Over the past 3 months, I have published film essays with a particular focus on the Primal Scene. I began with the recent film, The Lives of Others (February), using Arlow’s paper, “The Revenge Motive in the Primal Scene” as my primary text. In the following months, in commentaries on LA Confidental (March) and the two films, The Crying Game and Mona Lisa (April), I have continued to focus on a sense of exclusion and a wish for revenge as an important dynamic in understanding the primal scene as it is represented in those films. This examination of Bertolucci’s The Conformist continues those themes. In doing so, I have ignored other important themes in this complex work in order to focus on a peculiar aspect of the film as I see it.
The Conformist was the first film that I ever “analyzed”, and doing that got me interested in thinking and writing about unconscious fantasy in film. I would like to point the reader to two extraordinary (to me) features of this film: 1. An unprecedented concentration of primal scene imagery; and, 2. A configuration of imagery that allows us to “reconstruct” a very specific, detailed primal scene fantasy. I have written about this in a much more condensed version in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (1997: vol. 78:1031-1033). This expanded version was published in Double Feature: Discovering our Hidden Fantasies in Film (Herbert H. Stein, M.D.; 2002, Ereads).
In a classic psychoanalytic paper on “Fantasy, Memory, and Reality Testing” (1969), Jacob Arlow describes a patient who had spent three or four years of early childhood sleeping in his parents’ bedroom. Through analysis of dreams and their associations, memories, symptoms and character traits, Arlow was able to reconstruct the following unconscious memory/fantasy in his patient, later confirmed with further analytic material: “The patient in his parents’ bedroom had awakened from sleep and tried in various ways, or perhaps many times, to get his father to abandon the bed, hopefully for good. But the father persisted in returning to his bed and there was very little that the weak and small Oedipus could do. If only he could call the police or perhaps some criminals. They are stronger, they would get rid of father, take him away, and the little boy could enjoy mother for himself.” This fantasy is not unique to Arlow’s patient. In fact, a remarkably similar fantasy can be found hidden in the imagery of a feature film, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist.
The Conformist, is based on Alberto Moravia’s novel about a young man, Marcello, in pre-war Italy who volunteers his services to the Fascists. Marcello does not join the Fascists out of ideology, but to blend in, disguising his perverse sadomasochistic tendencies by expressing them through a perverse cultural norm. Moravia’s novel follows Marcello’s life from childhood through his death at the end of World War II. Bertolucci has changed the focus by presenting most of the story through Marcello’s reminiscences as he is driven towards the film’s central scene, a particularly violent assassination. Marcello has helped set up the assassination of his former teacher, Luco Quadri, an enemy of the Fascists. As the film opens, he receives a phone call in which he learns that Quadri’s beautiful wife, Anna, has accompanied him. With his assassin/driver, Mangianello, he chases after Quadri’s car with the vague hope of saving Anna, while we learn the background through his memories. Both the car and Marcello’s memories converge on the assassination, making it the intense focal point of the film.
Marcello’s reminiscences are presented with the subtle distortions of subjective memory. Objects are distorted in their proportions, the same people appear in different guises, some of the events appear to be distorted by fantasy. In this way, we share some of Marcello’s own confusion. We see that he harbors anger against his psychotic father and drug addicted mother. We also learn that as a child he was the victim of an attempted seduction at the hands of a young chauffeur, Lino, and ended up shooting his seducer, leaving him for dead. Marcello marries a woman he does not love, Julia, and falls in love with a woman he hardly knows, Quadri’s wife, Anna.
The film’s subjectivity allows us to enter Marcello’s mind, with its blend of memory and fantasy. It’s images are somewhat like the associations of a patient on an analytic couch, and like those associations, The Conformist reveals clues to another, hidden level of meaning. The story that we see is of a confused and tortured man in his thirties, but hidden in its imagery is a brief fantasy about a child in his bed, watching his parents.
One clue to the unconscious in an analytic hour is the presence of repetitions. When the same or similar images appear repeatedly in the course of an analysis, it may point to an actual memory that is being warded off by substitute memories. (Arlow, 1980; Greenacre, 1956) The Conformist can easily be seen to have continual repetitions of primal scene imagery, imagery relating to a child witnessing parental intercourse. Throughout the film, each scene contains some obvious elements of the primal scene while other elements are disguised or missing. As viewers, we never experience the primal scene directly or fully, but are continually teased with fragments.
