The Conformist (1970)

At a young age a boy is molested by his chauffeur. He shoots him and flees. It is in Italy in the 1930s and Mussolini has been elected dictator. This boy has grown up and, because of his childhood experience, feels radically different from everyone else. He chooses a life of over-compensation. Feeling like an outsider he searches heavily for a life of normalcy: a petty bourgeois wife, a house, a honeymoon in paris. He is so committed to normalcy that he over-commits. Not only is he a fascist, his secret is that he is their assassin and earns a living killing anti-fascists.

The film is beautiful of course and lauded by all accounts. Today, for me what resonates is the way in which normality functions as a decoy of self-hatred. Its simultaneously what is accepted by all and that which is the most impersonal. What experience is necessary or required to let go of that which tells us again and again, we are the problem, the bad person, the guilty? What will absolve us from the pain that we are alone with out hearts broken from the lies we've been told and that we even tell ourselves? What prevents us from giving in, to just playing by the rules, and being happy, if that is how happiness is today offered to us here? Happiness as conformity, as silence. Happiness as similarity. Happiness as unrecognizability. Everything else will be unforgiven and violently despised. Why not capitulate?

In the film, the assassin encounters the chauffeur and realizes that he did not kill him. That what he thought his whole life till now was untrue. Perhaps he began to no longer feel guilty for who he was. But the film ends, and we don't know what happens next. It seems, rather, a good place to start a film. What will you do when you realize you've built an entire life based upon a misunderstanding of who you are? What will you next do? What will you see in the mirror that morning? Today, the 'not-normal' has become a kind of conformity. And tradition, although it has its nostalgic appeal, is not to be celebrated without devastating sacrifice. And so we have no protocol for what to do when we realize that who we were in the past is not necessarily the person we are, or even want to be.

Of course, these questions suppose an identity of oneself is possible, and I imagine that will make some people cringe. It just seems to me that any question of change requires some identifiable position to set out from without which everything, everything, is for naught.