SCÈNE 16. Gabriel Frieberg, Founder & Editor, The Schmear Hunter
Nuts for nuts: How broken identity weaves into a dark political tapestry.
Welcome back to Mise-En-Scène. This newsletter is a one-year-old! I love tending to it. It’s kept me engaged, refreshed, and humbled in moments when I needed to self-soothe with art, beauty, and delight. I’m thankful for every new subscriber, comment, DM, email, geek-out and freakout. Trust that I’m paying close attention and can’t wait to bring you more cool people and their favorite frames in 2025.
I struggle to think of someone more fitting to close us out for the year than
, also known as . Gabriel is a prolific creator, editor, and writer who crafts and curates expert commentary, critiques, and recommendations on film and TV. Lucky for us fiends, his pace is relentless. His distribution? Boundless. In addition to his Substack newsletter, he records and produces The SchmearCast, on which he dissects of-the-moment cultural output, separating the hype-worthy from the merely fine. Lastly, his reviews on Letterboxd are fun and frequently surface under-looked gems.For his Mise-En-Scène selection, Gabriel plunges us head-first into political intrigue and the dark arts of autocracy: Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970 thriller, The Conformist (Il Conformista), based on the 1951 novel of the same name by Alberto Moravia. If you’re familiar with the story—and especially if you’re not—there’s a modern way into it. As The Schmear Hunter himself hath decreed:
Don’t worry, we’ll get there. The Conformist centers on Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a psychosexually suffocated bureaucrat in Fascist Italy whose desperation to conform drives him to volunteer for a chilling mission to assassinate his former professor, Professor Quadri (Enzo Tarascio), an anti-Fascist dissident hiding out in Paris. Bertolucci, who was only in his late 20s when he directed the film, applies his poetic instincts to create off-kilter, uncanny frames that underscore the cold perversity within both protagonist and system.
Marcello’s last name literally translates to “clergy,” a delicious detail, because he is spiritually bankrupt and typifies the oppression inherent in any formalized establishment. (Have you seen this year’s Best Picture contender, Conclave?) Trintignant plays Marcello with chilling clinical restraint that wouldn’t be out of place in a contemporary Michael Haneke film.
After the jump: Gabriel Frieberg on the walnut scene in The Conformist and the curious parallels between Marcello Clerici and United States Vice President-elect J.D. Vance.
[Nat’s note: My Q&A with Gabriel took place shortly before U.S. Election Day this past November. “Prophetic” doesn’t even cover it!]
“WHEN THERE ARE SO MANY OF US, THERE IS NO RISK”: THE SCHMEAR HUNTER FOUNDER AND EDITOR GABRIEL FRIEBERG ON THE CONFORMIST (IL CONFORMISTA), 1970
GABRIEL ON HIS FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH THE CONFORMIST:
I was a film major at the University of Michigan, and my best friend was a PPE Major (Philosophy, Politics, Economics). He was assigned a meaty essay on fascism in The Conformist, and considering my aptitude and interest in film and his relative paucity, I watched the movie and wrote the essay for him. Between the watch, the thinking through and analysis for the essay, and my love of political thrillers (easily my favorite genre, especially of the arthouse variety), I knew I had found my new favorite film.
GABRIEL ON WALNUTS AND THE FILM’S COMMENTARY ON FASCISM AND IDENTITY:
You are never on firm ground with The Conformist. The film is surreal and subjective. The [walnuts] still is from early in the film, when our highly unreliable lead character (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant) is receiving his assignment from top fascist brass. His handler is a nattily dressed fellow with an effete tone. The mutability of gender and queerness is astonishingly critical to the film. They exist to show the sublimation of identity within fascist regimes. I read the walnuts quite literally, in keeping with The Conformist’s pitch-black sense of humor. Fascism is nuts! This assignment being given makes no sense and bears no real political deftness or even purpose. The utilization of our lead, Marcello, is also ass-backwards: he is a rebel without a cause, latching onto fascism due to his own inner brokenness and lack of conviction. The guy is all style, no substance, and how that’s not sniffed out speaks to the movement’s madness.
GABRIEL ON WHY THE CONFORMIST CONJURES U.S. VICE PRESIDENT-ELECT J.D. VANCE:
The F word has entered the conversation here in America, with just a few days to go before the presidential election. I’m not here to parse its veracity in that context, but I can remind readers what Bernardo Bertolucci wanted to tell viewers about fascism in 1970. Aside from those high-powered megalomaniacs, the real perpetrators of fascism are the broken “yes men,” the pencil pushers, the stepped-on, the people like Marcello who go along with something due to their own lack of integrity. There’s a soul in Marcello, and it is fighting so hard to get out, but at every chance to break free, he sticks with the program; he opts in, he conforms.
