Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton

Thinking about Father: Bernardo Bertolucci

3 4 4 “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.” —James Joyce, Ulysses B ernardo Bertolucci’s films seem to me to take as their theme a matter which has preoccupied a great deal of recent film criticism: the ways in which the individual is, in Louis Althusser’s phrase,“interpellated as a subject” in ideology, in which the Symbolic Order of the culture is inherited, internalized, perpetuated. In offering various proposals for a psychoanalytical reading, the model of psychoanalysis to which I will refer is that developed by Norman O. Brown in Life Against Death, a work which adheres, as its title implies, to the concept of the death instinct outlined by Sigmund Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and subsequently abandoned by much post-Freudian psychoanalysis (with the crucial exception of Melanie Klein and her followers). Rather than proceeding to an abstract array of concepts, I shall introduce them as they apply at points of crucial significance in the films. At the beginning of The Conformist (1970), Marcello is picked up at his hotel by Manganiello, and they set off in pursuit of Professor Quadri, Marcello’s former teacher, whom he has been hired to assassinate. In the car, Marcello is clearly oblivious of what Manganiello is saying to him. The camera tracks in slowly on his face, which is smiling mysteriously, and a dance tune fades in on the soundtrack. Bertolucci cuts to a recording studio, and the track in continues,this time toward a huge wall of glass which separates us from the recording area and through which we see a dazzling white decor, a small orchestra, and three girls in green and white dresses clustered round a microphone in the middle, jigging and swaying to the music of the song they are singing. Marcello is pacing back and forth in front of the glass partition, on our side of it, talking to Italo about his need to conform: “I want stability, security . . . an impression of normalcy. . . . When I look in the mirror, I seem to look different from everybody else.” The imagery gives us an extraordinarily complex visual and aural metaphor for the structure of ideology. The radio broadcast conveys an impression of normalcy to its listeners, and the essence of their experience of it is their blindness—they cannot see what they hear. A link is at once established both with Italo’s literal blindness and with the film’s central image of Plato’s cave, proposed during Marcello’s first conversation with Quadri. One might describe Marcello’s conformity in terms of the progress from the proposed thesis on the cave under Quadri’s tuition to the fulfillment of the need to sit down in front of the wall with the prisoners. Thinking about Father: Bernardo Bertolucci (1977) 21 Chapter 21.indd 344 1/17/12 10:54 AM 3 4 5 t h i n k i n g a b o u t fat h e r The glass partition here becomes an analogue both of the wall and of the cinema screen, on which we“see only the shadows projected on the back of the cave . . . the reflections of things.” The image allows us to experience more than the radio listeners, and it simultaneously gives us a figure of that extra experience through Marcello, who wishes to be absorbed into the normalcy on which the scene beyond the glass gives us a (critical) perspective. The broadcast attempts to naturalize ideology and to sublimate physical reality. The song the girls sing is called “Who is happier than I?” and the title of the program—“the Archangeli program of light music”—assimilates the happiness to a state of celestial bliss and contentment . The colors of the girls’ dresses suggest nature, fertility, innocence, purity, amid the antiseptic cleanness of the decor, and the song is followed by a man doing imitations of birdcalls. This onslaught of joy and Natural Process provides the context in which Italo’s propaganda broadcast will take effect. He speaks, not of a political but of a spiritual alliance, a mystical union authorized by Nature (“their deep kinship”) between two images—“the Prussian image of Mussolini, the Latin image of Hitler.” The progress of the broadcast might be summarized thus: unsurpassable happiness (the song) and Nature (the bird imitations) can reach their mutual zenith in a preordained spiritual union (the Axis). The emphasis on history is crucial: the sequence of unparticularized rhetorical abstractions culminates in...