Conformity In The Conformist

The Conformist directed by Bernardo Bertolucci follows the rise and fall of Italian Fascism, but tells it through the perspective of one man, Marcello Clerici. The narrative of the film is told through several non-sequential flashbacks that take place while Clerici and his chauffeur are driving to assassinate Professor Luca Quadri, a former professor of Clerici who is an exiled fascist. Clerici is a man of a troubled past and an uncertain future. He joined the Fascist secret police even though he doesn’t seem to really believe in Fascism and he’s marrying a woman that he doesn’t necessarily seem to love. All to have a life that appears normal. Marcello Clerici is a man imprisoned by his need to fit in, to appear socially and politically normal.

When Clerici meets with Quadri, he talks about his proposed graduate thesis on Plato’s cave, describing how prisoners were chained in a dungeon with only the shadows of statues to watch. The prisoners would mistake these shadows as reality since it is all they have known since childhood. Clerici states that these prisoners are like us. To which Professor Quadri replies “You who come from Italy should know from experience…Shadows. The reflection of things. Like what’s happening now in Italy.” The thesis of Plato’s cave summarizes Clerici’s reality. His reality is Fascism because it was what was presented to the people of Italy as normal, so they came to believe it. In this way, they are trapped just as the prisoners in the dungeon are forced to accept a reflection of reality that, according to Quadri is false. This scene is filmed mostly in the dark, the only light coming in a straight beam from the window, creating a clear boundary between light and dark. At certain points the two men stand away from the light so we can hear them speaking but cannot really see them, mimicking the lighting that a cave would have. Clerici moves into the light when he describes the theory and as he explains the height of the statues some of the men would carry behind the wall, he raises his hand into the salute to Hitler. The shadow of this image is cast on the wall behind him, as it would if he were in Plato’s cave. The shadow of Clerici in the Hitler salute demonstrates the Italians acceptance of Mussolini and Fascism as their new reality. Clerici is just one of the many who supports this regime in order to fit in with the crowd.
Clerici’s imprisonment because of his need to be normal can be compared to the prisoners of Plato’s cave, however, the origin of Clerici’s obsession to fit in is never made completely clear. We do get some glimpses of his personal life that to help explain this urge. At one point in the movie, Clerici goes to get his mom from his childhood home so they can visit his dad, who is in an insane asylum. Although the house is decaying due to lack of care, the gated entrance, marble staircases, carved plaster show that it belongs to a family of wealth. Clerici even remarks to Manganiello “the decadence here makes me nauseous.”  In many ways, the extravagance that he grew up in is one of the things that makes him stand out as different. He asks Manganiello “does this house look normal, a place for normal people, a place for a normal childhood?” His mother makes fun of his “city wife,” which indicates that she thinks he is marrying below his class, something he would do if he thought his wealth made him stand out from the average person.
It is not just the extravagance of his childhood that sources these feeling of alienation that are deeply rooted in Clerici; the glances we get at his family shows that both his mother and father are extremely dysfunctional. His mother is completely disheveled, half naked and covered in dogs when he arrives at the house. It appears that her driver is her lover and he may also be providing her with the morphine that she is addicted to. His father has been institutionalized in an asylum for insanity due to syphilis. Clerici’s father was equally political in his day and humiliate opponents by force feeding them castor oil. In this way, Clerici can be seen to be following in his father’s footsteps, at least politically speaking. This means that he needs to work even harder to distance himself from his family’s failings.
The most notable childhood trauma is the homosexual experience he had with his chauffeur, Lino, when he was thirteen years old. Lino came to rescue him from a group of classmates who were being mean to him. At first the two are playfully chasing each other around and then Lino leads him to his room to show him his gun. He locks the door and takes off his hat revealing his long hair, which started to stroke. Clerici recounts “He was so much like a woman, he trembled like a woman.” Lino’s femininity confuses Clerici, stroking Lino’s hair suggests that he was attracted to him, however; when Lino started making sexual advances toward Clerici by kissing his knees, the boy jumps away, grabs Lino’s gun and starts firing around the room, eventually hitting Lino. He runs out the room, assuming he killed him. He has carried the confusion of the sexual interaction and the guilt of the murder he thinks he committed ever since then. He wants to escape these personal demons; the things that make him stand out when he wants to blend in.
He may not have come from a normal family, but Clerici is determined to create that stability, security, and most importantly, normalcy for himself. Normal means getting married and having a family. More specifically, getting married to a woman. So Clerici may still be repressing the sexual uncertainty that he has harbored since childhood. Getting married to a woman would socially confirm his normalcy. Guilia, his dim, fashionable fiancé is at best superficial, caring only about shopping and dancing, and at worst obnoxious, such as when she got drunk at the Chinese restaurant. Because of these qualities, she is a confusing match for Clerici who is serious and intellectual. In a flashback to Clerici’s confession in preparation for his marriage, he admits to the priest that he she’s not his ideal choice. “I'm marrying a petty bourgeois. Mediocre. A mound of petty ideas. Full of petty ambitions. She's all bed and kitchen.” His deep desire to create a façade of normalcy leads him to marrying this woman that he doesn’t necessarily love.
This conflict is apparent early on in the movie in the scene where Clerici eats dinner with Guilia and her family. In this scene, they seem not to be able to keep their hands off of each other. They start fooling around on the carpet until the maid walks by and Clerici says “careful” quickly stops, straightens his jacket and sits on the couch. Guilia reassures him “but Marcello, we’re engaged, what’s wrong with it?” The lighting is very important to understanding this scene. Light streams in from the blinds casting stripes of light and shadow on the two. This sharp contrast of light and shadow forms a cage around the couple, illustrating the conflict inside Clerici. In an earlier flashback in a meeting with his blind, Fascist best friends, Clerici admits “In the morning when I'm dressing in the mirror I see myself. And compared to everyone else, I feel I'm different.” Italo remarks that other people are trying to be different from everyone else but he is trying to be the same. Clerici’s need to control this part of him that he believes is atypical means that he sees his loveless marriage as something that is completely necessary
If Guilia seems like an odd match for Clerici, Anna seems like the perfect one, she is everything that Guilia is not: smart, manipulating, and strong. When Clerici and Guilia come to meet Quadri for the first time we see a shot of her seductively striding toward the camera, thumbs in her pockets, a cigarette in her mouth. The way she walks, leans against the door, the fact that she wears pants presents her as more masculine than Guilia. This is not the first time we see Anna. Twice previously we see the actress who plays Anna (Dominique Sandra) playing other characters in scenes where Clerici walks in on intimate moments. The first time being the woman lying on the desk at the Fascist headquarters and again in a brothel where he desperately hugs her. Both of these occasions indicate that Anna is his ideal woman that he is projecting into these voyeuristic moments. It seems like he is kind of fated to find her. If Clerici is gay, Anna’s masculinity explains why he is more attracted to her than he is to Guilia, similar to the way he was attracted to Lino when his appearance became feminine. Like Clerici, Anna’s sexuality is ambiguous. She obviously loves her husband and she seems to also be attracted to Clerici, although this could be a ploy to distract him from his real purpose of being in France. There is also a great deal of sexual tension between her and Guilia. Clerici spies on the two women as Anna kisses Guilia’s knees as she lies on a bed in just a robe. This scene echoes Lino kissing Clerici’s knees when he was a child. This scene shows that she embodies the sexuality that he represses in order to be normal. He has fantasized about her leading up to this because a part of him wants to embrace it which is why he needs to work so hard to be the perfect normal person.
While the lighting in many of the scenes in Rome used sharp contrast between light and shadow to create an unharmonious environment, the use of light in the Paris scenes changes.

