When interviewed by Andrea Sabbadini at the Freud Museum in London, Bernardo Bertolucci spoke of beginning psychoanalysis in 1969 as he was scripting the Spider's Stratagem and The Conformist, and a year later Last Tango in Paris. These three films are considered his most innovative work—a counter to those who are concerned that psychoanalysis will dampen creativity. Bertolucci said, “More than analyzing me, my case, there in a horizontal position, I was analyzing movies that I was in the process of doing…. I was talking more about my dreams about the films, my fantasies about the films which weren't yet done, than about myself…I found that I had in my camera an additional lens which was…, it's not Kodak, it's not Zeiss, it's Freud, it's a lens which really takes you very close to things…. The movies have always been the closest thing you can imagine to a dream. The movie theater is like the amniotic darkness of a womb, so we are all dreamers, dreamers in a womb.” The Conformist is Bertolucci's most dreamlike film with extensive use of flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks in a non-chronological order like the complexity of a dream's timelessness.
Adapted from a novel by Alberto Moravia, The Conformist (1970) tells the story of Marcello (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who as a young adolescent shoots his homosexual chauffeur during an attempted seduction. In 1938 Marcello joins the Fascist party in a yearning for normality and protection by identifying with the establishment. He volunteers to inform on Quadri (Enzo Tarascio), his former professor, now an anti-Fascist leader in Paris. Meanwhile, he coolly decides to marry Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli), a petty bourgeoise young woman, and, as a cover for his mission, he honeymoons in Paris. En route his orders are changed; Quadri is to be killed. He and his bisexual wife, Anna (Dominique Sanda), are assassinated by the Fascists with brutal, visual splendor. In the epilogue, the day Mussolini is deposed, Marcello, now a devoted father and husband, discovers that Lino, his chauffeur he thought he had killed, is alive and seducing a homosexual squatter in the Coliseum. Marcello's conformist facade fragments and he bizarrely accuses Lino of Quadri's and Anna's murder. In an eerie ending we see Marcello, through bars, turning in fascination to the squatter, thereby turning to homosexuality.
The film explores Marcello's use of pseudo-conformity to obscure his conflicts about homosexuality, sadism, and his oedipal longings. Guilty about his supposed killing of Lino and terrified that he might act on forbidden impulses and be punished, he invites the Fascists to absorb his fragmented self because they allow and glorify the acting out of his sadistic and patricidal wishes. We see his sadistic character throughout the film: He betrays those closest to him; he ridicules Hemlock, his mother's chauffeur and lover, and provokes Manganiello, the Fascist agent, to attack him; he taunts his father as a torturer like himself; and he exposes his blind mentor, Italo, as a Fascist in the epilogue. In his symbolic marriage to Italo, he commits himself to the grandiosity of Fascism but, paradoxically, instead of suppressing his homosexuality and sadism, he intensifies these internal conflicts and provokes others to act them out. He supplants his superego by incorporating the Fascist group superego.
Marcello attempts to defend against further homosexual threats through his heterosexual facade and restrictive conformity.
Bruce H. Sklarew, M.D., an associate editor and co-founder of the award-winning Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, organizes the film programs at meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association and has co-edited two books on psychoanalysis and film.
He cannot be tender with his wife and his one sexual overture is colored with perversity. Otherwise he either avoids her or demeans her. In contrast, Anna enthralls him by her bisexuality and mysterious seductiveness.
Various images portray Marcello's internal threat of being castrated, subjugated, tightly enveloped, or lost into a merger. Lino entraps him in his room. His schoolmates surround and humiliate him by pulling down his pants. Marched in to meet Quadri, he is surrounded by his intimidating disciples. Hotel guests exit an elevator and envelop him as he is about to watch Anna's attempt to seduce Giulia. And perhaps the most riveting image—his entrapment at the end of the farandole dance, which foreshadows his final envelopment by the anti-Fascist marchers. These images of entrapment and subjugation reenact the seduction by the chauffeur and along with his sadism suggest that to Marcello the homosexual object, Lino, is both torturer and victim, seducer and corpse, a blurred exchange of sadomasochistic roles.
I found that I had in my camera an additional lens which was…, it's not Kodak, it's not Zeiss, it's Freud, it's a lens which really takes you very close to things….
Marcello's visit to his seductive mother illustrates the oedipal threat. She is both the archaically yearned for oedipal mother and a feared bitch. Receiving him lying exposed with a syringe under her bed as a litter of puppies crawls over her body, she chides Marcello for his distance by recounting a dream about his coming through the door of her room and kissing her. We can wonder if as a child he was sadistically teased by her flamboyant exhibitionism and if he also witnessed her affairs. Her icy wish that the father were dead conveys an oedipal triumph.