As the film opens, Marcello receives a phone call in bed. He prepares to leave, taking a pistol, and covers his sleeping wife’s exposed back and buttocks. Here we have important static visual elements of the primal scene—a man and woman in bed, the woman’s exposed body, and the symbolic suggestion of the man’s erect penis (the pistol). There is no direct sexuality and no observer, other than the film’s audience. The next few scenes, the beginning of Marcello’s reminiscences, add missing elements.
As Marcello leaves his hotel, there is a visual distortion seen from the outside through the hotel’s glass door. He enters a car driven by his compatriot, Mangianello. As they drive, Marcello begins a series of reminiscences, which we see in the form of flashbacks. The first is to a 1930’s radio studio. It adds the observer and some of the sexuality while taking us out of the bedroom. Marcello and his blind friend, Italo, talk in a darkened booth that looks out on the studio where a man conducts three young women singers who sway as they sing. Marcello is explaining to Italo, who is jealous over losing him, that he is marrying his fiancee, Giulia, to conform, to be normal. (To blend in and be unseen.) With the singing girls still in front of them, he tells Italo how he and Giulia roll around on the floor together. Later, while Italo gives a radio address about the union of Italy and Germany, Marcello talks with a Fascist leader about committing himself to the cause by helping to eliminate enemies.
The film moves to another flashback. Marcello is going to meet a Fascist official. He wanders through oversized rooms, then peers through a curtain to see a woman’s leg dangling over a table. Dressed seductively, she is sitting on the table, flirting with a man who is seated. She looks back at Marcello, then lies down on the table. The man embraces her and kisses her. The camera zooms back suddenly, putting the scene into the distance. Marcello closes the curtain and walks out. He is later led back in to see the minister. The bed of the opening scene is disguised as a desk and the woman’s nakedness is suggested by her provocative dress and seductive exposure. Marcello is in the position of the child observer, and, in fact, the scene’s visual distortions make him look smaller than the provocative “lovers.”
We next see Marcello visiting Giulia. They roll on the floor in passionate embrace (as Marcello has described to Italo) and are observed and interrupted twice, by Giulia’s maid and then by her mother. They sit across from each other with her maid looking into the room until Giulia says to her, “Don’t stand around looking!” The maid runs out. Giulia leaps upon Marcello. They embrace and roll on the floor. The maid returns and they separate quickly, Giulia giving a gasp. She tells him that it’s all right because they’re engaged. Soon, they are talking about marriage. Giulia asks Marcello to go to confession before they are married. They begin to kiss and she invites him to make love to her on the floor. He says, “We’d better think about the priest. He might not grant us absolution.” He talks about having a surprise for her, when her mother walks in saying she loves surprises.
If we examine this succession of scenes, it can be seen that the primal scene elements complement one another. Each succeeding image adds a different perspective on the primal scene. The opening scene provides the actual physical elements of the primal scene with only a suggestion of action. The later scenes are more suggestive of the elements of watching and of actual sexual activity, but without the bedroom setting. When Marcello happens onto the seduction in the official’s office, for instance, the bed of the opening scene is represented by the official’s desk and the woman’s nakedness by her obviously seductive dress.
Each scene taken individually has primal scene elements that might be noticed by an analytic observer, but taken together they create a powerful subliminal gestalt. A modern analogy that comes to mind is that of the CT scan, in which numerous plane x-ray images are coordinated by a computer to give one three-dimensional image. The pattern is not confined to the opening scenes. The primal scene is represented in diverse aspects throughout The Conformist. In fact, virtually every scene of the film contains an obvious primal scene derivative.
There are also scenes, scattered throughout the film, that are linked by their repetitive focus on certain visual details. The details do not appear to be of importance to the plot or to any conscious themes that have been identified.
When Marcello peers at the couple through the curtain, the first thing we see is the woman’s leg swinging over the side of the desk. In the same scene, the man seems not to see Marcello, but the woman turns to smile back at him. In the course of the film, the camera will focus several times on dangling bare legs and backward stares:
Marcello visits his mother in her bedroom. Before he leaves, Marcello bends down to get her slipper. We get a view from under the bed of Marcello crouching next to his mother’s dangling leg.
