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Retired history teachers everywhere must be quietly lamenting that Mussolini: Son of the Century wasn’t around when they were building their Twentieth Century Europe modules. Joe Wright’s Italian-language TV adaptation of Antonio Scurati’s novel, which has just arrived in full on Sky and Now, is a world away from the fuzzy VHS recordings of old war documentaries that served as the multimedia element of many of our GCSE history classes.
Following Il Duce’s faltering first steps towards domination, from establishing his fascist party, through the March on Rome to the installation of a dictatorship in Italy, Wright’s eight-part drama has the fidgety energy of a student trying to make history more exciting and cool. “What if the scene where blackshirted goons violently attack that socialist paper was shot in a stylised, Tarantino-ish way?”; “Could we replace the characters with puppets here?”; “Wouldn’t it be cool if Mussolini played with a grenade on his desk in this scene?”; “How about we soundtrack the whole thing with frenetic big beat scored by one of the Chemical Brothers?”
Amazingly, for the most part this approach works well. The restlessness of Wright’s direction feels suited to the roiling, change-filled era of Italian history it depicts, when socialism and fascism were vying to usurp the old order, and all manner of literary, technological and artistic movements were bubbling up. At the centre of this circus is Luca Marinelli’s spectacular performance as Mussolini, a fourth-wall-breaking narrator-lead who seems as interested in convincing the TV audience of fascism’s charms as he is the Italian public. This Mussolini seems more than a little inspired by the TV antiheroes of the past two decades, men who carried us along for the ride as they did terrible things: a dash of Walter White’s sociopathy and scheming here; a sprinkling of Tony Soprano’s brutishness and brittle self-doubt there – not to mention his hairline too.
Framing Mussolini in such a way is a high risk strategy. One of the less enjoyable aspects of TV’s golden age were the bad fans, viewers who cheered on TV’s antiheroes in their worst moments. On its release Scurati’s novel, which uses historical documents alongside Mussolini’s omniscient narration to retell the tale of the rise of fascism through its instigator’s eyes, was criticised by some historians for “resurrecting the cult of the leader” at a time when the far-right was making gains in Italy. It’s hard not to imagine the same criticism being levelled at Wright’s adaptation (though it should be said that Italian reviews have been unanimously glowing so far).
For his part, Wright has spoken in interviews of the need for the audience to feel “seduced” by Mussolini, to grasp how a nation might have fallen under his sway. And certainly the series is at pains to undercut its lead character’s stump speeches at every opportunity: Mussolini is portrayed as pompous and craven, ready to sell out his fellow fascists whenever the movement looks like it is about to go south. The cruelty and brutality of that movement is shown in unflinching detail. As it moves from violent rabble to terrifyingly efficient force, uncomfortable parallels with recent violent rabbles-turned-terrifyingly efficient forces will be felt.
Son of the Century arrives on our screens at an interesting cultural moment. The past decade of populist and far-right political movements have brought ideas and figures considered fringe or extreme closer to the mainstream: people like Curtis Yarvin, a previously obscure US “neoreactionary” thinker who yearns for the replacement of liberal democracy with a “form of one-man rule: halfway … between monarchy and tyranny” (vice-president JD Vance is reportedly a fan). The question for that mainstream, has been whether to go with option one: continue treating these ideas and figures as fringe and extreme – to “no-platform” them, in essence; or option two: contend with them, but risk giving them oxygen to grow.
For much of the past decade, it has felt like option one had won out. But then came Donald Trump’s re-election in November, and with it the feeling that ignoring these fringe figures and ideas had either had no effect, or had been actively counterproductive. So now some are feeling it might be time to try option two. A case in point: on the eve of Trump’s election the New York Times published an interview with Yarvin, arguing that “given that [his ideas] are now finding an audience with some of the most powerful people in the country, Yarvin can’t be so easily dismissed anymore”. Son of the Century too has more than a little of option two about it, reckoning with fascism in a way that some will find illuminating and others will feel is potentially dangerous. It feels emblematic of a new, charged cultural era.
I wonder though if Son of the Century also signals something else: the definitive demise of the antihero drama. The TV zeitgeist already seems to have largely shifted away from the exploits of morally dubious men in the past few years – though Taylor Sheridan seems to be on a (actually pretty successful) crusade to keep them alive. But when a figure of such historical, outsized horror is being given the antihero drama treatment, where does the genre have left to go, what new moral depths does it have plumb? Vince Gilligan, Breaking Bad’s creator, used to describe the journey of Walter White, from cheery chemistry teacher to ruthless drug lord, as progressing from “Mr Chips to Scarface”. Well, even that has nothing on the descent at the heart of Son of the Century.
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