Italian Americans in Film and Other Media: The Immigrant Experience from Silent Films to the Internet Age 303147211X, 9783031472114

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Chapter 1: Introduction
Works Cited
Films Shows Cited
TV Shows Cited
Part I: The Immigrant Experience
Chapter 2: Races to the Rescue in an Ethnic Urban Milieu: D.W. Griffith and the Biograph Italian Dramas
Works Cited
Films Cited
Chapter 3: The Italian (1915) and the Representation of Italian Immigrants in Silent American Cinema
Italians and Italian Culture in the United States
Migration and Silent American Cinema
Early American Cinema and The Black Hand (1906)
Italians in Hollywood
The Italian (1915)
Conclusions
Works Cited
Films Cited
Chapter 4: Italianness and Foundational Masculinity in Edward Dmytryk’s Rendition of Pietro Di Donato’s Christ in Concrete
Works Cited
Films Cited
Chapter 5: A Sting from the Past: Assimilation and Healing Rituals in Helen de Michiel’s Tarantella (1995)
Works Cited
Films and TV Series Cited
Chapter 6: The Celluloid Closet: Sex, Power, and Coming Out Repression of the Italian American Closet in Nunzio’s Second Cousin (1994), Kiss Me, Guido (1997), and Mambo Italiano (2003)
Researching the Queer in Italian Americana9
Theoretical Framework
I. Nunzio’s Second Cousin (1994)
From Gay Bashing to Tolerance Teaching
Dinner at the Randazzos
II. Kiss Me, Guido (1997)
III. Mambo Italiano (2003)
Space and Place in Mambo Italiano
Concluding Thoughts
Works Cited
Films and TV Series Cited
Chapter 7: From True Love (1989) to Union Square (2011): Recovering the Exploded Family in Nancy Savoca’s Films
Works Cited
Films & TV Series Cited
Chapter 8: A Realistic Tale of Improbable Friendship. Notes on Matthew Bonifacio’s Amexicano (2007)
Preliminary Notes
Theoretical Framework
Migration and the Border as Themes
Film Analysis
Bruno Transisi and Ignacio: From Pervasive Mistrust to the Collapse of Trust and Obsession
Bruno Sammartino: From Large to Larger-than-Life
Works Cited
Films and TV Series Cited
Part II: Italian Americans in Other Media
Chapter 9: Italian American Gangsters Taking on a New Line of Work in Luc Besson’s The Family (2013)
Works Cited
Films and Performances Cited
Chapter 10: The Transnational Puppet: From Italy and Back
Puppet and Madness in the Broader Aesthetic Mediascape
The Emigrated Pupo and Italian American Film
Works Cited
Films and TV Series Cited
Chapter 11: Comfortable and Uncomfortable Fictions: Italian Americans in the First Decades of Television
Preliminary Notes on the Viewing Experience
The Early Years of Television
The Late 1950s and 1960s
Works Cited
Films Cited
TV Series and Shows Cited
Chapter 12: Looking Back, Moving Forward: Italian Americans on Television from the 1970s to the 1990s
Shifting Stereotypes in the 1970s
The 1980s and 1990s
Works Cited
Films Cited
TV Series and Shows Cited
Chapter 13: Italian Americans on Television in the New Millennium: From Small to Smaller Screen(s)
From the Sopranos to the Barones and the New ‘Non-ethnic Ethnics’
Non-fictional Italian American Characters: Reality Shows, Chefs, and Entertainers
Works Cited
Films Cited
TV Series and Shows Cited
Chapter 14: The Goddess and the Huntress: Diana and DC’s Helena Bertinelli
A Matter of Terminology
The Medium
The Superhero
The Divinities of Sequential Art
Diana
The Huntress
Epithet
Isolation and Darkness
Motherhood and Children
Costume
Triads
Furies and Camilla
Rex Nemorensis
Works Cited
Chapter 15: CNN’s Searching for Italy: Stanley Tucci as Foodways Icon
Works Cited
Films and TV Shows Cited
Chapter 16: Chef/Cook, Influencer, Mixologist, Travel Host: Stanley Tucci as Everyman
Works Cited
Films and TV Series Cited
Chapter 17: An Unlimited Memeiosis of The Godfather: Diachronic and Synchronic Observations of a Pervasive and Ubiquitous Meme
Inception
Diffusion
Modification
Declination
Dormancy
Works Cited
Films and TV Series Cited
Part III: Interviews
Chapter 18: Interview with Helen De Michiel
Chapter 19: Interview with Tony Vitale
Chapter 20: Interview with Michela Musolino
Chapter 21: Interview with Anthony Julian Tamburri
Index

Citation preview

ITALIAN AND ITALIAN AMERICAN STUDIES

Italian Americans in Film and Other Media The Immigrant Experience from Silent Films to the Internet Age Edited by Daniele Fioretti · Fulvio Orsitto

Italian and Italian American Studies Series Editor

Stanislao G. Pugliese Hofstra University Hempstead, NY, USA

This series brings the latest scholarship in Italian and Italian American history, literature, cinema, and cultural studies to a large audience of specialists, general readers, and students. Featuring works on modern Italy (Renaissance to the present) and Italian American culture and society by established scholars as well as new voices, it has been a longstanding force in shaping the evolving fields of Italian and Italian American Studies by re-emphasizing their connection to one another. Editorial Board Rebecca West, University of Chicago, USA Josephine Gattuso Hendin, New York University, USA Fred Gardaphé, Queens College, CUNY, USA Phillip V. Cannistraro†, Queens College and the Graduate School, CUNY, USA Alessandro Portelli, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, Italy William J. Connell, Seton Hall University, USA

Daniele Fioretti  •  Fulvio Orsitto Editors

Italian Americans in Film and Other Media The Immigrant Experience from Silent Films to the Internet Age

Editors Daniele Fioretti Italian, 208 Irvin Hall Miami University Oxford, OH, USA

Fulvio Orsitto Villa Le Balze Georgetown University Fiesole, Firenze, Italy

ISSN 2635-2931     ISSN 2635-294X (electronic) Italian and Italian American Studies ISBN 978-3-031-47210-7    ISBN 978-3-031-47211-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47211-4 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Gregory Adams / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgments

Once again, we would like to thank our families for their constant support and never-ending patience. We would also like to thank all the scholars who, in the last decades, have created and shaped the field of Italian American Studies. Without their work and their inspiration, this book would not exist. Their writings have been a constant source of inspiration for us and for the authors of the chapters that constitute this volume. It is impossible to list all the names that now allow us to be standing on the shoulders of giants, but we would, at least, thank Anthony Julian Tamburri, Fred L.  Gardaphé, Paolo A.  Giordano, Anna Camaiti Hostert, Jonathan J.  Cavallero, Pellegrino D’Acierno, Stanislao Pugliese, John Paul Russo, Robert Casillo, Ben Lawton, Giuliana Muscio, Salvatore LaGumina, George DeStefano, Richard Alba, Francesca Canadé Sautman, Ilaria Serra, and many others. We would also like to remember the late Peter Bondanella and acknowledge his groundbreaking blend of Italian and Italian American studies which constitutes the backbone of this volume.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 Daniele Fioretti and Fulvio Orsitto Part I The Immigrant Experience  13 2 Races  to the Rescue in an Ethnic Urban Milieu: D.W. Griffith and the Biograph Italian Dramas 15 Irene Lottini 3 The Italian (1915) and the Representation of Italian Immigrants in Silent American Cinema 31 Bernhard Kuhn 4 Italianness  and Foundational Masculinity in Edward Dmytryk’s Rendition of Pietro Di Donato’s Christ in Concrete 51 Gloria Pastorino 5 A  Sting from the Past: Assimilation and Healing Rituals in Helen de Michiel’s Tarantella (1995) 67 Daniele Fioretti

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Contents

6 The  Celluloid Closet: Sex, Power, and Coming Out Repression of the Italian American Closet in Nunzio’s Second Cousin (1994), Kiss Me, Guido (1997), and Mambo Italiano (2003) 85 Ryan Calabretta-Sajder 7 F  rom True Love (1989) to Union Square (2011): Recovering the Exploded Family in Nancy Savoca’s Films115 Gloria Pastorino 8 A  Realistic Tale of Improbable Friendship. Notes on Matthew Bonifacio’s Amexicano (2007)137 Claudia Peralta and Fulvio Orsitto Part II Italian Americans in Other Media 155 9 Italian  American Gangsters Taking on a New Line of Work in Luc Besson’s The Family (2013)157 Rosetta Caponetto Giuliani 10 The  Transnational Puppet: From Italy and Back173 Federico Pacchioni 11 Comfortable  and Uncomfortable Fictions: Italian Americans in the First Decades of Television189 Fulvio Orsitto 12 Looking  Back, Moving Forward: Italian Americans on Television from the 1970s to the 1990s205 Fulvio Orsitto 13 Italian  Americans on Television in the New Millennium: From Small to Smaller Screen(s)221 Fulvio Orsitto

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14 The  Goddess and the Huntress: Diana and DC’s Helena Bertinelli237 Felice Italo Beneduce 15 CNN’s Searching for Italy: Stanley Tucci as Foodways Icon263 Alan J. Gravano 16 Chef/Cook,  Influencer, Mixologist, Travel Host: Stanley Tucci as Everyman275 Alan J. Gravano 17 An  Unlimited Memeiosis of The Godfather: Diachronic and Synchronic Observations of a Pervasive and Ubiquitous Meme281 Anthony Dion Mitzel Part III Interviews 301 18 Interview  with Helen De Michiel303 Daniele Fioretti 19 Interview  with Tony Vitale311 Daniele Fioretti 20 Interview  with Michela Musolino327 Daniele Fioretti 21 Interview  with Anthony Julian Tamburri337 Ryan Calabretta-Sajder Index349

Notes on Contributors

Felice Italo Beneduce  is a senior lecturer in the Department of Italian at Columbia University. His scholarly interests include the fantastic in contemporary Italian literature and cinema, Italian-American literature and cinema, Immigrant Literature in Italy, Cultural and Translation Studies, Primo Levi and Judaic Italian Studies, the phenomenon of return immigration to Italy, and Sequential Art. His current research examines how the trauma of anti-Semitism in Italian society between 1938 and 1998 was expressed in the fantastic literature of Jewish Italian authors such as Primo Levi and Antonio DeBenedetti. Beneduce is a passionate teacher and feels his role to be as a bridge between the Italian, American, and ItalianAmerican cultures. To this extent, he conveys to his students—by means of a constant dialogue with them—the tradition of respect and a willingness to learn from the Other. His philosophy in teaching is grounded in the establishment of a connection with students that goes beyond the classroom, gladly devoting to them individual time and assistance. Ryan  Calabretta-Sajder  is Associate Professor and Section Head of Italian and Associate Director of Gender Studies at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where he teaches courses in Italian, Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Film and Media, Jewish, and Gender Studies. He is the author of Divergenze in celluloide: colore, migrazione e identità sessuale nei film gay di Ferzan Özpetek (Celluloid Divergences: Color, Migration, and Sexual Identity in the Gay Series of Ferzan Özpetek) with Mimesis editore, editor of Pasolini’s Lasting Impressions: Death, Eros, and Literary Enterprise in the Opus of Pier Paolo Pasolini with Fairleigh xi

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Dickinson University Press, and co-editor of Theorizing the Italian Diaspora: Selected Essays with IASA and Italian Americans On Screen: Challenging the Past, Re-Theorizing the Future with Lexington Books. His research interests include the integration of gender, class, and migration in both Italian and Italian American literature and cinema, as well as teaching Italian language and culture through Digital Humanities and Virtual Reality. In Spring 2017, he was awarded one of four Fulbright Awards for the Foundation of the South to conduct research and teach at the University of Calabria, Arcavacata. He is currently working on two authored, book-­length projects, one exploring the Italian American gay author Robert Ferro who died of AIDS complications in 1988 and the second on the Algerian Italian author Amara Lakhous. He is currently the president of the American Association of Teachers of Italian, president of Gamma Kappa Alpha, the Italian National Honors Society, and founding editor of Diasporic Italy: The Journal of the Italian American Studies Association. Daniele Fioretti  is an associate teaching professor at Miami University, Ohio. His research interests include Italian literature, Italian cinema, Italian American culture, biopolitics, and posthuman studies. He edited, in collaboration with Fulvio Orsitto, the book Italian Americans in Film: Establishing and Challenging Italian American Identities (2023). He authored the books Utopia and Dystopia in Postwar Italian Literature (2017) and Carte di fabbrica: la narrativa industriale in Italia 1934–1989 (2013). He also published the letters from Paolo Volponi to Pier Paolo Pasolini (Scrivo a te come guardandomi allo specchio. Lettere a Pasolini 1954–1975, 2009), and numerous articles and book chapters on Italian literature, Italian and Italian American Cinema. Rosetta Caponetto Giuliani  is Associate Professor of Italian Studies at Auburn University. Her areas of academic interests include Italy’s colonialism in East Africa, the Italian American diaspora, studies on nostalgia, food movements and activism, and philanthropy studies. She is the author of Fascist Hybridities (Palgrave, 2015) and co-editor of Longing for the Future (Routledge, forthcoming). Alan  J.  Gravano  is the Writing Center Director at Rocky Mountain University. He is a former MLA Delegate Assembly member (2017–2020), serves on the Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession (2018–2021, Chair 2020–2021), and is past president of the Italian

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American Studies Association (2015–2021). He serves on the Modern Language Association (MLA) Language, Literature and Culture (LLC) Italian American (2022–2027). He contributed “Reassessing the Topography of New York City in Don DeLillo’s Fiction” to Don DeLillo in Context (Cambridge UP, 2021) and published “CNN’s Searching for Italy: Stanley Tucci as Foodways Icon” and “Chef/Cook, Influencer, Mixologist, Travel Host: Stanley Tucci as Everyman” in Italian Americans in Film and Other Media (Palgrave, forthcoming 2024). Bernhard  Kuhn  is Professor of Italian Studies at Bucknell University, where he teaches Italian language, culture, and cinema. His areas of research include Italian cinema, Italian opera, and intermediality in an Italian context. He is the author of a book entitled Die Oper im italienischen Film (Opera in Italian cinema). He also published several articles on intermedial aspects of stage media and film, as well as articles on Italian Silent cinema. Irene  Lottini  teaches Italian language, literature, and culture at the University of Iowa. Her main research interests focus on Italian silent, modern, and contemporary cinema; the relationship between film and the other arts; and Italian American cinema. Her publications include essays on Italian literature, 1910s cinema, and modern and contemporary film. She has presented papers on silent, modern, and contemporary cinema at numerous national and international conferences. Anthony Dion Mitzel  is Adjunct Professor of Linguistics, Language and Culture at the Università di Bologna, Italy. His research interests are sociocultural semiotics, humor studies, and applied linguistics. Mitzel did his undergraduate work at Youngstown State University, Youngstown, Ohio, USA, and his postgraduate work at University College London, UK, with a Ph.D. dissertation entitled “Authenticity and Ephemerality: The Memes of Transcultural Production in Italian American Culture,” which focuses on the expressions of Italian culture around the world. His creative works have been published in journals in Italy and the USA, while he has presented his research at conferences throughout Europe and North America. He is currently directing and producing a documentary on Italian American culture in Youngstown and Lowellville, Ohio, entitled Our Lady. Fulvio Orsitto  is the Director of the Georgetown University study center in Fiesole (Italy). He has published more than 30 essays and book

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chapters on Italian and Italian American cinema and on Italian Literature. His book publications include the edited volumes The Other and the Elsewhere in Italian Culture (2011) and Cinema and Risorgimento: Visions and Re-visions (2012), the 2014 manual Film and Education. Capturing Bilingual Communities (with C. Peralta and F. Caramaschi), and the coedited volumes Cultural Contaminations (2014, with S.  Wright), Pier Paolo Pasolini. American Perspectives (2015, with F. Pacchioni), Cultural Crossings (2016, with S.  Wright), TOTalitarian ARTs: The Visual Arts, Fascism(s), and Mass-Society (2017, with M. Epstein and A. Righi), The Italian Economic Miracle in Cinema, Television and Literature (2019, with I.  Lanslots, L.  Martinelli, and U.  Perolino), Crossroads. Paths to Intermediality (2022, with F.  Ciabattoni and S.  Wright), and Italian Americans in Films. Establishing and Challenging Italian American Identities (2023, with D. Fioretti). Federico Pacchioni  is the founding director of the Ferrucci Institute for Italian Experience and Research at Chapman University, where he holds the Sebastian Paul and Marybelle Musco Endowed Chair in Italian Studies. Dr. Pacchioni’s research aims at understanding and promoting Italy’s creative reservoir through the field of media and cultural history by unveiling dynamics of artistic collaboration, authorial legacy, intermedial aesthetics, and glocalism. He is the author of more than 60 publications, including peer-reviewed articles, creative writings, and translations. Among his books are Inspiring Fellini: Literary Collaborations Behind the Scenes (University of Toronto Press, 2014), A History of Italian Cinema (Bloomsbury Press, 2017, co-authored with Peter Bondanella), The Image of the Puppet in Italian Theater, Literature and Film (Metauro Edizioni, 2020 and Palgrave Macmillan 2022), I frutti del mio giardino (Manni Editori, 2022), and Southwest of Italy: Stanzas for a Travel Memoir (Guernica Editions, 2022). Gloria Pastorino  is Professor of Italian and French at Fairleigh Dickinson University, where she also teaches English and World literature, drama, and film. Her publications include Othello. As Interpreted by Luigi Lo Cascio (Bordighera 2020), Beyond the Grave: Zombies and the Romero Legacy (with Bruce Peabody; McFarland, 2021), Per amor di battuta: Dario Fo e la reinvenzione della lingua scenica (Scriba, 2023), articles on Italian cinema, cinema and migration, Italian theatre, mafia and masculinity, and translations for American productions of plays by Dario Fo, Luigi

