Killing Off Beauty: On Bertolucci’s and Moravia’s The Conformist
Shierry Weber Nicholsen
October 2004
Note: Bernardo Bertolucci’s film The Conformist, based on the novel of the same name by
Alberto Moravia, will be shown at SAM on Friday evening January 28th, the second film in the
Luminous Psyche 2005 series.
At that moment he felt that he would willingly have killed her;
for it seemed unbearable to him to know that she was alive
and an enemy; and he felt also – though he was frightened at feeling it –
that to see her die would now, possibly, give him greater pleasure
than to be loved by her. (The Conformist, 304)
.
How can people support destructive political regimes? This has been a question for many of us in
this election year just past. Surely the answer to it is complex and multidimensional, but to explore
it is vitally important as we try to think about how constructive political change can be possible.
Alberto Moravia’s novel The Conformist, published shortly after the end of the Second World
War and made into a film by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1970, offers one profound psychological
answer to it. Moravia’s novel is the study of a man who collaborates with Mussolini’s secret service
to murder an important anti-fascist who is a former professor of his. The novelist might have been
coached by Donald Meltzer and Herbert Rosenfeld, for the novel’s premise seems to be this:
Psychologically, serving political destructiveness represents a despairing and resigned assault on
beauty and the potential for love it represents.
Marcello Clerici, the subject of the novel, was a cruel (and cruelly treated) child who felt strongly
that his cruelty was abnormal and who could not find any resolution of or diminishing of his guilt.
He seeks not to make reparation for his cruel acts but rather to hide his abnormality by appearing
and perhaps even become "normal" – hence the title The Conformist rather than The
Collaborator. In his quest for normality, Marcello not only takes a petit-bourgeois "mindless" wife
but also volunteers himself to Mussolini’s secret service. Marcello is given the task of leading is the
Secret Service to a former professor of his who has become an important member of the antifascist forces in Paris.
This novel, and Bertolucci’s movie, can be read in terms of an Oedipal wish to kill the father, but
far more important and interesting to me is the link the novel makes between Marcellos’ guilt and
despairing resignation to what he experiences as a "curse" and his collaboration in murdering what
represents to him the source of love and beauty. For Moravia does not portray a person without
guilt who is completely given over to evil. Rather, he shows us Marcello’s ongoing ruminations
about his untenable psychological position. We see him in a church hearing the story of Cain and
Abel and identifying himself with Cain.
If there was really such a thing as a curse, why had it been hurled against him? With this
question his mind was again clouded over with the clinging melancholy that continually
oppressed him – the melancholy of a man who is lost and who knows that there is nothing he
can do to save himself . . . .(180)
Moravia does a wonderful job of describing the internal state of submission to destructive forces.
Here is Marcello, recognizing what he has got himself into after his task is changed from simply
helping to locate Quadri to making sure that he is murdered:
He realized that he had been enticed into a kind of trap, and that, having put out one finger, he
was now, through a subterfuge, caught by the whole arm; but, strangely, once the first shock of
surprise was over, he found that he felt no real repugnance at the change of plan – nothing
more , in fact, than, an obstinate, melancholy resignation in the face of a duty which, though it
increases in unpleasantness, yet remains unchanged and unavoidable (206)
Marcello’s resignation to his distasteful condition coexists with his more active rejection of the
good. He can recognize beauty and recognize love, and even long for them and hope to protect
them from attack, but he cannot feel "claimed" by them. His sense of impenetrable rejection allies
itself with a wish to destroy them and becomes a feeling of obligation to a destructive organization.
Thus Marcello gets married – and arranges to take his honeymoon in Paris to serve as a cover for
his Secret Service work!
In Meltzer’s notion of the aesthetic conflict, the original aesthetic object, the mother in all her
aspects for the baby, is both overwhelmingly beautiful and promising of goodness and also
mysteriously unknowable and therefore perhaps dangerous. The child's sensitivity to this
overwhelming beauty gets repressed; it is too much to bear. We all suffer this shut-down of our
aesthetic capacities and have to work to regain them as we develop our psychic strength. Moravia’s
novel combines this idea with the notion, elaborated by Herbert Rosenfeld as well as Meltzer, that
the destructive impulses – envy of the good and the beautiful, frustration and resentment at what is
experienced as rejection or indifference or attack – can become master of the psyche and hold the
part of the psyche that longs for goodness and love in thrall. The longing is not killed off
completely but held subjugated so that the destructive forces are directed toward the unattainable
good and beautiful. Feeling so despairingly inferior to beauty and all it stands for, we would hope
to denigrate it; and if we cannot do that, then obliterate it. The more beautiful the object, the more
we want to kill it off.