On the train to Paris, Giulia describes her seduction by an old man to Marcello, while he reenacts it with her. The viewer of the film is teased with their opening embraces, but as they begin to make love, we see only a partial view of their bodies and then the train window with Giulia’s feet coming up into view as she kicks off her shoes.
In perhaps the most obvious primal scene image of the film, Marcello spies on Anna and Giulia through a partly opened hotel bedroom door. Giulia is lying on the bed, her legs dangling over the end of the bed. Anna caresses Giulia’s leg.
Marcello, Giulia, Anna and Quadri are eating together in a booth of a Chinese restaurant, while Mangianello spies on them from another booth. At one point in the scene, the camera suddenly takes a more distant angle and focuses on Anna’s leg dangling over her knee beneath the table. Marcello moves his leg up against hers.
There are many scenes in the film in which someone intrudes upon or observes two people embracing or in some stage of lovemaking. In the following scenes, we are reminded of the attractive woman on the desk top looking back at Marcello and smiling:
Marcello is in confession, describing his seduction by Lino and the ensuing “murder” to an elderly priest who appears to be excited and keeps pressing for sexual detail. At one point we see Giulia in her bridal gown outside the confessional box. The priest opens his door to look at her. She is looking at either Marcello or at both of them. It becomes unclear who is looking at whom.
In a scene that has a dreamlike quality, Marcello goes to a meeting with an agent, Raoul, in Ventamiglia. Again, Marcello walks in on a man and woman in a suggestive pose. Mangianello is embracing a woman while looking back over his shoulder in Marcello’s direction, smiling.
Marcello is peering through a hotel bedroom door as Anna attempts to seduce Giulia, who is lying on the bed. Anna looks back at the door in Marcello’s direction while she strokes Giulia’s leg. Later, Giulia asks her to turn away from her while she dresses. Anna turns towards the door and stares in Marcello’s direction.
As Anna and Quadri approach the site of the assassination, she turns her head to look back at the car following them with Marcello and Mangianello. She is frightened at their being followed, but Quadri is unsuspecting and unperturbed.
In the last scene of the film, we see a shadowy naked figure on a bed. Marcello is seated on a bench with his back to the bed and the naked figure. The film ends with Marcello turning his head and looking back through the bars of the bench.
There are also reprisals of the opening scene as when Marcello, visiting his mother in her bedroom, attempts to cover her partial nakedness and when Lino, the seducer, holding a pistol, undresses while the young Marcello lies on a bed beside him.
In an analytic hour, this repetition of detail might be interpreted as pointing to the presence of an unconscious memory (Arlow, 1980). Using a little imagination, we can begin to construct some variation of the following “memory” in The Conformist: A child peers up, perhaps through the bars of a crib, as a man undresses and approaches a woman in her bed. The man pulls back the sheet, exposing her nakedness. The child is beckoned and excited by the woman’s backward glance at him and her bare leg hanging down.
The primal scene is not a neutral act. Arlow (1980) has pointed out that it often engenders feelings of envy and desires for revenge from the child who is forced to be a passive observer. As the film develops, the primal scene is invested with strong overtones of envy. This can be seen in many places in the film—in the early scenes, there was a hint of Marcello’s jealousy over Anna; Italo, his blind friend, is more clearly envious of Marcello and Giulia—but one of the most interesting and evocative comes from a central metaphor of the film, Plato’s myth of the cave. Marcello and Quadri capture that envy discussing Plato’s parable in which men are chained to a wall and forced to look at images through a screen:
“Imagine an enormous tunnel in the form of a cavern. On the inside, men who have lived there since childhood, all enchained and obliged to face the back of the cave. Far behind them shines the light of a fire. Between the fire and the prisoners imagine a wall, low, similar to the little stage on which the puppeteer has his puppets appear . . . and now try to imagine men who pass behind that wall carrying statues of wood and stone . . . What do they see? . . . They see only the shadows that the fire projects.”
