The Fascist Cinematic Universe

Tim Brinkhof considers Joe Wright’s new Mussolini miniseries as a flawed representation of the rise of fascism in Italy.

By Tim BrinkhofDecember 7, 2025

• Television

• History

MUSSOLINI: SON OF THE CENTURY, a 2025 Italian TV miniseries directed by Joe Wright that chronicles the rise of the titular figure from disgraced newspaper editor to dictator of Italy, isn’t like most other historical dramas. It’s based not on a biography, memoir, or study but on a novel—the first in a pentalogy by Italian author Antonio Scurati. It’s also surprisingly experimental, featuring sets and camerawork reminiscent of German expressionism, a soundtrack that ranges from hardcore techno to Elvis Presley, and characters capable of breaking the fourth wall: Benito Mussolini (Luca Marinelli), who regularly speaks directly into the camera, introduces himself by promising the viewers that before the final credits roll, they, too, will have become fascists.

Though somewhat evocative of Wright’s previous period pieces—including Darkest Hour (2017), the Oscar-winning film that depicts Winston Churchill’s fight to convince an inert British Parliament of the unavoidability of war with Adolf Hitler—Son of the Century actually bears a much looser resemblance to Trotsky, an equally flamboyant Russian TV series from 2017 about the titular Bolshevik leader who lost control of the USSR to Joseph Stalin. The similarities range from the superficial to the significant. Both shows have large budgets and expansive casts. Both recount, in minute detail, the private lives and public maneuverings of controversial historical figures. Last but not least, both take numerous creative liberties, imbuing their subjects with a sense of scope and spectacle that approaches the films of Christopher Nolan or the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

And yet, despite these liberties, Mussolini: Son of the Century and Trotsky aspire to be more than artful entertainments. Far from using history as mere narrative backdrop, they navigate its nooks and crannies as would a professional historian, and reach insights through the unique properties of their medium that conventional academic inquiry cannot. Yet, because of their engaging plotlines and high production quality, these shows don’t bring their subjects to life so much as make them appear larger than life. If they tell us anything about the events they depict, it’s how the present day wants to remember them.

In style and substance, Son of the Century—currently streaming on MUBI—draws little distinction between itself and the history it dramatizes. The original Italian edition of Scurati’s book, M: Son of the Century (2018), which he refers to as a “documentary novel,” opens with a disclaimer stating that the “facts and characters […] are not the fruit of the author’s imagination” but are “historically documented and/or testified to with authority by more than one source.” Wright goes a step further: by having Mussolini directly address the audience and share thoughts he withholds from other characters (he frequently compliments people to their faces, only to mock them in theatrical asides), the viewer is given the impression that they are getting to know the “real” Mussolini—a figure not encountered in books or black-and-white news footage.

Trotsky aspires to project a similar air of authenticity. Though not as transparent about its inspirations, the series closely follows both the tone and content of Leon Trotsky’s My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography (1930), a nostalgic retrospective on the author’s revolutionary career, which he composed during his first year in exile. Like Son of the Century, Trotsky promises to take viewers behind the scenes, breaking down the carefully constructed public persona of its protagonist to reveal aspects of his character and conduct that the historical Trotsky would have kept hidden from view. In a scene that serves a similar function as Mussolini fooling an army officer in order to avoid arrest during the March on Rome, we watch Trotsky gift his own wristwatch to a Red Army soldier to demonstrate their equality before learning that he keeps dozens of identical watches in his drawer.

Unlike Wright’s series, however, Trotsky pulls back the curtain on other major figures. In each episode, the protagonist (played by Konstantin Khabensky)—living out his final days dodging assassins in Mexico City—has an imagined conversation with a deceased person from his past. His father, David Bronstein (Sergey Sosnovsky), a pious landowner, deplores the rebellious, atheistic cause to which Trotsky devotes himself, while Vladimir Lenin (Yevgeny Stychkin)—whose early death opened a door to Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship—wonders whether their lives’ work, culminating in the murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, was ultimately a mistake. These conversations, like Mussolini’s fictitious tête-à-têtes with the viewer, are not and cannot be based in reality, yet within the context of their respective narratives, they somehow strike us as more real than events and exchanges we know to be rooted in historical fact.

This is not to say that the two shows are completely detached from academic research, fabricating or rewriting history whenever its writers and directors see fit. Scurati’s novels—and, by extension, Wright’s program—are based on a large body of letters, telegrams, and newspaper articles, many of which are embedded within the author’s texts, so as to allow readers to compare his dramatizations directly to the source material. The way Son of the Century portrays both Mussolini and fascism—as cynically opportunistic and lacking a coherent or consistent ideology—reflects the work of various historians, from A. J. P. Taylor, who in The Origins of the Second World War (1961) described the dictator as a “vain, blundering boaster without either ideas or aims” and his regime as “corrupt, incompetent, [and] empty,” to Denis Mack Smith, who in his 1982 biography Mussolini contended that his only “superlative ability” was “as a propagandist.”

