00;00;14;29 - 00;00;42;06

Jonathan Hafetz

Hi, I'm Jonathan Hafetz, and welcome to Law on Film, a podcast that explores the rich connections between law and film. Law is critical to many films. Film, in turn, tells us a lot about the law. In each episode, we'll examine a film that's noteworthy from a legal perspective. We look at legal issues that the film explores and we also look at how law is important to understanding the film and what the film teaches us about the law, and about the larger social and cultural context in which it operates.

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Jonathan Hafetz

This episode, we look at the conformist, Bernardo Bertolucci's 1970 political drama set in 1930s Italy. The film centers on Marcello clergy played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, a mid-level fascist functionary who's ordered to assassinate his former professor, an anti-fascist dissident living in Paris. The film, which includes many flashbacks to Claridges early life and decision to join the secret police, provides powerful and chilling insights into the psychology of conformism and fascism.

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Jonathan Hafetz

The film, widely considered one of the greatest ever made, not only features outstanding performances but also superb production design and cinematography that helps capture Italy under Mussolini. The film is as timely today as it was when it was released. As the world witnesses a resurgence of authoritarianism in the United States and Western Europe. Joining me to talk about The Conformist is Aziz Hok.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Aziz is the frank and produced Jay Greenburg Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, a leading scholar of U.S. and comparative constitutional law. Aziz's recent work concerns democratic backsliding and the regulation of AI. His award winning scholarship is published in several books in leading law, social science, and political science journals. He also writes for numerous popular publications, including Politico, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Aziz as an actor pro bono practice and is on the board of the American Constitution Society, the Seminary Co-op, the New Press, and the ACLU of Illinois. As he has previously served as a clerk to Judge Robert Design of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and then for the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the US Supreme Court.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Before joining the Chicago Law School faculty, Aziz was counsel and then director of the Brennan Center Liberty and National Security Project, where I had the honor of working together with him, litigating cases in both the courts of appeals and the Supreme Court. As he is great to have you on law and film.

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Aziz Huq

It's great to be here, John, and thank you very much for having me. I'm going to disagree with two parts of your bio. I think the more important disagreement is that John came to the Brennan Center while I was working there with a amazing docket of really important cases, and it was entirely my honor and my learning experience to get the chance to partner with John on those cases.

00;03;03;19 - 00;03;34;19

Aziz Huq

I think the benefits from from doing that accrued, yes, to the Brennan Center, but absolutely to me, from what I learned from watching him. Litigate. You already had a lot of experience litigating at that time, and I don't think there was really any benefit that flowed the other way. And then one very minor correction, which is relevant to the topic of the podcast, is that I no longer write for The Washington Post, a change that is not unrelated to the question of who today is a conformist.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Yeah, that's a very important correction to point out. And that's at the Brennan Center. So we don't do grass. We'll just say that the feeling is mutual. It was an honor for me, too. So, let's talk about The Conformist. So the film is set in 1930s Italy. Mussolini is in power. What is the basic context? So we have a little background.

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Aziz Huq

I think today our image of fascism is refracted through a powerful example of Hitler's Germany. For good reason, because Hitler's Germany is associated with the moral abyss that is the Holocaust, in a way that is distinctive and has no parallel in, history. But we forget at our peril that Hitler was not the first fascist, that Italy under Benito Mussolini had moved into what Mussolini called fascism.

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Aziz Huq

I believe queening a term as a way of picking out a political regime in the 1920s. And the short version of that is that Mussolini grew up as a well-educated, well-read, but troubled kid, got into fights, was often entangled with the law because of his hot temper, became involved in left of center politics, and really took off as a political figure on the national stage when he was made the editor of a Milan based newspaper called Avanti!

00;04;58;23 - 00;05;40;14

Aziz Huq

That was a socialist newspaper. This really made his name. He broke, however, from the socialists and from the Marxist tradition around World War Two and in the wake of World War Two, argued for a version of socialism that was national rather than international in character and that had room for, and indeed centered ideas of family and faith in a way that the Socialist Party of Italy at the time had no room for Mussolini began a campaign of civil unrest through what were called the fascist, the, combat the mental or the combat bands.

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Aziz Huq

These were groups of armed Blackshirts who would go about disrupting, in particular, socialist meetings and organizations, the fascist movement, of Mussolini became important and, increasingly prominent thanks to winning a significant number of votes, not in the first postwar election of 1919, but in the, 1921 elections in which the, mostly these party took 35 seats, not enough by any stretch to form a government, but a significant national presence thanks to their extra legal campaign.

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Aziz Huq

In the following year, Mussolini led, what became known later as the March on Rome. This was a march of something like 30,000 fascists challenging the, liberal government in Rome, arguing that they had failed to suppress the threat posed by the socialists. The socialists at this point were positing the possibility of a general strike, and under the shadow of the march on Rome, the Italian king decided to invite Mussolini to become the head of government.

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Aziz Huq

So Mussolini seized his power in 1922 through a mechanism that is lawful but which is backed by an unlawful threat, and in the wake of that, seizure of power over the next decade, the space available for political organizing, the space available for criticism and resistance at what became known as the fascist government, narrows to a thinner and thinner point that there's a famous moment in 1924 when an opposition politician called Giacomo Matteo Matteo was assassinated after giving a critical speech aimed at Mussolini.

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Aziz Huq

Eventually, Mussolini is dragged into World War Two through an alliance with Hitler, and his government falls in 1943. Eventually, he's driven north, forms a kind of rump republic in a place called Salo. When that falls, Mussolini is is dragged onto the street, hanging from a lamppost. And, his body is both defamed and maltreated in ways that, have now become famous as an image of what happens to a dictator after they fall.

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Jonathan Hafetz

You know, that background is so helpful to kind of frame the film, even though it kind of zooms in on a particular person to try to talk about some of these dynamics. So it and it centers on Marcelo clergy. Right. Who's played brilliantly by Jean-Louis Trintignant. He is this individual who joins the fascist secret police. We see him that when the film opens on his way to assassinate his former university professor, staunch anti-fascist Luca Quadri, played by Enzo Tarantino, who's living in exile in Paris.

