The Conformist

Marcello Clerici's lifelong project of 'normality' is rooted, Moravia makes clear, in a childhood trauma he's never processed: as a boy he believed he killed the chauffeur Lino after Lino's attempted sexual assault on him, and from that point on Marcello organizes his entire adult identity around becoming as unremarkable, conventional, and legible to others as possible — marrying a shallow, conventionally pretty bourgeois fiancée, Giulia, precisely for her ordinariness, and joining the Fascist secret police not out of ideological conviction but because Fascism offers the most totalizing, uniform-wearing, rule-following version of belonging available to a man desperate to disappear into the crowd.

The mission Marcello accepts — to facilitate, under cover of his honeymoon, the assassination of his former university professor Quadri, now an anti-Fascist exile in Paris — puts his need for conformity into direct, excruciating contact with the one relationship in the novel that actually tempts him toward a different life: his attraction to Quadri's wife Lina (who in turn desires Giulia) exposes desires and identifications Marcello has spent his whole life suppressing in the name of normalcy, and Moravia stages the Paris sequence as the closest Marcello ever comes to admitting that his entire adult self is a performance built over an abyss he can't look into directly.

Moravia's cold, clinical prose style, closely tracking Marcello's own self-justifying rationalizations without ever fully endorsing them, is the novel's mechanism for its larger political argument: Fascism, in this account, isn't chiefly the work of true believers or sadists but of ordinary, conflict-averse men willing to do almost anything to avoid standing out, feel abnormal, or be identified as different — a diagnosis of totalitarian complicity as a problem of psychology and desperate belonging rather than simply of ideology.

Bernardo Bertolucci's celebrated 1970 film adaptation is visually and structurally freer than Moravia's novel — restructuring the chronology, adding the famous Plato's-cave dialogue with Quadri and reworking Marcello's psychology through a more overtly Freudian, visually symbolic lens — and while the film has become for many readers the more familiar version of the story, it also changes or omits some of the novel's specific late-book turns, including the fuller working-out of what happens to Marcello afterward. Moravia's own prose, tighter and more interior than the film's operatic visual style, keeps the emphasis squarely on Marcello's self-deceiving internal logic rather than on the political spectacle Bertolucci foregrounds, which is worth reading directly rather than assuming the film has already told the whole story.