Back to Back 34 - Love Your Enemy But Kill Him Too

Contrasting films where the political assassin gets cold feet

Ashes and Diamonds (1958) - director Andzrej Wadja
The Conformist (1970) - director Bernardo Bertolucci

Genre: Political psychodrama fable

Those who build walls, those who only offer solidarity with their own, those who pit people against each other in order to control both sides, those who limit civil rights and liberties, those who deny the right to free movement using the weapon of the law and the alibi of responsibility - these are today’s fascists. The problem is being able to pinpoint anyone who isn’t even marginally complicit in the legitimization of fascism as a method.
Michaela Murgia, How to be a Fascist (2020)

Is it permissible to commit violence, to kill, in order to further your political aims - which of course will always be for the greater good, because they’re your aims?

For many years the evident consensus was the solid centrist liberal No: killing was always bad and wrong. But then we had Iraq in 2003, and it turned out that for liberals killing is actually OK if it has some pretext that can satisfy - not even the sniff test - but just the basic syntax test. That is, if it was a string of words that formed a grammatical sentence, then it was now a valid causus belli for your ‘just war’, and it turned out that - just this once, only as an exceptional thing - killing hundreds of thousands of civilians was actually the correct and liberal thing to do.

Now we have Gaza 2023-2024 and it turns out that you’re not even a proper liberal anymore if you’re not in favour of the wholesale slaughter of innocent people. Matter of fact, if you oppose it, you’re being antiliberal. Antisemitic, anti-LGBTQ+ rights, anti-history. So now the consensus is turned on its head and it’s not only OK to kill for political ends, but absolutely necessary to do so at an unprecedented rate. Hell in a very small place.

Now it’s not wrong to murder en masse, it’s only wrong to make those who are carrying out the killing feel uncomfortable, because public condemnation of wholesale murder, of actual genocide, violates their safe space.

Now that liberalism is dead, in other words, it’s time to rebuild a consensus around what kinds of violence are and are not permissible to an ethical person. A good place to start is the the study by Nick Hewlett, Blood and Progress: Violence in Pursuit of Emancipation (2016), which looks at the ethical and pragmatic aspects of the issue from a progressive-liberationist perspective.

Another place would be the ‘biopic’ of the assassin of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Revolution +1 (2021), made by Masao Adachi. The director used to be a literal guerrilla, a member of the Japanese Red Army and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and so though the director has come to a position against violence, he can certainly sympathize with the young man who was driven to homicide against the top-level sponsor of an extreme far-right religious cult like the Moonies.

Or we could go back and at least consider some much earlier cases of political assassins, even fictional ones. Not to look for the answers, perhaps, but just to look frankly at the questions, and to try to avoid the anodyne blanket liberal centrist bromide No to All Violence, which as we’ve seen means less than nothing in practice.

Set on a single day, 8 May 1945, VE Day, the day the war in Europe ended, Ashes and Diamonds follows a charismatic hitman called Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski) as he prepares to assassinate a Communist official called Szczuka (Wacław Zastrzeżyński).

Maciek is a 'patriot' of the Polish Home Army, the resistance group clinging to the pre-war identity of the Polish republic. They have fought the Nazi occupiers, now they are fighting the Communist regime that is being installed in Poland.

But they're not very competent, prone instead to gunning down the wrong people and getting shitfaced at the tiniest opportunity. Maciek's commander or handler is determined that the Communist commissar must die, but not entirely clear about why, and is not prepared to do it himself, instead browbeating Maciek in bars, hotel rooms and toilets to for God sake stop vacillating and do the deed already.

Why is Maciek hesitating? Well for one thing, he's war-weary, having fought for six long years in sewers and basements against the Germans. He feels some guilt about murdering completely innocent men in a mixup. And he's finding love in the person of Krystyna the barmaid at the local tavern (Ewa Krzyżewska).

It's a kind of Hamlet-inflected tale, and the Communist bigwig plays the part of the evil usurping uncle. Except he's not evil. In fact he's a good bloke. He is also war-weary, having fough the Nazis for even longer, going back to the Spanish Civil War. And he has his own family troubles, for his son is part of the same movement as Maciek, and thus is also at war with him.