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Jonathan Hafetz

And then through these flashbacks, we kind of go back and we see why clergy first joined the secret police. And in this, you know, it's a real window into some dynamics of, you know, Italy under Mussolini and fascism. So why is these clergy joined?

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Aziz Huq

The film depicts a man who has experienced some kind of a trauma in early life. It's suggested that the trauma is the advance by a man who was a chauffeur within the family that pleurisy, rebuffs, violently ending in what he at least believes is the death of the person who made the advance, the chauffeur. This is a man who never gets over on the film's account.

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Aziz Huq

This early trauma and is persistently, troubled internally, not just by some sense of guilt, although I think there is some of that, but by a sense that his own repressed desires being out of step with those of a society. And so in the key moments in the flashbacks, and there is a flashback to the childhood incident with the chauffeur, but that's something of a setting up.

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Aziz Huq

The key flashbacks show us Clarice entering into a series of relationships through which he will be able to present himself as a normal and unremarkable member of society. One of those relationships is his marriage to a woman called Julia. Not clear entirely to my mind how he feels about Julia. There are moments which suggest that he has physical passion toward her, that he feels some kind of sexual desire toward her.

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Jonathan Hafetz

But there are.

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Aziz Huq

Many other moments which suggest that she is merely instrumental to him. He is. She's merely a rock through which he can assert his, membership as belonging in a regular society. He goes to church, at her request and confesses confesses not just to his early, perhaps murder, but even to the fact that he's about to join the fascist secret police.

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Aziz Huq

And that's the other act of joining that we see early on in the movie. We see him going to, the fascist headquarters and offering himself as a, potential spy with respect to Quadri. And it's and it's important to note that at the moment that he offers himself in this capacity, not only are his motives somewhat opaque, not just to the viewer, but actually to the person that he's talking to, but it's not clear from that conversation that what he will be asked to do is to kill Quadri.

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Aziz Huq

Indeed, what he seems to be volunteering for and what he seems to be accepted. Das is a spy, not as a killer, and I think that that is an important distinction.

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Jonathan Hafetz

You know, it's interesting. As a side note, you just to go back to his wife Julia, for a minute, that's played by Stephanie's umbrella. The one time he does exhibit passion. I think this connects to what you were saying before is there's a scene on a train when she tells him that she wasn't of. Now, was she not a virgin when they married?

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Jonathan Hafetz

But that she had been sort of sexually abused as a young teen girl by, I think it was a close family friend or something like that.

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Aziz Huq

I think they used the word uncle.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Uncle. Yeah, uncle. Uncle actually. Right. You're right.

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Aziz Huq

But it wasn't clear to me whether it was a biological uncle or just a close friend of the family. Maybe there was ambiguity. Or maybe simply. I don't know enough about the way that the word uncle is used in Italian.

00;12;06;24 - 00;12;20;24

Jonathan Hafetz

Yeah, but either way, that's the moment right when she reveals that whether it's the biological uncle or the friend uncle, that there's some passion which kind of goes back to some of the psychosexual trauma that's at the heart of Claridges like character.

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Aziz Huq

Absolutely. I think that there's two ways of reading the, initial approach that she makes to the fascist secret police, two ways of understanding his psychology. And I think one is somewhat boring. One is interesting and generative. The boring one, which is the one that I think most loudly semaphore by that early scene with the chauffeur.

00;12;45;23 - 00;13;24;10

Aziz Huq

It's actually loudly semaphore right at the end of the movie. And the very last shot of the movie is, here's a man who has a sexual orientation that is off kilter with what society expects. And this is, an instance of almost Freudian repression where he is unable to express himself in the ordinary way that he would, were society to be more open, and that anxiety and fear about the way that he can or cannot be in society is sublimated, is transformed into a powerful desire to belong at any cost.

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Aziz Huq

And and that's a, that's a that that I think turns its, homosexuality into a explanation of fascism writ large and for reasons that others have pointed out, Pauline Kael, as you generously shared with me when we were talking about this, movie before this podcast, Pauline Kael, the famous New Yorker film reviewer, made that what seems to me a legitimate criticism that to reduce fascism to an unexpected spillover or for oppressed homosexuality is to take a really complex and important phenomena and to trivialize it, and also to stigmatize homosexuality in a way that I think is profoundly problematic.

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Aziz Huq

But I think that the film is more complex and rich, and rewards a slightly different, reading, one that focuses not so much on homosexuality, but on Clarice's inability, see, or difficulty in finding a role that he is intrinsically comfortable in society and therefore having to actively reach out, to situate himself, to make himself into the thing that society will accept at whatever point in time.

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Aziz Huq

Now, let me point to just one scene that I think illustrates a little bit of this. So there's a scene at which he, Clarice, she is meeting with one of the leaders of the fascist. Maybe it's the fascist party, maybe it's the fascist secret police, and he's given the assignment with respect to Quadri. And then he, is given a gun, and it's not clear why he's been given the gun.

00;15;03;20 - 00;15;28;14

Aziz Huq

And he as he is walking out of the room, the film breaks from naturalism. And there is a moment where Clarice, she first points the gun in the air one way and points it in the air of the second way, and then points the gun at his head. And it's a moment of sort of acting within the largely but not completely naturalistic world of the movie, which is also acting.

00;15;28;16 - 00;15;48;12

Aziz Huq

And what are we to make of that breaking of the naturalist convention at that moment in time? One way to think about it is that Clarice, she is a is a person who is, in some important sense, empty on the inside. He doesn't know who he wants to be, but he what he wants to be is is untroubled and accepted.

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Aziz Huq

He wants to, as the title suggests, conform. And and in seeking to conform. He is not entirely alone. So I think that one can read his behavior alongside the behavior of his wife Julia, as parallel efforts to play out stereotypes of what it is to be a certain kind of person in Italian society in this time period. If you lack a certain sense of yourself, if you lack a certain sense of moral compass, if you lack a certain sense of substantiality from within, if you are in to, to quote a or to to to refer to the title of a famous book from the turn of the 20th century.

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Aziz Huq

If you are a person without qualities. This is a famous book by Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities. So one way of thinking about what the movies about is, is what happens when a, a violent, authoritarian political movement, one that seeks to reshape the totality of social life. And we can talk about whether Mussolini was actually successful in that regard.