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Pirandello (Enrico IV, Ivan Dee Publisher 2002), Mariangela Gualtieri, Romeo Castellucci, Luigi Lo Cascio, Lella Costa, and Juan Mayorga. Claudia Peralta  is a professor in the Department of Literacy, Language, and Culture at Boise State University. Her research interests focus on multilingual education, literacy and multiliteracy, multicultural education, and social justice. She has published several articles in international journals on critical issues in multilingual education, specifically on the relations between home, community, and school. Peralta has documented the experiences of Mexican immigrant and first-­generation Mexican youth and refugee students in the educational system in the US. She has co-produced two documentaries: Latino Community in Treasure Valley Idaho (2013) and Starting over Again: The Refugee Experience in Boise, Idaho (2014). In 2014 she also published the manual Film and Education: Capturing Bilingual Communities (with F. Orsitto and F. Caramaschi). Peralta served as editor for the bi/multilingual department in Reading Teacher and on the editorial board for the Bilingual Research Journal and is an editorial advisory board member for the NABE Journal of Research and Practice.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Daniele Fioretti and Fulvio Orsitto

This volume is the ideal continuation of our previous co-edited book, Italian Americans in Film. Establishing and Challenging Italian American Identities (2023). We are still of the opinion that the Italian American experience is a phenomenon that cannot be explored in terms of polar oppositions (Italian vs. American, American vs. Italian, or Italian American vs. Italian) and that it should be approached and studied as a multidimensional field of centrifugal forces, where culture, language, and nationality interact in a very complex way with race, class, gender, and sexuality. This second installment of our Italian American research project addresses more directly identities and facets of Italian Americanness that for too long have been placed on the margins (i.e., women directors, as well as authors that explore same-sex relationships, in a context where

D. Fioretti (*) Italian, 208 Irvin Hall, Miami University, Oxford, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] F. Orsitto Villa Le Balze, Georgetown University, Fiesole, Firenze, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Fioretti, F. Orsitto (eds.), Italian Americans in Film and Other Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47211-4_1

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heteronormativity has always taken the main stage). Our aim is also to explore in more detail how Italian immigrants were depicted in silent cinema, to see how and why one of the most influential directors of all times such as D.W. Griffith produced several short films centered specifically on them. Even though Griffith had no Italian descent, we can still find him relevant in the representation of Italian Americanness; his external point of view provides us with an opportunity to examine how the American mainstream population looked at the mass arrival of Italian immigrants in the early 1900s. The Italian American experience in visual arts does not just deal with cinema; this is why we felt the necessity to explore fields like music, dance, puppetry, comics, and television, but also perspectives inherent to new technologies, such as videogames, social media, and, in particular, memes. These different dimensions attest to the vitality and the persistence of Italian Americanness, as well as its constant mutation while we turn our attention toward younger generations, whose cultural landscape is less and less determined by literature and more and more characterized by visual— and interactive—modalities of fruition. In doing so, we believe we have opened new directions of scholarly investigation that will bear fruit in the next years. After this brief “Introduction”, the volume develops through a tripartite division that consists of a first section called “The Immigrant Experience” (split into two subsections: “Silent Films” and “Revising Gender and Ethnic Perspectives”), a second one named “Italian Americans in Other Media”, and a third one titled “Interviews”. The first subsection of “The Immigrant Experience” focuses on silent cinema (a field that requires different interpretative tools compared to modern cinematography) and encompasses two contributions: one by Irene Lottini, “Races to the Rescue in an Ethnic Urban Milieu: D.W. Griffith and the Biograph Italian Dramas”, and one by Bernard Kuhn, titled “The Italian (1915) and the Representation of Italian Immigrants in Silent American Cinema”. In her chapter, Lottini investigates the representation of non-Anglo-Saxon figures in Griffith’s Biograph shorts, examining how these characters are represented as posing a threat to the nation’s dominant culture and middle-­class society. Starting from Griffith’s own description of the multiethnic environment of Lower East Side’s Rivington Street—seen as a place of competing, differentiated forces—Lottini discusses the characterization of the racially coded types populating the films he directed for the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company between 1908 and 1913. The

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infamous allegations of southern Italians’ inadaptability to lawful society popular at the time resonate especially in Griffith’s Biograph shorts. Following Joanne Ruvoli’s analysis of this director’s so-called revenge films, Lottini focuses on the 1909 one-reeler films The Cord of Life, At the Altar, and In Little Italy (which all portray Sicilians as antagonists), concluding that they present ethnicity as “incompatible with assimilation”. Although Griffith’s categorization of Italian immigrants becomes more articulated in the 1912 film The Inner Circle, the re-proposition of the divide between law-abiding and felonious Italians (at the core of the 1909 ‘revenge films’) here informs the disparity between ‘the happy family’ and ‘the ominous element’. Kuhn’s chapter examines Reginald Barker’s The Italian (1915), among the most famous silent films portraying Italian immigrants in the United States. Literature has a generally positive evaluation of this film, mostly because of its unusually complex view of tenement life and multiethnic immigration in America. Compared to other films of the period, The Italian stands out as a sympathetic portrayal of the immigrant experience while also incorporating several stereotypes related to Italians. Indeed, it also underscores the aversion of the U.S. society toward Italian immigrants at the time. Beyond the depiction of two separate and incompatible cultures, The Italian also conveys an admiration toward Italy. To fully understand this film, Kuhn also discusses it in the context of Italian migration into the United States and the perception of Italy and Italians at the time it was produced. The second subsection of “The Immigrant Experience” is titled “Revising Gender and Ethnic Perspectives” and consists of five chapters. In her contribution, “Italianness and Foundational Masculinity in Edward Dmytryk’s Rendition of Pietro Di Donato’s Christ in Concrete”, Gloria Pastorino analyzes Edward Dmytryk’s Christ in Concrete (aka Give Us This Day, 1949), based on Pietro Di Donato’s novel Christ in Concrete. In discussing the depiction of the Italian American community as traditionally identified with holding heteronormative family ties above any other, Pastorino highlights how the film is a love story marred by poverty, in which the bond created among men who work together challenges the allegiance to one’s family and defines men’s identity. It is the betrayal of that bond that largely causes the protagonist’s demise in a country in the middle of an identity crisis, following the Wall Street crash of 1929. The film suggests that unity, rather than divisiveness, is what can help workers—and, by extension, the country—get out of the impasse, at the end of the 1920s as well as in 1949 (when the film was made), in the era of the

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Red Scare, just preceding Senator McCarthy’s witch hunt. In Pastorino’s view, Dmytryk’s film also signals a change in attitude toward Italian immigrants, who had been part of the fabric of American society since the turn of the century. By the 1950s nobody disputed their presence in America and this film portrays their community in a benevolent, albeit stereotype-­ ridden, light. In the chapter titled “A Sting from the Past: Femininity and Ethnic Roots in Helen De Michiel’s Tarantella (1995)”, Daniele Fioretti discusses the movie Tarantella by Helen De Michiel as a reflection on the persistence of Italian culture in second- and third-generation Italian Americans, in particular Italian American women. Diana, the protagonist of the movie, is a strong, independent woman who chooses to distance herself from her Italian heritage and, in particular, from a traditional concept of womanhood that denies women individuality and freedom of expression. It is only after the death of her mother that Diana starts— thanks to the help of a family friend who represents a substitute for the mother figure—a painful but necessary process of reconciliation of her internal conflicts. Only after she has acknowledged the strength and the resilience of her mother and grandmother, Diana is able to reconnect with her origins. From this point of view, according to Fioretti, the movie Tarantella represents a deep and heartfelt analysis of the discomfort of fully assimilated Italian Americans who desire to reconnect with their ethnicity, maintaining that part of their tradition that is still alive and useful for them. Ryan Calabretta-Sajder, in “The Celluloid Closet: Sex, Power, and Coming Out Repression of the Italian American Closet Nunzio’s Second Cousin (1994), Kiss Me, Guido (1997), and Mambo Italiano (2003)”, examines the representation of homosexuality in three Italian American/ Canadian films: Nunzio’s Second Cousin (1994), Kiss Me, Guido (1997), and Mambo Italiano (2003). This chapter opens with an exploration of queer Italian Americans in literature and critical theory, charting an evolution from Masculinity Studies to Homosexuality Studies. Then, Calabretta-­ Sajder discusses the theoretical framework for his work, considering both the concept of bella figura versus brutta figura as well as the significance of private versus public spaces, especially within an Italian American context. Additionally, he uses Eve Sedgwick’s theory of the closet to analyze how homosexual Italian Americans confront their identity—either before or after—leaving the closet. Although each film has a unique relationship with homosexuality, all three male protagonists end with a better

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understanding of their own identity and the concept of gender, whether homosexual or not. In the following chapter, “From True Love (1989) to Union Square (2011): Recovering the Exploded Family in Nancy Savoca’s Films”, Gloria Pastorino reflects on the truism according to which women film directors are not given the same opportunities as their male counterparts, stating that it could be easily extensible to all male-dominated fields and could be even truer if a woman director’s ethnic background places her in a subordinate position in her culture of origin (especially if that perception is confirmed by films that depict a kind of masculinity that glorifies violence and relegates women to either the domestic sphere or the role of wanton seductresses, as mafia movies do). Several Italian American women filmmakers opt for a disavowal of their ethnicity to prove their worth, regardless of how Italian-sounding their last names are. Some filmmakers have, instead, opted to embrace and portray their heritage on film. Most notably Nancy Savoca, Helen De Michiel, and Marylou Tibaldo-Bongiorno have confronted stereotypes about Italian families and have taken issues with traditional interpretations of women’s roles either debunking them or showing how Italian Americanness is just one extra element in the depiction of universal women’s realities. Pastorino’s analysis focuses on Nancy Savoca, who has directed several films that look at ethnicity (Italian American, or of women from South American countries) as a fundamental element of the development of her characters that aims at depicting the struggles of all women (regardless of ethnicity) to find their places and voices in American society. Career women, mothers, brides, daughters, nuns, servants, ‘dogs’, entrepreneurs, or ditzes, according to Pastorino, Savoca’s women find, in their very fragility, the strength to try to redefine their roles. In the last chapter of this subsection, “A Realistic Tale of Improbable Friendship. Notes on Matthew Bonifacio’s Amexicano (2007)”, Claudia Peralta and Fulvio Orsitto discuss Matthew Bonifacio’s independent movie, which centers around the improbable friendship between Italian American Bruno and undocumented Mexican worker Ignacio. Peralta and Orsitto equate the fictional undocumented im/migrants portrayed in Matthew Bonifacio’s film to what Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘human waste’, which is the collateral damage of economic progress. The life on the border—be it a physical border or a metaphorical one (the one that divides American culture from the im/migrants’ cultural milieu of provenance)— experienced by these individuals causes great anxiety and fear (whether

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real or imagined). This situation also causes instability, eventually leading to what the authors define in terms of pervasive mistrust and a final collapse of trust—which then generates exclusion for the unwanted and an obsession with security for the ones living inside the border. All of these emotions (the collapse of trust, pervasive mistrust, and obsession) are palpable throughout the movie also because the initial depiction of Mexican im/migrants is overwhelmingly negative. In its second half, Peralta and Orsitto note that Amexicano shifts ‘the border’ between welcoming and exclusion, although for the two protagonists and for Gabriela (Ignacio’s sister and Bruno’s love interest) a happy ending just isn’t in the cards. The second section of the volume, named “Italian Americans in Other Media”, encompasses nine chapters. In the first one, “Italian American Gangsters Taking on a New Line of Work in Luc Besson’s The Family (2013)”, Rosetta Caponetto Giuliani analyzes Luc Besson’s 2013 film The Family in light of a recurrent theme such as that of looking for ‘a new line of work’. In this film, an Italian American mobster showing no regrets for his past life agrees to live under witness protection to ensure his family’s survival. Set in present-day Normandy, the film takes the gangster genre to a new terrain while also serving as a vehicle for its director’s obsession with Hollywood gangster films. This chapter examines the ‘new line of work’ for a genre in danger of becoming extinct and the mediatic disguise envisioned by French filmmaker Luc Besson to enable the survival of gangster movies in the twenty-first century. “The Transnational Puppet: From Italy and Back”, by Federico Pacchioni, investigates the implications of the image of the puppet within Italian American cinema, by tracing the origins and evolution of key interlocked associations—folly, otherness, power, memory, and identity— within European and American aesthetic constructs. In both European and American cultures, puppet and puppetry have been and continue to be linked to the idea of folly, albeit different traditions emphasize and apply this idea in different directions—madness in terms of perception of reality (Northern/Eastern Europe), madness caused by the experience of otherness (United States), politically motivated and anarchic madness (Italy). All these threads fuse in the Italian American cinematic image of the puppet in unique ways which, according to Pacchioni, reveals the layered possibilities and creative potential of puppetry in expressing and exploring diaspora experience and culture. In the chapter titled “Comfortable and Uncomfortable Fictions: Italian Americans in the First Decades of Television”, Fulvio Orsitto begins his

1 INTRODUCTION 

7

tripartite analysis of how Italian Americans are portrayed on American television. Orsitto examines some examples of ‘ethnic comedies’ from the early 1950s, namely Papa Cellini (1952), Bonino (1953), and The Continental (1952–1953), noting how ethnic traits were often exploited for questionable comedic purposes—another example discussed is Life with Luigi (1952–1953). Orsitto then considers the nationally televised NYC hearings led by Senator Kefauver’s Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, aka the Kefauver hearings (which focused on narcotics and their connection to the Mafia), and the success of shows like The Untouchables (1959–1963), which commercialized the stereotypical connection between Italian Americans and organized crime. Despite the renewed ethnic sensitivity that emerged in the mid-to-late 1960s (due primarily to the civil rights movement), the author concludes by remarking on how Italians and Italian Americans continued to appear on a fairly regular basis in negative roles during this period. In “Looking Back, Moving Forward: Italian Americans on Television from the 1970s to the 1990s”, Fulvio Orsitto continues his analysis focusing on three decades: the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s. With respect to the end of the previous chapter, Orsitto highlights that in the 1970s things seemed to change and, despite some backward-looking television shows and series, one may notice a more consistent presence of Italian American law-abiding and educated characters. Indeed, popular shows such as Happy Days (1974–1984) were undoubtedly characterized by a ‘looking-­ back’ attitude, given by the show’s temporal setting and, perhaps most importantly, by the recovery of old stereotypes. However, even within the ‘Happy Days universe’, a series like Laverne & Shirley (1976–1983) shows characters permeated by a certain authenticity, especially Laverne, given her daily struggle to make ends meet, and the fact that she is one of television’s first liberated women. While series like Columbo (1968; 1971–1978; 1989–2003) and Petrocelli (1974–1976) finally introduce Italian American characters who prefer using brains over muscles, others like Toma (1973–1974) and Baretta (1975–1978) still show how using brute force is a prerogative of many Italian American cops populating the small screen during this decade. During the 1980s and the 1990s, TV series continued to have a two-face Janus kind of approach, with stereotypes being displayed in massive doses (especially in comedies and crime shows, but also in a large group of Mafia-related characters), coexisting with more progressive portrayals or, simply, with ‘regular Joes’. Finally, in the chapter titled “Italian Americans on Television in the New Millennium: From

8 

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Small to Smaller Screen(s)”, Fulvio Orsitto concludes his overview by discussing The Sopranos (1999–2007)—and this show’s multidimensional rendering of Italian Americanness—vis-à-vis Everybody Loves Raymond (1996–2005), populated by what its creator Phil Rosenthal calls ‘non-­ ethnic ethnics’. Orsitto then investigates the most popular example of a reality show starring Italian Americans: Jersey Shore (2009–2012). Speaking of Italian American non-fictional characters (i.e., of Italian Americans playing themselves on television), the chapter then focuses on cooking shows and on a couple of the most famous Italian American TV personalities: Lidia Matticchio Bastianich and Giada De Laurentiis. Orsitto argues that the former, being specialized in Italian and Italian American cuisine, has successfully managed to present herself in the United States (and be recognized as such) as an iconic representative of both cultures. The latter, as part of a new generation, proposes a very different image of Italy (and Italian cuisine) and embodies a very different case of Italian Americanness. The chapter ends with a reflection on the most recent depictions of Italian Americans offered by streaming companies like Netflix and Prime Video and Subscription Video-On-Demand (SVOD) companies like Paramount+. In the chapter titled “The Goddess and the Huntress: Diana and DC’s Helena Bertinelli”, Felice Italo Beneduce analyzes the work of Sequential Artist Joseph Cavalieri who, in 1989, created a new version of a pre-­ existing DC character, the Huntress, who in his reboot was renamed Helena Bertinelli. Cavalieri worked her into a new noirish mythos, connected to the world of the mafia and centered on the concept of vendetta. Beneduce’s thesis is that many of the features of Helena Bertinelli reverberate with themes connected to the Italic deity Diana, not the least of which is the very codename the DC character adopts: the Huntress. Both share the quality of impressive skill with the bow, both appear in costumes that hide their true identities, both are lovers of solitude and isolated places, and both possess the traits of irascibility and vindictiveness. In sum, this chapter endeavors to connect the Italian American character—through her Italian American creator—to a heritage deriving from the Italian peninsula. The next two chapters, both authored by Alan J.  Gravano, focus on Stanley Tucci—here discussed as a foodways icon and as a social media celebrity. In “CNN’s Searching for Italy: Stanley Tucci as Foodways Icon” Gravano examines Stanley Tucci’s CNN show Searching for Italy as a culinary travelogue exploring Italy’s diverse and rich food culture. This show, which ran for two seasons (2021–2022), features the celebrated actor and

1 INTRODUCTION 

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food enthusiast traveling across the country to discover each region’s culturally unique flavors, ingredients, and takes on recipes, and brings viewers on a culinary journey. Gravano summarizes the various episodes, highlighting how Tucci provides appropriate commentary on the cultural significance of each dish and how Tucci contemplates the historical and current political issues facing Italians today, presenting them to the viewer in a thought-provoking manner. According to Gravano, Tucci brings a personal touch to each episode, sharing memories of his own experiences in Italy and reflecting on how the country’s food culture has influenced his life. The chapter “Chef/Cook, Influencer, Mixologist, Travel Host: Stanley Tucci as Everyman” examines how Tucci has recently been making waves on social media with his cocktail-making skills and promotion of San Pellegrino. With his charming demeanor and impressive culinary skills, the actor has quickly become a social media sensation, garnering millions of views and followers across various platforms. On his social media platforms, Tucci has given his followers a behind-the-scenes look at his culinary routine, sharing tips and techniques for creating fresh, authentic meals at home. Moreover, Tucci’s Instagram posts allow his personality to flourish and include moments of back-and-forth between him and his wife, Felicity Blunt. Gravano contends that his authenticity shows as he describes his creations and connections to his Italian American heritage. The last chapter of this second section of the volume is authored by Anthony Dion Mitzel and titled “An Unlimited Memeiosis of The Godfather: Diachronic and Synchronic Observations of a Pervasive and Ubiquitous Meme”. Mitzel’s intent is to offer and demonstrate a novel semio-memetic model for the interpretation of Italian signs in the periphery using Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) as a prime example. After discussing ‘The Godfather meme’, this chapter moves beyond the constraints of the materiality of the original cultural artifact (where it originated, i.e., the Puzo text), suggesting that it has now surpassed the original idea and intent of the novel, evolved into a film trilogy, and reached its apotheosis via popular culture, where there is now a plethora of multimodal variations indexed to it. While it is true that The Godfather was and is an Italian American–based text, it has now achieved global multimodality, going beyond its original ethnic connection to Italian and Italian American themes. Mitzel concludes by stating that this text has achieved an influence usually reserved for religious and other canonical texts.