For its part, Trotsky depicts a version of Trotsky that corresponds to the scholarship of Robert Service, whose 2009 biography presents its subject as equal parts selfish and selfless: a firm believer in the people’s revolution and his own key role in it. According to Service, Trotsky was one of the first Marxist agitators to grasp the potential of mass communication, which he used not only to foment unrest but also to publicize himself and his achievements. At the same time, he was utterly devoted to his cause, placing his work before friends and family and—in supposed contrast to Lenin or Stalin—regularly risking his own life for the sake of his convictions. Trotsky’s deep commitment to revolution also echoes historian and translator Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (2017), which posits that there was an almost religious quality to the relationship between early generation Bolsheviks and their political philosophy. To cite an excerpt published by the Los Angeles Review of Books, quoting the revolutionary Aleksandr Arosev:

I don’t know about the others, but I was in awe of the tenacity, durability, and terrible fearlessness of human thought, especially that thought within which—or rather, beneath which—there loomed something larger than thought, something primeval and incomprehensible, something that made it impossible for men not to act in a certain way, not to experience the urge for action so powerful that even death, were it to stand in the way of this urge, would appear powerless.

Though well-researched, Son of the Century is not free from factual errors. Some of these appear to have been made accidentally. In a 2018 article for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, journalist and historian Ernesto Galli della Loggia criticized Scurati’s first novel for mixing up an inexcusable number of dates and citations—small yet, in light of the subject, serious slipups that would never have made it through the editorial process of an academic journal. Other errors seem deliberate, made in the interest of telling a more compelling story. John Foot, author of Blood and Power: The Rise and Fall of Italian Fascism (2022), who otherwise praised the show in a review for The Conversation, points to the “overplayed” role of socialite Margherita Sarfatti (Barbara Chichiarelli), Mussolini’s early career sponsor and mistress—a classic trope, likely leaned into “to increase the clarity of storytelling.”

Trotsky likewise exaggerates the importance of a person its protagonist encountered early in life. In the opening episode, a young Trotsky—locked up in an Odessa prison while still going by his birth name, Lev Bronstein—is summoned to the office of the warden, Nikolai Trotsky (Sergei Garmash). Over a game of chess, the latter (quoting Dostoevsky and smoking a big cigar) convinces his naive and idealistic prisoner that power cannot rest on promises of freedom or equality but only on fear. Taking this lesson to heart, Trotsky adopts the warden’s name as his own. “Wearing his skin like a pelt,” as he puts it, he transforms from a hotheaded demonstrator into a cold and calculated revolutionary. This anecdote, often quoted on the internet, likely originated from the Marxist journalist Isaac Deutscher’s 1954 book The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879–1921, which mentions how Trotsky, hurrying to obtain an illegal passport, “had to inscribe hastily the name he was to assume, and […] scribbled that of one of his former jailors in the Odessa prison.” Trotsky himself, it’s worth noting, makes no mention of this jailer, writing in My Life that he picked the name “at random, without even imagining that it would become [his] name for the rest of [his] life.” (His previous pen name, “Antid Oto,” came about as a joke, so he could “jestingly” tell his friends that he would “inject the Marxist antidote” into the newspapers he wrote for.)

Beyond minor errors and embellishments, there are problems with the way Son of the Century characterizes the nature of fascism itself. Joshua Arthurs, a professor of history at the University of Toronto specializing in 20th-century Italy, told me that, “though there is no question that Mussolini played a crucial role as the personal embodiment of fascism,” he would “not center [Mussolini] as the prime actor.” Piero Garofalo, a professor of linguistics at the University of New Hampshire who researches Italian history and cinema, questions the show’s insistence that Mussolini managed to rise to power in large part because the representatives of Italy’s pre-dictatorial government failed or refused to stand in his way. “Certainly, the weakness of King Victor Emmanuel III and Parliament’s ineptitude were factors,” he wrote in an email. “Nevertheless, Mussolini’s rise cannot be reduced to the capitulation of those two entities, as he enjoyed the support of military officials, economic elites, and large portions of the population.”

History as depicted in Wright’s show also runs counter to the scholarship of two of Italy’s foremost scholars of fascism, Renzo De Felice and Emilio Gentile. Challenging the Marxist historians who wrote the first postwar studies on the subject, which identified Mussolini’s movement as a bourgeois, militarized response to the specter of Bolshevism, De Felice proposed that the dictator was neither cynical nor opportunistic but a genuine idealist with a clear and substantive vision who—far from caring only about his own prestige—actively sought to modernize Italy by forging a middle way between communism and capitalism. Gentile—who told me that he is not familiar with the show or the novels but thought that they appear “far from historical reality as we know it today”—has argued, similarly to Slezkine, that fascism should be considered a kind of secular religion. In his view, it attracted followers not because it provided a way for people to realize their personal ambitions or an outlet for violence and frustration—as the show and novels strongly suggest—but because it gave them a source of meaning, purpose, and security.