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Aziz Huq

What happens when when that movement comes to a place where you have these kind of half formed people like Claire Ichi, like Julia, who are mostly content to get along and go along, and what will they do? Well, they'll try and find ways of thriving in that world. They'll try and find ways of masking the gap in their own selves.

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Aziz Huq

And this is this is why I think that moment of of rupture, in the fascist office is important. It it shows you the playwright she is looking for a role to play. And there's this very graphic moment where he shows you that he is seizing on a role in order to fill a gap that's inside him. What happens when authoritarianism, violence, intolerance meets a population of people who are half formed?

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Aziz Huq

And I think you can you can read the film as it's not just a question of clarice's homosexuality, which I don't think is actually, at the end of the day, all that important and much more in terms of a sense of a person who is not in touch with himself, the sense of a person who is not in touch with his own moral compass, if indeed he has one, and the sense of a person who's not in an important way, in touch with his own romantic feelings, he doesn't know who he loves.

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Aziz Huq

In some important sense. And I think that this is what makes him vulnerable to the lure or the opportunities presented by fascism. And if you look at him in that way, if you look at him as a person without qualities, then gosh, it's not a story of somebody who has some exceptional predisposition or vice, depending upon what era we're talking about homosexuality and or what perspective we're talking about.

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Aziz Huq

He's a person who is vulnerable because of his incompleteness, his patinas in the face of these buffeting and powerful social forces.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Yeah. So interesting. Think about his character that way. And I, you know, one other contrast which just comes to mind is between him and Mangano. Right. Who's the sort of, heavy that is tasked with accompanying clergy to Paris and to making sure that he effectively goes through with the mission, which seems to more in some ways, maybe a more typical of what you might think of as a typical candidate for someone who would, you know, join the fascist movement or party.

00;19;23;04 - 00;19;52;11

Aziz Huq

That's right. Montano is portrayed as somebody who had been in combat in Africa, maybe earlier in Mussolini's regime. The main events of the movie, as I understand, transpire in 1938 and, Mussolini had invaded, Ethiopia, I believe, 4 or 5 years beforehand that Ethiopian campaign was famous for its brutality. Some half million Ethiopians die in that, conflict.

00;19;52;14 - 00;20;42;09

Aziz Huq

Ethiopia becomes famous militarily because the Italians deploy poison gas, and they deploy it at scale in ways that lead to quite horrendous losses of human life and suffering. So Mangano is somebody who has come through brutality, who refers back to his brutality and who has the kind of matter of fact, no nonsense asked to toward further instances of that brutality and is manifestly irritated by Clarice's dithering and hesitation about the task of, assassinating Quadri and the question of whether, countries wife Anna, for whom Clarice she might have feelings for, although that I think is again ambiguous, the question of whether Anna will become collateral damage.

00;20;42;13 - 00;21;17;18

Aziz Huq

And so what I think the movie is showing us here, not to suggest it's being didactic is fascism takes many types. And there are the, Montano types who move smoothly from one campaign into another, who seemingly enjoy the fact of brutality. And there the people like Cleary, Chee and Julia, who are incapable of formulating what I think we today would call a spine in response to the pressures that are imposed by fascism.

00;21;17;20 - 00;21;58;16

Aziz Huq

And then, of course, you have, the Professor Quadri and his wife, who take a very, very different approach to respond to fascism in this very, very different way. And really, it's the tensions and the dynamics between these characters out of which the conflicts and the drama of the movie, emerge. And the fact that the dramas of the characters are overlaid with what might be a set of sexual tensions which cut across the loyalties that are created or destroyed by fascism and that complicate or render those loyalties at times suspect, at times impossible to perform without some sort of profound sacrifice or contradiction.

00;21;58;18 - 00;22;21;06

Jonathan Hafetz

Yeah, it's so interesting because there's a line in the film when clarity is being recruited about why do people join, right? And they say, don't most people do it for power, for money, but few people do it for love of fascism. So it's it's except there's some universal there's sort of a host of reasons why people might join, but it's often for sort of other reasons that they would become supportive.

00;22;21;08 - 00;22;48;12

Aziz Huq

Absolutely. And I think that the reason that I'm trying to gesture toward that, I think, is illustrated by Clarissa and Julia, which is that the sense of simply going with the flow and wanting to do well under the terms of the flow, whatever it is, is a really, really common one. And I think that once one sees Bertolucci as telling the story, and we should say that the story is based upon a novel by Alberto Moravia.

00;22;48;15 - 00;23;16;12

Aziz Huq

When we see battle actually telling the story, I think it is to do the story a profound disservice, to reduce it, to wow people who are repressed, people who have unusual forms of sexuality, at least as a statistical matter, are likely to become fascist. I don't think that that's his take at all, and I don't think it captures the ambiguities, the moral and the practical ambiguities that people necessarily confront.

00;23;16;12 - 00;23;34;09

Aziz Huq

Although Manzano does not confront right, we see somebody who is completely comfortable and is completely smoothly moved from the world of killing Ethiopians to the world of killing dissidents. For others, this is a transformation. This is a new world in which it's really hard to figure out your place. It's really hard to figure out what sort of things you can and cannot do.

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Aziz Huq

What do you have? Agency over?

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Jonathan Hafetz

Sticking with the topic of what might be viewed as some deviant sexual behavior, right. From from the other standpoint, do you think there's a or does the film suggest that there's a tendency for fascist, authoritarian governments to define and legitimize what they view as sexual deviancy? That was something that sort of really struck me when I was rewatching the movie, that there's an effort to really define from the top down, to define normalcy and what's not normal.

00;24;02;22 - 00;24;04;06

Aziz Huq

Where did you get that from.

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Jonathan Hafetz

As one of the pressures for, well, for one of the clergy, it needs to want to conform is because of the way other behaviors would be viewed as deviant. Well.

00;24;14;01 - 00;24;55;04

Aziz Huq

That might be true. Also, I think that we see only the priest who. Clarice cheek, officers confession to, making a judgment about sexual deviant and, the judgment that the priest reaches, which is condemnation. But also, how is it that you've said and you've taken so long to come to confession? I think that the way that the movie presents that suggests that this is not really a motive force, at least for clarity, because Clarice, he responds to the priest by laughing at him, but he laughs at the fact that the priest is not concerned with the fact that he might have murdered somebody.