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The third and final section of the volume, titled “Interviews”, gathers the transcription of four informal dialogues (three by Daniele Fioretti) with Italian American representatives of different areas of expertise and professions. In the first one, Daniele Fioretti asks Helen De Michiel— widely praised for her film Tarantella (1995)—a wide array of questions (ranging from her thoughts about the evolution of filmmaking to her next projects and, last but not least, her Italian heritage). In the second contribution to this section, Fioretti interviews Italian American director Tony Vitale—well known for his film Kiss Me, Guido (1997)—about the importance of Italian American culture in his upbringing and his relationship with his Italian ancestry. Music and performing arts such as dancing are an integral part of the Italian American experience: dance performances bring on stage the physical presence—hic et nunc—of the body on stage, a central element of the ritual experience of traditional dances like tarantella. This is why we decided to include an interview with Michela Musolino, an Italian American singer and dancer who exemplifies the protean spirit of Italian American culture, constantly engaged in a dialogue between traditional folk performers and American music genres, such as jazz, blues, and rock ’n’ roll. In the last interview of this final section, Ryan Calabretta-­ Sadjer asks academician (and Italian American studies guru) Anthony Julian Tamburri to talk about the John D.  Calandra Italian American Institute he currently directs and also about the television program (born in collaboration with CUNY TV) called Italics. The latter, Tamburri explains, has covered a vast array of topics, from literature and film to advocacy and history. Lastly, Calabretta-Sajder and Tamburri comment on the current status of academic research focusing on Italian American studies and the media.

Works Cited Fioretti, Daniele, and Fulvio Orsitto (Eds.). Italian Americans in Film. Establishing and Challenging Italian American Identities. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. Tamburri, Anthony Julian. To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate. Montreal: Guernica, 1991.

Films Shows Cited Amexicano (Matthew Bonifacio, 2007) At the Altar (D.W. Griffith, 1909)

1 INTRODUCTION 

Christ in Concrete (aka Give Us This Day—Edward Dmytryk, 1949) The Cord of Life (D.W. Griffith, 1909) The Family (Luc Besson, 2013) The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) The Inner Circle (D.W. Griffith, 1912) The Italian (Reginald Barker, 1915) Kiss Me, Guido (Tony Vitale, 1997) In Little Italy (D.W. Griffith, 1909) Mambo Italiano (Èmile Gaudreault, 2003) Nunzio’s Second Cousin (Tom DeCerchio, 1994—Segment of Boys Life 2) Tarantella (Helen De Michiel, 1995) True Love (Nancy Savoca, 1989) Union Square (Nancy Savoca, 2011)

TV Shows Cited Baretta (1975–1978) Bonino (1953) Columbo (1968; 1971–1978; 1989–2003) The Continental (1952–1953) Everybody Loves Raymond (1996–2005) Happy Days (1974–1984) Jersey Shore (2009–2012) Laverne & Shirley (1976–1983) Life with Luigi (1952–1953) Papa Cellini (1952) Petrocelli (1974–1976) Searching for Italy (2021–2022) The Sopranos (1999–2007) Toma (1973–1974) The Untouchables (1959–1963)

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PART I

The Immigrant Experience

CHAPTER 2

Races to the Rescue in an Ethnic Urban Milieu: D.W. Griffith and the Biograph Italian Dramas Irene Lottini

In his memoirs, The Man Who Invented Hollywood (1972), David Wark Griffith (1875–1948) recounts his impressions when strolling through the crowded streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side in his younger years: The Ghetto, Mulberry Bend, the Bowery, and Chinatown were all well known to me, but Rivington Street was the lively one, eternally jammed

The Biograph films The Cord of Life, At the Altar, The Lure of the Gown, An Arcadian Maid, The Inner Circle, and The Coming of Angelo discussed in this chapter have been restored by the Film Preservation Society—https:// filmpreservationsociety.org/ (accessed April 10, 2023). I would like to thank Tracey Goessel and Benjamin Solovey for providing me with copies of these works and the related essays.

I. Lottini (*) Department of French and Italian, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Fioretti, F. Orsitto (eds.), Italian Americans in Film and Other Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47211-4_2

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with pushcart peddlers hawking their wares. They had every imaginable commodity from a needle to a wedding outfit; even fruits and vegetables of all kinds in season. Rivington Street never appeared as a melting pot to me, but more like a boiling pot. Here were Italians, Greeks, Poles, Jews, Arabs, Egyptians, all hustling for a living. Emotional, tempestuous, harrowing Rivington Street was perpetually a steaming, bubbling pot of varied human flesh. (Griffith 55–56)

While rejecting the idea of the “melting pot”, a metaphor for cultural integration and assimilation,1 Griffith describes the multi-ethnic environment of Rivington Street as a place of competing, differentiated forces. The figurative language that he uses—“emotional, tempestuous, harrowing”, “boiling pot”, and “steaming, bubbling pot”—aligns with the characterization of the racially coded types populating the films which he directed for the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company between 1908 and 1913. Scholars have investigated the representation of non-Anglo-Saxon figures in Griffith’s Biograph shorts and have examined how these characters pose a threat to the nation’s dominant culture and middle-class society.2 Griffith’s racially inflected stories echo the turn-of-the-century concerns about non-native inability to integrate and assimilate into American urban life which developed as immigration to the United States was reaching its apex.3 With the post-1880 increase of arrivals from southern and eastern Europe, assertions about the inadequacy of the newcomers dominated the nativist discourse. The distinction between the “old” immigrants, who “came from the most progressive sections of Europe” and “were quickly assimilated”, and the “new” immigrants, “who have come … from the less progressive and advanced countries of Europe” (1911a, 13–14) and have been hardly assimilated, is outlined in the 1911 Reports of the Immigration Commission, the voluminous result of the study conducted by the so-­ called Dillingham Commission (1907–1911). The sections of the reports dedicated to Italians, who constituted the largest non-native community in the country, are strongly influenced by the theories of southern inferiority proposed by criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909)4 and anthropologists Giuseppe Sergi (1841–1936)5 and Alfredo Niceforo (1876–1960).6 In the fifth volume of the Dictionary of Races and People, northern Italians are depicted as “cool, deliberate, patient, and capable of great progress in the political and social organization of modern society”, while southern Italians are described as “excitable, impulsive, highly

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imaginative, impracticable” with “little adaptability to high organized society” (1911b, 82). In addition, Sicilians are singled out as “vivid in imagination, affable, and benevolent, but excitable, superstitious, and revengeful” (ibid., 127). When these reports were issued, the juxtaposition between Italy’s northerners and southerners had already been popularized. In 1890, Harper’s Weekly published an article on “The Italians” as part of a series titled “The ‘Foreign Element’ in New York City”. While juxtaposing the “two distinct classes” who came to the United States, the piece describes southern Italians as “swarthy”, “by no means slow to anger”, and propense to “repel an insult with a thrust of a stiletto” (Mason 1890, 818).7 Twelve years later, journalist, photographer, and social reformer Jacob August Riis distinguished between northerners and southerners in his book The Battle of the Slum (1902), in which the latter are labeled as “avowedly the worst of the Italian immigration” (Riis 176).8 The allegations of southern Italians’ inadaptability to lawful society resonate in Griffith’s Biograph shorts. In her essay on the director’s “revenge films”, Joanne Ruvoli has investigated how ethnicity is presented as “incompatible with assimilation” (Ruvoli 61) in three 1909 one-­ reelers—The Cord of Life, At the Altar, and In Little Italy—which portray Sicilians as antagonists. Through a language that evokes the derogatory rhetoric of the time, the promotional materials for these productions highlight the ethnic origin of the characters and link it to their malevolent and vengeful nature. The presentation of The Cord of Life as “a thrilling episode of a Sicilian’s revenge” (Bowser 1973, 58), the description of the villain in At the Altar as a Sicilian past master “in the evolution of means of wreaking vengeance” (ibid., 67), and the reference to “indefatigability of purpose” as “one of the most dominant traits of the Sicilian’s nature” in the introduction of In Little Italy (ibid., 153)9 reveal how the early twentieth-century American film industry capitalized on the popular perception of southern Italians’ innate propensity for violence. In the three films, the characters’ inability to control their intemperate instincts allows for the construction of sensational moments. As Scott Simon notes, “the truly preposterous characterizations of such vindicative immigrants suggests that Griffith may also have found their types useful as a way to justify the outrageous plot lines of melodrama, particularly those demanding the races-to-the-rescue” (Simmon 50). The Cord of Life, At the Altar, and In Little Italy have a similar plot in which a Sicilian man, unable to accept rejection, wreaks vengeance against docile characters who are ultimately saved by the timely intervention of police officers. As in other racialized

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stories, in these shorts, the villain’s revenge targets the family unit. Griffith re-proposes the ‘family discourse’ characterizing many of his films 10 and grounds the “family melodrama of threat and reconstitution” (Friedberg 1990, 326) in an ethnic milieu that divides immigrants into the two distinct categories of kind-hearted, law-abiding Italians and overly emotional Sicilians.11 In The Cord of Life, Antonine, “a facinorous Sicilian profligate” and “a worthless good-for-nothing scoundrel” in the words of the Biograph Bulletin, asks for a loan from his cousin Galora, “an energetic provident husband and father” (Bowser 58). When the latter refuses, the former vows revenge on Galora’s family. The juxtaposition between the two male figures is highlighted by contemporary critics. While referring to the film’s ethnic backdrop, The Moving World Picture writes: “We owe a belated compliment to the Biograph folks for this natural and graphic representation of the life of the Italian, bringing out, as it does, in dramatic contrast the strong paternal affection, the domestic love and the jealous and revengeful character of the Sicilian” (“The Theater Unique” 1909, 672). In staging Antonine’s “dastardly” scheme (Bowser 58), Griffith takes advantage of the dramatic and suspenseful implications associated with the environment of a multi-story tenement building. The space is defined by two introductory shots: an exterior one, in which Antonine walks through the ground floor entry, and an interior one, in which the villain reaches his cousin’s apartment after climbing the stairs. In the second shot, the initial twenty-seven seconds that precede Antonine’s entrance from the stairs serve as an indication of the flights which he needed to climb and, at the same time, offer a depiction of everyday life in a crowded tenement: a man is smoking, reading the newspaper, and arguing with the landlord while several women are climbing or descending the stairs, walking in pairs, carrying baskets or bundles of laundry, and talking to each other. These explanatory shots establish the context of Antonine’s revenge. He returns to the building after his cousin has left and, when Mrs. Galora briefly goes to help a needy neighbor, he enters the couple’s apartment and hangs their young child out of the window in a basket tied to a rope that will be released if the sash is opened.12 The height of the window, now communicated by an exterior shot of the building and by Antonine counting the stories with exaggerated gesticulation, allows for a sensationalization of the sentimental motif of the child threatened with death—a sensationalization that resolves in a last-minute race to the rescue. When Antonine, who has followed Galora and has tried to stab him, is arrested, he reveals

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what he has done to the infant and causes his cousin to rush back home. A parallel editing13 intercuts between Galora’s run and his apartment where his wife, unaware of the villain’s trap, might inadvertently kill her child by opening the window. The environment of the building portrayed in the first part of the film is now evoked to increase the suspense. The tenement crowd contributes to the “retardatory structure”14 of this segment by producing a diegetic delay.15 When Mrs. Galora is about to open the window to hang out some clothes, she is interrupted by the entrance of the same needy neighbor who has distracted her before. In addition, the height of the window calls for a spectacular rescuing action. Helped by two policemen who have followed him in his run, Galora hangs head down from the top of the window and lifts his child back inside. The thrilling nature of this rescue is confirmed by contemporary spectators. The Movie Picture World reports: “The climax is reached when the father, after a mad race, dashes into the room and, lowering the upper sash, reaches down and saves the baby from almost certain death. A gasp of relief went up from the audience” (“The Theater Unique” 672). And the New York Dramatic Mirror remarks: “We must confess to having taken a long breath when we saw the feat successfully accomplished” (“Reviews of New Films” 1909, 16). The reunification of the family is celebrated in the final shot. While making the sign of the cross and hugging their infant, the Galoras kneel and take a pose that evokes the catholic iconographic motif of the holy family and establishes a parallel between Galora as a protective father and the religious image of St. Joseph with the Christ Child hanging on the back wall. Introduced in the scene as a marker of the characters’ ethnicity, the picture ultimately contributes to celebrating the reconstituted family unit. If in The Cord of Life, Antonine’s vengeful instincts are provoked by a refused loan, in the two shorts At the Altar and In Little Italy, the Sicilian antagonists are rejected suitors. At the Altar sets the polarization between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ immigrants in the environment of an Italian boarding house whose crowded dining room is shown in a symmetrically composed medium shot in the opening scene of the film. The ethnic origin of the characters is suggested through stereotypical traits and accessories: the thick mustaches of most male figures, the plates of spaghetti and straw-­ bottomed bottles of wine on the table, the crucifix and two religious images (the St. Joseph with the Christ Child already used in The Cord of Life and a crucifixion) hanging on the back wall.16 The entrance into the room of a new boarder generates the juxtaposition that informs the

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storyline since the landlady’s daughter Minnie rejects the advances of “course [sic] Sicilian” (Bowser 67) Grigo and accepts instead the courtship of the newly arrived Giuseppe Cassella, a romantic violinist. In striking contrast, Giuseppe’s Italian background is associated with the poetic value of his musical talent—an association which Griffith underscores in his adaptation of Robert Browning’s Pippa Passes (1909)17—while Grigo’s ethnicity is linked to excessive rage, accentuated by the hysterical gesticulation with which he cries over Minnie’s photo, kisses it, tears it into pieces, and vows revenge. The shot that celebrates Minnie and Giuseppe’s engagement concludes with an image that clearly signifies the divide between the family unit and its threatening force. According to a common practice in early cinema, two narrative events are simultaneously staged in the dining room of the boarding house and actors convey competing information through their gestures and expressions. The result is a split scene whose dividing vertical line is marked by the crucifix hanging on the back wall: on the left, Minnie, her fiancé, and her parents hug each other, while, on the right, isolated Grigo expresses his desperation and fury. These emotional outbursts generate the suspenseful development of the story, thus revealing how Griffith’s representation of racially inflected plots is intertwined with his innovations in cinematic style and storytelling. Enraged by Minnie’s rejection, Grigo builds a trap which holds a loaded gun and plants it under the floorboard of the altar step so that “when the priest steps forward, the bride will pay the price,” as the intertitle declares. While illustrating Grigo’s action, Griffith inserts a close-up of the “infernal machine” (Bowser 67) to emphasize the devious intricacy of the villain’s plan and the consequent danger to the unaware couple. The tension generated by Grigo’s scheme reaches its apex in the final segment of the film thanks to Griffith’s use of parallel editing. After installing his trap in the church, Grigo returns to the boarding house where he confesses his plan in a note and then takes poison. The note is found by a housemaid who promptly alerts a policeman. The film displays a race to the rescue by cross-cutting between the wedding ceremony and the policeman who runs through the city to save the bride and the groom. The suspense is also increased by the diegetic retardatory device of the officer who injures himself while avoiding a chicken and, unable to continue his run, dispatches a newsboy to the church. The dramatic effect of Griffith’s parallel editing is underscored by the contemporary spectator, as it is proven by a review of The Moving Picture World: “The audience have their interest aroused to the highest pitch as these alternate pictures are shown, and

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there is a noticeable relaxing of nerves when the pistol is discharged and the bride is unhurt” (“Comments on the Film Subjects” 1909, 268). Safe and unharmed, the couple and the wedding guests finally kneel down for the priest’s blessings in a devotional gesture that contrasts with Grigo’s violation of a sacred space. The villain’s desecration of a church in At the Altar becomes an attack against the sacredness of the domus in the short In Little Italy (1909). Here, Tony is rejected by widowed mother Marie, who has instead accepted Victor’s suit, and plots to be revenged by killing his rival. The “indefatigability of purpose” that the Biograph Bulletin indicates as a characteristic trait of Tony’s Sicilian origin18 provides a motivation for a “retardatory structure” which dominates the film and repeatedly enhances the suspense.19 Three times Tony attempts to stab Victor, but every time he is stopped by a passerby’s sudden arrival. Later, after the villain has wounded Victor at an Italian ball, the tension rises again as he learns that his rival is still alive and being cared for at Marie’s home. The final race-to-the-rescue sequence, which alternates between Tony’s attempts to break into the sickroom, Marie’s fight against him, and the constable’s rush through the streets, translates into a defense of the domestic space, underlined by the widow’s use of pieces of furniture to keep the villain outside.20 The promotional material itself remarks on the intensity of Tony’s violation of the domus by detailing the stages of Marie’s action: The door being barricaded, he [Tony] tries to effect an entrance through the window, but a portable cupboard placed in front prevents him, so kicking in the cellar door he climbs up a ladder to a trap in the floor; on this trap the widow places a heavy trunk and she and one of the children sit on it to increase the weight, while she dispatches the other child for the constable. Tony soon overcomes this resistance and forcing his way through the trap is just about to finish the destruction of Victor, when a well directed shot from the constable’s gun, who has just arrived, causes the stiletto to fall from his hand. (Bowser 153)

In the resolutory conclusion of the story, the protection of the family from Tony’s vengeful plan is guaranteed by the well-timed arrival of a sheriff, according to a trope already proposed in The Cord of Life, in which lawmen save Galora from Antonine’s stabbing attempt and help him rescue his child, and in At the Altar, in which a promptly alerted officer runs toward the church. As it has been noticed,21 the characters’ call for

