I

The singular attempt at translating the mostly Italian school of period neodecadence of the 1970s into a more contemporary era resulted in a film that seethes with the condemnation of a reactionary Weltanschauung that made the best of the original genre so worthwhile, even with its excesses. The Comfort of Strangers (UK/Italy 1990), directed by Paul Schrader, is adapted from Ian McEwan's novel by Harold Pinter, who had supplied the 1960s with its first parable on power, decadence, and repressed sexuality in The Servant (UK 1963). Schrader's film was hardly understood by critics of the time as the type of allegory on fascism that arrived with Visconti, Cavani, Bertolucci, Wertmüller, and Pasolini. Here, in a 1990s setting, Venice underscores a monumentalized past in which two couples play out the metaphors of liberalism being sacrificed to the sinister desires of fascism. The very notion of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice novella and Visconti's film Morte a Venezia/Death in Venice (Italy/France/USA 1971), the total liberation of the senses, which results in self-destruction, is also at the heart of Strangers. Like Mann's character of the aging German historian (a Gustav Mahler-like composer in Visconti's film) Gustav von Aschenbach and his obsession with the Polish boy Tadzio vacationing with his mother and siblings on the Lido, the Italian aristocrat Robert's desire for handsome British tourist Colin shifts uncomfortably between aesthetic appreciation and outright homosexual desire. Is this an intentional mime of Visconti's vision of a sexually aware Tadzio from Mann's Death in Venice? Only the trappings of his tradition-based life—his reputation as an important man based in heritage and inheritance, his repressed but faithful wife, and the grandeur of his palazzo surroundings—allows him the thin veneer of being the connoisseur rather than the sexual predator. His self-definition is based in the static values of his “history,” the phallocratic dominance of the fathers, which is at once a bourgeois defense of racial and cultural supremacy that fueled fascism in Europe.

The construction of a glorious past that can elevate the present while at the same time freezing middle-class values against the perceived threats of the Left, is one of the hallmarks of both Italian and German fascism.