00;24;55;04 - 00;25;30;28

Aziz Huq

The fact that Clarice, he might have had these desires that are by the the standards of society at that time were abnormal. What the priest focuses upon us is it took Clarice a really long time to confess. So that Clarice, she laughs at this effort to impose sexual normality, because it turns out that in offering it, the priest inadvertently or inverting Lee, reveals that the the thing that the priest is most concerned with is the church's monopoly over discipline and that self-interest makes Clarice she laugh.

00;25;30;28 - 00;25;49;19

Aziz Huq

It doesn't scare him. That's not the thing that worries him. The other thing that I think is worth noting here is that so much of the film unspools in Paris rather than in Italy. And we should have said maybe more clearly that the film starts out on the morning in Paris in which on which Clarice is to go.

00;25;49;19 - 00;26;17;04

Aziz Huq

And, well, initially we think that it is he who is going to kill Quadri, or maybe Quadri and Anna. Right. Turns out that's not quite what happens. And I think that's another important disjunct in the movie, and then flashes back from that morning in Paris to both Clarice's life in Italy as a child, as a as an adult, getting married to Julia, but then also to the day or day as they've spent in Paris already.

00;26;17;06 - 00;26;48;05

Aziz Huq

And so my guess would be that at least half of the movie is shot in Paris, and half of the movie is about being in Paris as the next part in Italian. And one of the things, one of the very striking and I think famous scenes of the movie, which takes place at a Parisian dance hall, is this long dance between Anna, on the one hand, who is quadri, his wife, maybe at one point had been Clarice's love interest in one way, shape or form, although that's not fully fleshed out.

00;26;48;07 - 00;27;34;07

Aziz Huq

A dance between Anna and Julia, Clarice's wife, and it is an incredibly seductive and sexual dance, and it comes in the immediate wake of a scene in which she spies on Anna and Julia as honor is helping Julia try on clothes in a way that, again, is suggestive that both Honor and Julia have non-heterosexual desires. They have, at the time, nonstandard designs, and so that much of the movie literally inhabits, and then shows that we're inhabiting a world in which those desires are both performer bill and public in the dancehall and performer Bill in private.

00;27;34;08 - 00;28;11;17

Aziz Huq

So I think that once you recognize that there's all of those elements going on in the movie, it becomes harder and harder to see this as a movie about repression, because, I mean, surely Clarice and Julia are presented with a image, a picture, a possibility of how they could live free given their own sexual abilities. And I don't think that Julia and Clarice's marriage is portrayed as being one in which Ashley, either of them would care all that much if the marriage became a much looser marriage, if it became a marriage of convenience in which they pursued their own romantic and sexual pursuits.

00;28;11;17 - 00;28;39;03

Aziz Huq

There is almost this sort of turn in the movie that does not happen, but that you can imagine happening, which suggests that what's at stake here is not merely sexual repression, it is not merely sexual liberation, because that liberation is on the cards as it's available. And just to put a point on that, there is a scene where Clarice, she is talking to Anna at her place of employment, which is a school for young ballet dancers.

00;28;39;05 - 00;29;05;24

Aziz Huq

And it's an ambiguous scene in many ways. But one of the things that Clarice, she says, is run away with me to Brazil. I have contacts that I can set up a shop with a new life there. And so there is this moment where he literally raises the possibility of stepping outside the frame, of turning a completely new leaf, and on the logic of the film, it is hard to see why he would have said that unless he, at least in some way, meant it.

00;29;05;27 - 00;29;24;20

Aziz Huq

Although I think at least my read, if she is somebody who doesn't quite know himself, he doesn't quite have a moral center is gosh, she should always be suspicious of what he says, because I don't think he even knows when he means something and when he doesn't mean something. But, but, but the come with me to Brazil moment is a moment in which I think we do see the walls of the movie.

00;29;24;22 - 00;29;45;04

Aziz Huq

The confines break down even more than they've broken down in Paris and Paris remembers is this is Vichy Paris, I imagined, well, no, this is not Vichy Paris. This is 1938. Excuse me, this is prior, but this is free Paris at a time when it really wasn't supposed that Paris would fall, the fall of France. Remember at the beginning of World War two?

00;29;45;06 - 00;30;09;20

Aziz Huq

Beginning of 1940 is pretty unexpected. Not the outcome that most people think is going to happen. And so Paris is a place of freedom at this point. And yet and yet and yet she fails in these, in this profoundly important way when put to the test of, you know, which he prefers his fascist sympathies or his feelings for Anna, or maybe his feelings for Julia, although I think that those are not significant.

00;30;09;23 - 00;30;28;21

Jonathan Hafetz

Yeah, they would only be by but I mean, they would have to leave fascist. They don't like he wouldn't be able to follow this. I mean, you know, the scene takes place, the dance, the famous dancing that you referred to takes place in Paris, contrast to fascist Italy. He would have to go even further to Brazil. I guess that's what I meant by some of the repressive qualities of fascism.

00;30;28;26 - 00;30;33;27

Jonathan Hafetz

Repressing anything that's, you know, not deemed to be sexual a normal.

00;30;33;29 - 00;31;05;28

Aziz Huq

Yeah, but I would just the only way I'm pushing back on that, I agree with that. And in the very last scenes of the movie, you see through Nietzsche and Julia back in Italy, and you see them with a child and, and maybe we'll talk about the scene where he interacts with the child, which comes directly after the murder of Quadri and Anna and I think is actually meant to is meant to trouble us in a way that maybe no other scene in the movie is as troubling that that moment of contrast, I think, is is really worth drawing out.

00;31;05;28 - 00;31;27;25

Aziz Huq

But it is consistent with your reading that when they're back in Italy, they return to this heteronormative ideal of a of a nuclear family. If, if a child and in some sense, the moments in the movie where she is happiest, maybe the only moments in the movie where clarity is happy are the moments these interacting with the child, which I think is is another telling feature.

00;31;27;28 - 00;31;47;05

Aziz Huq

But the only point that I was making is it's literally a maybe half of the movie occurs in a space that is, at least notionally, free of fascism. Indeed, it's in the space where Clarissa and his allies are the tendrils of fascism poking into this this space of, freedom.