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assistance and the consequent response of the police signal the immigrants’ trust in law enforcement and hence their assimilation and Americanization. On the other hand, the villains’ isolation and their desecration of community and family spaces mark their immorality and inadaptability to the norms of an ordered society. Griffith’s categorization of Italian immigrants becomes more articulated in the 1912 film The Inner Circle, presented as “a reflex of an ominous condition existing in this and other countries founded upon fact” (Bowser 429). The film opens with three expository shots which compare and contrast a triad of characters. The first shot introduces a widower who lives alone with his daughter “in the Italian quarter of the city” as the Biograph Bulletin specifies (ibid.). He enters an unadorned room and places a flower on a table beside a picture—presumably the picture of his dead wife—while his child is sleeping on a chair. After waking the little girl up and warning her to behave, he contemplates again the picture and then leaves. The second shot reveals ‘the happy family’, as the preceding intertitle announces. In a parlor, whose refined décor contrasts with that of the widower’s bare room, a man is reading when his daughter enters and shows him her book. Finally, the third shot displays the members of the Inner Circle secret society who constitute ‘the ominous element’. A man with a dark, thick mustache is fiddling with a knife until one of his fellows draws his attention to the extortion letter that they are about to send to Sig. Cataldo, the wealthy man from the previous shot. As the story develops, the gang members respond to Cataldo’s promptness in informing the police about the threat by deciding to bomb his home and forcing the widower to complete the deed. The latter reluctantly plants the bomb, but when he finds out that his own daughter is inside Cataldo’s house, he runs and prevents the tragedy at the expense of his life. In this drama, the divide between law-abiding and felonious Italians informing the 1909 ‘revenge films’ is re-proposed in the disparity between ‘the happy family’ and ‘the ominous element’. Cataldo is presented as an Americanized immigrant. None of the stereotypical traits and accessories which mark the Italian-ness of characters in previous shorts complement his portrayal and his ethnicity is only revealed by his last name and the information provided in the Biograph Bulletin. His success and consequent wealth22 denote his participation in the American Dream of social mobility, and the resoluteness with which he “becomes defiant and reports the matter to the police” (M 1912, 29) after receiving the threatening letter is an indication of his faith in the American justice system. On the other

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hand, the depiction of the members of the Inner Circle relies on commonplace images. The knife that one of the characters is holding in the introductory shot is an object that often connotes Griffith’s Italian immigrants. In The Cord of Life, Antonine brandishes it to signal his vindicative intention and raises it when he strives to stab his cousin. In At the Altar, Grigo reaches for his knife before he contrives his ‘infernal’ plan. In the short In Little Italy, Tony’s several attempts to kill his rival result in “plenty of stiletto work” (“Comments on the Films” 1910, 17) as the contemporary press points out. Even in the one-reeler The Lure of the Gown, a 1909 romance that refrains “from depicting characters as outright criminals” (Ruvoli 60), a brandished knife appears as a manifestation of an emotional outburst. When Enrico is refused by Veronica, the Italian street singer whom he has tried to win back after he had initially forsaken her, he reacts by flaunting a stiletto against the young woman’s new suitor. The plot of The Inner Circle brings out an additional facet of the portrayal of Italian villains. The gang members’ criminal plan against a wealthy man alludes to the stereotype of the bomb-tossing immigrant that loomed large in the collective imagination in the years of the widespread fear of violent radicalism. Indeed, the storyline of The Inner Circle harks back to that of Griffith’s 1909 short The Voice of the Violin, which exploits the popular turn-of-the-century association of immigrants with anarchists, and of anarchists with bombers.23 In this film, a German music teacher joins a group of anarchists and is dispatched to blow up a capitalist’s home, but manages to defuse the bomb when he discovers that the doomed house is the residence of the girl he loves. Griffith returns to the image of the bomb-throwing immigrant in the 1913 film The Coming of Angelo, which tells the story of a love triangle set in an Italian seaside colony. Guido, the leader of the colony, is asked to hide a bomb by some of his fellows. When his fiancée Theresa leaves him for the newly arrived Angelo, he decides to use the device against his rival, but Theresa’s timely intervention saves Angelo while Guido is killed in the explosion. In his critical analysis of the film, Charles Musser identifies Guido’s friends as Italian anarchists and interprets Guido’s relationship with them as an indication of his ties to his ‘immigrant roots’. Contrarily, “Angelo may be of Italian descent but is thoroughly Americanized” (Musser 2003, 108). In The Inner Circle, the figure of the widower, a reluctant bomber who ultimately saves his child while losing his own life, blurs the clear-cut distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ immigrants. In the race-to-the-rescue segment of the film, the parallel editing intercuts the shots of the burning

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fuse with several moments that follow the evolution of the widower’s character from a threatening force to a tragic hero: the poor man places the explosive device and then discovers that his daughter is inside the doomed house, three police officers knock him unconscious after they return from following a false lead, the widower’s child is attended by Mrs. Cataldo24 in the parlor, the widower is taken inside the parlor and begins running after he regains consciousness and remembers the impending danger, the wealthy family leaves the house, the widower manages to throw the bomb away from the house and informs the policemen of the gang’s hiding place before he dies. The self-sacrifice of the character determines a variation in the melodramatic motif of the threatened and reunited family, which is underscored by the closing shots of the film. After the widower dies, his daughter reaches out and hugs Mrs. Cataldo, who previously comforted her after the little girl was thrown down by a car. The woman confirms her intention to take care of the widower’s child and begins walking with her husband toward the house. On this image of a reconstituted family, a fade begins and continues in the next and final shot, which shows the widower’s unadorned room presented in the opening of the film. The space is now connotated by its emptiness, and the picture of the widower’s dead wife, the flower next to it, and the doll abandoned by the child on a chair are “signs of absent characters” (Gunning 1991, 276). Through the film’s circular structure and the fade connecting the two final shots, Griffith interweaves the motif of the reunited family with that of loss. As Lea Jacobs writes, “there is a family formed at the end of The Inner Circle, but this conventional ending is made more complex by reference to the other, parallel, family which has been utterly destroyed” (Jacobs 120). While the film opens and closes with interior shots of domestic spaces, the complex development of the story requires the characters to move around ‘the Italian quarter of the city’. In its depictions of an ethnic neighborhood, this drama reveals the attention to street life that emerges in many films of Griffith’s Biograph corpus. Interpreted in relation to an artistic tradition that encompasses the paintings of the Ashcan School and the photography of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, the director’s street scenes constitute a key element of his New York stories.25 As it occurs in other productions, in The Inner Circle the characters inhabit a landscape of sidewalks, stoops, and entranceways which define a city “constructed on the scale of the human body” (Gunning 2001, 89). When the widower’s daughter goes to visit her father at a street market, a compact medium shot creates the atmosphere of a cramped and hectic environment. In a

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space delineated by the shop windows and the awning of a tobacco store, a crowd of extras move around vegetable stalls and carry out concurring incidental activities: men and women walk, talk, and gesticulate, children run and are scolded by the adults, people try to make their way, and a policeman patrols the area. The tender interaction of the widower and his child in the foreground is interrupted by the arrival of two members of the secret society, who enter the scene disguised as a peddler and an organ grinder. To hide their identity while monitoring the outcomes of the extortion letter sent to Cataldo, the two villains have adopted “the signs of lowly jobs associated with their ethnicity” (ibid.)26 and now exhibit those stereotypical attributes as they reach the street market. One carries plaster statuettes and the other grinds his organ and pretends to beg for money while he moves to the foreground. In this self-referential representation of Italian-ness, their attempt to blend into the hustle and bustle of the crowd is the final addition to the abundance of human activity which pervades the scene. With its plethora of movements, gestures, and expressions, this fragment of street life aims to reproduce the cramped conditions and spontaneous vitality of an immigrant neighborhood. In an “urban landscape reduced … to a few square meters” (Mottet 125/ Gunning 2001, 89),27 Griffith reconstructs a jam-packed space that recalls his description of Lower East Side’s Rivington Street. While endowing the story with a believable background, this street scene reveals how the ethnic characterization of the film is entwined with the director’s search for a detailed rendition of the modern city. Besides offering the context for a family melodrama and the justification for a race-to-the-rescue segment, the racially inflected plot of The Inner Circle gives Griffith the opportunity to express his fascination with the life of lower-class neighborhoods. Two months later, this fascination produces The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912),28 a story of ‘New York’s other side’, as the opening intertitle indicates, and Griffith’s best-known Biograph urban drama.

Notes 1. For a brief discussion of ‘the melting pot metaphor’, its popularization, and its critics in the first decades of the twentieth century, see Alfredo Montalvo-­Barbot (2019, 5–8). 2. On the representation of race in Griffith’s films, see Bernardi (1996, 103–128), and Hlebowicz (2017, 380–389). For Italian American characters in Griffith’s Biograph shorts, see Ruvoli (2011, 59–67) and Bertellini (2010, 206–207).

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3. On the historical coincidence of immigration and moving pictures productions, see Bertellini (2004b, 432–435). 4. See Cesare Lombroso (1876). 5. See Giuseppe Sergi (1895/1901 and 1900). 6. See Alfredo Niceforo (1898). 7. See also Joseph P. Cosco (2003, 25–26). 8. On Riis’ representation of Italians, see also Cosco (2003, 21–60). 9. As observed by Ruvoli, the Biograph Bulletin “highlights Tony’s Sicilian origin as the main motivation for his vengeful actions” (Ruvoli 61). 10. See Nick Browne (1981, 67–72) and Bernardi (1996, 119–124). 11. Giorgio Bertellini has discussed the categorization of Italian immigrants ‘into two clear-cut groups’ in his studies on the ‘Black Hand films’. See Bertellini (2004a, 388; 2005, 216–217; and 2010, 205) and also Ruvoli (2011, 63). 12. Antonine’s endangering of a child’s life as a manifestation of his fierce nature recalls the racial characterization of Griffith’s 1908 film One Touch of Nature, in which an orphan child is forced to beg in the snow and beaten by “a Sicilian couple of the very lowest type” (Bowser 50). 13. On Griffith’s investigation of “the suspenseful possibilities of parallel editing in the first months of 1909”, see Tom Gunning (1991, 190). 14. Referring to Meir Sternberg’s study on the “retardatory structure” of suspenseful narration, Tom Gunning notes that “Griffith soon developed a number of delaying devices with the story, both in the carrying out of the fatal action and the rescue” (Gunning 1991, 191). On the “retardatory structure”, see Meir Sternberg (1978, 159–182). 15. As Charlie Keil has pointed out, delaying effects are employed both at the level of the diegesis (first, Mrs. Galora is about to open the window when a neighbor enters the apartment and then two policemen attempt to stop Galora’s run) and through narrative devices (Griffith interrupts the shots of Mrs. Galora approaching the window with cuts to the alternate shots of her husband rushing home). See Keil (2001, 119–120). 16. About the “stereotypical accessories” of Griffith’s Italian characters, see Ruvoli (2011, 59). 17. In his analysis of Griffith’s The Violin Maker of Cremona (1909), Scott Simmon refers to “Griffith’s geographical hierarchy for Italy”, in which “ethical and racial values increase the closer one gets to the North (and to Pordenone), from the criminal depths of Sicily’s At the Altar (1909) to the spiritual heights of Asolo’s Pippa Passes (1909)” (Simmon 1999, 118). 18. The Moving Picture World echoes the Biograph Bulletin and introduces Griffith’s film as “a good study, illustrating the tenacity of purpose which is such an important component of average Sicilian character” (“Comments on the Films” 1910, 17).

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19. J.B. Kaufman (1999) notes how this film demonstrates “Griffith’s increasing facility as a suspense filmmaker” (Kaufman 147). 20. See Ruvoli (2011, 63). 21. See Ruvoli (2011, 64) and her reference to Bertellini (2004a, 217). 22. The Biograph Bulletin explains that the active members of the Inner Circle “have observed with envy the success of another Italian and feel that they should share the proceeds of his industry without working for it” (Bowser 429). 23. On Griffith’s The Voice of the Violin and its contextualization, see Simmon (1993, 50–51) and Porton (1999, 17–18). 24. This character, played by Mary Pickford, is presented as Cataldo’s daughter in the review of The New  York Dramatic Mirror. Lea Jacobs, however, interprets this figure as Cataldo’s wife—an interpretation that better aligns with the depiction of the Cataldos as ‘the happy family’, juxtaposed to the image of ‘the lonely widower and his child’. See Jacobs (2002, 119–120). 25. See also Mottet (1998, 120–150) and Gunning (2001, 88–89). 26. A similar association is presented in Griffith’s 1910 film An Arcadian Maid, in which a country girl is persuaded to steal her master’s money by a peddler, whose Italian ethnicity is specified in the Biograph Bulletin (Bowser 217). 27. Mottet (1998, 125) is quoted and translated in Gunning (2001, 89). 28. Lea Jacobs notes that “in its use of extras and evocation of incidental activity”, the street market scene in The Inner Circle “seems to anticipate The Musketeers of Pig Alley, shot two months later” (Jacobs 121).

Works Cited Bernardi, Daniel. “The Voice of Whiteness: D.W.  Griffith’s Biograph Films (1908–13),” in The Birth of Whiteness. Race and the Emergence of US Cinema, edited by Daniel Bernardi, 103–128. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996. Bertellini, Giorgio. Italy in Early American Cinema. Bloomington-Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010. ———. “Black Hands and White Hearts: Southern Italian Immigrants, Crime, and Race in Early American Cinema.” In Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film, edited by Lee Grieveson, Esther Sonnet, and Peter Stanfield, 207–237. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 2005. ———. “Black Hands and White Hearts: Italian Immigrants as ‘Urban Racial Types’ in Early American Film Culture.” Urban History 31, No. 3 (2004a), 375–399. ———. “Migration/Immigration: USA.” In Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, edited by Richard Abel, 432–435. New York: Routledge, 2004b.

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Bowser, Eileen. Biograph Bulletins: 1908–1912. Edited by Eileen Bowser. New York: Octagon Books, 1973. Browne, Nick. “Griffith’s Family Discourse: Griffith and Freud.” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 6, No. 1 (1981), 67–80. “Comments on the Film Subjects. ‘At the Altar,’” The Moving Picture World, Vol. 4, No. 10 (6 March 1909), 268. “Comments on the Films. ‘In Little Italy,’” The Moving Picture World, Vol. 6, No. 1 (10 January 1910), 17. Cosco, Joseph P. Imagining Italians: The Clash of Romance and Race in American Perceptions, 1880–1910. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Friedberg, Anne. “‘A Properly Adjusted Window’ Vision and Sanity in D. W. Griffith’s 1908–1909 Biograph Films.” In Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, edited by Thomas Elsaesser, 326–335. London: BFI, 1990. Griffith, David Wark. The Man Who Invented Hollywood. Louisville: Touchstone Publishing Company, 1972. Gunning, Tom “Bobby the Coward.” in The Griffith Project, Vol. 5, edited by Paolo Cherchi Usai, 85–91. London: British Film Institute, 2001. ———. D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Hlebowicz, Bartosz. “D.W. Griffith.” In Race in American Film: Voices and Visions That Shaped a Nation, edited by Daniel Bernardi and Michael Green, 380–389. Santa Barbara, CA-Denver, CO: Greenwood, 2017. Jacobs, Lea. “The Inner Circle.” In The Griffith Project, Vol. 6, edited by Paolo Cherchi Usai, 118–122. London: British Film Institute, 2002. Kaufman, J.B. “In Little Italy.” In The Griffith Project, Vol. 3, edited by Paolo Cherchi Usai, 146–147. London: British Film Institute, 1999. Keil, Charlie. Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking, 1907–1913. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. Lombroso, Cesare. L’uomo delinquente studiato in rapporto all’antropologia, alla medicina e alle discipline carcerarie. Milan: Hoepli, 1876. M. “Reviews of Licensed Films. The Inner Circle.” The New  York Dramatic Mirror, Vol. LXVIII, no. 1757 (August 21, 1912), 29. Mason, George. “The ‘Foreign Element’ in New  York City. V.  The Italians.” Harper’s Weekly, Vol. 35, No. 1765, October 18, 1890, 817–819. Montalvo-Barbot, Alfredo. Melting Pot, Multiculturalism, and Interculturalism: The Making of Majority-Minority Relations in the United States. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019. Mottet, Jean. L’invention de la scène américane: cinéma at paysage. Paris, L’Harmattan, 1998. Musser, Charles. “The Coming of Angelo.” In The Griffith Project, Vol. 7, edited by Paolo Cherchi Usai, 107–108. London: British Film Institute, 2003. Niceforo, Alfredo. L’Italia barbara contemporanea. Milan-Palermo: Sandron, 1898.

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Porton, Richard. Film and the Anarchist Imagination. London-New York: Verso, 1999. “Reviews of New Films.” New York Dramatic Mirror, Vol. LXI, No. 1572 (February 6, 1909), 16. Riis, Jacob August Riis. The Battle with the Slum. New York: Macmillan, 1902. Ruvoli, Joanne. “‘Most Thrilling Subjects’: D.W.  Griffith and the Biograph Revenge Films.” In Mafia Movies: A Reader, edited by Dana Renga, 59–67. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Sergi, Giuseppe. Origine e diffusione della stirpe mediterranea. Induzioni antropologiche. Rome: Società Editrice Dante Alighieri, 1895. English translation: The Mediterranean Race. A Study of the Origin of European People. London: Walter Scott, 1901. ———. Specie e varietà umane. Saggio di una sistematica antropologia. Torino: Fratelli Bocca, 1900. Simmon, Scott. “The Violin Maker of Cremona.” In The Griffith Project, Vol. 2, edited by Paolo Cherchi Usai, 117–118. London: British Film Institute, 1999. ———. The Films of D.W. Griffith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Sternberg, Meir. Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. “The Theater Unique”, The Moving Picture World, Vol. 4, No. 21 (22 May 1909), 672. United States Immigration Commission, Reports of the Immigration Commission. Abstracts of Reports of the Immigration Commission, Vol. 1. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1911a. ———. Reports of the Immigration Commission. Dictionary of Races or People, Vol. 5. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1911b.

