Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic When Elon Musk performed a straight-arm gesture last month, many quickly interpreted it as the fascist salute first popularised by Benito Mussolini. But Mussolini himself is much less known today \u2014 and often disregarded as a historical sideshow.In fact, as a new TV drama shows, his emergence as the first fascist leader of any country has enduring lessons. Mussolini: Son of the Century attempts to capture his unscrupulousness and charm. The parallels with Donald Trump are front and centre.\u201cIf you make something about Hitler, there\u2019s nothing but darkness. Mussolini is really dark, but he also employed humour,\u201d says the show\u2019s English director, Joe Wright.Based on the bestselling novel of the same name, Son of the Century drives home how Mussolini\u2019s takeover of Italy was far from inevitable. \u201cThere were points all the way along where people could have stepped in and stopped it, and they didn\u2019t take those opportunities.\u201dIn 1921 Mussolini\u2019s party won less than 7 per cent of the seats. The next year he was asked to be prime minister. The king, Victor Emmanuel III, had refused to allow the army to crush Mussolini\u2019s thugs as they marched on Rome. The papacy settled for gaining privileges for the church. Socialists had undermined the political system. Industrialists saw fascism as the lesser of two evils. Even then, it wasn\u2019t too late to prevent dictatorship.Wright leans into the contemporary relevance: \u201cWe need to stand up against it. It is our responsibility to make sure it doesn\u2019t happen. If we don\u2019t, we are complicit. At what point do we abdicate responsibility for those we put into power, especially when we\u2019re benefiting or we\u2019re doing all right?\u201d The FT gave the series five stars. Luca Marinelli, who plays Mussolini, put on 20kg for the role \u2014 transforming himself from \u201cone of the most beautiful men in the world\u201d (Wright\u2019s words).Wright previously directed the Oscar-nominated Darkest Hour, lionising Winston Churchill for his defiance of Adolf Hitler. But Churchill declared himself \u201ccharmed\u201d by Mussolini. \u201cIt\u2019s a testament to Mussolini, because he did seduce not just Italy but the world,\u201d says Wright. \u201cNarcissists are often very charming. They have an ability to sniff out what people want and give it to them.\u201dMussolini\u2019s character sometimes speaks directly to the camera, intimately telling the audience he betrays everyone eventually. These asides were intended to be in English, while the rest of the show is in Italian. But politics intervened. While the show was in rehearsals, Giorgia Meloni, who started her political career in a neo-fascist party, became Italy\u2019s prime minister. \u201cThe next morning, I went into the studio and said, I want every single Italian to understand every single word,\u201d says Wright.Now it\u2019s not just Italians who might want to listen closely. Bullying humour is just one similarity between the show\u2019s Mussolini and Trump. \u201cSlippers are a man\u2019s undoing,\u201d the fictional Mussolini berates his wife at one point. There are other parallels: the focus on what is beautiful, and the lack of obvious morality or fixed ideas. Wright likens how Mussolini twisted the betrayal felt by Italian first world war veterans to how Trump mobilised the anger of \u201cleft-behind\u201d American voters. \u201cMake Italy Great Again,\u201d Mussolini tells the audience, in the one line that remained in English.Yet no one has stepped forward to broadcast Son of the Century in the US. \u201cIt\u2019s brought home to me how apolitical Hollywood is,\u201d says Wright. \u201cThe film industry there as individuals are very political people, and they\u2019ll donate and hold fundraisers. But in terms of what they will back, they\u2019re incredibly apolitical.\u201cThere was one streamer, who said, \u2018We love the show\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009However, it\u2019s a little too controversial for us.\u2019 Wait a minute, when did anti-fascism become controversial? That really shocked me, because our grandfathers and our great-grandfathers fought defending us against fascism. Is their sacrifice also controversial?\u201dWright, 52, started off political. As a teenager in the 1980s, he went on anti-nuclear marches and deployed the term fascist without precise meaning: \u201cThe police were fascists, and our schoolteachers were fascists if they kept us late.\u201dFor much of his career, however, politics took a back seat. He learnt directing from his father; his parents ran a puppet theatre in Islington, north London. In the 2000s, he directed Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, before some lower-profile productions. \u201cThe most difficult thing about my job is figuring out what stories to tell. And sometimes I\u2019ve got that really wrong.\u201d His interest in politics was revived by travelling to the Democratic Republic of Congo to research a play about the former leader Patrice Lumumba.With Son of the Century, his insight was that the novel \u2014 a mixture of imagined scenes and documentary evidence \u2014 lent itself to an \u201calmost cubist aesthetic.\u201d The staging is often hallucinatory, testing its credibility, but Wright dislikes his work being called theatrical. \u201cAnything that isn\u2019t realism is termed theatrical, which seems to me a misuse of the word. The intention is to be cinematic.\u201dHe is also untroubled by occasional anachronisms. Son of the Century has a techno soundtrack written by one half of The Chemical Brothers; it also features Elvis Presley\u2019s \u201cCan\u2019t Help Falling In Love\u201d. Wright\u2019s Darkest Hour showed Churchill conversing with the public on the London Underground, something that would never have happened. How does he respond to those who prioritise accuracy? \u201cYou just have to make choices. And I\u2019m at the service of my craft.\u201dWright was nervous about directing actors speaking Italian, not knowing the language himself. \u201cI don\u2019t know if it would be possible, if I didn\u2019t speak English, to direct English actors. The heritage of English acting is very text-based. The heritage of American acting is very psychoanalyst-based. The heritage of Italian acting is commedia dell\u2019arte, so it\u2019s incredibly physical and tuneful. What I discovered is I could understand the truth of what they were saying just by watching and hearing the tune.\u201dMussolini\u2019s humour was \u201cthe thing we were all most worried about\u201d; it is not present in the original novel. Both Marinelli and the novel\u2019s author, Antonio Scurati, were \u201cnervous\u201d about the scripts. \u201cI kept on assuring them that it wasn\u2019t a comedy\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009Mussolini has been treated as a clownish buffoon, and he wasn\u2019t that: he used humour sometimes but it wasn\u2019t who he was.\u201d The quantity of fascist violence in Son of the Century makes it impossible for the audience to sympathise much with Mussolini.The eight episodes centre on the leader, his associates and his mistress Margherita Sarfatti. Wright declined the producers\u2019 suggestion of editing them down into a 150-minute film. \u201cWe just couldn\u2019t see a way to make it work, because it\u2019s about the mundane minutiae of the descent into dictatorship.\u201dThe minutiae make the story, he insists, while rolling a cigarette. \u201cIf you try to make something universal, it never is. If you just focus on the specifics of the time and the place and the characters, people are able to project themselves into it.\u201dAs for solutions to today\u2019s polarisation, Wright admits: \u201cI don\u2019t have any answers.\u201d But having thought hard on what fascism means, he now sees a lack of meaning. \u201cThere is a void at the centre of fascism, and certainly at the centre of Mussolini. It constantly eludes definition, because it\u2019s always against something, but never for anything. There\u2019s a line in the show where Mussolini says: fascism is everything and the opposite of everything\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009He was just the uber-opportunist, so \u2014 whatever suited him at any given moment \u2014 that was fascism.\u201d\u2018Mussolini: Son of the Century\u2019 is on Sky Atlantic and Now in the UK<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic When Elon Musk performed a straight-arm gesture last month, many quickly interpreted it as the fascist salute first popularised by Benito Mussolini. But Mussolini himself is much less known today \u2014 and often disregarded as a historical sideshow.In fact, as a new TV drama<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":203530,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-203529","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203529"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203529\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":203531,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203529\/revisions\/203531"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/203530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}