00;31;47;08 - 00;32;07;14

Jonathan Hafetz

What an interesting moment about, Luca Quadri, the Nazis former professor. I, you know, appreciate this. I appreciate this as a professor, when repudiated, when he says it's impossible to teach philosophy in a fascist country, I found that kind of, you know, very kind of interesting, important statement that he makes.

00;32;07;17 - 00;32;28;02

Aziz Huq

Well, I know that we're going to talk about the present day, but why don't we one and I bring that in, right now. So as we record this, the administration in the Trump administration has said that it's going to crack down on what it characterizes as anti-Semitic speech in many US campuses. Columbia is at the forefront of these efforts.

00;32;28;04 - 00;32;57;08

Aziz Huq

Now. One can think that there are certain kinds of speech that are anti-Semitic and therefore inappropriate. It's very hard for me to believe that under any reasonable definition of the term anti-Semitic, what the administration deems or puts under that label is a, in fact, anti-Semitic in the sense of being animated by dislike or hatred, people who are Jewish or be speech that is not integral to the enterprise of academic inquiry.

00;32;57;10 - 00;33;35;29

Aziz Huq

And it seems to me that in today's order, in many of the orders around gender medicine and many of the orders around Dei, in the quite extraordinary threats and reprisals against law firms that represent Jack Smith, the administration is expressing not just expressing the view, but acting out the fact that it is impermissible to take certain positions and to defend certain positions, either in an academic context or in other contexts where the norm of neutrality and the norm of, even handedness, like the law, are supposedly paramount.

00;33;36;02 - 00;34;12;24

Aziz Huq

And so I think that what Quadri says about the impossibility of being, he says, the impossibility of being a philosopher is sharply presented and really can be understood in terms of the, profound and agonizing moral problems that administrators and academics are having today in the United States under these threats of defunding, under these threats of criminal prosecution for let me be clear, engaging in speech that is at the heart, land of the First Amendment, at the core of what we would call political speech.

00;34;12;26 - 00;34;40;16

Aziz Huq

I'd flag one more point here, which is understood or read in context. There's a couple of nice little ironies in what quadriceps. So here's the first irony. It was, well known that Mussolini, who remember I said was a was a very cultured person. His mother had been a schoolteacher. He had grown up learning, a slate of languages and was was apparently well into his political life.

00;34;40;16 - 00;35;00;28

Aziz Huq

He would relax by doing translations of poetry, but it was one of the things about him that was well known was that he always had a copy of Plato's works on his desk. He might have had Aristotle's works, too. I don't, I don't remember, but here was a man who was always at arm's length from philosophy. And yet.

00;35;00;28 - 00;35;23;24

Aziz Huq

And yet on the one hand, it is it is profoundly the case that totalitarian regimes from the Italian fascist regime onward up to the present day are free to naturally intolerant of independent minded speech for the very fact that they cannot control it, for the very fact it is not subservient, and it cannot be instrumentalized to their ends.

00;35;23;26 - 00;35;53;06

Aziz Huq

And on the other hand, in the example of Mussolini himself, we see this person who is in some sense a philosopher himself, and yet he is capable of, at the end of the day, ordering the execution of the qualities of the world. And so we should be alive to the ironies and the tensions and the, internal conflicts and our society in a society that are implicated.

00;35;53;06 - 00;36;25;10

Aziz Huq

When Quattrone makes this comment, the other thing that comes to mind is an important strand in contemporary American conservativism, represented, for example, by the Claremont Institute, is this strand of thinking that looks back to classical writers, Roman writers, and that finds justification for all sorts of exclusionary, bigoted, in my view, discriminatory practices, but does it in a way that is actually profoundly learned, profoundly invested with the classical legacy of the past.

00;36;25;15 - 00;36;40;01

Aziz Huq

And so, again, I think that we should be careful about drawing any kind of a facile distinction between, on the one hand, learning and philosophy, and on the other hand, the jackboot.

00;36;40;04 - 00;37;01;11

Jonathan Hafetz

And the architecture. The way architecture plays is also interesting. And there's a lot of scenes of Mussolini architecture in Italy, the sort of architectural design, the fascist period. But again, we see kind of today with with efforts of the Trump administration to kind of define what the kind of architecture would be, although, again, to kind of harken back not to the brutalist style of Mussolini, but to what viewed as kind of a classical style.

00;37;01;11 - 00;37;07;06

Jonathan Hafetz

To your point about reaching back for paying tribute to kind of classical Greco-Roman architecture?

00;37;07;09 - 00;37;51;14

Aziz Huq

Well, I think in both contexts there's a sense of the organization of public space being in the service of a political project of conformity and hierarchical exercise of power in but Lucci's movie, I agree with you that there are many scenes that are just visually really striking because of the vertical. So the horizontal laws, which are part of the Cavallari of brutalist neoclassical motifs that were common in the fascist, arena, I would flag this, a scene early on in which Clarice, she goes to see the father in an asylum, and it's got to be the most visually striking asylum I've ever seen.

00;37;51;14 - 00;38;16;08

Aziz Huq

It looks like an auditorium where everything is made out of marble. And there are these benches arrayed across the floor of the auditorium. And the auditorium is presented through a series of tracking shots with clarity, moving through these ranks of benches, which look like they're made out of marble, and you have scattered across the benches a kind of motley array, of mad people, people who are, confined.

00;38;16;08 - 00;38;39;04

Aziz Huq

And maybe that's a moment that underscores the point that you just made, John, about the performance of quality of architecture. Although it's just an odd way to use that point about the performative force of architecture in the asylum context. It is, by the way, another moment in the movie where the movie decides to abandon the conventions of naturalism.

00;38;39;06 - 00;39;06;19

Aziz Huq

It's not even an attempt to give a realistic portrait of what that moment look like, and to portray something that is clearly. Bertolucci has thought through how stylized this moment should be. But the stylized thing at the moment is, is it opens up a set of questions about how one reads that moment. I think this is like the moment I mentioned before, in which Clarice, she breaks the fourth wall by doing these salutes and pointing the gun both in the air and then at his head.

