Retrofit

The movie

“Fascist on Mars” is the title of an Italian movie that came out in 2006. The director, main author and protagonist of the film is the Italian comedian Corrado Guzzanti.

It is a satire of fascism: the protagonist wants to please the Duce and decides to conquer the red planet (red=communist!) together with a group of strange people.

The movie is filmed in the style of a cinegiornale. One of the pillars of Mussolini's propaganda, the Istituto Luce produced newsreels that were projected every day in theaters everywhere in Italy.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of every cinegiornale was the martial tone used by the background voice. The speaker would use a sustained and sharp language, very identifiable with fascism; his tone mimicked the one used by il Duce. The emphatic tone sounds grotesque today, but it was the signature of every single message from the dictatorship.

As an example, consider this remarkable piece of propaganda showing grain harvesting (mietitura) in Libya in 1940. The voice says I villaggi deserti biancheggiano al sole (deserted villages are whitening in the sun), which looks like a verse in a poetry collection rather than in the news. The voice praises the virtues of the Italian settlers who teach harvesting to the “indigenous”.

The fascist thought the italian language was being bastardized by foreign words, and they did not like it. So they imposed new words to “italianize” back the language: they replaced any word of French or English origin with neologisms taken from Latin. You can find many references to this “italianization” process on the web, for example here. I chuckle when I read pallacorda for “tennis”, or vitaiolo for “playboy”.

Today, the language and the tone used in the cinegiornale sound overly grotesque and ridiculous to most italians (but I suspect they sounded already very ridiculous at the time). The choice of Guzzanti to use this style for his film makes it very funny to almost every italian (except to fascist, I guess).

Look at these scenes of the movie on youtube, and compare them with the cinegiornale above: same tone, same style. The word “flashback” is deleted and replaced with retrolampo – a made up word that sounds so much funny in italian.

Fascists on Mars today

The movie is from 2006, but it is in the news again because Elon Musk decided to do his coming out during the inauguration of the Trump presidency. And Musk says he wants to go to Mars, something every serious scientist deems, not only impossible, but a waste of time and resources.

Therefore, I find it only normal that many “memes” pairing Guzzanti and Musk are appearing on Facebook; the movie will be broadcast on the italian TV once again; and manifests appeared in the city of Turin showing Musk wearing a fez (a typical hat weared by fascists in the colonies) while doing the nazi salute. The manifest reads “O Marte, o morte”, paraphrasing the famous slogan “O Roma o morte” pronounced by Giuseppe Garibaldi while conquering the south of Italy.

Should we laugh at Musk?

Or should we take him seriously?

I think we should take him very seriously, because he is a dangerous man. I also think we should laugh at him because he is ridiculous and grotesque, like the main character of the movie. One thing I am sure of is that fascists hate when we laugh at them. So, let's laugh and laugh very hard.

The movie is available on youtube with English subtitles.

Laugh hard, my friends.

Giuseppe Lipari