Wadja's mastery of the film art is already clearly consolidated here. Certain setpieces, like the action scene at the beginning where Maciek ambushes the wrong men, or the romantic scene where Maciek and Krystyna talk in the bombed-out church with a giant crucified Christ hanging upside-down, are wonderfully composed and edited.

It's like a noir film about crime gangs, but instead of mafiosi feuds we are in the very political arena of different visions for postwar Poland. The nation is ever-present in the dialogues, and in shots of dusty flags being shouldered as burdens.

Indeed it's quite possible to see the beautiful Krystyna, embittered by war and loss, as a stand-in or symbol for Poland itself. Which she is, but at the same time she is a very real and human character, and by no means just a cardboard icon of nationhood. Her portrayal is the heart of the film, because the patriot-apparatchik antagonists get all the action and agency, but she, a humble nobody, gets all the isolation and alienation.

The ending is wrenching, both poignant and elegaic as well as existentially grim and darkly comic. In all, Ashes and Diamonds is a very solid piece of early Wadja work, a highly-watchable noirish thriller with a political edge.

Very soon after this film came Jean-Luc Godard’s first explicitly political work, Le Petit Soldat (1960), banned for three years as the Algerian War which it dealt with raged on. It also dealt with a reluctant assassin who’s tasked with murdering his political opponent, in this case a central figure in the FLN, the group who are fighting against the colonialist French forces in Algiers and taking the secret war to France itself.

It’s an absurdly pre-political film, attempting a morally bankrupt apolitical stance but without doing even a fraction of the homework required to take such a position. At the time of its release, hoping that the French government wouldn’t ban it completely, Godard made a number of ridiculous assertions: ”One can say that the film is not political because I do not take a position for anyone.” Right, Jean-Luc, there are good people on both sides, heard that one before.

Whatever the technical-cinematic novelties essayed by the film, and they are extremely impressive, including the verité style sequence of real torture similar to The Battle of Algiers (1966) in its documentary rawness, the film is a sorry mess. This harsh judgement on naïveté and clumsiness is also the later Godard’s own admission: “it frightens me a little that I could have written those things and have them said... it’s completely reactionary and enormously confused.”

Nevertheless, this film would go on to serve as model to the young Bernardo Bertolucci, who looked up to Godard as combination filmic god and adoptive father, and who would add in a few ‘easter-egg’ type references to Godard in his film of political assassination, such as Godard’s home address and phone number (a form of primordial arthouse cinema doxxing avant la lettre).

—-INTERMISSION—

Is it possible for a film to become too complex, too intertextual and evocative of so many different themes - psychosexual, political, artistic, philosophic, architectural, literary - that it weighs itself down to the point of collapse? If so, The Conformist would be that film. It would be theoretically possible to go through the film shot by shot and tease out all the allusions, the poetic symbols, the filmic and literary references, the soundtrack clues, the colour-coding and the placement of character and set elements in a complex blocking scheme, that each carry a particular meaning.

In this case the film is viewed as a tremendously dense tapestry of those very many meanings and symbolic resonances, all crowding together on this rather simple fable framework, a feat of narrative boldness that threatens almost to collapse the fable under its own weight.

So we could see the film as a palimpsest of coiled and complex meanings, a text to be disassembled as a reverse of the complicated poetic-cinematic process whereby it came together. By doing so we would have set ourselves a task that the film, however satisfying as an artistic and viewing experience, simply cannot justify. How many years would it take to unpack all these dense layers? What other experiences would we be denying ourselves while occupied on this task? Ironically, the film itself even offers its own commentary on such a dilemma.

Let's go the other way, and approach this film from the angle of radical simplicity. In the most basic telling, it's the story of Marcello (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a man in a deeply ambivalent place.

His sexuality is confused: he wants to be 'normal' but continuously finds himself attracted to what we might call 'gay situations': characters and events that offer him more excitement than the staid bourgeois hetero place in society that he keeps telling himself is his goal.

His politics is likewise confused, embodied in his two fathers. There is his literally insane biological father, whose fascist blackshirt is a straitjacket and who lives in a mental institution obsessing on "slaughter and melancholy", strage e malinconia. Then there is his adoptive philosopher father, Professor Quadri, who tutored him on Plato's metaphysics but then exiled himself to Paris to fight the fascist threat.