00;39;06;21 - 00;39;30;09

Jonathan Hafetz

Certainly one of the most chilling movie scenes is the not the end, but towards the end. We'll talk about the end after, but the sort of climax, if you will, I guess, where clergy, Mangano and the fascist team set out upon Quadri and Hanna when they're on the road, ambushed them, stop their car and and murder both of them in cold blood.

00;39;30;15 - 00;39;57;25

Jonathan Hafetz

First, Quadri is murdered by the fascist henchmen, and then Anna is also murdered. Before she's killed. You know, Clarissa has remained in the car that was trailing Quadri and Anna, and we see Anna come over to the car outside the window, pleading with clergy to save her life and courage just sits stone cold. I thought, this is a very interesting scene, that maybe a number of different interpretations, but maybe a scene about betrayal.

00;39;57;28 - 00;40;26;22

Aziz Huq

I agree that it's a striking scene. I think it's worth saying right at the beginning that the scene is immediately followed by a scene of clarity with his young child. Five years later, at which he's warm and human and vocal with the child in a way that he hasn't been with. And so with, the movie is drawing a contrast and a very forceful one between, the clarity who is capable.

00;40;27;00 - 00;41;06;18

Aziz Huq

It's not that he is incapable of human emotion. It's not that he's incapable of mercy, empathy, warmth, or the light because we see him genuinely performing those things in the subsequent scene. But in the scene of Quadri and Anna's killing, we see him. Well, I think that this is ambiguous or I think it's underdetermined. I think that one interpretation, we see somebody who is frozen, who is suddenly at the crosshairs or at the crossroads of mutually inconsistent desires, the desire to conform, and the sexual desire for Anna.

00;41;06;21 - 00;41;33;14

Aziz Huq

So it's very clear that he has sexual desire for honor, which in part is channeled into and through with, the sexual ization of his relationship with with Julia. There is a moment where you might imagine that, that what happens is that he is simply frozen. And that's consistent with some of the things he says in the earlier scene to the henchman about his inability to act, the difficulty of performing.

00;41;33;17 - 00;42;03;23

Aziz Huq

There are hints earlier on in the movie that he is not meeting Julia's sexual expectations, and so the theme of impotence is being raised in a number of different contexts. And I'd say the first reading I would offer if that scene in the car where honor is pleading with him is, this is another moment of incapacity. If, the inability to act because being caught between two conflicting emotions, I think the other reading of the scene.

00;42;03;23 - 00;42;24;22

Aziz Huq

And I'm interested in what you think, Tom, is that this is a moment at which he chooses to switch off his emotions. He he purposefully decides not to feel. And so if you take my reading of him, which I offered a few moments ago, as somebody who is the man without qualities, this is a moment in which he leans in.

00;42;24;22 - 00;42;51;22

Aziz Huq

He decides not to have commitments, and he extinguishes the commitments that are within himself. And I think I lean toward the first and not the second. But I don't think that the movie clearly tells us which of those is going on. The hints that jumped out at me were the fact that he I on my reading of it, he does look out the window directly in her face.

00;42;51;25 - 00;43;20;22

Aziz Huq

I don't think he turns away, which you might imagine is one version of this, of the attraction that he turns away when you even look at her. No. He remains somewhat unmoving. Lee fixed on her as she begged and pleads with her. And the second point is that the girl is on the seat beside him, as I recall, and there is a sense in which he might lift the gun and either shoot her or shoot his accomplice and save her, and we see the gun not being moved.

00;43;20;23 - 00;43;44;24

Aziz Huq

And so this is, there's a famous Chekhov line, or there's a famous joke about a Chekhov play. I believe it's the Seagull that, look, if you see a gun and in that one, you know it's going to go off in act four. And The Conformist defeats that expectation. The conformist has a gun. So there's a gun that's introduced early, and then the gun doesn't go off.

00;43;44;24 - 00;44;07;11

Aziz Huq

It's that's not the gun that kills Anna. And so there is this sort of deferment or even denial of the pleasures of violence that the viewer has, because the viewer is expecting him to be the one that kills Quadri, at least after the Ventimiglia scene. And the viewer doesn't get that. The viewer gets a failure to act. And so I am torn about how to read that.

00;44;07;11 - 00;44;10;23

Aziz Huq

I'm very I'm interested in what you think is is going on in that scene.

00;44;10;25 - 00;44;28;22

Jonathan Hafetz

Yeah. I don't I mean, he doesn't he doesn't act and he's labeled by Manzano as a coward after. Right. I shot he had tried to save Anna, right, by trying to persuade her not to travel with her husband, with Luca Quadri, because he knew Quadri to be killed. That would save her life. And she probably would have lived the.

00;44;28;22 - 00;44;48;12

Jonathan Hafetz

She wasn't with him. They weren't going to kill her. But I don't know. I mean, he sort of I feel like he does sort of decide and that sort of commit and a half commit a way to the, to the project. I mean, it's interesting and maybe to also read it with what happens at the end and towards the end, which is where the government of Mussolini falls.

00;44;48;12 - 00;45;11;13

Jonathan Hafetz

Right. That's at the film's conclusion. And there's, kind of chaos out in the street. And she tells his wife, Julia, you know, when you ask why he's going out, I want to see how a dictatorship falls. And I think these final scenes are also very interesting. And one of the things which harkens back to something you were saying is clarity seems to now play a new role in these scenes, right?

00;45;11;13 - 00;45;22;28

Jonathan Hafetz

Where he denounces his former friend as a fascist. So I don't know, I that may inform my reading of the scene in the car, but the aftermath is also very interesting, cause I do think he starts to play this other role.

00;45;23;00 - 00;45;42;28

Aziz Huq

I'm not sure we're supposed to think, but that role is a different one because he is, after all, conforming in his own way and the later role just as much as he was conforming in the earlier role. So the latest scenes, which occur in 1943, are occurring in the wake of the Allied invasion, and they're pushing him, maslany up through the north of Italy.

00;45;43;01 - 00;46;12;01

Aziz Huq

I agree with you that there is an important element of watching Clarissa adapt to a new era, a new moment at which what it means to conform is, is different from what it meant in the past. And it shows how quickly people can adapt to these new circumstances. I will come back to a couple of things which really struck me, although I think maybe they're incidental to the overall way that it is presented.

