‘Slap the Monster on Page One’ or — Analysing the Propaganda Model?
A young woman has been murdered on the outskirts of Milan, but Marco Bellochio’s ‘Slap the Monster on Page One’ (1972) appears not to give a damn. In fact, we can pretty much guess who did it from the start meaning there’s zero mystery to unravel and the crime itself is neglected to the point of becoming practically irrelevant. What does fascinate Bellochio, however, is how the editor of a right-wing newspaper, Giancarlo Bizanti (Gian Maria Volonté), exploits, distorts and manipulates the “facts” to simultaneously demonise the political left whilst increasing support for the right before an upcoming election.
This approach makes it feel almost like an inverted Giallo or Poliziotteschi where the social and political background is explicitly brought to the foreground and analysed with forensic scrutiny as opposed to the actual killing or its motives. Also, Bizanti might control his paper, and therefore what the people think, but Bizanti is himself a puppet of “higher forces”. Bizanti doesn’t mind this. He sees the situation and power dynamic he’s in clearly. It’s just how the world works and to think differently is naive stupidity.
There’s an astonishingly psychologically violent scene where Bizanti and his wife are at home watching him explaining the danger of the political left on an Italian television program when, after hearing his wife tell their son how wonderful his daddy is for informing the viewers, he mercilessly calls her an idiot, a moron, for believing the same lies the ignorant population eat up and swallow. She, of all people, as the wife of a newspaper editor, should be able to see the game he’s playing and the fact that she can’t makes him hold her in utter contempt. It’s a horrible, and deeply uncomfortable, moment but we can’t quite shake off the fact that he’s right. There is a game being played here by those in control of the information systems and we’re the fools if we buy it. This is ‘All the President’s Men’ (1976) if The Washington Post were the bad guys.
Bizanti is also Volonté at his coldest. We’re use to seeing him play unhinged psychopaths but, generally, outside of his work with Leone almost every character he portrayed contained some shred of humanity, usually in the form of the emasculated man-child. His work with Elio Petri, especially, demonstrates this with even his fascist police Inspector in ‘Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion’ (1970) providing a few good laughs, albeit at his own expense, and his factory worker, Lulù, in ‘The Working Class Goes to Heaven’ (1971) might be coarse, vulgar and uncouth but he’s also, at times, undeniably adorable.
None of that is present in Bizanti with Volonté playing him as nothing more than a pragmatic machine, an extension of ever expanding communication systems and Italian cybernetics (notice his main way of visually consuming the world is through the eye of the TV).
Bellochio directs with the dynamic energy of a petrol bomb thrown through a plate glass window and this might be one of the best representations of Italy’s Years of Lead you’ll see as left-wing radicals clash with far-right protesters with the public caught between both, and if a lot of it appears captured for real that’s because it was. And, as becomes apparent towards the end, this is a situation deliberately fanned by American cultural and financial involvement in Italy to crush any form of Socialism.
Yet what’s most arresting about Bellochio’s film is how strikingly relevant it is today, if not even more so. The use of disinformation to incite social agitation and embolden business, wealth and the right, as well as the extent these various systems that disseminate this “news” have become so inextricably and inescapably embedded into our lives, is more prevalent than ever. Make Bizanti the owner of a social media platform and not only could you release this movie today without altering a single word you’d also have to make it even more insidious. Now that’s scary.
