June 14, 2009

"Il Divo"

Here's my full review from The American Conservative of the recent Italian film, which I'm posting to provide some perspective on my subsequent post, "The Deep State:"
Most movie critics are more concerned with film than with life, but my goal has been to help make movies, those pungent yet unreliable distillations of life, more compelling for the reader who is more interested in the world than in the cinema.

Consider “Il Divo,” a baroquely stylized biopic about Giulio Andreotti, seven times Prime Minister of Italy in the 1972-1992 era, and then a perpetual defendant in murder and Mafia trials in 1993-2003. Paolo Sorrentino’s “Il Divo” is clearly a film of aesthetic ambitions (the owlish politician inhabits a De Chirico Italy of sinisterly empty arcaded streets) and some historical significance.

Still, the labyrinthine “Il Divo” would be impenetrable to any American who hasn’t read up on Italy’s lurid recent past, in which Andreotti’s rival, ex-Prime Minister Aldo Moro, was kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades, various Vatican-connected bankers died in fashions that would have amused the Borgias, a Masonic lodge served as a seeming government-in-waiting for a post-coup Italy, and brave magistrates investigating the Mafia blew up.

Italian politics, with its constantly collapsing governments, strikes Americans as a joke. Yet, the fundamental questions of Italy’s Cold War years were deadly serious: Would the unruly joys of Italian daily life succumb to the grayness of a Communist state, the Cuban tragedy writ large? Yet, just how many Machiavellian machinations in the name of saving Italy from the Reds could be borne?

We often heard in 2002 that the U.S. did such a wonderful job reforming Germany and Japan after WWII that we were bound to accomplish the same in Iraq. Unmentioned went the 1943 American invasion of western Sicily. Needing to keep civil order without tying up troops, we turned control over to local anti-Fascist men of respect: i.e., Mafiosi who had been lying low during Mussolini's crackdown. It worked, but the blowback lasted 50 years. After the war, to keep Italy’s huge Communist Party out of power, the U.S. subsidized the Christian Democrats, who relied on Mafia get-out-the-vote capabilities in the South.

In the Anglo-American world, to label anything a “conspiracy theory” is to dismiss it out of hand. In Italy, in contrast, conspiracy theories are the default explanation for how the world works, because conspiracies are the main mechanism by which politicians get done what little they do. In Italy, the political is personal. To understand historical events, you need to tease out the occluded connections among the players.

As “Il Divo” demonstrates, Italy apparently needed to be led during those difficult decades by the least operatic politician imaginable, and can only now afford to revert to more stereotypically Italian showboats such as current Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Like a more cultivated, less bumptious version of the Daleys who have ruled Chicago for 41 of the last 54 years, Il Divo is not a diva. Andreotti doesn’t bluster from balconies, nor even bother to cut a stylish figure. He listens carefully, forgets nothing, and confines his own utterances to mordant witticisms. As portrayed by Toni Servillo of the recent Neapolitan mob movie “Gomorrah,” Andreotti is a thin, stoop-shouldered man who never talks with his hands. Telegraphing his introversion, he keeps his chin tucked to his sternum, his elbows tight to his ribs, and makes only the most primly clerical symmetrical gestures. Servillo’s characterization is reminiscent of Austin Powers’s nemesis, if only Dr. Evil were underplayed by Jack Benny.

Margaret Thatcher reminisced about Andreotti, “He seemed to have a positive aversion to principle, even a conviction that a man of principle was doomed to be a figure of fun.” “Il Divo’s” nightmarish depiction of Italian politics raises an unsettling point. In Andreotti’s defense, he at least was born into his system, while America is now led by a man who, with every opportunity in the world beckoning, carefully chose to make his career in our closest equivalent: Chicago politics.

Having been acquitted on a second appeal in the shooting of a journalist investigating Moro’s death, and saved by the statute of limitations from conviction for his 1970s alliance with the Sicilian Mafia, Andreotti is still influential as a Life Senator at 90. The unflappable maestro commented on “Il Divo,” "I don't agree with Sorrentino's portrayal of me, but I understand he had to make certain dramatic choices to make it interesting; my real life is actually quite boring." Unfortunately, an American would have to be as well-informed as Andreotti to make sense of “Il Divo.”

Unrated, but would be PG-13.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

9 comments:

RWF said...

It was probably a mistake to unify Italy, the various parts of Italy had diverged so far from one another economically, politically and culturally that making a stable government is impossible except with the use of personality cults or extreme political movements.

Richard Hoste said...

Did I just fall into a time machine and go back a couple months ago?

John Seiler said...

RWF is right. Italy should break apart again, as should Germany. While divided Italy produced art and music that still makes the world gasp in wonder, unified Italy produced Mussolini and junky Fiats (now, Chryslers too). Divided Germany produced Beethoven and Goethe, united Germany...75 years of bad wars.

Even America would be better off with the government broken up, with Obama becoming President of Illinois, where I don't live. When the 13 colonies were "free and independent," our political leaders were Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Henry, etc. Now we're a consolidated empire of 300 million ruled by Bushes, Clintons, Obamas, Doles, McCains, Romneys, etc.

In economics, the Internet, culture, and most else, the time of devolution is here. So should it be in government.

America is not the current strangulating mega-government, and to survive now needs divided government.

testing99 said...

Steve, in the somewhat defense of the Christian Democrats (who were at least preferable to the loathesome Communists), the Mafia and the far more powerful but less well known Camorra, existed before the Italian State.

[I can't believe you did not refer to the Camorra who are older, more widely distributed, more powerful and widespread if less centralized than the Sicilian Mafia.]

The Camorra for example may date back to the 1400's.

Eliminating the Camorra or the Mafia would require a total change in the way of life of Italians who live there. Not just honest government, but a massive, overweening state that susses out and kills without hesitation and mercy any nascent "Big Men" and total propaganda efforts to eradicate cultural tendencies towards Big Men, along with fracturing clan/kin ties (and brutal suppression of female preference for Big Men).

Such a thing is theoretically possible, but would require such a crushing police state exerting brutal control over every aspect of life that it would take the manpower of the WWII Red Army and the resources of today's America (pre-meltdown) to pay for it.

I'm somewhat sympathetic to Andreotti. At the worst he bought time and space for the next generations of Italians to find something other than Communism.

Drawbacks said...

"Dietrologia. It means the science of what is behind something. A suspicious event. The science of what is behind an event." (Don Delillo -- Underworld)

Jorn said...

"To understand historical events, you need to tease out the occluded connections among the players"

'occluded' = blocked, not hidden

Anonymous said...

Wow, a Jorn Barger sighting!!!

susanjane said...

I have researched the invasion of Sicily by the Allies in 1943. I would like to know more about "Needing to keep civil order without tying up troops, we turned control over to local anti-Fascist men of respect". I was not aware that there would be a need of any civil order. I was always told and also read that the Italians were very happy to see our soldiers. Please direct me to any links regarding this...... susanbohdan@sbcglobal.net

Also, the American invasion started at Gela's southern beaches. I am tracing my Dad's journey thru Sicily and hope to write a manuscript in the near future. I hadn't gotten into the Mafia angle, as of yet. Perhaps now will be a good time!

Regards,
Susan Bohdan, daughter
Pvt Lloyd D Troyer
39th Engineers Combat Regiment
Company D

Tom V said...

JS: "junky Fiats"

Fiat Group owns Ferrari.