Films Cited An Arcadian Maid (D.W. Griffith, 1910) At the Altar (D.W. Griffith, 1909) The Coming of Angelo (D.W. Griffith, 1913) The Cord of Life (D.W. Griffith, 1909) In Little Italy (D.W. Griffith, 1909) The Inner Circle (D.W. Griffith, 1912) The Lure of the Gown (D.W. Griffith, 1909) The Musketeers of Pig Alley (D.W. Griffith, 1912) One Touch of Nature (D.W. Griffith, 1908) Pippa Passes (D.W. Griffith, 1909) The Violin Maker of Cremona (D.W. Griffith, 1909) The Voice of the Violin (D.W. Griffith, 1909)

CHAPTER 3

The Italian (1915) and the Representation of Italian Immigrants in Silent American Cinema Bernhard Kuhn

The Italian (1915) is among the most famous silent films portraying Italian immigrants in the United States.1 The literature generally evaluates this film positively. Film scholar Peter Bondanella applauds the “unusually complex view of tenement life and multiethnic immigration in America” and praises its artistic qualities (Bondanella 2004, 28). According to Anthony Julian Tamburri, one of the leading figures of Italian American Studies, the film is “one of the best of the silent era” (Tamburri 2011, 36). Compared to other films of the time period, the film stands out as a sympathetic portrayal of the immigrant experience while also incorporating several stereotypes related to Italians. It also underscores the aversion of the US society toward Italian immigrants at the time. Beyond the

B. Kuhn (*) Department of Languages, Cultures & Linguistics, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Fioretti, F. Orsitto (eds.), Italian Americans in Film and Other Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47211-4_3

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depiction of two separate and incompatible cultures, The Italian also conveys an admiration toward Italy. In order to fully understand this film, it is helpful to consider it in the context of Italian migration into the United States and the perception of Italy and Italians at the time the film was produced. Highly relevant in this regard is also the development of the cinema conventions first in New York and later in Hollywood.

Italians and Italian Culture in the United States Migration from Italy to the United States changed throughout history as did the attitude and perception within the United States toward Italians and Italy. At least since the American Revolution, Italian culture was highly regarded among the educated class. Jefferson, for example, admired Italian architecture and had his residence in Monticello designed based on prints designed by Palladio.2 Italian language and literature became part of the curriculum of many prestigious US universities,3 and since 1825, Italian operas have been performed in the United States.4 While the admiration for Italian literature, art, music, and craftsmanship persisted, the general perception of Italians changed toward the end of the nineteenth century with the advent of mass emigration.5 At that time, the new immigration, in particular from Southern and Eastern Europe, was perceived predominantly as an invasion, and people requested political action against it. In 1907, Congress approved the creation of a US Immigration Commission. At this commission, scientists and scholars from different areas worked together to analyze the migration phenomenon. The result of the study was published in 1911 and concluded that Southern and Eastern Europeans were inferior to other immigrants. Northern Italians were declared different from Southern Italians. According to this study, Northern Italians supposedly had a more developed sense of social organization, while Southern Italians were characterized by stronger individualistic sentiments. Since then, even in immigration statistics, people were registered as either Northern or Southern Italians, although compared to other nationalities, all Italians were considered undesirable and un-Americanizable (Carravetta 2018, 141). Perhaps the worst consequence of this study was that stereotypes concerning Italians, and in particular of Italians from the South, which already existed in American society, received legitimacy. Stereotyping of Italian immigrants started long before the Commission began working on this report and even before films started depicting Italians in a stereotypical fashion. The

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police reporter and photographer Jacob Riis had a key role in the early depiction of Italian immigrants. Already in 1888, he lectured about the lives of the immigrants and presented a magic lantern and stereopticon show, which he entitled “The Other Half: How It Lives and Dies in New York”. After writing a few articles on the subject, in 1890, he published a book on the subject, entitled How the Other Half Lives, depicting the immigrant ghettos of New York. His book includes a chapter on Italian immigrants, where he claims that Italians at times have difficulty adapting to civil law and controlling themselves. Riis describes the new Italian immigrants as gamblers who are prone to violence: Ordinarily he is easily enough  governed by authority—always excepting Sunday, when he settles down to a game of cards and lets loose all his bad passions. Like the Chinese, the Italian is a born gambler. His soul is in the game from the moment the cards are on the table, and very frequently his knife is in it too before the game is ended. No Sunday has passed in New York since “the Bend” became a suburb of Naples without one or more of these murderous affrays coming to the notice of the police. (Riis 1996, 94)

Migration and Silent American Cinema As the portrayal and interpretation of aspects of immigration played already a significant role in Riis’s pre-cinematic shows, Italian immigrant narratives feature prominently in early US cinema and continue to do so throughout the history of silent film. The depiction of Italians and Italian Americans changed throughout the silent period. In the early period, when the US film industry was still located in New Jersey and New York, films consisted primarily of short one- or two-reel productions. Italians were often depicted as primitive, irascible, and violent. When the film industry moved to Hollywood, during the so-called transitional phase, films gradually became longer and of higher quality. The goal was to appeal to a broad audience. Films of that period portrayed Italian Americans as protagonists with human qualities and frequently with pathos. While Italian Americans were seen as different and not part of American society, these films highlight why immigrants deserve to be considered Americans or at least to be treated better (Bertellini 212–213). The third phase can be defined as a mature silent phase. In this phase, Hollywood worked with a star system and films were presented in elegant cinemas. Italians, such as Rudolph Valentino, featured prominently among

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the stars, and some American films were produced in Italy or included Italian themes. However, Hollywood still presented Italians and Italian Americans as the ‘other’, different from mainstream America (Muscio 2004, 105–106).

Early American Cinema and The Black Hand (1906) In the early phase of silent cinema, D. W. Griffith, for example, produced a number of early films depicting Italians. Examples include The Greaser’s Gauntlet (1907), In Little Italy (1909), The Violin Maker of Cremona (1909), At the Altar (1909), and Pippa Passes (1909). All these films portray Italians in a stereotypical way, depicting them as irrational and often vindictive people, primarily motivated by emotions and passions. The most harmful stereotype concerning Italians and Italian Americans, already perpetuated by early US cinema, was the portrayal of Italians as criminals who were associated with a criminal organization, such as the Mafia. An early example is The Black Hand (1906). Produced by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company in 1906, this film was partially filmed on location in New York (on Seventh Avenue) and partially in a studio.6 It depicts the story of the kidnapping and rescue of a girl in an immigrant neighborhood in New York. The kidnappers are presented in a way that the audiences would recognize them as stereotypical Italians. They identify themselves as the Black Hand and are portrayed as primitive, violent, and foolish. They all wear thick mustaches, play cards, and constantly drink red wine when in their apartment. The letter they send to the family threatening to kidnap their daughter is full of spelling mistakes, thus underscoring the social separation from the educated class.7 The letter also points to the violence of the kidnappers when they threaten not only to kidnap the store owner’s daughter but also to blow up the butcher store.8 They also threaten to hit the girl when she tries to flee, highlighting their impulsiveness and cruelty. The end of the film shows the foolishness of the kidnappers when they don’t notice the note which is passed through the window, and they don’t realize when the girl opens the window and the door for the police to enter. While the film presents Italian immigrants as drunkards and criminals, it also contrasts them with Mr. Angelo, an assimilated, honest, and hardworking Italian American who follows the customs of American society. The most important aspect is that the Italian butcher, who like the criminals wears a thick mustache, asks the police for help and works with them so that the kidnappers can be arrested, and his daughter

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liberated. This is a strong contrast to the common stereotype of the violent Italian who likes to solve issues by himself as described by Riis.9 Other differences include the correct English spelling on the signs in the butcher shop and the portrayal of women. While the woman living with the criminals is portrayed exclusively as a servant,10 Mr. Angelo’s wife works together with him in the store and assists with the arrest of the criminals. Other examples of early films which follow the film’s stereotypical portrayal of the Italian immigrant as uneducated, violent, and impulsive are The Detectives of the Italian Bureau (1909), The Organ Grinder (1912), The Adventures of Lieutenant Petrosino (1912), The Criminals (1913), and The Padrone’s Ward (1914). Like The Black Hand, these films generally contrast violent Italians with assimilated Italian Americans. Several films of this time period can be categorized as “bad-wop-and-good cop-­ wop”11 films (Bondanella 179).

Italians in Hollywood While the portrayal of Italian Americans in early cinema, by and large, is highly problematic, American attitudes toward Italians were not the same throughout the United States and were often contradictory. On the one hand, new immigrants were seen by the dominant culture with contempt, as backward, primitive, excessively instinctive, and sentimental; on the other hand, especially among the educated middle and upper class, Italy was still seen as the cradle of art and culture. This is particularly the case in California, where during the second decade of the twentieth century the film industry began to establish itself when the center of the American film industry moved from the East Coast, primarily Fort Lee, New Jersey, and New York to Hollywood. At that time, among the elite in California and Hollywood, Italian culture was appreciated for several reasons. Perhaps the most important factor is that many Italians were well integrated within the community. Italian immigration to California had started in the first half of the nineteenth century, and by the early twentieth century, many entrepreneurs of Italian origin were successfully established. Examples include Amadeo Giannini, who founded the Bank of Italy (which later became the Bank of America), and Marco Giovanni Fontana, who started the canning business, which later became Del Monte Foods. There were also several Italian newspapers, such as La voce del popolo and Italia (Ricci 2018, 11).

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Italians were also well integrated into the local artistic community. Theater was very popular at the time, and Italian actors and musicians were generally highly appreciated in San Francisco at the beginning of the twentieth century. According to a contemporary historian, there was at least one weekly performance of an Italianized version of Shakespeare in San Francisco. While on the East Coast theatrical pieces were frequently presented in dialect, San Francisco preferred performances in standard Italian. Italian musicians and orchestras also performed regularly—Lina Cavalieri or Enrico Caruso are just two examples—and opera composers, such as Mascagni or Leoncavallo, were invited to stage their works (Muscio 2019, 14). Italian architecture and design inspired urban buildings, villas, and gardens. The Italian architect Marcello Piacentini won the first prize at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exhibition in San Francisco, which underscores the American appreciation for Italian architecture. At that exhibition, also Italian contemporary art was presented and greatly appreciated (Ricci 12). The appreciation of Italian artists can also be seen in the early years of Hollywood’s film industry, where Italians were highly valued, particularly if they were famous actors, directors, musicians, and skilled artisans. Italians were described as dynamic, able to adapt, with a lively imagination and natural agility. Furthermore, constancy, a sense of order, and spontaneous creativity deriving from a glorious past were perceived as Italian qualities.12 Many Italians came from the theater to the film industry. Early examples include the actor Antonio Maiori and the musician Cesare Gravina.13 The artistic appreciation for Italian artists, recognizable by their Italian names, even resulted in some American actresses taking on Italian names.14 Virginia McSweeney became Virginia Valli and May Dooley became Nita Naldi (see Muscio 2018, 118). American directors also admired early Italian films and their directors. D. W. Griffith’s admiration for Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914), for example, is depicted in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Good Morning Babilonia (1987). Understanding the way Italians were seen in the United States at the time when Hollywood’s film industry developed is hence more complex than it seems at first. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a lot of respect toward the Italian arts, including architecture, painting, music, theater, and early Italian cinema, as well as toward Italian artists. While this was the case in the United States in general, the negative perception of new immigrants from Italy (especially Southerners) at that time might have been less strong among the upper classes of the West Coast

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than on the East Coast.15 It seems that among the elite in California, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Italy was still predominantly associated with the greatness of the arts and beauty, to a certain degree reminiscent of the Grand Tour and the depiction of Italy in painting, photography, and travel literature. While the Grand Tour was seen as the rite of passage of wealthy mostly European men traveling to Italy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, starting in the nineteenth century more and more wealthy Americans traveled to Italy as tourists (Ellerbee 2010). The somewhat contrasting views of Italy are also reflected by the cinema of the time. The following analysis of The Italian will highlight the connection between these perceptions: on the one hand, the Italy of the past, admired by the American middle class, and on the other hand, the fear of mass immigration and the arrogant point of view toward poor Italian immigrants.16 The Italian (1915) The Italian is a high-quality six-reel film melodrama, produced by Thomas Ince and directed by Reginald Barker. All actors are American. The original title of the film was The Dago,17 but it was changed to The Italian at Beban’s request, given that he frequently represented immigrants on screen as well as on stage (Bondanella 23). The film plot is similar to Laemmle’s one-reel film The Wop (1913).18 However, The Italian offers a more complex depiction of Italian immigration and ought to be seen as part of the transitional phase, when cinema aimed at attracting the middle-­ class audience with longer, higher-quality productions (Keil 36–37). According to the New York Dramatic Mirror from December 30, 1914, the film offers a “realistic glimpse of slum life” and is “aimed at a more cultivated public than has been reached by that useful trinity, pathos, sentimentality and melodrama” (Anonymous 1914, 26). The Italian tells the story of Beppo who comes to the United States to earn enough money to marry his love Annette. Once in the United States, he finds work as a bootblack. The local slum boss, Bill Corrigan, offers him money if he convinces other Italian immigrants to vote for a certain politician. Beppo accepts and uses the money to have Annette join him in the United States. They get married and have a son. During a heat wave, the son gets sick, and the doctor orders pasteurized milk. When Beppo wants to buy the milk, he gets robbed. He finds the robbers and gets in a fight with them. The police arrive. Beppo sees Corrigan and asks the slum boss for help but gets rejected and subsequently arrested. While in jail, his

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son dies. Beppo swears revenge. When he learns that Corrigan’s daughter is ill, he enters the slum boss’s house dressed as a peddler with the intention of killing her. Once he sees the girl in the crib, he notices that she makes the same gesture his son used to make. He changes his mind and leaves without doing any harm. Beppo’s story ends with showing him crying at his son’s grave. The Italian includes a framing sequence depicting the main actor of the film, out of character, in a middle-class setting. The first images of the film show the opening of a curtain, thus alluding to the medium of theater. Next, it presents the actor George Beban in an elegant living room reading a book. Beban is wearing a shirt with a bowtie and a jacket while smoking a pipe. The camera alternates between Beban and point-of-view (POV) shots of the book. The close-up of the cover enables the audience to read the title, The Italian, as well as the name of the authors: Thomas H. Ince and G.  Gardner Sullivan, the scriptwriters of the film. After Beban sits down on a sofa and reads, another POV close-up shows the first page of the first chapter of the first part entitled “In Old Italy”, thus setting the scene for the beginning of the film: “From the grey, old monastery, flung like a rampart of the faith against the Italian sky, the bells were ringing the Angelus. A deep, sweet silence had shrouded the vineyards, where the peasants stood with bowed heads. Even the shaggy burros seemed to understand as they gazed with calm, patient eyes over the scene they had grown to love; the sunshine, the mountains. Infinite peace and” (2:01). After another shot of Beban, the camera fades out, which ends the frame story. The next shot introduces the first scene of the film’s real story by showing a monastery in Italy and monks walking in the courtyard. This beginning underscores that the film seeks to appeal to the middle class and not only to the mass market. Barker shows the well-known actor Beban in surroundings familiar to a middle-class audience.19 The film also explicitly points to theater and literature. The POV shots of Beban reading the book invite the audience to identify with him. By first depicting the page of a book and then visually presenting what the text communicated with words, Ince and Barker imply that the film is going to tell the story of the book with images. The connection of theatrical, textual, and film elements, along with the fade at the end, suggests that the film visualizes literature in a way similar to a theatrical representation of literature. These intermedial references further convey that the film ought to be seen as aesthetically comparable to the established artistic media of theater and literature. Cinema at the time was primarily seen as a medium of

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entertainment and not yet fully accepted as an artistic medium. By connecting the film with theater and literature, Ince and Barker implicitly claim that their film is aesthetically as valuable as literature and comparable to a theatrical performance.20 The film itself is divided into six parts. The first and the beginning of the second part take place in Italy. During the second part, the protagonist leaves for the United States, and the rest of the film takes place in New York. The first part presents the main Italian characters: first, Trudo Ancello and his daughter Annette and, next, the main character Beppo Donnetti, who is described as an “admirer of the pretty Annette” (Intertitle at 4:31). Annette and her father are peasants and work in the vineyard, harvesting grapes. The farmers are playful with each other and seem content. The plants are healthy, and the harvest is rich. When the monks in the monastery ring the Angelus, the peasants show their devotion by signing a cross and bowing their heads. Beppo works as gondoliere in Venice. The first shot of him portrays him as a romantic young man, laying on his gondola and playing the guitar. After presenting Beppo, the camera shows a couple hiring Beppo to take them on a gondola ride. During the gondola tour, the film alternates between tracking shots of Venice, close-ups of the couple on the gondola, and close-ups of Beppo. One intertitle during this Venice sequence includes a Shakespeare quote from his Troilus and Cressida (III, 3): “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin” (Intertitle at 7:25). Shortly after this quote, Barker includes first a dream scene, conventionally incorporated with dissolves, showing Beppo and Annette embracing each other in the field. After that dream, Beppo observes the couple in his gondola kissing each other, which seems to distract him, so he crashes into a bridge and falls into the water. This moment is presented in a comical way and the depiction of laughing bystanders invites the audience of the film to laugh. The film includes several slapstick moments, primarily in the American section, whose function is comical relief. The presentation of Italy in these first scenes (and throughout the film) is picturesque and aestheticized (Bertellini 2010, 216). Like the frame story, it seeks to appeal to a middle-class audience, by presenting not a realistic depiction of Italy at the beginning of the twentieth century, but an imaginary Italy, based on travel descriptions and romanticized images familiar to the middle class. The depiction of farmers during the Angelus is a reference to a François Millet painting, The Angelus (1857–1859), which, like literature and theater, creates an intermedial connection with