Moravia portrays this dynamic exquisitely when he shows us Marcello arriving in beautiful Paris,
the object of the Fascist attack:
This, then, [Marcello thought] was the capitol of France, of that France that had to be
destroyed. He felt now that he had loved this city that lay before his eyes for a long time -- long
before that day, when he found himself there for the first time. And yet this admiration that he
felt for the majestic, kindly, joyous beauty of the town emphasized to him the somber nature of
the duty he was preparing to perform. Perhaps if Paris had been less beautiful, he thought, he
might have evaded that duty, he might have escaped, have freed himself from the bonds of fate.
But the beauty of the city established him firmly in his hostile, negative role. . . (224-5)
A terrible confusion of good and evil results from this dynamic. As Marcello reflects later, "The
thing that caused him the greatest distress was the feeling that these two quite different anxieties
were merged together and that he was no longer capable of distinguishing them from each other --
the anxiety of the lover who sees himself rejected, and that of the secret agent who fears he has
been discovered." (254)
In Moravia’s novel this beauty appears in two women. The first is a prostitute he sees on the way to
Paris. She has her hand on the knee of the Secret Service man who is accompanying him. She
resembles Meltzer’s "beautiful mother" but she is degraded for Marcello almost before he can wish
to rescue her::
[W}hat struck him most forcibly about her was her forehead, and not so much its whiteness as
its appearance of being illumined in a mysterious way by the intense expression of the eyes,
with a purity of light that made him think of one of those chaplets of diamonds that women
used to wear, on great occasions, at balls. Marcello continued to gaze at her for some time in
astonishment, and as he gazed he was conscious of a painful, indescribably feeling of regret and
disdain. (209)
But the central aesthetic object – and object of killing – in the novel is not Signor Quadri, the
professor who is to be assassinated, but his wife Lina. She has the same kind of radiance he had
seen in the prostitute on the Riviera, and he wants her to love him. Clearly, Lina knows what
Marcello is and despises him for it, yet she makes a pretense of interest in him and displays a
sexual interest in his wife. Marcello kisses her by force, and she wipes her lips off disgustedly. This
is perhaps the moment when he comes closest to feeling separately the love and the terrible pain of
rejection on the one hand and the murderous hatred of beauty on the other, and when he hopes to
overcome his hatred:
[N]oticing with what care and what distaste she cleaned those lips which, according to the
pretense, should have still been palpitating and greedy for more kisses, there swept over him an
obscure feeling of desperate, heart-rending pain. "Love me!" he wanted to cry out, "love me . . .
for God’s sake, love me!" it suddenly seemed to him that not only his own life, but Lina’s too,
now depended upon her love for him – so longed-for, so impossible. Now, as though infected
by Lina’s steadfast loathing, he realized that he too was filled with a hatred which, though
mixed with love and inseparable from it, was yet bloody and murderous. At that moment he
felt that he would willingly have killed her; for it seemed unbearable to him to know that she
was alive and an enemy; and he felt also – though he was frightened at feeling it – that to see
her die would now, possibly, give him greater pleasure than to be loved by her. (303-4)
I will end by pointing out that in this terrible picture an impulse of genuine concern is still possible,
for such an impulse follows directly from the above:
Then a sudden, generous impulse of spirit made him sorry, and he said to himself, "Thank
Heaven, she won’t be [present when the secret service arrives to murder her husband] Thank
Heaven." And he saw that he had really wished for a moment to have her killed with her
husband, in the same way and at the same time. (304)
Yet Marcello’s repression of his own pain and suffering seals him after all in his subjugation to the
destructive forces. His wife Giulia raises the possibility of having children:
Marcello said nothing and Giulia went on, "Why are you so silent? Wouldn’t you like to have
children by me"? "Of course I should," he replied; and all of a sudden he felt, to his
astonishment, two tears spot out of his eyes and trickle down his cheeks. And then two more,
hot and scalding, like tears already wept some time long past, that had lain within his eyes to be
infused with burning sorrow. He knew that what made him weep was Giulia’s talk of happiness
of a few minutes before, and yet he was unable to define the reason for it. Perhaps it was
because this happiness had been paid for in advance at so dear a price; perhaps because he
realized that he would never be able to be happy, not, anyhow, in the simple, affectionate way
described by Giulia. With an effort he at last repressed his desire to weep…. (322)
The repression of mourning means that no reparation can be made; the beautiful cannot be
restored and enjoyed. Immediately after this moment comes word that Signora Quadri has gone
with her husband, and the knowledge that she too will be murdered.
The fate of Signora Quadri’s wife in Bertolucci’s version is slightly different, as is Bertolucci’s
handling of this material in the medium of film. I hope that readers interested in this dynamic will
attend the January 28 showing of The Conformist at Luminous Psyche 2005.
Reference
Moravia, Alberto. The Conformist. Translated by Angus Davidson. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Young, 1951.