00;46;12;03 - 00;46;39;10

Aziz Huq

So one point that I would make about those later scenes is the other character. One of the other characters who reappears from the earlier part of the movie is Julia. And when I was watching, I had a very profound reaction to the fact that Julia, in those later scenes, is grown up in a way that she's not. In the earlier scene, she's very childish in the earlier scenes, and in the later scenes she is, she doesn't move the same way.

00;46;39;12 - 00;47;23;16

Aziz Huq

Her hair is cut slightly differently. The actress who plays her, Stefania Santorelli, plays her as if there's a weight upon her that has made her into an adult. And so we see that here, that that relationship is different. It's not the relationship of disregard on Clarice's part of contempt on clarice's part that we've seen before. There's a child and as I said, the fact that somebody who does this profoundly evil thing is immediately portrayed as having the joy of parenthood, of having the joy of the relationship with that child, is, I think one ought to take that as this, as this slap in the face to the viewer who was searching for the moral interpretation

00;47;23;16 - 00;47;54;24

Aziz Huq

for any kind of moral opportunity or possibility or judgment being executed in the movie. No, people will not get their just desserts. And that is played through and in the scenes that follow that that clarity. Performing his new role, conforming to the new post fascist regime doesn't just talk about Mussolini as a dictator, which I think is itself telling, but then rats out, seemingly not to any immediate effect.

00;47;54;24 - 00;48;20;08

Aziz Huq

His friend, who facilitated the introduction to the fascist Party in the first instance, in what Pauline Kael I think rightly notes as a non too subtle metaphor the friend is blind, and there is a sense of, from being particularly vulnerable. You missed out the very, very last moment of the movie, which is so there's a peculiar encounter with somebody who might be the chauffeur.

00;48;20;11 - 00;48;44;20

Aziz Huq

And it's not it's not clear whether we're supposed to think it is the chauffeur or whether it's somebody who Claire actually simply mistakenly believes is the chauffeur. But one of the things he does is he doesn't just point to his former friend and say he was a fascist collaborator. He points to the chauffeur and says, this man, this man killed this man, tried to rape a boy back in 1932 or 1928.

00;48;44;23 - 00;49;21;06

Aziz Huq

And then both the blind man and the accused, the person accused of being the chauffeur. I think we're supposed to be unsure about whether it is run away. And clarity is left with a young man who the former chauffeur was trying to seduce. And there is a long shot at the end of the movie where the, adolescent late adolescent, chauffeur allegedly was trying to seduce is lying on what looks like a bed and what looks like a sort of cell or an open storefront and clearing.

00;49;21;08 - 00;49;54;20

Aziz Huq

She is sitting in front on the stairs and staring at the man's body in a way that is ripe with sexual feeling. And the movie ends with this long and lingering closeup on Clarice's face, which is at one level blank. But on the other hand is is you're seeing the play of light on his face, the play of the torches, the play of, neon lights in a way that again, I think if you want to read it metaphorically, it is emphasizing his emptiness.

00;49;54;22 - 00;50;21;19

Aziz Huq

But it is also a moment where we're back to the desire, to the non-normative desires where, you know, here's here's the married man who has left his wife and child, you know, said that he's going to go off to look and see how a dictator falls. And he ends up maybe at the cusp of, of a hookup and that I think, really complicates or to my mind, shapes what's gone before.

00;50;21;19 - 00;50;44;19

Aziz Huq

I think it for the reasons that I suggested, I, I'm not keen to lean into Pauline Kael's reading of the movie. I'm not keen to say this is just about repressed homosexual desire, but I do think that there is this moment at the end where you think, you know, it's not just that the that the normal person is willing to just kind of go along with whatever it is that the regime requires, however brutal, however terrible.

00;50;44;21 - 00;51;15;04

Aziz Huq

But there's not going to be any consequence. And I think this was true for both Germany in the 40s and 50s, and for it was very little by way of consequences for those people who committed horrendous acts of violence, murder or worse, they found their way back into normal, ordinary, normal, quote unquote, society. And they were back in the position where they were grappling with their, you know, emptiness with their nontraditional, non-conformist sexual desires.

00;51;15;04 - 00;51;40;28

Aziz Huq

And you're back where you began after all of this violence, after all of this, you know, the loss of poetry, the killing of honor, nothing made a difference for for clarity. And I think that's a profoundly I think it's a moral message, although it's a profoundly demoralizing moral message. It's about the the failure of of us as a society, even in the wake of World War Two.

00;51;40;28 - 00;52;00;03

Aziz Huq

And maybe we should say something about the role that Italy plays in the Holocaust here, which I do think is not trivial, but not it's not directly on point, but it's not completely incidental. In 1943, there's no consequence. I think that's really stunning and important when standing the moral fabric of the movie.

00;52;00;05 - 00;52;20;06

Jonathan Hafetz

Yeah. This is so much how he's kind of back at that moment. And he also now assuming it was the chauffeur, Leno, I think his name was. And I think clarity believes it was so encouragement it was. He also has now sort of some sense liberated from the idea that he actually killed this chauffeur, right, with the gun that accidentally, I think that he had accidentally shot the chauffeur.

00;52;20;06 - 00;52;31;20

Jonathan Hafetz

He's still alive, but he is he's sort of confronting these sort of questions and existential doubts or moments that he was back then and kind of left, you know, looking into a void in some sense.

00;52;31;22 - 00;52;50;24

Aziz Huq

Yeah. And nobody, nobody is punished except, I mean, Quadri in on a murder that doesn't count as a punishment. Nobody is. Nobody is brought to justice. There's no moment of reckoning. There's this just life goes on. And in some ways, life goes on better. Rich. He has a child, and the relationship with the child appears to be a loving and happy one.

00;52;50;27 - 00;53;00;22

Aziz Huq

He is the only person in the movie who ends up even fleetingly happy. Gosh, that's a profoundly dismaying message to to take away from that movie.

00;53;00;24 - 00;53;09;10

Jonathan Hafetz

And you can see just how easily he will shift in to the post fascist Italy. As you said, it's a lesson about the lack of consequences.

