A man arrives in the big city with a plan as simple as it is lethal: to blow up the symbolic heart of the neo-capitalism that killed his comrades. This is not the opening of a Costa-Gavras political thriller, nor a nihilistic noir in the vein of Jean-Pierre Melville. It is the almost picaresque kick-off to It's a Hard Life, Carlo Lizzani's 1964 film, and its protagonist, the anarchist Luciano Bianchi, is perhaps the most perfect and tragicomic incarnation of the "disorganic intellectual" that Italian cinema has ever conceived. A towering Ugo Tognazzi, at his expressive zenith, lends his face and body to this veteran of the Tuscan provinces, catapulted into the foggy, feverish Milan of the economic boom on a mission of vengeance that will crumble in the meat grinder of modernity.

The film, adapted from Luciano Bianciardi’s sprawling, booze-soaked, eponymous novel-pamphlet, is a singular cinematic object, a hybrid that dances on a tightrope stretched between the ferocious satire of Commedia all’italiana and a sociological analysis that grazes the desolate plains of Antonioni-esque incommunicability, but with the volume turned up and a glass of red in hand. While Antonioni's characters wandered, silent and hieratic, through the aseptic architecture of modernity, sensing its existential void, Lizzani and Tognazzi’s Luciano wallows in that same modernity, shouts at it, insults it, analyzes it with Marxist pedantry, and finally, inexorably, is devoured by it. This is alienation seen not from the terrace of a bourgeois penthouse, but from the counter of a tavern or the desk of an exploited translator—an alienation proletarian in spirit, even if intellectual in form.

Luciano Bianchi arrives in Milan to blow up the "Pirellone" tower, that phallic totem of industrial power which, in the narrative's fiction as in the historical reality of the Ribolla mine disaster, puts profit before the lives of miners. His is a chimerical terrorism, a Futurist gesture in reverse: not the celebration of the machine, but its desecration. And yet, the metropolis does not fight him; it seduces him, neutralizing him with a weapon infinitely more powerful than repression: integration. Milan has no need for truncheons to defuse his bomb. It offers him a job, a studio apartment, advertising, consumerism, and above all, it offers him Anna, a pragmatic and vibrant Giovanna Ralli, the incarnation of a new femininity, emancipated and perfectly integrated into the city’s productive rhythms. Love, which ought to be humanity’s last trench, becomes here the sweetest and most inexorable cog in the system's machine.

Luciano's journey is a descent into the inferno of affluence. His ideological furor is diluted by the urgency of paying the rent. His invectives against Capital become advertising slogans for detergents and refrigerators. Lizzani, a director with a steady hand and a clear eye—less stylistically pyrotechnic than other masters of his time, but perhaps for that very reason more effective at x-raying reality—stages this process of domestication with almost documentary-like precision. The sequence in which Luciano memorizes the tram routes, the unwritten rules of Milanese productivity, is a small masterpiece of editing that depicts assimilation as a process of neurological reprogramming. His provincial body and mind, accustomed to human rhythms, are formatted for the intangible assembly line of the tertiary-sector metropolis.

The comparison with Bianciardi’s written page is illuminating. The novel is a furious stream of consciousness, a feverish and erudite monologue steeped in a rage that the film, by its very nature and the demands of the market, cannot help but soften. Lizzani's It's a Hard Life is a "translation" that is also, in part, a "betrayal," in the highest and most necessary sense of the word. If the book is a scream, the film is a tragicomic sigh, a shrug of the shoulders in the face of the inevitable. Tognazzi is masterful in mediating between these two souls: his performance retains the intellectual fury of the literary character, but grounds it in a clumsy physicality, in a mask of pathos that elicits laughter and pity in equal measure. He is, deep down, an aged and drunken Holden Caulfield, who instead of railing against the "phonies" takes aim at the "integrated," only to end up becoming the most integrated of them all.

Meta-textually, the film performs the same operation on Bianciardi’s novel that the affluent society performs on its protagonist: it takes it, sands down its most radical edges, packages it in an accessible format—that of the comedy—and sells it to the general public. This is not a demerit, but an observation that adds another, vertiginous layer of complexity to the work. Lizzani himself seems aware of this short circuit, and he makes it explicit in one of the film’s most brilliant and modern scenes: the translation of an American pilot’s manual. Here, the director abandons realism and launches into a pop, almost Godardian montage, with superimposed text and the rhythm of a music video ante litteram, showing language itself becoming a commodity, a slogan, a sound emptied of meaning. It is the visual materialization of the film’s core thesis: in the society of the spectacle, even the language of rebellion can be co-opted and turned to profit.

One could see in Luciano Bianchi an antecedent of Howard Beale, the "mad prophet of the airwaves" from Sidney Lumet’s Network. Both are men who scream the truth at the system, and both are transformed by that same system into a sideshow freak, a successful product. The crucial difference is that Beale’s rage is broadcast on live TV, spectacularized and monetized, while Luciano’s is consumed in private, between the walls of a studio apartment, and fizzles out not in a bloodbath, but in the hum of a brand-new refrigerator. The Italian tragedy is more intimate, quieter, more bitter. It is defeat without martyrdom, an abdication that takes place not on the scaffold, but before a television installment plan.

The final sequence is one of sublime cruelty. Luciano, now a model employee and family man, watches his child sleep in a hyper-technological cradle. His wife hands him a glass of milk, the beverage of childhood, a symbol of regression and forced pacification. From the window, his nemesis, the Pirelli skyscraper, looks on, impassive and victorious. His face no longer expresses rage, but an infinite resignation, the awareness of having become a small cog in the machine he wanted to destroy. Life is no longer "hard" because of poverty, but because of the sickly sweet taste of conformity, the ash of a betrayed ideal that coats the mouth. It is the same disillusionment one would breathe, years later, in the cubicles of Mike Judge’s Office Space, but stripped of any residual, salvific irony.

It's a Hard Life remains a fundamental document, not just of Italian cinema, but of the cultural history of the West. It prophesied, with ruthless lucidity, the fate of protest in the age of mature capitalism: its ability to absorb and neutralize all antagonism by transforming it into a lifestyle, a product, a market niche. The anarchist bomber has become an advertising creative. The revolutionary has bought a house. His bomb never went off, but perhaps, in a way, it exploded inside him, silently, leaving in place of his heart a crater filled with prosperity and regret.