Trotsky, by comparison, does not align with a historical tradition so much as a living political doctrine. The show was produced by Channel One, a broadcasting service operated by the Russian state and a well-documented distributor of government propaganda. Its initial release date of November 6, 2017, roughly corresponded with the centenary of the October Revolution—an event that, as Moscow correspondent Joshua Yaffa reported in The New Yorker, the Kremlin wasn’t too keen on commemorating. While World War II, known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War, continues to be celebrated and referenced in mainstream media as a display of Russian exceptionalism, the Bolshevik coup d’état has been largely disregarded since Putin entered office. As Stephen Lovell, a professor of modern history at King’s College London and the author of The Soviet Union: A Very Short Introduction (2009), told me: “A regime that was emphasizing unity did not want to linger over the history of a civil war.”

Seen through a contemporary lens, Trotsky reflects how the political establishment of the Russian Federation wishes people to recall the creation of the state it succeeded. In a move that might well have pleased Stalin, the series treats Trotsky’s life as a kind of Greek tragedy, his inevitable downfall brought about by his own flaws. It also leans heavily into long-standing antisemitic stereotypes about the revolution and its orchestrators. A self-hating Jew with a deep-seated inferiority complex and little love for his own motherland, the Trotsky we see on-screen is driven less by a desire to change the world than to rule over it—a goal he resolves again and again to pursue no matter the cost. The show’s ideological raison d’être, otherwise obscured by informative scenes about historical events like the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk or the Bolshevik-Menshevik split, comes through most clearly in its epigraph, taken from the Book of Proverbs: “The way of the wicked is as darkness: they know not at which they stumble.”

Son of the Century, though not the mouthpiece of a particular regime or party, also finds itself caught up in present-day discourses. Scurati intended for his documentary novel—which became a national sensation and won the prestigious Strega Prize—to encourage readers to confront a relevant yet often overlooked aspect of Italian history. Detractors like Della Loggia responded by saying that such a confrontation, while necessary, should not take place inside a novel, much less one that approaches its subject neutrally and in narrative form, without authorial scrutiny or interjection. “Scurati allows Mussolini and the documents to speak for themselves,” Garofalo told me, “but this approach provides a faux-objective portrayal of fascism. Facts do not speak for themselves; they require context and interpretation.”

This point is perhaps even more applicable to the show, which—as Wright explained in an interview with The Guardian—wants the audience to be “seduced by Mussolini and to get excited by what he’s doing.” In contrast to Ridley Scott’s Napoleon (2023), in which Joaquin Phoenix’s bumbling, neurotic performance falls comically short of the legendary French emperor’s actual reputation, Son of the Century shows us Mussolini as he would have appeared to his own followers: charismatic, commanding, magnanimous—a man who always gets what he wants, when he wants it. In a way, his heinousness and depravity only enhance his stage presence: as with Walter White in Breaking Bad (2008–13) or Batman’s nemesis the Joker, the audience gravitates toward him not in spite but, perversely, precisely because of the laws he breaks and the people he hurts.

Son of the Century might have proven less controversial had Mussolini gone down in history as a thoroughly demonized and discredited figure, but that is not the case. As historian Paul Corner argues in Mussolini in Myth and Memory: The First Totalitarian Dictator (2022), Italy never reckoned with fascism the way Germany did with Nazism. With the violent and corrupt aspects of Mussolini’s rule forgotten, ignored, or gradually normalized, his shadow continued to loom over postwar Italian politics, eventually paving the way for future far-right leaders such as Silvio Berlusconi (who famously told The Spectator that “Mussolini never killed anyone”) and Giorgia Meloni, who began her career as a member of the neofascist Italian Social Movement and—when asked if she had seen Wright’s program—said that she is far too busy to watch TV.

In 2018, NYU historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: How They Rise, Why They Succeed, How They Fall (2020), argued that Scurati’s novel was not a response to the rehabilitation of Mussolini’s legacy so much as its latest, most bombastic symbol. Earlier this year, she extended her criticism to the show, calling Wright’s vision “paradoxical.” As Mussolini himself explains in one episode, building a dictatorship is all about managing expectations: once you cross a boundary, that boundary ceases to exist. Since Mussolini’s fall and the gruesome treatment of his corpse, his on-screen appearances have crossed many thresholds that separate the permissible from the unspeakable. First, he showed up exclusively in documentaries. Next, he graduated to dramas—initially in cameos, then as a supporting character, and finally as the protagonist. Now, with Son of the Century, he has also become the narrator, freely exchanging fact for fiction and seducing you whether you are aware of it or not.