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the arts. Venice is presented as a busy but happy place for locals and tourists. The clothing distinguishes tourists from people from Venice or nearby. Tourists are dressed elegantly; locals wear traditional dresses or peasant clothes. Women are selling flowers, men are carrying goods; farmers are passing with carts and animals, and an artist is painting a portrait. For tourists, Venice is a place for lovers who enjoy the picturesque scenery. The Venice sequence ends with a final depiction of the happy people working and living in Venice. Almost all are smiling and people are friendly and greeting each other. The final shot of Venice is a long iris shot,21 showing a house with the flag of the Kingdom of Italy, while a gondola passes by, underscoring again the picturesqueness of the scenery. The first part of the film presents Beppo as a romantic gondoliere who is in love and as a happy young man who also likes to joke. Unfortunately for him, also the merchant Gallia, an elderly, but rich man, is interested in marrying Annette. Her father gives Beppo the ultimatum of one year to have enough money for a home for Beppo and Annette. Beppo decides to move to the United States. The intertitle specifies: “Beppo sails for the golden-land America” (Intertitle at 19:50). Before he departs, Annette gives him a neckless with a small crucifix, which points to the religious connection of Annette and Beppo. The film does not particularly focus on Beppo during the Transatlantic passage, nor does it depict the immigration process at Ellis Island. Instead, the film focuses on the emotional side by incorporating chiaroscuro images and evoking a painterly effect. After Beppo’s departure, the film includes an image of Annette and her father embracing each other. Shortly before the arrival of the ship in New York, after most of the passengers started to dance on deck, a medium shot shows a sad Beppo. After the Intertitle “Memories” (22:51), a long shot depicts a chiaroscuro image of Annette extending her arms toward the sea, and, shortly after, a POV shot of the Statue of Liberty. While both chiaroscuro images with Annette evoke a rather sad sensation, linking Annette’s silhouette with the famous American landmark and contrasting Beppo’s sad expressions with dancing passengers create an ambivalent sensation and foreshadow that life in the United States will be difficult. At the same time, Beppo’s feelings, poetically expressed by the silhouette conveying Annette’s longing, connect the viewer with the characters’ emotional world (Bertellini 220). The unrealistic portrayal of Italy and Italian emigration must be seen in the context of the Hollywood culture of the 1910s and the intended audience of the film. While it is true that Italians from the North also

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emigrated to the United States, most Italians emigrated to the United States from Southern Italy. The film also mixes regional characteristics from Northern and Southern Italy. The women at the beginning of the film, for example, represent peasants from the North.22 However, they wear traditional dresses with shawls tied under the chest, as was typical in the South of Italy. Likewise, the way the farmers grow their grapes on low-­ growing vines is reminiscent of Southern Italy. Furthermore, the representation of Venice, filmed in Venice, California, has little in common with Venice in Italy (Muscio 2004, 121). Another geographically implausible element is that Beppo sends his future wife a ticket for a ship with the name Palermo since it seems unlikely that a ship named after the Sicilian city would leave from Northern Italy. Although these inaccuracies could be interpreted as a lack of interest in the reality of contemporary Italian culture, it is unlikely that they would have been noticed by the film’s audience, neither by middle-class viewers nor by immigrant viewers. The reason for making Beppo a Venetian immigrant might have been that the depiction of a well-known Northern Italian city was considered more engaging for the American middle class. In addition to these geographic ambiguities, the depictions of the Italians also have little to do with reality and ought to be defined as picturesque and stereotypical. While most Italians emigrated because of economic necessity, it is not obvious that Beppo suffered economic hardship. Although certainly not rich, Beppo seems quite content with his life as a gondoliere. The film hence does not confront its audience with serious poverty in Italy. Instead, the audience gets to see healthy and happy people. The representation of the Italians as religious people also fits into this picturesque portrayal, through the depiction of the monastery and devout farmers with a crucifix at home. During the scenes at Trudo Ancello’s house, exaggerated gestures and laughter underscore the emotional side of the stereotypical Italian (Casella 1998, 26). A further example of supposedly emotionally uncontrolled behavior is the frenetic Tarantella dance among the Italians on the ship once it is close to New York. When Annette arrives in New York, exaggerated, histrionic gestures also point to Beppo’s otherness in the United States. We can thus conclude that the Italy of The Italian is characterized by rich countryside, beautiful pseudo-Venetian architecture, and healthy and happy people showing their emotions in an exaggerated manner. This depiction is reminiscent of touristic images and stereotypes. It also confirms that the film seeks to appeal to the middle class, which in the 1910s was familiar with picturesque images from Venice

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or the Italian countryside either from personal travel experiences or from travel diaries, postcards, or photos. The portrayal of the United States, on the other hand, is quite different and can be seen as opposite to the depiction of Italy.23 While Italy is presented according to picturesque stereotypes, life in the United States is portrayed with more realism.24 Furthermore, and in contrast to earlier migration films, The Italian offers more than a stereotypical one-dimensional depiction of the immigrant. The portrayal of Beppo as an immigrant in the United States is ambivalent and he is portrayed as a complex character with different characteristics.25 After his arrival in the United States, Beppo is alone, but he is clever and able to help himself. While, at first, he appears helpless when he is yelled at by a local woman, the next scene shows Beppo acquiring the tools for working as a shoeshine. At that point, he has shaved his mustache and wears American clothing, which is a sign of his attempt to assimilate (Casella 27). When the local Irish slum boss offers him money to secure the Italian vote, he accepts and uses the money to pay for Annette’s passage to the United States. Instead of questioning the morals of Beppo’s action, the film presents Beppo’s acceptance of Corrigan’s money to reunite with his love as comprehensible by including a flashback, which visually repeats the last encounter with Annette and her father at their house in Italy. The sympathy with the immigrant gets even deeper. When Beppo and Annette’s son gets sick and dies, the film elicits further compassion with the immigrant by underscoring the injustice Beppo suffers, first caused by the robbers, then by Corrigan, and finally by the prison guard who destroys Beppo’s note for Annette.26 To document Tony’s death, the film contrasts shots of Corrigan’s happy family, Beppo in prison, and the death of his son, culminating in an iris out of the funeral carriage and an iris in of Beppo in his prison cell. This humanized and sympathy-evoking portrayal of the Italian immigrant only changes when Beppo wants to avenge his son’s death. Here the film depicts Beppo in a stereotypical way, similar to earlier immigration films. After the intertitle announcing Beppo’s plan—“Disguised as a peddler, Beppo seeks his revenge in the home of Corrigan” (1:07:55)—a close-up of his face before he enters the girl’s room characterizes him as scary and unpredictable. His eyes are first half open and then wide open, depicting him as a monster ready to kill. This rather horrifying portrayal continues when the medium shots show him moving slowly in the room, opening the curtains, bending over the crib with his hands stretched like claws, and looking for an object to harm the girl. These images are congruent with the stereotype of the violent and

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vindictive Italian who cannot control his emotions. While ultimately the stereotype gets contradicted by the fact that he doesn’t kill the girl, Beppo’s decision is less based on morals and instead on his emotions because he is touched by the girl’s gesture of moving her hand toward her chin. This moment reminds him of his son, as the following intertitle “The gesture that was little Tony’s” (1:15:21) and flashback of Beppo, Annette, and their son underscore.27 This scene incorporates expressive chiaroscuro lighting to further underscore Beppo’s change of heart, which is confirmed by the following intertitle: “At the eternal bedside of his baby where hate, revenge, and bitterness melt to nothing in the crucible of sorrow” (1:16:58). At the end, The Italian hence returns to the sympathetic depiction of the immigrant. The US society is, by and large, portrayed as adverse and with little compassion or solidarity toward immigrants. While Beppo finds work in the United States, ultimately he suffers hostility from individuals as well as from authorities. Beppo gets robbed and he gets arrested because Corrigan refuses to help him. Even the prison guard throws his note away. The rejection he experiences ultimately leads to the death of his son. The final images of the film depicting Beppo at his son’s grave underscore that he is alone with his sorrow. The contrast between the WASP culture and the immigrants is depicted in several ways in The Italian.28 It certainly manifests itself in the depiction of Beppo’s and Corrigan’s neighborhood. The immigrant ghetto is dirty, and Beppo’s apartment is rather small and simple. Corrigan’s neighborhood, on the other hand, is clean, and his mansion is nicely furnished. Even the police are at the politician’s service to close up the streets. The most interesting contrast, however, is depicted when Annette arrives in the United States and Beppo expects her at the first-class passenger landing. The cross-cutting between the arriving Americans, who after visiting Europe reenter the United States, and the immigrants, entering the United States perhaps for the first time, illustrates the differences between the two cultures. The Americans are elegantly dressed and seem happy to be back after a pleasurable trip to Europe. They are being welcomed by their friends and families. The immigrants, on the other hand, are simply dressed, carrying bundles with their belongings, and seem rather tired after their trip and insecure about their future. Considering Beppo’s story, this distinction between the immigrants and established Americans remains unchanged and none of Beppo’s attempts to assimilate—such as shaving his mustache or dressing like an American—changes this distinction.

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Regarding the depiction of the life of Italian immigrants in the United States, The Italian shows significant hardships and offers a sympathetic portrayal, thus inviting the audience to empathize with Beppo and his family. It certainly goes beyond a one-dimensional characterization of the immigrant as either criminal or completely assimilated, as depicted in earlier films, such as The Black Hand. The Italian characterizes Beppo as a human being with strengths and weaknesses. Beyond evoking individual compassion, however, it stresses the existence of two separate, unequal societies, one comprised of a dominant, rich, and powerful WASP culture and the other by the poor and powerless immigrants. There is little doubt that Corrigan’s daughter, a future representative of the WASP society, will survive, while Beppo’s son had to die. This fact shows that in the second decade of the twentieth century, Hollywood could not yet imagine a future or an equal space for Italian immigrants in the US society. The last images of the film close the frame story by depicting Beban again in the living room reading the book. Barker this time shows a POV close-up of the book’s last page, which describes what the audience just saw in the previous images: “With the precious flowers in his worn, grimy hands, Beppo, again knelt by the grave of his baby son. ‘Pretty flowers for you, my bambino, my….’. His voice broke abruptly into a sob; a deep racking sob of a man crushed beyond his strength to endure as he threw himself across his baby’s grave” (1:17:43). After depicting an emotionally moved Beban, the last shot of the film documents the closing of the curtain. The Italian thus seeks to reconnect with the middle-class audience by pointing, similar to the beginning of the film, to the media of literature and theater as well as by referring to the relationship between the viewer of the film and Beban as the reader of the book and representative of the middle class.

Conclusions The Italian is a high-quality film produced in a way that seems appealing to a broad audience, not only to immigrants or the working class but also to the middle class. While the film realistically depicts the class difference between the immigrant population and members of the dominant US society, it also offers a picturesque portrayal of Italy, familiar to the educated audience. In doing so, the film reflects the contradictory status of Italian culture within the United States. While the middle class had an appreciation for Italian high culture and picturesque portrayals of Italy,

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not much connection existed between the immigrant and the WASP culture. While Beppo in Italy is portrayed as part of the picturesque ambiance, in the United States, as an immigrant, he is presented as the ‘other’, disconnected from mainstream society. Even glimpses of the stereotype defining the Italian as a person with a vindictive, uncontrollable character are still existent. Nonetheless, The Italian presents a predominantly humanized portrayal of the immigrant, evoking an emotional response and thus inviting the audience to gain a more sympathetic view toward immigrants. If we look at the Hollywood cinema of the 1910s and 1920s, we are able to observe a continuity and expansion of the way Italians are depicted. As in The Italian, the portrayal of Italian immigrants in later silent Hollywood melodramas frequently evokes compassion and emotional sympathy, but the characters never experience full assimilation in the US society. In addition to films with Beban representing Italian male immigrants, at times female stars such as Mary Pickford or Lillian Gish played Italians, often involved in passionate love stories, set between the United States and Italy (Bertellini 233). In the 1920s, Hollywood also made many films with Rudolph Valentino, who represented the Latin lover type. While he became a star, there was no recognizable connection to the typical Italian immigrant of the time period. As an object of sexual desire, even the roles cast by Valentino represent ‘the other’, relating to the picturesque image of Italy’s past and connecting with historic characters such as Casanova (Bertellini 234–235).

Notes 1. The Italian was produced in 1915 by Thomas H. Ince under the direction of Reginald Barker. The film was restored by the Library of Congress and is accessible on the Library of Congress website. 2. The American government also hired Italian artists to decorate the Capitol building with sculptures and paintings. Constantino Brumidi, for example, painted the frescoes inside the Capitol. 3. Starting in 1753, a degree in Italian was offered at Philadelphia College, which later became the University of Pennsylvania. Beginning in 1778, Carlo Bellini (a friend of Filippo Mazzei, who was a close acquaintance of Thomas Jefferson) taught as a Professor of Romance languages at the College of William & Mary, and in 1802 Lorenzo Da Ponte, one of Mozart’s librettists, became the first professor of Italian literature at Columbia University. Of particular significance in the curriculum was

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Dante’s Divine Comedy, which also entered US popular culture in the form of references in the press or by building a wax museum based on elements from Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Even haunted houses were inspired at times by Dante’s masterpiece, which demonstrates how Italian literature also influenced US popular culture (Looney 2018, 97–100). 4. Italian music and musicians were highly appreciated. Jefferson hired Italian musicians for the first American military band. Filippo Traetta, an Italian composer, established the first conservatory in Boston in 1803. 5. Between 1881 and 1920 more than 4.5 million Italians came to the United States from Italy. There were certainly many reasons for leaving Italy; however, the main reason was economic hardship (Tirabassi 2018, 117–118). Economic hardship was caused, for example, by the enclosure of common lands, rising taxation, compulsory military service after unification, higher mortgage rates, and a collapse in global grain prices in the 1870s. Italians left from all regions of Italy, although most emigrants from Northern regions went to other European countries while emigrants from the South more often went to North or South America. In 1905, for example, 12,571 Italians from the Veneto region and 97,879 from Sicily emigrated to North and South America, while 95,459 from the Veneto region and 8329 from Sicily emigrated to other European states and Africa (see Carravetta 133). The trip to the United States was often difficult on overcrowded steamships. Most of the new Italian immigrants to the United States spoke their regional dialect and were illiterate men. They lived in immigrant neighborhoods, often together with people from the same geographic region (Mangione and Morreale 1992, 146). 6. The center of the early American film industry was in New York (Bertellini 167). The Mutoscope and Biography Company’s first studio was on the roof of the Hackett Carhart Building in New  York, at the corner of Broadway and East 13th Street. In 1906, the company moved to a new studio on 11 East 14th Street (Alleman 2005, 210–211). 7. The letter reads: “Bewar!! we are desperut! Mister Angelo we must have $ 1000.00. Give it to us or we will take your Maria and Blow up your shop. Black Hand”. In early immigration films, unassimilated criminals are often presented as illiterate, illustrating the nativist claim that literacy reveals the true character (Bertellini 193). 8. Historically it is true that the Black Hand used bombs to threaten other citizens (Mangione, Morreale 167). Anarchists also used bombs at the time period. While anarchists were also often perceived as Italians, certainly not all anarchists were Italians (Bondanella 176). 9. According to Riis, the Italian generally does not report issues to the police and prefers settling scores himself. This is even the case when he has been physically attacked: “The wounded man can seldom be persuaded to betray

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him. He wards off all inquiries with a wicked ‘I fix him myself’, and there the matter rests until he either dies or recovers. If the latter, the community hears after a while of another Italian affray, a man stabbed in a quarrel, dead or dying, and the police know that ‘he’ has been fixed, and the account squared” (Riis 95). 10. The woman working with the criminals treats Maria poorly, which is in contrast to the expectation of gendered compassion. The American press at the time perpetuated the stereotype of Italian women as connected with crime (Bertellini 193). 11. The term ‘wop’ was used in a derogatory way for Italian immigrants. The slur likely originated from the southern Italian dialectal word ‘guappo’, meaning ‘dandy’ or ‘swagger’ (see Zimmer 2018). I am grateful for Daniele Fioretti’s comments and for pointing me to this article. 12. “Doti dinamiche come le italiane—quell’immediato, miracoloso senso d’adattamento, la fantasia rapida e vivace, una scioltezza nativa di movimenti—parevano fatte apposta per essere incanalate e per prosperare nel cinematografo. Ancora qualità italiane: la costanza, il senso dell’ordine, quella snellezza di invenzione di eredità gloriosissima” (Puccini 329). “Dynamic attributes like the Italian ones—that immediate, miraculous sense of adaptation, the quick and lively imagination, a native fluidity of movements—seemed made to be channeled and to flourish in cinema. Other Italian qualities: constancy, a sense of order, that slenderness of invention of a very glorious heritage” (my translation). 13. Antonio Maiori was born in 1870 in Sicily. Already in the late 1800s, he performed Shakespeare in the Bowery. He also had a role in the film Poor Little Peppina (1916). Cesare Gravina was born in 1858 in Naples. He was a conductor in Italy who had worked at La Scala. In the United States, he became a film actor and performed in more than 70 films. Other examples include the actors Tullio Carminati and Agostino Borgato, who had performed together with Eleonora Duse (Muscio 2018, 118–120). 14. While Italians were appreciated for their artistic talents, Italian actors generally did not represent Italian main characters, which can be interpreted as a sign of xenophobia (Muscio 2018, 118). 15. San Francisco was one of the few cities where Italians from Northern Italy outnumbered Italians from Southern Italy (Mangione and Morreale 147). 16. This contradictory perception of Italy and the Italians in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century has been analyzed in Brodhead (1994). 17. Like ‘wop’, ‘dago’ was a derogatory term, used for Italian immigrants. 18. The Wop tells the story of Luigi, a widowed father who after being unjustly arrested and sentenced, gets enraged with the judge and is possessed by the

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idea of killing the judge’s child. After serving his sentence, he enters the judge’s house, but when he is about to kill the girl sleeping on a bed, she awakes and Luigi recognizes that she is his own daughter who had been cared for during his absence by the judge’s daughter. 19. Beban was a well-known actor with roots in dramatic theater. He became famous by performing the melodrama The Sign of the Rose, which showed his suitability for Italian roles. He thus became the Italian face of American cinema (Bertellini 214–216). 20. Keil argues that the film sought to appeal to both, the middle class and the working immigrant class. While the frame story, as well as the portrayal of Italy, was directed at the middle-class audience, the inner narrative contains many narrative elements familiar and hence appealing to the immigrant population (see Keil 1990). 21. An ‘iris shot’ shows the center of the frame in a circle. Frequently, a circular mask was used to create that shot. The Italian makes frequent use of iris shots to emphasize or evoke emotion. 22. Beppo’s gondoliere dress is likely also from Southern Italy since Beban bought it from a Sicilian immigrant (Bondanella 25). 23. The scenes depicting New York were filmed in San Francisco (Bondanella 25). 24. According to Mitry (1983), “as soon as we get to New York and the streets of Brooklyn, it all changes. What we then find is truth, the unmistakable authenticity of life ‘caught unawares’”. Certain scenes remind Mitry even of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1946) (cf. Mitry, 9). Also the way the intertitles depict Beppo’s English can be described as linguistic realism. For example, when he tries to get his money back from the thieves, an intertitle reads: “‘I must get-a-de-milk or my babee is die’” (54:17) (Bondanella 26). 25. An ambivalent characterization is typical for films produced during the transition phase, where immigrants often are humanized and portrayed with compassion (Muscio 2004, 106). 26. The encounter between Beppo and Corrigan is presented in a highly spectacular manner. After a first rejection from Corrigan, a tracking shot depicts Beppo holding on to the driving car before Corrigan pushes him onto the street. A close-up depicts Corrigan’s boots on Beppo’s face. This sequence is intercut with a medium close-up of Annette waiting for the milk, evoking further compassion for the family’s dire situation. 27. The portrayal of Beppo as part of a former happy family is used to contrast his rage. According to Casella, the United States used to be fascinated with the portrayal of the Italian family. The depiction of family in The Italian is at times reminiscent of depictions of the holy family or la Pietà (Casella 28). 28. The acronym WASP stands for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, the social group representing the dominant culture and upper-class elite of the United States.

