Ask people who are genuinely into cinema, fashion and style what’s their favourite film and many will promptly answer Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist.
This elegant film taken from Alberto Moravia’s eponymous novel is indeed informed by the choreographed style of musicals and melodramas and by American and French films from the ‘30s.
Perfect production design and settings and Vittorio Storaro’s impeccable cinematography contribute to make of this film a true masterpiece.
Yet despite admiring the style of this film I must admit that, at the same time, I hate it because it focuses on a main character, Marcello, who, after a traumatising incident in his childhood, becomes obsessed with the concept of normality.
Marcello rejoices about the fact that, as a grown-up, he has turned into an ordinary man who does exactly what the other human beings around him do.
He smokes the same cigarettes everybody smokes; he marries an ordinary middle-class woman and makes love to her because this is his duty; he supports Franco in Spain and Mussolini in Italy not because he believes in what they represent, but because all the other average Italians do so.
In a nutshell, Marcello is happy to be part of an unthinking collective entity.
The Conformist has constantly been on my mind in the last few months.
Marcello’s thirst for conforming to everything that surrounds him seems to have become a sacred rule for our entire society. Most of us simply want to belong to a group: we join social networks, we add as many friends as possible in our lists of contacts and subscribe to newsletters and blogs not because we are genuinely interested in these things, but because “we” want to conform and be part of a group.
One of the main characteristics that distinguishes a group is the language in which it expresses itself: contemporary conformists chop up words, abbreviate them and generally express themselves in cryptic “txt msgs” or emails formed by single letters and numbers, thinking punctuation is something you only use when you need to create emoticons.
In a way we must consider ourselves lucky James Joyce didn’t live in our times: his famous stream of consciousness would have given many readers a headache if it had been formed by an assortment of letters, numbers and emoticons (though, you may argue, in this case Ulysses would have been a hit in some circles…).
The disjointed and broken form of language in which many of us started expressing themselves in the last few years is just an aspect of modern conformism, but language is not the main victim.
The modern attitude to conform has indeed mainly killed real culture and the art world: we rarely read proper books or engaging and stimulating publications, but we daily feed our brains with small articles and pieces of news written in short blog post-style, believing and accepting whatever they say, without criticising them.
Most “art conformists” nowadays are also guilty of the so-called “David Shrigley syndrome”, a peculiar illness that leads you to proclaim that everybody who can’t draw is actually a talented illustrator with multiple skills.
Such obnoxious characters are sometimes even invited to direct films, write columns in newspapers and ultimately DJ at supposedly trendy parties organised during the relentless fashion weeks that seem to regulate our lives in place of ordinary natural seasons.
Talking about fashion it would be impossible not to mention the consequences fashion conformism generated: try to state Marc Jacobs is not a genius-like designer but a talented stylist and hordes of fashionistas will turn into violent terrorists ready to lapidate you (look at the bright side: at least their brains would finally react to an unusual stimulus, very different from that of buying a new bag...).
Tell your editor not to glamorise obesity by putting for the umpteenth time Beth Ditto naked on the cover of a magazine and you will be fired for not having understood that she’s a true rebel and iconic style goddess (but when you were an overweight teenager dreaming of becoming an artist or a fashion designer one day, you were just a pretty laughable blob of fat).
Go to students following a course in fashion design and ask them to come up with something extraordinarily outlandish: chances are they will design an outfit à la Gareth Pugh, justifying it by telling you they did it because they feel very “gothic” inside (whatever that means); ask them which designer inspires them on a daily basis and 90% will say Ann Demeulemeester, but don’t ask them to explain you why because they wouldn’t really know.
The thirst to conform to what is fashionable and trendy has also caused unlikely marriages between publications and corporate brands: there was a time when people collaborated with each other to publish a magazine, write a screenplay or release a record, nowadays we have conformed to a basic idea, a collaboration is mainly a Machiavellian scheme according to which a big brand gets a magazine, a celebrity, an untalented artist and such likes and together they design a…pair of sneakers. “You’re strange,” Giulia told her husband Marcello in Moravia’s novel, “Everybody tries to be different from the other human beings, but you don’t seem to want to be different, you just want to be like everybody else.”
Like Marcello we have applied the ideal of conformism even to our most individualistic instincts: the will to differentiate ourselves from the others often turns into a mere exercise in how to conform to trends and fads.
In the past when you wanted to look different you would dig out of your wardrobe old clothes and accessories that belonged to random members of your family, from grandparents to uncles and aunts; now we all go on eBay and buy a 40s hat, because we have been told that vintage is cool and hats are fashionable again.
There is one solution, though: thinking with your own mind. The next time you are at an exhibition in front of an artwork created by the umpteenth untalented model/celebrity/celebrity’s son or daughter turned artist or you find yourself at a catwalk show during which a designer has, for the hundredth time, recycled that embarrassing trend from the 80s you just hated, and you hear somebody next to you asking “Don’t you think that’s the work of a genius?”, don’t enthusiastically nod, but refuse to conform, stand tall and tell them what you truly think. You may end up raising a few eyebrows, enticing the disgust of many conformists and losing the favour of that prominent blogger all conformists idolise. But you know what? It’s much better to be a social outcast than an inveterate, impenitent and illiterate conformist.
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