Marcello 'the conformist' wants to conform to his literal father's desire for him, however insane it may be, and to enter into the bourgeois marriage to a bourgeois girl mandated by the church and the fascist state. But something keeps pulling him away from this goal, something in him which just won't conform. This is where the first of the tangles takes place. Because it turns out that you can be a sexual 'nonconformist', quite gay indeed in fact, and still make your way in the fascist regime.

Marcello's friend Italo, a blind ideologue of fascism who writes absurd screeds about the Prussian qualities of Mussolini and the Latin qualities of Hitler, is gay and frequently makes advances toward his friend Marcello. He constitutes a second-level or subsidiary emanation of the father figure, but this time quite kinkily attracted to the younger man - the theme of abuse of children by perverse elders is also a recurrent theme of the story.

Another secondary father figure in this by-now quite crowded field is Manganiello, named after the club that fascist thugs used to beat up their socialist rivals in the street fights of the early 1920s. He is the brute, the no-nonsense skull-basher. If Marcello were simpler, he could unproblematically identify with this man and fit right in to fascist Italy. But he loathes the vulgarity, the stupidity.

There's a parallel building up with Visconti's Nazi psychodrama The Damned, made just before this film and probably much too late to be an influence. Most likely it's a case of creative convergence. But in both cases various types of sexuality are accommodated within the fascist-Nazi psychoneurotic complex. The important thing, it turns out, is not so much the sexual orientation as the instrumentalisation of sex, as with economics and social class and culture, to impose a strict hierarchy of dominance and control. And of course the absolute lack of scruple to use cruelty to achieve your goals.

To a great extent this current of polymorphous perversity undermines the psychoanalytic interpretation of fascism that both these films, along with Pasolini's Salò (1975) as well as salacious fluff like The Night Porter (1974) all try to pull off. As a dramatic device it has its limitations, though it can make for some powerful melodrama, as it does here and in The Damned. It very much dates these works to a period in the 60s-70s when Freudian explanations seemed to hold sway over everything.

But as an explanatory framework for authoritarian political forces its simply disastrous. If fascism is simply the continuation of liberal capitalism taken to its logical end and stripped of all illusions of humane ethics, then that's a way to understand it with clarity and so to fight back against it. If fascism is just a confused psycho-soup of conflicting sexual orientations and desires, what even are we supposed to do about that? Solve right-wing politics with psychotherapeutic counselling?

At its most extreme, this psychoanalytic reading of fascism is grossly misleading and even insulting to many of those who become its victims. Though fascist-Nazi ideology may fixate on a sexual threat emanating from the Other, and also single out 'sexual perversion', homosexuality and transsexuality as enemies to be conquered and suppressed, the far right isn't all about sex by any means. It's about instrumentalising popular fears of the Other - racially as well as sexually coded - to achieve hierarchical dominance within the liberal-capitalist framework of contemporary society. It's at least as much about a militarized vision of social class as about sexual orientation, and probably much more so.

Considering the technical aspects of the film - cinematography, art direction, costume, framing and blocking, sound and the integration of music, editing, narrative structure - is to consider filmmaking at the very pinnacle of excellence, just as is the case with Italian cinema in general at around this time. Bertolucci is the most sensuous and deliberate of filmmaking artists, and he gathered together the very best in filmmaking arts to work with him.

Master cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, arguably one of greatest DPs in cinema history (Apocalypse Now, 1900, Reds, The Last Emperor, among others - he was Bertolucci’s constant collaborator) was able to use this film as his laboratory, working to encode meanings in the very light and colour of the film. This layer adds just another level of complexity to the meaning. Finally deciciding whether all these complex levels of meaning integrate into a satisfying whole, or whether it's another example of the dread phrase "style over substance", depends on how we view the weight of its symbolic import.

For me, I feel the fable, construed as a fairytale about fascism as a psychosexual disturbance, though highly engaging as the film is being viewed, simply doesn't work to endow the whole thing with the depth such a complex work really needs. In the end the fairytale tells us very little, not at the deepest level, and not even at the more superficial level of an Aesop-like moral to the tale. Fascists are violent people? This I knew. But now, as it turns out, so are the centrist liberals who want to be their friends.