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Works Cited Alleman, Richard. New York: The Movie Lover’s Guide: The Ultimate Insider Tour of Movie New York. New York, NY: Broadway Books, 2005. Anonymous. “The Italian”. New York Dramatic Mirror. December 30, (1914), 26–27. Bertellini, Giorgio. Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape, and the Picturesque. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010. Bondanella, Peter. Hollywood Italians: Dagos, Palookas, Romeos, Wise Guys, and Sopranos. New York, NY: Continuum, 2004. Brodhead, Richard H. “Strangers on a Train: The Double Dream of Italy in the American Gilded Age.” Modernism/Modernity, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1994), 1–19. Carravetta, Peter. “The Silence of the Atlantians: Contact, Conflict, Consolidation (1880–1913)”. In The Routledge History of Italian Americans, ed. William J. Connell and Stanislao G. Pugliese, 132–151. London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2018. Casella, Paola. Hollywood Italian: gli italiani nell’America di celluloide. Milano: Baldini & Castoldi, 1998. Ellerbee, Genevieve. “Voyage to Italia: Americans in Italy in the Nineteenth Century.” Sheldon Museum of Art Catalogues and Publications 83, 2010. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/sheldonpubs/83/ (accessed April 12, 2023). Keil, Charlie. “Reframing The Italian: Questions of Audience Address in Early Cinema.” Journal of Film and Video 42/1 (1990), 36–48. Looney, Dennis. “Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy in Nineteenth-Century America.” In The Routledge History of Italian Americans, edited by William J.  Connell and Stanislao G.  Pugliese, 91–104. London and New  York, NY: Routledge, 2018. Mangione, Jerre and Ben Morreale. La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience. New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 1992. Mitry, Jean. “Thomas H. Ince: His Esthetic, His Films, His Legacy.” Translated by Martin Sopocy and Paul Attallah. Cinema Journal 22/2 (1983), 2–25. Muscio, Giuliana. “East Coast/West Coast: The Long Tradition of Italian Immigrant Performers.” California Italian Studies 9/1 (2019), 1–17. https:// escholarship.org/uc/item/4x94q9wd (Accessed April 12, 2023). ———. “Italians in Hollywood.” In Italy in Hollywood, edited by Stefania Ricci, 116–181. Torino: Skira, 2018. ———. Piccole Italie, grandi schermi. Scambi cinematografici tra Italia e Stati Uniti 1895–1945. Roma: Bulzoni, 2004. Ricci, Stefania. “Italy in Hollywood.” In Italy in Hollywood, edited by Stefania Ricci, 8–21. Torino: Skira, 2018.

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Riis, Jacob A. How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. Boston, MA and New York, NY: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Tamburri, Anthony Julian. Re-viewing Italian Americana: Generalities and Specificities on Cinema. New York, NY: Bordighera Press, 2011. Tirabassi, Maddalena. “Why Italians left Italy: The Physics and Politics of Migration, 1870–1920.” In The Routledge History of Italian Americans, edited by William J.  Connell and Stanislao G.  Pugliese, 117–131. London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2018. Zimmer, Ben. “‘Wop’ Doesn’t Mean What Andrew Cuomo Thinks It Means.” The Atlantic. April 23, 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ archive/2018/04/wop-­d oesnt-­m ean-­w hat-­a ndrew-­c uomo-­t hinks-­i t-­ means/558659/ [Accessed September 15, 2023].

Films Cited The Adventures of Lieutenant Petrosino (Sidney M. Goldin, 1912) At the Altar (D.W. Griffith, 1909) The Black Hand (Wallace McCutcheon, 1906) Bicycle Thieves [Ladri di biciclette] (Vittorio De Sica, 1946) Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914) The Criminals (Allan Dwan, 1913) The Detectives of the Italian Bureau (Sidney Olcott, 1909) Good Morning Babilonia (Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, 1987) The Greaser’s Gauntlet (D.W. Griffith, 1907) The Italian (Reginald Barker, 1915) In Little Italy (D.W. Griffith, 1909) The Organ Grinder (George Melford, 1912) The Padrone’s Ward (Lloyd Ingraham, 1914) Pippa Passes (D.W. Griffith, 1909) Poor Little Peppina (Sidney Olcott, 1916) The Violin Maker of Cremona (D.W. Griffith, 1909) The Wop (Carl Laemmle, 1913)

CHAPTER 4

Italianness and Foundational Masculinity in Edward Dmytryk’s Rendition of Pietro Di Donato’s Christ in Concrete Gloria Pastorino

A recent adaptation into Sicilian of Shakespeare’s Othello by actor, director, and writer Luigi Lo Cascio portrays the Moor’s reaction to Desdemona’s presumed infidelity as something that has nothing to do with cultural or racial differences and everything with gender ones. The “green-eyed monster” is awakened in Othello by Iago’s insinuations, which are believed on evidence that is, at best, circumstantial, because the two soldiers speak the same language. Lo Cascio highlights this aspect of the play by making Othello, Iago, and a soldier/narrator (absent in the original play) speak Sicilian, while Desdemona speaks in Italian. Incomprehension between the sexes is determined by the fact that they literally and figuratively speak a different language: what triumphs in this Othello is the camaraderie between men—a bond that no other type of

G. Pastorino (*) Department of Literature, Languages, Writing, and Humanities, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Fioretti, F. Orsitto (eds.), Italian Americans in Film and Other Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47211-4_4

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family can rival, no matter how strong the ties. A similar apparently unshakable male bond is displayed in a film shot in the middle of the twentieth century, Edward Dmytryk’s Christ in Concrete (aka Give Us This Day, aka Salt to the Devil, 1949).1 It depicts a community, the Italian-American one, that is traditionally identified with holding heteronormative family ties above any other and, indeed, the film is a love story marred by poverty. However, it also shows how the bond created among men who work together challenges the allegiance to one’s family and defines men’s identity. It is the betrayal of that bond that largely causes the protagonist’s demise in a country in the middle of an identity crisis, following the Wall Street crash of 1929. The film suggests that unity, rather than divisiveness, is what can help workers (and, by extension, the country) get out of the impasse, at the end of the 1920s as well as in 1949, in the era of the Red Scare, just preceding Senator McCarthy’s witch hunt. Dmytryk’s film also signals a change in attitude towards Italian immigrants, who had been part of the fabric of American society since the turn of the century. By the 1950s nobody disputed their presence in America and this film portrays their community in a benevolent, albeit stereotype-ridden, light. Christ in Concrete focuses on construction workers’ conditions in the 1920s as well as on their shattered hopes and dreams after 1929: their plights are America’s plights and the depiction of their lives as realistic rather than cartoonish marks a switch in the perception of Italians that is typical of the decade following World War II. Christ in Concrete is the adaptation of the novel by the same title written in 1939 by second-generation Italian bricklayer Pietro Di Donato. The author did the treatment for the film, John Penn did the adaptation, and Ben Barzman, a screenwriter blacklisted just like the director and the actor playing the protagonist (Sam Wanamaker), wrote the screenplay. The result is a film that combines several plot points of the five chapters of the novel, adding extra characters and melodrama, to expand on what is narrated in the first chapter, “Geremio”—originally a short story about Pietro di Donato’s father’s death. The novel—a complex and multifaceted portrayal of the lives of immigrants in New York—was chosen as “Book of the Month” over John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, another novel about the plight of lower classes. It is written in an English that reproduces as faithfully as possible how the Italian spoken by immigrants would sound. The experiment is quite sophisticated: Italian immigrants among themselves would either speak their dialect, if they came from the same region, or a mixture of dialect and Italian, depending on their level of education

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before emigrating. The novel is narrated in the third person in perfect English (remarkably poetic, at times), while dialogues sometimes use more or less correct Italian, for instance, “bella casa mio” (Di Donato 14); words and expressions that mimic the Italian ones, for instance, referring to men as “Christians” (Di Donato 12), which is a synonym for ‘man’ in several Southern dialects; or using repetition of words not normally used to express a concept and placing adjectives after the noun, as in: “courage-­ courage, sister mine” (Di Donato 33). When characters speak in English their words are accented: “[…] somebody’s whose gotta bigga buncha keeds and he alla times talka from somebodys elsa” (Di Donato 12) or “Padrone-padrone, the underpinning gotta be make safe and…” (Di Donato 18)—to which the padrone answers “Lissenyawopbastard!”, giving the exchange a faithful reproduction of the two people’s slang, the Italian immigrant’s and the Anglo-American contractor’s. This attention to language and life in the tenement gives the novel an authentic flare that is completely missing from the 1949 film version.2 The film plays the same game that Di Donato’s contemporaries played to be accepted into mainstream culture, as Fred Gardaphé writes in the introduction to the most recent edition of the novel, quoting Arthur Casciato’s speech from 1939 and noting how: “the writer would efface his or her own class or ethnic identity to speak in the sonorous voice of ‘the people’” (xi). Most traces of ethnicity are erased in the film, where only the protagonist’s wife Annunziata speaks with an Italian accent (also being the only Italian actor), while the rest of the cast has either American or British accents.3 The use of language is not the only difference with the novel: the film focuses on Geremio—a skilled bricklayer and eventually foreman—his loves, aspirations, and struggles until his death in an accident caused by endless code violations made ‘necessary’ by Great-Depression-induced budgetary cuts. The film strikes a balance between Geremio’s personal family melodrama and workers’ conditions, camaraderie, fears, and helplessness in a system that exploits them disregarding their safety and retribution fairness. The director, Edward Dmytryk, shot the film in England, where he took refuge for two years when finding work in the US had become impossible for him and the other nine of the infamous ‘Hollywood Ten’—the writers, directors, and producer4 who refused to answer whether they belonged to the Communist Party during the HUAC (House Committee on Un-American Activities) hearings in 1947.5 Notwithstanding Dmytryk’s distancing from the Communist party, of which he was a member for less than a year in the 1940s, his politics were leftist and liberal.6

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Christ in Concrete indicts an economic system that exploits workers providing inadequate compensation and no security. Moreover, as Rebecca Prime notices, the accident that buries the protagonist alive at the end of the film “serves as a visual metaphor for the collapse of the American Dream and the promise of a better life America held out to its immigrants” (Prime 2014, 122).7 As Peter Bondanella holds in Hollywood Italians, the structure of the final editing of the film is akin to film noir (Bondanella 32)—Dmytryk’s specialty. The black-and-white film begins with Geremio running through the tenement streets up to his apartment and having a row with his wife Annunziata. The story of what led to the opening night scene is retold to a character that does not exist in the novel, Kathleen, Geremio’s ex-lover and now mistress. In typical film noir fashion, once the long flashback ends, the main character’s road to redemption is cut short by his untimely death that punishes the sinner, following the taste and morality of the times. However, the Italian release presented at the Venice Film Festival was edited chronologically, without the flashback. The resulting narration slightly changes the focus of the film, turning it into a true tragedy where Geremio’s death becomes the preventable accident on the job illustrated in the first chapter of the novel as well. Geremio’s lapse in judgment yields a death sentence (impaled and buried in cement) incommensurate with the crime (betraying his wife and cutting security corners on the construction job). Bondanella also sees the film as indebted to Neorealism, mentioning the producer, Rodney Geiger’s ties with Roberto Rossellini, whose Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisan (1946) he had produced, and who was originally supposed to direct this film as well: “Most likely, Geiger envisioned Dmytryk’s film as a means of cashing in on what he perceived to be a relatively small but profitable market for the starkly realistic films with ethnic Italian themes in the wake of the popular works of Rossellini, De Sica, and other Italian directors” (Bondanella 30). Rebecca Prime, however, points out that the film has little in common with neorealist concerns: Rather than using real locations, it was filmed entirely on sound stages. Its narrative does not focus on contemporary events (the story is set in the 1920s and early 1930s) and follows a clear causal structure that reflects screenwriter Ben Barzman’s Hollywood training […] If Italian neorealism is a presence in the film, it reveals itself in Christ in Concrete’s thematic preoc-

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cupations and, specifically, its sympathetic and frank depiction of the lives of working-class immigrants. (Prime 121)

That was in line with author Di Donato’s concerns in writing the novel. He had first published the first chapter as a short story in the March 1937 issue of Esquire magazine; the story described the circumstances that led to the death of his father on the job in 1923. Later on, he expanded it into a novel about Geremio’s oldest son, Paul, a stand-in for Di Donato himself, who, like Paul, was 12 when his father died and had to give up the idea of studying to begin working as a bricklayer to sustain his mother and seven siblings. The film is not a bildungsroman focused on Paul’s sense of responsibility: totally absent from the film are Paul’s difficulties to grapple with religion, the hypocrisy of self-serving Catholic priests, the pseudo-­ religion of mediums who pretend to commune with the dead for a fee, the support system built into Italian tenement life, and the exploitation without possibility of redemption of Italian immigrant workforce (both in construction for men and in its equivalent for women, the textile industry), culminating with his godfather’s death in the hard times of 1929. The film just focuses on Geremio’s story, from bachelor bricklayer on New  York high rises to a family man with four (not eight) children made with Annunziata, a sort of ‘mail-order bride’ imported from Italy to settle down and establish some kind of legacy (instead of the woman married at 15 in Abruzzo 20 years earlier before migrating to the US, as the story goes in Di Donato’s life and novel). In the film, she is the eldest daughter of the woman Geremio’s friend Luigi8 courted years earlier in Italy, whose face and values remind Geremio of a wholesome life that does not seem to exist for him in America. The film focuses on external signifiers of Italianness such as food, which is never missing in an Italian household, as co-worker Giulio says when his wife comes by the construction site at lunchtime to prepare him a giant sandwich. While he shares it with Geremio and Luigi—bachelors condemned to skimpy American pre-packaged food—Giulio says: “When an Italian cooks, there is enough food for Garibaldi’s army!” That seems to be confirmed during the wedding scene, which begins, amidst straw-­ covered wine bottles, with Geremio’s exhortation to “devour” the suckling pig in front of him and ends, after much singing in English and a cake, with enormous bowls of unseasoned spaghetti with tomato sauce in separate, just as big, bowls. The same kind of spaghetti with tomato sauce is eaten by Geremio at the very end of his three-day honeymoon, when the

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lie about having bought a house for Annunziata is revealed to her. There is spaghetti with meat sauce after a snowstorm in 1929, when all the men are laid off but manage to make a little money shoveling snow. The bounty is shared with the impoverished owner of the house Geremio, and Annunziata keep trying to buy, Jaroslav, when he stops by their apartment to let them know he can’t hold out any longer and he needs to sell.9 In each circumstance, the consumption of food is joyous and convivial, even in one of the last scenes of the film, when Geremio, as foreman who has betrayed his crew by not being clear on the perils of the job, self-isolates. Workers merrily share what looks like several pizza pies prepared, as usual, by Giulio’s wife, as if food were always a way to forget for a moment the preoccupations of the day (and as if the meager pay of a Depression-era job could afford Giulio to feed all his co-workers). This insistence on food in a 1949 film seems to indicate that Italians are already identified with food, child-like enthusiasm for simple pleasures, and an attitude of counting one’s blessings as long as there is health, food on the table and, possibly, red wine. The extravagantly rich wedding scene right after Annunziata’s boat arrival to New York is based on the fourth chapter of the novel, “Fiesta,” which culminates with the feast for the wedding between Ci Luigi, Annunziata’s brother maimed on the job, and Cola, a widow of one of Geremio’s co-workers, killed in the same accident in which Geremio loses his life in chapter one. The mouth-watering food is described in detail, from antipasti to the soup, to eels, fried squabs and mushrooms, escarole salad, a stuffed suckling pig, snails, lobsters, and all sorts of clams and mussels for a five-hour dinner that takes 20 pages to describe. As Michele Fazio (2007) explains in his article “‘Vomit Your Poison’: Violence, Hunger, and Symbolism in Pietro Di Donato’s Christ in Concrete,” in the novel, food has a far less stereotypically epicurean meaning. The novel begins with Geremio and his fellow workers being figuratively eaten up by the building that collapses on, hurls, impales, and buries them inside itself in a particularly graphic description that fuses “body parts with wood, steel, and concrete, inextricably binding workers to their job, even in death” (Fazio 117). The blood spilled turns into a grotesque rendition of the Eucharist, Tomas’ splattered brains are compared to macaroni, and Geremio’s own attempt to bite through wood to keep breathing is thwarted by concrete pouring on his head, crushing his jaw, and turning into a deadly last meal. Food becomes torture for hungry 12-year-old Paul trying to find help to feed his family: the fat priest denies him help and