There is less sharp contrast in the lighting, and in general the scenes tend to be lit brighter. The color pallet of Rome is mostly white, gray, black, brown to represent Clerici’s conformity to the Fascist regime, his blending in, and his lack of joy. There is much more color in Paris starting with the orange tinted train ride to Paris, the bright purple Parma violets that Clerici buys for Anna, the blue tint when Clerici goes to the dance class Anna is teaching. The change in lighting and color reflects the change in Clerici’s mental state. He is falling in love with Anna, and yet he still kills her. Anna is everything that Guilia will never be and everything that Clerici wishes he could be. He is a coward who just wants to fade into the background but Anna is strong-willed and would never conform to any person or government. She is confident in her bisexuality and not afraid to exhibit that in public places such as the dancehall. She goes against the traditional gender roles of the 1930’s and fully accepts herself and sexuality while Clerici refuses to even acknowledge certain aspects of his past. The two women in his life represent the two sides of him. Guilia is the normal, dull middle-class woman who is focused on values, a family, church. In contrast, Anna is political, the wife of an intellectual, and sexually free. He would never be able to choose the side of himself that Anna represents so instead, the security and normalcy the Fascist secret police provides him with wins over love. He impassively watches the woman he loves get murdered, not even turning to look at her while she is banging on the car window screaming for help. Clerici shows that a person will sacrifice all their own values in order to blend into

society.