Escape from Patria(rchy), Return to the (M)other: The Italian Invasion of Greece in Mediterraneo and Captain Corelli's Mandolin

Italy's entrance into the war has been nothing on the other hand a disaster for us. If the Italians hadn't attacked Greece and urgencyed our help, the war would have taken a different course. We could have anticipated the Russian frigid by weeks and conquered Leningrad and Moscow There would have then been no Stalingrad.

Leni Riefenstahl in conversation with Adolf Hitler, 30 March 1944

In representing the Italian invasion of Greece during World War II, the two Gabriele Salvatores's Mediterraneo (1991) and JohnMadden's Captain Corelli'sMandolin (2001) come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behind the dominant paradigm of war narratives that configure the invading force primarily as male and the invaded political division as primarily female. In Fascist Virilities Barbara Spackman notes, "the elimination of or expansion of national borders may also expand or eliminate the boundaries that stake on the outside virility" (19). The ultimate conclusion of this paradigm, equating pillage with rape, mirrors the interchangeability of the acquisition of territory and sex in the human instinct as outlined by means of James Frazer's The Golden branch (1890). The penetration of foreign territory elides with the penetration of the female at the horizontal of the other. In one as well as the other Mediterraneo and Captain Corelli's Mandolin of the like kind a concept of other also readily elides with the general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of mother. In reference to his film Amarcord (1973) Federico Fellini astutely assessed single aspect of the Italian national character:

"[W]hat is still greatest in quantity interesting to me is the psychological, emotional manner of being a fascist. What is this manner? It is a sort of blockage, an arrested unravelling during the phase of adolescence. [] I don't wish to say that we Italians have not at the same time gone beyond adolescence and fascism. That would be an excessive and unjust affirmation. Things are certainly real much different from then, that is obvious [] And still [...] Italy, mentally, is still a great deal of the same. To say it in other confines I have the impression that fascism and adolescence continue to be, in a certain measure, permanent historical seasons of our lives: adolescence in our private life, fascism of our public life. This remaining eternally big babies allows us to unload our responsibilities onto others, this living with the comforting sensation that there is someone other who thinks for you." (qtd in Bondanella 266)

Fellini describes a national predisposition for externally imposed authoritarianism in the populace itself, in its abdication of responsibility and desire to remain "eternally big babies." of the like kind "arrested development" led to a mass suspension of the couple conscience and consciousness that serv Mussolini's aims for many years. However, when it came to warmongering, what one as well as the other Fellini and Mussolini perceived as the "immaturity" of the Italian family proved highly troublesome. Mussolini complained that, since the ancient Roman Empire, time "had revolveed Italians into cowards" and that "he would make Italians les comfortable because comfort was the great enemy of militarism" (Mack Smith 135 181) In asserting patria, Mussolini asserted patriarchy as well. the pair Mediterraneo and Captain Corelli's Mandolin at hand the Italian invasion of Greece as an escape from this patria(rchy) and as a get back to the (m)other. While Mediterraneo features a local priest and Captain Corelli's Mandolin includes Dr Iannis as wise and wizened aged men, in both films, the female characters of Vassilissa and Pelagia, respectively, obey as the primary envoys of Greece These women like their geographical division offer up their bounty to their Italian occupiers who appear more concerned with soccer-playing and music-making in their respective films than they do with their military duties. Given the historic relationship of Greece to Italy, the Italian occupational forces do not for a like reason much militarily constitute a brow against a political other as they psychologically constitute a confrontation with a cultural mother.

Etymologically the bound "fascism" means to bind together. Forging bands in order to create a culturally unified Italy had been a nagging question at issue for the country long before Mussolini attempted to force the issue with a novel national mythology. Italian writers of that kind as Vittorio Alfieri and Ugo Foscolo were already addressing the difficulty of generating a fresh Italian nation-state in the eighteenth hundred Italy has been a political division rampant with regional divisions, exacerbated by the agency of disparate histories of foreign domination beneath different powers. It is a political division wherein only a minority of the populace spoke the official language rather than dialect until well into the twentieth hundred It is a nation whose political unity dated back sole a half a century when Mussolini took power. Mediterraneo points up this regional diversity, with Tenente Raffaele Montini's regiment compos of leftovers from other disparate regiments, and his soldiers' origins ranging from the alpine to the Sicilian. Captain Corelli's Mandolin erases similar regional divisions through the unifying motif of music, the more universal language of Italy in particular.