Speaking to a hall full of veterans of the Great War, recounts the Italian version of the Dolchstosslegende—the Nazi myth that Germany’s defeat in World War I was the work of traitors at home. Mussolini, played by Italian actor Luca Marinelli, tells the veterans that the blood they shed for their fatherland was wasted by an incompetent democratic government that failed to achieve the territorial gains it was promised by England, France, and Russia. To stomping boots and booming voices, Mussolini—the son of a socialist blacksmith who became the father of fascism—concludes that it is up to them, the newly formed Blackshirts, to avenge this “mutilated victory” and restore Italy to her rightful glory.

Turning away from the crowd to look directly into the camera, he reveals his true colors. Addressing us, the viewers, he refers to his supporters not as heroes but as outcasts, “people at the bottom of the barrel” whose anger and resentment he will harness to satisfy his own political ambitions. “Follow me,” he grins, turning his back towards the roaring crowd. “You’ll love me too. You’ll become fascists too.”

Son of the Century, directed by Joe Wright and currently available in the United States via the streaming service MUBI, is based on a 2018 book of the same name by Italian author Antonio Scurati. Most would describe it as a work of historical fiction, but Scurati prefers a different, more specific label: documentary novel. “Facts and characters,” a disclaimer reads, “are not the product of the author’s imagination,” but taken directly from reputable sources and eyewitness accounts. Scurati’s goal, it stands to reason, was not simply to tell an engaging story, but to make sense of the past in a way that conventional historical analysis could not.

Director Joe Wright on the set of Son of the Century. Andrea Pirrello

The same can be said of the novel’s televised adaptation, which promises to get to the core of what fascism was all about. With its expressive cinematography, techno-inspired soundtrack, and constant breaking of the fourth wall, the series aims to tell us where fascism came from, how it rose to power, and why it remains a relevant force in both Italian and international politics more than 80 years after its inventor was beaten to death beyond recognition and strung, head down, from the roof of a gas station in a northwestern suburb of Milan.

Because of its commitment to the aspirations of its source material, Son of the Century cannot be judged in the same way we judge most other period dramas. The historical settings of Wright’s Pride & Prejudice (2005) and Anna Karenina (2012) are just that: settings. It’s different when directors tell stories that don’t take place in history as much as they are about history itself, its meaning, and its significance. Think D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), which celebrates the Ku Klux Klan’s role in the Reconstruction-era South, or Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012), which presented torture as instrumental in the so-called Global War on Terror. Like Son of the Century, these works cannot be evaluated on their creative merits alone. Aside from cinematography and music, we have to scrutinize their portrayal of people and events, the extent to which those portrayals reflect or refute established scholarship, and—perhaps most importantly when dealing with a legacy like Mussolini’s—how they influence our collective memory today.

Fascism as depicted in Son of the Century—which concludes with the murder of socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti and the transformation of Italy’s parliamentary democracy into a one-party dictatorship—is little more than an empty vessel, a Rorschach test that means different things to different people. The squads of thugs tasked with maiming, murdering, and intimidating Mussolini’s opponents mainly use the movement as an outlet for their frustration and sadism, and they threaten to turn against their leader when his ascending political career calls for some conflicts to be resolved through diplomacy rather than deadly force. The cruelty depicted in the show is not an exaggeration: One researcher described the Blackshirt practice of pouring diarrhea-inducing doses of castor oil down the throats of their victims to harm and humiliate them as having reached “endemic proportions.”

Similarly, Mussolini’s financial sponsor and mistress, the socialite and art critic Margherita Sarfatti, sees fascism as an expression of futurism, an Italian artistic and intellectual movement that embraced modernity and progress for the revolutionary change it would bring, eagerly anticipating a future where traditional morality no longer applies. She is, notably, the only character in the series to make this connection, and although Mussolini does not seem to truly share her vision, he never corrects her with a different, definitive ideology of his own. To him, it doesn’t matter what people see in fascism as long as they see something. “I am consistent,” he tells the viewer after he is elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1921—a victory he achieved only by siding with landowners, businessmen, and other elements of bourgeois society he had previously opposed. “I betray everyone, including myself.”

