Why we should watch "The Young Berlusconi"? Brilliant, nostalgic, haunting

During the three episodes of The Young Berlusconi, the new Netflix docuseries that reconstructs the entrepreneurial trajectory of the most controversial politician in the history of this country, there is a subtle undertone felt behind the enthusiasm of the narrative. The story, which begins in the 1970s with the acquisition of the first local television networks and the birth of Milano 2, then unfolds through the yuppie triumph of the 1980s with Mediaset and AC Milan, concluding finally with the birth of Forza Italia, is one of unstoppable success, brilliant and miraculous foresight, but above all it is a snapshot of a society caught in a historical turning point. In this success story, much like in Villeneuve's Dune, behind the almost messianic figure of the Cavaliere, one glimpses that of the manipulator, one senses in the background the role that rhetoric of disengagement, hedonism, and unscrupulousness would have on the current state of democracy and today's culture of post-truth and post-ideology. Just as Berlusconi anticipated the zeitgeist of the twenty-first century, a society where everything is content, commodified, and spectacularized, the story of his entrepreneurial strategy and his Shakespearean conquest of power anticipates a world like ours, where political propaganda becomes subtler and more insidious the more openly it is in its intentions. In this sense, Berlusconi's radical difference from the rest of the previous political class (an entire episode revolves around the fall of Craxi and Tangentopoli) appears both historically necessary but surreal: one of the most absurd yet strangely truthful moments of the show is precisely when Canale 5 was shut down but the population actually protested to get back their television programs including, unbelievably, The Smurfs. A bizarre situation, almost laughable, but one that speaks well to the stagnation of official culture, the desire for change and modernity in the country, but also the substantial frivolity and superficiality of an electorate that, fundamentally, clamored only for bread and circuses.

Berlusconi was the prophet of a society happy with its wealth, enthusiastic about its own vitality and yet spoiled at the terminal stage, drugged with a superficiality and joy that were beautiful then but today have had other and heavier consequences. Exploring this society, the change in that world from the "high" perspective of Berlusconi is perhaps the most important value of this series which, let's say, is neither a hagiography nor a lamentation, but the lucid account, between joy and dystopia, of a winning ruthlessness.