00;53;09;13 - 00;53;32;14

Aziz Huq

Right? Which, you know, thinking about that in the present day context, it's, you know, how many people will go along with, you know, whatever it is that is done with to noncitizens, whatever is done with respect to the people who dependent on drugs that fall, provided the Ukrainians who will suffer and die because of the Russian military advance and the Russian occupation.

00;53;32;17 - 00;53;49;03

Aziz Huq

The list literally just goes on and on and on, right? The people who are perfectly willing to tolerate or even participate in those things. It's almost an optimistic point that you can just go back to normal, things can flip back, and people will just shrug their shoulders about what happened in a past moment of brutality.

00;53;49;05 - 00;54;06;11

Jonathan Hafetz

I mean, even the as to like Ukraine, all the people who are lining up for support just flip support for Ukraine, just flip when the political winds change. And so it's things like that that to me make this, you know, in some sense the kind of animating forces and the dynamics around fascism that make this movie so timely.

00;54;06;14 - 00;54;27;22

Aziz Huq

And I think that the more one gets away from the Pauline Kael, it's just about repressed homosexuality reading, the more that one sees that while this lunacy might be capturing here is a universal sentiment where what's universal here is, I think it is fair to say that most people have a kind of soft and molten core when it comes to morality.

00;54;27;22 - 00;54;51;18

Aziz Huq

They don't have sharp edged moral intuitions. Some people who are religious do, but then whether their religious intuitions add up together is is a different question. But most people don't have hard edged moral intuitions. Most people have very, very short horizons. They don't see that much beyond their own situation. They don't think that much about what's happening in places that are geographically distant.

00;54;51;24 - 00;55;32;03

Aziz Huq

They don't think about the future. Right. Which is the the maybe will be our downfall as a consequence of the climate emergency. And those people are the creatures and the leaders of the world, and we shouldn't pathologize them overly. We shouldn't treat them as as abnormalities. We should see them actually as within the within in some important measure, the mainstream and a kind of case study in how people adapt, they get along in circumstances which are inhumane, in which there's this terrible violence or suffering or evil in some form that is going on around them, and they are willing to wait.

00;55;32;05 - 00;55;57;19

Aziz Huq

Giulia will turn the other cheek and in some way, but the will in some ways pitch in, and some ways watch while it happens and not not get in the way. And I think that either turning the other cheek or watching and suppressing your own feelings, or failing to to to act must mean that captures to my mind much of what I think is likely to.

00;55;57;21 - 00;56;05;11

Aziz Huq

It does happen in these contexts. If authoritarian transitions, may well capture in a lot of what's happening in the US.

00;56;05;14 - 00;56;14;25

Jonathan Hafetz

These if we could just go back for a second to a point I think you were going to make about Mussolini, Italy and the Holocaust and its relevance to the movie.

00;56;14;28 - 00;56;53;10

Aziz Huq

The Holocaust has a has an Italian history as much as it has the German history. Mussolini signs on to the anti Semitic program in in 1938. So well after Hitler has has has taken many important, and terrible steps down that pathway. But once Mussolini agrees to introduce anti Semitic race laws, the way in which those laws are enacted is a far cry from, the way in which they're enacted, or you or applied in Germany in particular.

00;56;53;12 - 00;57;25;13

Aziz Huq

And so while Mussolini spoke of setting up concentration camps, he never did. So he didn't go after people who protected Jews in the same way that, the Nazi regime in Germany did. So there is a sense in which Mussolini's version, particularly the racial aspect of fascism, was was much less full throated than the German version. And one way in which that's relevant to The Conformist is is the general view is the most.

00;57;25;13 - 00;58;07;03

Aziz Huq

Leni just was never a success, for as Hitler was, driving down fascist principles into the fabric of society, he was much less engaged in that project. Than Hitler was, and so much more, Italian society just kind of went along Asit had gone on prior to the 1920s. Now, remember, as Italy, not that all the racial or augmente, though, is in the late 1880s, but lots of stuff just ticked over, as I understand it, from the historical literature in Italy, in a way that didn't really happen in, Germany.

00;58;07;03 - 00;58;34;13

Aziz Huq

And and so in that context, Bertolucci's point about, well, you know, people are just sort of living their ordinary, model lives. I think it takes on an even greater force, because I think it does capture something about the reliance of the fascist regime in Italy on cooperation as opposed to coercion, where I think the German regime can be fairly characterized as much more coercion and less cooperation.

00;58;34;15 - 00;58;53;28

Jonathan Hafetz

There's a great film also that touches on that aspect, the Holocaust aspect of fascism, which is, garden of the Fitzy Contini, which actually, incidentally, if I call correctly, Dominique Sandor, who's the Anna in this movie, is also in that movie. But that was about an upper class Jewish family. So in Italy, during the war. So it's a I mean, kind of an interesting.

00;58;54;00 - 00;58;58;27

Jonathan Hafetz

Yeah, another interesting kind of piece about Italy during that period with a focus more on the Jewish issue.

00;58;59;00 - 00;59;22;00

Aziz Huq

Yeah. And I certainly left the film thinking that, gosh, I should know more about the history of how society adapted in Italy to Mussolini's version of fascism, if in part because, you know, maybe the knee jerk tendency to think about the present moment in terms of comparisons to Nazi Germany is it's an illuminating, because it turns out that there are multiple kinds of fascism.

00;59;22;02 - 00;59;37;04

Aziz Huq

There are multiple strands of flavors, and maybe the flavor that's going to be much more the is I don't think the comparison is inapt with respect to the last moment. Maybe what the comparison we should be thinking about is the comparison to Italy in the 20s, not Germany in the 30s.

00;59;37;06 - 00;59;49;28

Jonathan Hafetz

No, that's right, I think. And when people take the fascist label, everyone has thinks, what if it's not Nazi Germany, that it's not fascism, which is maybe a spectrum or something varied on a spectrum. And I think this movie has a lot of insights into it.

00;59;50;00 - 00;59;52;28

Aziz Huq

I completely agree people should watch the movie these.

00;59;53;03 - 01;00;03;08

Jonathan Hafetz

Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. It's been great to have you on to talk about The Conformist and yeah, as I said at the outset, I think it's as timely now as it was when it came out. And, yeah, it's been a pleasure.

01;00;03;10 - 01;00;05;16

Aziz Huq

It's been great to be on. John, thank you so much for having me.