Is it “giving up” to cry as you think of the people who would suffer if the worst comes? To sigh as you try to imagine the stories people will tell after the next great war? No, I mean fascists have given up on humanity's capacity for improvement. Fascists no longer believe that people can become better versions of themselves. The ideal human already exists, but in a corrupted state; the angel already lives inside the marble. The fascist Übermensch is the distilled Aryan man, separated from sin and indulgence, formed by subtraction, by removing all impurities, moral and physical and sexual and cultural and racial. We've lost perfection along the way, and we must restore it, says the fascist. The future is in the past, the past is in the future, and whatever the future is, it will not include you. Perfection is achieved by process of elimination. The fascist Golden Path is a cul-de-sac.
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Do not mistake the sunlight for Fellini’s approval. It might seem like a fine little town that just happens to salute Il Duce, but what Fellini has given us is not a nostalgic propaganda film. Amarcord is a parade of fascist personality types. It reads like that Harper’s essay, Who Goes Nazi, a dinner party game where the only goal is to make it through the next five years. Who at this table would go Nazi? No, not necessarily first, but in general. Who’s willing to admit to the thorny vine wrapped around their heart? How about you? You’ve always been so turned on by authority. But Fellini moves beyond the boring fascist archetype of the kinkslave. Here we have insecure class clowns (getting uncomfortable now, isn’t it, fellow insecure class clowns? (it’s okay, I figured it out, I’m trans)), we have desperate loners, we have boys pretending they’re on deployment thinking of their faraway lovers. Fascism is a waltz and a half. Fascism is, as it turns out, largely functional—not because of its ideas, but because fascists appreciate a punctual train. Fascists, and those living under their thumb, enjoy surprisingly “normal” lives. You, too, can live under fascism—so long as the State doesn’t notice you.
Communism commits a cardinal sin of political philosophy: it asks you to wait a goddamn minute. Not the case with fascism. Fascism is a hail mary. Fascism is a temporary measure to clean things up, don’t worry, they’ll lift the emergency declaration when they’re done. Fascism is an application submitted to heaven, response date never. If your elementary school teachers made you send letters to the boys fighting in Greece and write essays about the divine beauty of the State, you’d think it wasn’t so bad, you didn’t really mean those words anyway and it didn’t kill anyone. Well, it did kill people, lots and lots of people, but only as a system, and only really far away from here, and everyone else voted for it too!
And faith—and faith. “Make the sign of the cross, dad.” In fascism all fathers must lose their faith. No child loves Jesus more than the child of a secret nonbeliever. In fascism everyone must acquire religion so they can lose it again. The authoritarian has no faith (because they have given up on life, not because they thought about it and changed their mind), but fervently insists upon the contrary. Above all, they want everyone to bear the same scars upon their hearts—to have the same callouses in the same painful places—to share in the same secret disillusionment. They want you to know their Struggle.
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From Ur-Fascism:
Italian fascism was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not totally totalitarian, not because of its mildness but rather because of the philosophical weakness of its ideology. Contrary to common opinion, fascism in Italy had no special philosophy. The article on fascism signed by Mussolini in the Treccani Encyclopedia was written or basically inspired by Giovanni Gentile, but it reflected a late-Hegelian notion of the Absolute and Ethical State which was never fully realized by Mussolini. Mussolini did not have any philosophy: he had only rhetoric. He was a militant atheist at the beginning and later signed the Convention with the Church and welcomed the bishops who blessed the Fascist pennants. In his early anticlerical years, according to a likely legend, he once asked God, in order to prove His existence, to strike him down on the spot. Later, Mussolini always cited the name of God in his speeches, and did not mind being called the Man of Providence...
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Art must die. Not because fascists hate all art, or even because fascists don’t support art. Fascists consider themselves critics, tastemakers, the real judges of quality. If they don’t like a work of art, if it fails their strict criteria, then why on earth would it hang in a museum? For other people with different tastes? Heavens no. That would make them degenerates, and there are no degenerates in my town. The fascist would love to buy a famous work of art and hang it on his wall for visitors to gawk at. The fascist salivates over Guernica and fawns over El Greco. The fascist covets the approval of critics—curators—columnists—the literati. To the fascist, art is a contest, a war, a kulturkampf. If the leftists win that war, then culture—the glorious monoculture, the creation myth of the Nation-State—will die. Culture is a fractured Greek statue out of context; culture is the fresco we pray under but never look at. If we have to burn it all and start over, then that's what we'll do. If we have to drain all the color out of life to eliminate these rainbow sidewalks, then let's get draining. It's art if I control it and vandalism if I don't.
So forward Italy! Hail the syndicates! The fascists have solved the Hegelian dialectic, and from this synthesis we forge a pure nation, virile and manly, where comedy is legal! I’ve made plenty of broad statements about fascism already, but here’s another one: fascism is fundamentally irredentist. It believes it’s entitled to something it used to have, be it land or power or money or cultural relevance. The Rhineland belongs to the German people, current borders be damned. Ukraine is just the lesser Rus, a breakaway colony in need of conquest (“denazification,” they said). Rome succeeded Greece as the capital of the “West,” and Greece therefore belongs to Rome. In the same way, fascism views art like a territory it lost to the dark forces of the Left, which fascists must re-conquer to save civilization from itself. Yes, the fascist loves filling his bookshelves with classics so they can gather dust. The fascist is desperate for the appearance of taste, yet he scorns artists. He dreams of cultural dominance, so he maligns anyone who achieves it; he imagines the whole artistic economy as a conspiracy designed to exclude him. (In other words: the fascist is a sore loser.) He wants your love, and he’ll kill you for it. Fascism loves art it can claim and hates art it cannot. The fascist wants to make the publisher buy his mediocre novel. If they didn't want the firing squad, they shouldn't have rejected his draft.
It's not that fascists don't understand art. Fascists can know an awful lot about art. Some fascists can even make art, although they are often hamstrung by their own cynical insincerity. But fascist art ultimately serves no purpose beyond decoration, because the fascist perspective runs counter to creativity. The fascist fetish—Albert Speer's Berlin, Mussolini's Rome, Franco's Madrid—Trump's glimmering, "crime-free" D.C.—is fundamentally imitative, not creative. Better to re-create the gilded past (as imagined by the national myth) than create an unknown future. It's not surprising that fascism lends itself to the occult. Its goals are entirely mystical, its rules are utterly obscure. What motivates fascism, you ask? You'll find the answer on the playground, in the school bus, at your local Chamber of Commerce. I promise, it's there.
Have a look into the crystal ball. You'll find the answer in the fog.
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The fog is thicker now. You can't see anything. You don't seem to be anywhere. The birds, the trees, the life and color and chaos—all gone, to make room for strength and steel. To fuel the war effort. They're just memories now, vecchio. Relics of a weaker, more effeminate Italy, before we gave up on those silly dreams and childish ideals. Before Il Duce showed us a future worth remembering.
I want my future back. I remember the future; I was a child then. I had no worries in those days. I knew the comfort of strict boundaries, the warm embrace of supervision. In the future I remember, I had everyone's attention... in the future I remember, I had everything...
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Sulla spalletta del ponte
Le teste degli impiccati
Nell’acqua della fonte
La bava degli impiccati.
Sul lastrico del mercato
Le unghie dei fucilati
Sull’erba secca del prato
I denti dei fucilati.
Mordere l’aria mordere i sassi
La nostra carne non è più d’uomini
Mordere l’aria mordere i sassi
Il nostro cuore non è più d’uomini.
Ma noi s’è letto negli occhi dei morti
E sulla terra faremo libertà
Ma l’hanno stretta i pugni dei morti
La giustizia che si farà...