On the way to the assassinations he says to Manganiello, “I just had a strange dream I was in Switzerland and you were taking me for an operation in the hospital because I was blind. And Professor Quadri did the operation. The operation was a success, and I was leaving soon with the wife of the professor, and she loved me.” In this dream he is blinded like Oedipus. But this husband-father, rather than punishing him, in a reversal absolves him by restoring his sight—an undoing. And not only is he going off with Anna; she is in love with him. The dream couples his oedipal wish with absolution. Even the dream setting—“beautiful Switzerland”—offers Marcello solace through neutrality in contrast to the turmoil within himself and Italy.
For Marcello, mothers are split between the bourgeois and seemingly purer Guilia and her mother, and the whore-mother Anna and mother. Anna and mother are merged in many parallel visualizations. Bertolucci suggests Marcello's confusion and conflict by showing Dominique Sanda in two roles in addition to Anna. He watches her as the woman on the Fascist minister's desk who glances at him, as well as the whore at the museum-bordello—among other primal scenes. Marcello has also split his image of fathers into the “good” fathers—Italo and the Fascist hierarchy who condone his impulses and provide group protection—and the “bad fathers”—his real father and the priest, whom he ridicules. As the father he yearns for, Quadri is admired, but as the father who abandoned him at the university as did his father in his psychosis, Quadri is targeted. Thus, Marcello displaces revenge against his father and his teasingly seductive mother through his betrayal of Quadri and his wife.
As witness or voyeur, Marcello can fantasize that he controls what he sees rather than being its helpless victim in many primal scene equivalents. Watching Anna attempt to seduce his wife, he also vicariously gratifies his own homosexuality. He manipulates Manganiello into attacking his mother's chauffeur and lover, and he remains passively frozen while the assassins kill Quadri and Anna. This frozen stance, like the immobility experienced in dreams, compromises two contradicting urges—to save her and to kill her. It also allows him to brace himself against his underlying panic about acting on his impulses as in the tightness of his body and his martinet gait—his character armor. By chiding his father for his Fascist torturing, Marcello provokes him to be “tightened,” to ask for a straightjacket. Marcello's tightness also reveals his conflict about identification with his father and, like him, becoming a Fascist killer.
Throughout the film, Bertolucci's images raise the issue of reality versus illusion. During Quadri's and Marcello's discussion of Plato's cave, a parallel to viewing film, Marcello remains in dark shadows while Quadri is intermittently silhouetted in profile as though he is only an illusion, a shadow. In the car, on the way to the assassination, the windshield wipers alternate clear vision and blur, reality and illusion, one figure in focus, another, not. Bertolucci's extensive use of achronological flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks rendered in a richly poetic and stunning visual style conveys this ambiguity by obscuring the separation between present and past, one character with another, and doubling.
The confusion of time is like a dream full of primary process, dreamlike inconsistencies. The dream-work of condensation, displacement, and symbolization and surrealistic images abound in Bertolucci's visual representation of Marcello's complex “dream”—the entire film. In contrast to Moravia's novel's straightforward narrative form and so many films resembling only illustrations of a story, this film evokes puzzlement and may activate an effort to assemble chronology and causality. Freud described dream-work like an icepack, the latent dream thawing into new segments and then reassembling into a new form as it re-freezes—the manifest dream. Bertolucci speaks of “destroying scripts”; the final film is the result of his innovative and spontaneous style of shooting and editing.
In the present action Marcello sits in the back seat of the car driven by the chauffeur, Manganiello. The flashbacks reveal his past, the past that leads to the present conflicts and situation. Each of the chauffeurs (drivers) represents an aspect of Marcello's inclinations: Manganiello, the sadistic Fascist; Lino, the homosexual; Hemlock, the gigolo, and Marcello's mother, who drives Marcello to the asylum to visit his psychotic father. Bertolucci thus represents the chauffeurs as resonating with and powerfully drawing forward Marcello's conflicts with sadism, homosexuality, and incest.
Lacking sufficient autonomy in his fragile self riddled with primitive pre-oedipal conflicts, Marcello attempts to balance restriction and gratification via immersion in the condoning Fascist hierarchy. Harold Blum wrote, “We journey to abstract ourselves by fabrication. But when the fabric already has been woven, we journey to unravel; identity recedes from our lives the more we pursue it.” Joyce McDougall describes the fragile aspects of someone who desperately seeks conformity saying, “Normality is an over adaptation to the real world” and that “conformity elected as an ideal is a well compensated psychosis.”
The dream-like replications and reconfigurations that pervade the film convey Marcello's chaotic, kaleidoscopic internal state. No matter where he turns, he perceives everything and everyone as another mutation of his past or a fusion of past and present. Lacking an integrated identity, everything merges, blurs, and overlaps; he does not clearly differentiate between himself and others. His false self fragments when his Fascist support crumbles. He thus experiences a fluid, shimmering state in which the fabric of his identity unravels.