Benito Mussolini gives a speech in Italy in 1933.Keystone Archive/via Getty Images

The series’ take on fascist ideology (or Mussolini’s alleged lack thereof) reflects academic research on the subject, which over time has moved away from studying fascism as a unified theoretical construct—be it an outgrowth of capitalism, a response to Bolshevism, or something else entirely—and towards studying fascism as a decentralized social phenomenon, with focus placed on the “how” as opposed to the “what” or “why.” Befitting its form, Son of the Century emphasizes the role of media and performance, showing how both were used to project non-existent strength while hiding real weakness. Both on screen and in actual history, this process is best illustrated by the March on Rome, a mass demonstration by Mussolini’s supporters in 1922 that resulted in his appointment as prime minister. While the violence involved in this event was real, the power behind it was not nearly as formidable as it appeared; although the fascists weren’t bluffing, they were certainly gambling. As seen in the series, Mussolini was prepared to escape to Switzerland and would have left the country had the march resulted in an actual confrontation with the army.

The series, much like Scurati’s novel, attributes fascism’s ascent not to the cunning of Mussolini or the strength of his Blackshirts, but to the shortcomings of the government they replaced. As historian Denis Mack Smith put it in the New York Review of Books in 1968, infighting saw the liberal politicians of the early 1920s “almost competing against one another in their desire to invite Mussolini into power.” Fearing his generals would rise up against him, Italy’s king, Victor Emmanuel III, refused to sign Prime Minister Luigi Facta’s declaration of martial law, allowing the March on Rome to succeed in spite of its own organizers’ doubts. The king then appointed Mussolini prime minister, placing him in charge of a new coalition, despite the fact that the fascists were only a minority party in parliament. A few weeks later, parliament duly voted to give him dictatorial powers. “Democracy,” he says in one episode, “is beautiful. It even allows you the possibility of destroying it.”

The series’ emphatic critique of Mussolini’s enablers reflects present-day concerns over democratic backsliding in the West, particularly in Italy and the United States. The final episode, which culminates in Mussolini’s 1925 speech that ushers in his 20-year dictatorship, ends on the word “silence”—as if to remind viewers what is lost when democracy falters. The 2024 Venice Film Festival, where Son of the Century premiered, also showed documentaries about Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump. “Make Italy great again,” Mussolini says to the camera, in English, following the March on Rome, an event which is shown to resemble the Jan. 6 riot in all but its outcome. Despite this obvious reference to current events, few critics have interpreted Mussolini and fascism as stand-ins for Trump and MAGA. This is surprising, not only insofar as many of the criticisms leveled against the former can and have been applied to the latter; Trumpism, too, has been described as ideologically incoherent, shaped above all by the whims of its idiosyncratic figurehead. But critics’ silence on the modern connection is also odd to the extent that the series and novels—in sharp contrast to some scholarship—treat Italian fascism as tailor-made for export across time and space.

Son of the Century’s treatment of history has been largely well received. John Foot, a professor of modern Italian history at the University of Bristol, for example, finds little to complain about. But others have accused both Wright and Scurati of sensationalizing and trivializing, and not without reason. Although occasionally chipping away at the marble chin of Il Duce’s public persona to reveal a man whose outsized impact on the planet was more accidental than inevitable, the Mussolini we meet on screen is, ultimately, difficult to distinguish from the one constructed through his own propaganda.

Marinelli in Son of the Century.Andrea Pirrello

And with its melodramatic flair and blockbuster aesthetics, Son of the Century arguably makes its protagonist appear not just alive but larger than life. Wright’s direction, even more so than Scurati’s writing, turns Mussolini into an antihero rock star in the mold of Walter White in Breaking Bad or the Joker in the eponymous 2019 film. He is captivating despite (and, for some, even because of) the heinous things he does and stands for. As NPR critic John Powers summed up: “I can imagine [him] really enjoying this series.”

In some ways, the most problematic aspect of Son of the Century is its very existence. It is, after all, nearly impossible to imagine television entertainment centered on Adolf Hitler, who—though certainly not identical to Mussolini in his convictions and crimes—remains the closest point of reference. The fact that the Italian dictator can be the star of his own television series (and for that series to include slapstick comedy, moments of sentimentality, and stylized excess reminiscent of a Quentin Tarantino film) is first and foremost a testament to the persistence and pervasiveness of his personal and political afterimage.

There is a reason that one of the most recent books on Italian fascism, published in 2022 and written by historian Paul Corner, was titled Mussolini in Myth and Memory and not “Fascism in Myth and Memory.” Unlike Germany, Italy never fully reckoned with its totalitarian past. Decades after World War II, partly misplaced and partly fabricated nostalgia for Il Duce’s firm but supposedly benevolent leadership became the launchpad for the careers of other far-right politicians, from Gianfranco Fini and Silvio Berlusconi to Giorgia Meloni, not to mention three of Mussolini’s own progeny: granddaughter Alessandra, granddaughter Rachele, and great-grandson Caio Giulio Cesare. Certain movements die with their leaders, but leaders can live on in memory—even through TV shows that try to put them to rest.