You wanna get political? Let’s get political. It’s hard not to watch Marcello and think of J.D. Vance—a serial flip-flopper, former friend to the trans community, former hater of Donald Trump turned sycophantic lackey. No matter how polished he comes off, when you look into his beady eyes, it’s impossible to see humanity anymore. If Bertolucci doesn’t show us Marcello’s trauma and interiority (and even that is suspect), the character appears the exact same way: equally distant, vacant, and unknowable. It’s very sad, but also, who knows what tomorrow brings for Marcello as fascism crumbles and he stares directly and implicitly into the camera?
GABRIEL FRIEBERG RECOMMENDS
If Gabriel’s appreciation of The Conformist is any indication, he’s deft at navigating the layers of a nervy cultural work. Read on for his thoughts on some of his other picks, from classic Steinbeck to Industry’s glow-up. Also? All hail Sam Wasson and his nimble, revelatory page-turners on film classics.
Chinatown (1974), directed by Roman Polanski.
Gabriel says: I think about this movie on a daily basis and try to give it a watch at least once a year. I find so much mystery and meaning within it each time—it is a perfect object. I also inhale any arcana related to it, like Sam Wasson’s book about its making, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood (2021), and Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma (2023), where she grapples with her love of Roman Polanski films and her hatred for the convicted statutory rapist.East of Eden (1952), by John Steinbeck.
Gabriel says: On vacations, I like to truly tune out and try to tackle a classic novel, so this past summer, I sunk into Steinbeck’s magnum opus East of Eden, and I’m glad I did. The book is not at all stodgy—it moves, and Steinbeck writes with such authoritative yet sensitive humanism and respect for nature. I watched Elia Kazan’s 1955 adaptation, and it didn’t quite work for me, despite James Dean’s magnetism being abundantly clear. Kazan’s granddaughter, Zoe, is taking a crack at it for Netflix with Florence Pugh as a miniseries, and I honestly think more breathing room for the saga will do it good.Ad Hoc at Home: Family-Style Recipes (2009), by Chef Thomas Keller with Dave Cruz.
Gabriel says: I love to cook, but I’m quite a mad professor in the kitchen—an improviser who definitely needed to drill down on technique more. Realizing this, I decided to cook my way through a cookbook for the first time. Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc at Home topped many “Best Cookbook” lists (as did his French Laundry book, but baby steps…). I’m having a blast cooking my way through it deliberately, loving the process of learning new techniques and sourcing delicious ingredients and requested accoutrements (e.g., Champagne vinegar, fleur de sel, new kitchen supplies).Industry Season 3 on HBO.
Gabriel says: I have adored Industry since it aired during the pandemic back in 2020, and I felt weirdly proud of how much it leveled up this past season, even though I had absolutely nothing to do with that improvement. The show entered the rarefied air of A+ TV in my book, deepening the characters and their relationships, thrilling us both cinematically and in terms of storytelling, with a finale that exceeded my wildest dreams. We recapped and analyzed the show weekly on The SchmearCast, and it was such a gratifying experience, especially when the show’s brilliant creators, Konrad Kay and Mickey Down, came on for an interview at season’s end.Queer (2024), directed by Luca Guadagnino.
Gabriel says: I’ll take any opportunity I can get to bang the drum for this film. I caught it at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), and it was my film of the festival. I found it deeply strange, heartbreaking, miserable, and moving. Guadagnino is reaching back into his Suspiria (2018) bag for this one, and he gets a gut-wrenching performance out of James Bond himself, Daniel Craig. There are a lot of naysayers and boo-birds coming out for this, but I urge viewers to go in blind and let Queer worm inside you and rip you asunder. Next up for me: diving into William S. Burroughs’s novella prior to my rewatch.
That's all for this installment of Mise-En-Scène. If you're up for more politically charged cinema analysis (and honestly, who isn't these days?), The Conformist is currently streaming for free on Kanopy with a subscription, and available for rent on the usual platforms. Settle in with a stiff drink and prepare to take in even stiffer facial expressions.
A massive thank you to Gabriel for this exploration that’s uncomfortably timely. Follow his cultural adventures on Substack and listen to The SchmearCast.
Thoughts? Critiques? Passionate defenses of pencil-pushing fascists? My DMs are always open. Until next time—stay weird, stay watchful.
See you in 2025!