This metaphor applies equally to the passive child forced to view parental sex and the film’s audience seated in a theater, looking up at images on a screen it can never enter. The viewer of The Conformist, who is subtly, but repeatedly presented with primal scene imagery, should be primed to identify with that child’s excitement and frustration.
The revenge fantasy reaches a crescendo in the assassination of Quadri and the scene that follows it. All the tension of the film moves towards the assassination scene. Marcello and Mangianello are moving physically towards the site of the assassination, all the while anticipating what will happen there. Marcello’s reminiscences move towards the assassination in time while explaining how the plot advanced to this point. In addition, certain scenes, such as the opening scene in which Marcello gets up from the bed to get dressed and the scene in which Marcello shoots Lino, have helped prepare the viewer for the primal scene revenge fantasy that is evoked by the assassination and its aftermath.
As the assassination scene begins, Marcello sits in the rear seat of the car, behind his driver, Mangianello, seemingly paralyzed as he watches the events unfold. Quadri and Anna are just ahead of them on a winding mountain road in the midst of a snow- covered forest. Anna looks back over her shoulder (one of the film’s repetitive images) at the car following them. She is frightened at being followed, but Quadri is calm and unsuspecting. A car swerves in front of Quadri’s car, blocking the way. The driver is slumped over the steering wheel. Anna fears danger and pleads with Quadri not to leave the car. Nevertheless, he goes out to check. Assassins appear from the surrounding woods. The driver of the car steps out to join them. As Quadri asks him what he wants, they begin stabbing him repeatedly. They head for Anna who flees, screaming in terror as she runs to Marcello’s car. Anna presses her face against the rear seat window implicitly begging for him to save her. Marcello does nothing. Anna runs on, the assassins in pursuit. They finally shoot her. She falls to the snow, her face covered with blood.
The scene changes. Several years have passed and Mussolini’s government has just been toppled. Marcello says good night to his three or four year old daughter after leading her in her prayers. He gets a call from his friend, Italo, and prepares to go out to meet him. His wife begs him not to leave (just as Anna had begged Quadri not to leave the car) because there is rioting and danger in the streets in the wake of Mussolini’s fall (another assassinated father). Marcello goes out over her objections (as Quadri had). As he leaves, the lights begin to go off and on. The little girl cries out, “Mommy, where are you? I’m afraid!”
Once again, two scenes can be taken as separate aspects of a single fantasy. The little girl in bed, the parents arguing in the other room, the hint of external danger, and the girl’s fright are more mundane elements of the primal scene close to the experience of every viewer. The assassination appears to be far from the bedroom or scenes of childhood, but it conveys the raw emotion and violent imagery that we might associate with the primal scene revenge fantasy. Influenced by the repetitive primal scene imagery that has come before, we can construct the following:
A child lies in his bed or crib, perhaps with a nurse nearby (Mangianello), watching his parents in bed, or imagining them together in the next room. He weaves a fantasy of revenge. The parents are interrupted and father leaves, possibly to check on the supposedly sleeping child (the slumped over driver). This imagery has been suggested in the opening scene when Marcello leaves his bed to go out. The father is viciously murdered and the mother sadistically abused and killed in a more violent version of the primal scene while the child watches, frozen by the scene and his own ambivalence.
Moravia’s novel (1951) contains a primal scene experience with violent overtones that Bertolucci has chosen not to include in the film. Instead, he has, with what I assume to be unconscious artistry, imparted a sense of an unconscious primal scene memory and fantasy that can enrich our experience in a unique way. The success of this unusual dimension will depend upon the ability and need of each viewer to preconsciously reconstruct a scene from its fragmented elements. When it works, it adds depth to the presentation of the film’s major political and dynamic themes.
Arlow, J. (1969), Fantasy, memory, and reality testing. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 38:28-51
Arlow, J. (1980), The revenge motive in the primal scene. J. Amer. Psa. Assn., 28:519-542.
Dervin, D. (1985), Through a Freudian Lens Deeply: A Psychoanalysis of Cinema. Hillsdale, N.J.: The Analytic Press.
Greenacre, P. (1956), Re-evaluation of the process of working through. Int. J. Psa., 37:439-444.
Moravia, A. (1951), The Conformist. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young. Translated by A. Davidson.