Introduction: A Dictatorship Narrated in the First Person

Joe Wright’s eight-part series Mussolini: Son of the Century, adapted by Stefano Bises, Antonio Scurati, and Davide Serino from the first volume of Scurati’s documentary novel and premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2024 before its Italian broadcast in January 2025, undertakes a task that political drama usually avoids: it hands the narration of fascism’s birth to fascism’s architect. The series covers a compressed historical arc, roughly from the founding of the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in 1919 to the parliamentary speech of 3 January 1925 in which Mussolini assumed responsibility for the murder of the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti and, in effect, inaugurated open dictatorship. These are matters of historical record. What is not a matter of record—what belongs entirely to the adaptation—is the device that governs the viewer’s access to them: a Mussolini who repeatedly turns from the diegetic world to speak directly into the lens, soliciting, cajoling, and confiding.

This essay argues that the series’ direct address is not a stylistic ornament but its central philosophical instrument, and that everything the work has to say about charismatic authority, mass complicity, and the seductions of political spectacle is routed through it. The wager of the analysis is that the fourth-wall break performs, rather than merely depicts, the mechanism by which fascism recruits. Weber’s account of charismatic domination supplies the vocabulary for the leader’s claim on his followers; Arendt’s reflections on complicity and thoughtlessness illuminate the silence that surrounds him; Gramsci, imprisoned by the regime the series dramatizes, furnishes the theory of hegemony against which the work’s account of consent must be read; Schmitt names the juridical logic of the exception that the final episode enacts; and Walter Benjamin’s thesis on the aestheticization of politics, together with a Camusian reading of the protagonist’s cynicism, accounts for the disquieting pleasure the series manufactures and then forces the viewer to notice. These thinkers are enlisted not as external authorities but because the work itself keeps staging the problems they named.

I. The Grammar of Charisma: Weber and the Manufactured Confidant

Max Weber defined charismatic authority as legitimacy grounded neither in tradition nor in legal rule but in the personal devotion aroused by an individual held to possess exceptional qualities. Its decisive feature, for Weber, is relational and unstable: charisma exists only in so far as it is recognized by followers, and it must be continually proved, lest recognition lapse. Mussolini: Son of the Century can be read as a sustained dramatization of precisely this instability—and its formal signature, the address to camera, is the mechanism by which the series both exhibits and interrogates the charismatic bond.

Consider what the direct address actually does to the spectator’s position. When the protagonist breaks from a rally or a backroom negotiation to explain his calculations, the viewer is not being informed as a neutral witness; the viewer is being enlisted as a confidant. The opening minutes establish the contract with disarming candour: the character promises that the spectator, too, will come to love him, will become a fascist too. The line is delivered as prophecy and as seduction at once. Weber’s insight was that charismatic recognition is not extracted by force but conferred by the follower; the series literalizes this by making the audience the party that must confer it. Each aside is a small demand for recognition, and the accumulation of asides constitutes the ongoing ‘proof’ that Weber insisted charisma requires.

What distinguishes the series’ treatment from hagiography is that it exposes the labour behind the magnetism. The protagonist is shown to be improvisational, opportunistic, and frequently frightened; in the second episode he is near ruin, his newspaper failing, his movement stalled. Charisma here is not an emanation of inner greatness but a performance assembled from available materials—wartime resentment, the theatrics of the piazza, the borrowed glamour of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s occupation of Fiume. The historical D’Annunzio matters to the argument: the series presents Mussolini as a man who studies the poet-adventurer’s choreography of nationalist spectacle and then absorbs its techniques while discarding its author. This is Weber read against the grain of the ‘great man’ thesis. The series retains the biographical form of the great-man narrative—it is, after all, structured entirely around one figure—yet the direct address continually punctures the aura it constructs, letting the viewer see the join between the man and the mask. Charisma is denaturalized precisely at the moment it is most effective.

The device also solves a problem intrinsic to Weber’s category, which is that charisma is notoriously difficult to represent from the outside. A film that merely showed crowds cheering would document the effect while leaving its cause opaque, inviting the viewer to supply, from their own imagination, the magnetism the images assert. The direct address circumvents this by relocating the charismatic transaction from the depicted crowd to the actual spectator. We are not asked to believe that the diegetic Italians found him compelling; we are made to test the proposition on ourselves, in real time, as the confiding voice works on us. In this sense the series conducts an experiment whose subject is the person watching, and whose hypothesis—that the mechanisms of 1922 remain operative on a viewer of the twenty-first century—is confirmed or refuted in each spectator’s private response. Weber’s claim that charisma lives only in recognition is thereby moved from the register of ...