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gives him a piece of his cake to bring home, a neighbor offers him bread, and eventually workers from his father’s old crew share sandwiches with him but it all feels like charity, bitter bread, while Annunziata is left with two onions and few potatoes to feed seven children. In Fazio’s reading, the wedding feast in chapter four is a celebration of sensuality and working-class masculinity: the over-consumption of food is akin to a display of sexual prowess. The spaghetti eaten at the end of the meal (already a selfindulgent excess after an already abundant meal) are not the film’s exuberant extravagance of a group of people who wants to prolong celebrations, but an eating competition among men who declare themselves still hungry, interestingly “pregnant for” (Di Donato 261) spaghetti. Spaghetti are poured directly on the washed tabletop, with “the pans of thick red oily sauce and handfuls of grated cheese and hot pepper, mixing the contents of the separate rows deftly with fork and spoon” (Di Donato 263). Bowls of wine are placed at each end of the long table, men’s hands are tied behind their back, and food is gobbled down in lusty mouthfuls amid hotpepper-induced tears. There is little difference between the frenzied movements of the eating competition and the following tarantella dance: it is all part of bacchanalia that, in a novel that emphasizes poverty and hardship, stands out incongruently as the forced effort to enjoy life with limited means. For Fazio “food is eaten as if one were making love” (Fazio 129). Virility is reaffirmed in the excessiveness of eating and in boasting about belonging to the Italian race “the richer than the richest, purer than the finest, more capable than an-y! an-Y!” one, “the flower of Christians—…. We are the glory of Rome, the culture!” (Di Donato 261). Since the fifth and last chapter, “Annunziata,” opens with the words “Nineteen twenty-nine!” and describes the gruesome death on the job of Paul’s self-appointed godfather and mentor Nazone (and Paul’s consequent departure from God), Ci Luigi’s wedding feast feels like a last supper. The novel is rife with Christian references, including the title one. In the last chapter, Paul sees his father in a nightmare saying: “Ahhh, not even the Death can free us, for we are … Christ in concrete…” (Di Donato 298). Geremio is Christ, but so are his fellow workers, Nazone and Paul, forever and cyclically, from father to son, condemned to die for a job that brings no rewards: “Who nails us to the cross? Mother … why are we living!” (Di Donato 298). None of this is present in the film, not even the several references to Italian culture, which show how general cultural awareness in Italy transcends the level of education and social class: Paul building a radio is called “a Marconi,” ‘the Lucy’ is thus nicknamed after

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his favorite opera, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, at the wedding celebration they play Verdi’s Aida’s triumphal march, Dante’s Divine Comedy is quoted, etc. The only signifier of Italianness in the film is the consumption of spaghetti10; if it weren’t for the fact that Italians constituted the highest percentage of construction workers, the film could be about any immigrant group living in tenements in the 1920s11: accents (except for Annunziata’s) are American or stridently British and the song sang at the wedding reception is a ballad with no relation to Italy at all, not even melodically.12 Dmytryk’s film focuses on the social injustice of workers’ exploitation, which is a theme with which Anglophone audiences could identify in the post-World War II years. Unlike the novel, the film does not emphasize the importance of family life or the sense of community found in tenement living, where common conditions create a real support system, a bond, and a sense of protection stronger than what official religion can offer. The film’s references to family are tied to the production of children or food—both women’s jobs that include men only marginally, in terms of responsibility more than actual participation and care. The Italian women of the film are all confined to the domestic sphere: Giulio’s wife, who brings food to his workplace twice and has two lines (about food and the new baby’s tooth); the midwife, present at the wedding and for the birth of the couple’s four children (four fewer than in the novel); and Annunziata, who embodies the need for domesticity since her storyline revolves entirely around the domus, the promised house with which Geremio lured her to New York from Italy and for which they save every possible penny for the eight years they are together, until his death. The emancipated and sexually liberated Kathleen (not present in the novel) is not Italian and does not share the same needs to have a house and a family.13 On the contrary, her attempt to change Geremio into a store clerk and be content with the fun they are having together (“Why tie ourselves down? This is 1921!”) is what prompts his decision to ask Luigi to put him in touch with Annunziata for a short epistolary courtship. While Annunziata’s only goal in life is to raise her children in a house rather than the tenement apartment where she gave birth to them, Kathleen can afford to take care of herself, as Geremio tells her, reproachfully, after fighting with Annunziata at the beginning of the film before the long flashback: “You’re beautiful. Annunziata’s hands are rough. She’s worked, had children, she’s old. No older than you. What right have you to be beautiful?” Kathleen’s self-serving lifestyle is criticized by Geremio at the end of the flashback, when he realizes that her

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suggestion to run away together would make him less of a man: “No. A man doesn’t live for himself alone. There must be more than that!” The creation of Kathleen’s character for the film serves two purposes: it helps Dmytryk further his agenda in support of the rights of blue-collar workers and it acts as a catalyst for Geremio’s self-awareness. It is her attempt to make him choose a life of pleasure not tied to responsibilities that makes him run in the opposite direction twice, to build a more meaningful life. The film is not a bildungsroman about Geremio’s son Paul, but it may be seen as a grown man’s achievement of maturity—too late, since his newfound awareness of a real man’s duties leads him to his untimely death. Kathleen’s philosophy is selfish and the film implicitly criticizes the Anglo-American individualist philosophy as destructive of communities and ultimately of self-esteem. Geremio’s attempt to embrace her worldview leads him to betray both his wife and his co-workers, while the film’s message is that only in unity and common struggle there can be progress and meaningful achievements. The gifted bricklayer at the beginning of the story, who believes in the American Dream of attaining personal success by earning $1.50 an hour, turns into the responsible foreman at the end of the film, who puts his men’s safety above everything, even in the darkest hours of the Great Depression. In a remarkably cynical twist, his death yields the ‘human capital’ adjudication of $1000, prompting Annunziata’s final remark to Luigi “I’m thinking that, at last, Geremio has bought us a house.”14 Geremio’s death marks Annunziata’s definitive confinement to and identification with the domestic space, taking away her happiness as a woman while achieving her dream of being a homeowner. Geremio’s ‘American Dream’ results in his death and her bitter individualism, proving that only in the respect of the bonds of a community there is strength and true happiness. This thesis is also demonstrated by the bond Geremio has with his fellow bricklayers and by the consequences that betraying that bond brings. The beginning of the long flashback sees him with his ‘work family’, atop an unfinished skyscraper in New  York. Some spilled mortar on a plank between sections of the building under construction on the 40th floor causes a worker to slip with his barrel of bricks and hit Geremio, who almost falls to certain death. Aware that “Forty [stories] is no higher than ten” and that “it’s easier for a bricklayer to go down than up,” Geremio begins to think about mortality and the mark a man like him can leave on earth, aside from the anonymous contribution to building high rises in the city. The idea of marriage stems from seeing Giulio with his baby and his

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wife’s hot food during lunch break on a cold day: the warmth and complicity of an Italian household make him think that perhaps that is the key not to be forgotten once dead. Luigi talks nostalgically about his ex-­ girlfriend Filomena and the ten children she gave her shoemaker husband who does not even make 50 cents a day; the eldest is Annunziata, whose typically Italian face seems to Geremio a promise of serenity. Once he does marry her under false pretenses of owning a house (the only condition Annunziata imposes before leaving Italy), the purpose of Geremio’s work becomes securing the $500 needed as a deposit for the $1000 Brooklyn house Jaroslav, an already integrated Swedish immigrant, agreed to sell.15 The moment he begins to work to pay for the house, while they live on the top floor of a two-room tenement apartment, Geremio tries to detach himself from his work family, pursuing individual achievements while his co-workers insist on strength in union.16 It is this moment that marks, in Dmytryk’s agenda, the tension between the capitalistic pursuit of individual gain and the socialist awareness that workers can only see their rights recognized and make a decent living if they stick together. Even though Geremio is the most skilled bricklayer of the bunch, his victories only make sense when they are shared equally among his fellow workers. The individual pursuit of fame and fortune implicit in the ‘American Dream’ is a hoax, hardly achievable from the lowest ranks of society, in a job that fosters exploitation with limited security. Collegiality and respect for the common struggle, on the other hand, are the way to advance the workers’ cause and put food on the table, even in the darkest moments following the Wall Street crash of 1929. The film explicitly separates the private from the public sphere of the protagonist’s life (thus departing from the novel) also by defining gender roles in ways that would be more comprehensible for an American audience. For instance, in the film, it is Annunziata who displays “feminine” superstitions by sprinkling salt, “especially in the corners” of the house’s main room, and offering to hang the picture of Saint Joseph to protect the new house. In the novel, it is the men on the job on Good Friday who suggest to “Master Geremio” that for good luck in a new home, one is to sprinkle well with salt … especially the corners, and on moving day sweep with a new broom to the center and pick all up—but do not sweep it out over the threshold!

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That may be, Pietro. But, Master Geremio, it would be better in my mind that holy water should bless. And also a holy picture of Saint Joseph guarding the door. (Di Donato 20)

In the film, Annunziata’s disillusion when she needs to leave the house at the end of the honeymoon and her dismay at the living conditions of the tenement leave Geremio no choice but to try to accumulate the money for the down payment as fast as possible. For years they live on the bare minimum, so that he can keep his promise to Annunziata to give Jaroslav the $500 to buy the house. However, in the long run, Annunziata’s needs cannot compete with the crew of men to whom Geremio has pledged his work life. They are his moral compass, the people whose trust is indispensable to stay alive, and his true support system. The day foreman Murdin promises to award a $100 bonus to the fastest bricklayer, Geremio is ready to win the challenge alone, to feed the house nest egg and satisfy Annunziata’s demands sooner. However, Luigi protests the philosophy behind pitting man against man so that they will all work harder in hope of gaining extra money. He also suggests to Geremio that they must not work against one another since they “have always been like five sticks in a bundle.” Individual ambition quickly turns into camaraderie and, even though Geremio is the fastest, he is happy to work hard, set aside his differences with another bricklayer not to “fight like women,” share the bounty equally, and go drink with the boys who tease him remembering “when he was a man and not just a husband, […] when he had a taste for the female and wasn’t afraid of them.” In a way, he sacrifices Annunziata’s aspirations in favor of his work family, as he will reluctantly do again in 1929, leaving a meager one-day job to Giulio (whose wife repays him by sending a bottle of wine to Annunziata, again fulfilling her role of constant food provider even in hardship). The looks of the other four in the crew are enough to shame him into accepting that the person most in need and not the fastest bricklayer should benefit from a job offer—after all, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. However, when he sacrifices the men’s safety by accepting a demolition/construction job as foreman, fully knowing it is not safe, the consequences are disastrous. When Giulio questions the legitimacy of the job, Luigi answers that if Geremio saw the plans it is good enough for him: the trust built over time is all that is needed among men. If Christian symbolism in the novel is multifarious, in the film it is more straightforward (if dual): Geremio acts like Judas betraying his ‘apostles’—his group of men—and dies like Christ, impaled and buried in

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cement rather than nailed on a cross, on Good Friday, washing away his sins and achieving redemption for his family in the $1000 final adjudication. While there is an almost perfect balance between the scenes with Annunziata and those with co-workers (15 vs. 16) and a similar pattern of betrayal and forgiveness, it is in the company of men that Geremio seeks understanding and recognition, since their bond is forged by the common, daily struggle to sustain the other, personal part of their lives. It is on the job that they risk their lives, make decisions, and build their identities as men. It is with men that Geremio finds advice, comfort, and reassurance in all the crucial events of his life: the decision to marry an Italian woman from Abruzzi, introduced by Luigi; the arrival of Annunziata, who is first seen and protected by his work friends standing on the dock and then accepted by Geremio in front of them; the wedding, where he signs the contract for the house and negotiates a three-day honeymoon to delay giving the news of his betrayal of trust to Annunziata; during the difficult birth of his first child, when he turns to the expensive doctor after  the midwife fails, and is surrounded by his closest co-workers while waiting for the child to be born; and at the birth of his subsequent three children, playing cards with the boys in the adjacent room. It is also with men that Geremio in the film feels the sting of being judged for being self-serving. When, towards the end of the film, aware of the fishiness of the job Geremio has engaged them in, Giulio tries to get closer to Geremio, offering to break bread (pizza, actually) and reminding him of their pact of being “like five sticks in a bundle,” Geremio is not ready to be welcomed back into the fold, because he is not ready to admit his guilt. It is Luigi’s crippling accident on the unsafe job that finally causes Geremio’s crisis and the betrayal of his wife, whose forgiveness comes more easily than the men’s. With them, he needs to come clean and admit that “there was a thing between us as man to man which I have wronged and for this especially I ask your forgiveness.” The scene is reminiscent of Annunziata’s arrival by boat in 1921: just like Geremio could not see his promised bride until his five friends opened up, fan-like, and revealed the beautiful woman around whom they assembled, protectively, so could he not see Luigi, back from the hospital in crutches, until the three friends reveal his presence on the job site, opening up in the same fan-like fashion. The reveal of the most important person in Geremio’s life at key moments always happens in this rather theatrical way that helps him understand which is the best course of action. Luigi’s maimed but alive body acts as a reminder of

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the fragility of life and of  Geremio’s responsibility, as foreman and as friend, to protect it. However, even when the men re-welcome him into the fold and re-pledge their allegiance to him and their group, Geremio’s past sin catches up with him. Not having insisted on better protective measures causes the collapse of the building they are contracted to partly demolish and rebuild. Unlike in the novel, he alone dies, impaled and suffocated by the content of a loosened cement vat. The punishment seems incommensurate with the crime, but so was Christ’s. Geremio is not the one betrayed, but the one who, at many levels, does the betraying in the film—no matter how much he repents and makes amends. Part Judas, part Christ (because his sin is universal and his sacrifice brings redemption), Geremio’s fate is to die a most horrible, exemplary death. The only outcome possible in a socially unjust world is that men who do not uphold the bond of brotherhood, toil, and community are destined to die alone. Fred Gardaphé reiterates in the DVD voiceover discussion that Job is capitalized in the novel because it is the only god for workers, the real church upon whose altar men lay their hopes; he talks about “the American nightmare,” the other side of the coin of the promised riches migrants would find in the United States, and of the sacrifices of Geremio’s generation so that the next one would live better. Undoubtedly, the capital letter denotes reverence for the mighty Job that may take more than it gives to the men spending their lives for its benefit. That is why betraying the trust of the men who share the burden of Job’s toil means upsetting a balance that is supposed to be sacred—as much as a Catholic marriage, if not more. Job gives and takes from the men who worship it daily. The only defense to prevail in the Job is not to try to expand one’s personal gain, but to band together and put up a united front. That is why Geremio does not lose his life for the betrayal of his wife, but rather for not being truthful with his men, the other four sticks in the bundle, whose lives he puts in danger.

Notes 1. The original title was changed into Give Us This Day because “considered blasphemous by its English distributors”, as Erica Sheen writes in “Un-American: Dmytryk, Rossellini and Christ in Concrete” in Krutnik et al. (2007) ‘Un-American’ Hollywood, 40. For the same reason, it was re-­named Salt to the Devil for the American release, which was a flop largely because the film was pulled under threat of the American Legion to boy-

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cott all films in theaters that were going to project it, as reported by Dmytryk in his autobiography and by Erica Sheen. In Italy, the film was distributed as Cristo tra i muratori, a less forceful image than the original title that alluded more poignantly to protagonist Geremio’s death. The Italian version of the film (edited slightly differently from the original) won the Critics Award, the Premio Pasinetti, at the 11th Venice International Film Festival in 1950, while Dmytryk was in prison in the United States for Contempt of Congress for his refusal to testify about his and his colleagues’ presumed Communist sympathies. It was presented ‘fuori concorso’ (out of competition) because it had already been awarded the Crystal Globe at the 5th Karlowy Vary International Film Festival earlier the same year. 2. An actual tenement in the film is only seen in the B-roll titles that show shots of New York city streets and cityscapes from a distance first and then gets more and more into the underbelly of the glamorous city, from the Jersey side of the Hudson River, to Central Park, to Barbizon-Plaza (on Central Park South), to a small park and buildings in lower Manhattan, to a shot of Fifth Avenue, to an industrial area, to a shot of lower-income townhouses, to a tenement courtyard, with clothes hanging on lines and a dingy dog running around an unpaved street. The rest of the film is shot in the sound stage studios of Denham, England, as explained in the DVD voiceover feature of the film. 3. None more irksome than the children’s, who also grow up at record speed: by the end of the film Paul, the oldest, is 9 in 1929, while his father only decided to get married to a woman he never met and had to be wooed and “imported” from Italy in 1921. 4. Plus playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht testified he did not belong to the Communist party and left the country. J. Parnell Thomas, the Chairman of the committee, eventually was convicted of fraud and served nine months in prison, after relentlessly prosecuting Hollywood people who had not committed any crime. As reported by Friedman and Welsh in “A Very Narrow Path: The Politics of Edward Dmytryk”, “Citing constitutional guarantees of personal freedoms under the First Amendment, the other ten witnesses refused to answer the Committee’s questions about their political affiliations and were cited for contempt by Congress on November 24, 1947. All ten unsuccessfully appealed these charges and served six months to one year in prison” (Friedman, Welsh 214). 5. When he returned to America, he was imprisoned for four and a half months until he eventually recanted and collaborated, naming names in 1951, as he relates in his autobiography Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten. He was the only one in the group to recant. For further reading see the cited article by Friedman and Welsh “A Very Narrow Path” and Victor Navaski (2003), Naming Names.

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6. His 1947, Oscar-nominated Crossfire, for instance, denounced anti-­ Semitism as much as that year’s Oscar winner Gentleman’s Agreement, directed by Elia Kazan—another Hollywood director who testified against his colleagues. 7. As Pietro Di Donato’s son, Dick, explains in the DVD audio commentary on the film, his grandfather Geremio’s death was “one of the pivotal cases that started Workman’s Compensation.” 8. Luigi is actually “Ci Luigi” in the novel, Annunziata’s brother and Paul’s uncle (zio). 9. Eventually, Jaroslav agrees not to sell the house to someone else at Annunziata’s insistence. She gives him 100 dollars out of the last 125 left after the beginning of the Great Depression and then offers to share their meal. This part of the film plot is absent from the novel, but it serves the purpose of brilliantly  showing the solidarity among the lower classes in the film. 10. The previously mentioned pizza (towards the end of the film) and the presence of a suckling pig at Geremio and Annunziata’s wedding supper are also not common in American celebrations. 11. According to several sources, roughly 90 percent of New York City’s public works employees (and 99 percent of Chicago’s) were Italian. See http://www.digitalhistor y.uh.edu/voices/italian_immigration.cfm (accessed April 12, 2023) or https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-­ sciences/encyclopedias-­almanacs-­transcripts-­and-­maps/italian-­and-­greek-­ immigration (accessed April 12, 2023). 12. Ben Barzman himself wrote the lyrics to soundtrack writer Benjamin Frankel’s music, as recounted by Barzman’s widow and writer Norma in the DVD voiceover feature. 13. Kathleen is also never associated with food—just wine, at Gennaro’s, the neighborhood bar/dance hall frequented by Geremio and his crew. 14. In the novel, Geremio had bought a house and just needed to sign the papers at the time of his death. The money is almost entirely spent for his funeral, as we are told by Ci Luigi in the second chapter (“Job”): “The money that was to have bought your little house barely pays the burial and stone. You have no money” (Di Donato 63). The adjudication of the Compensation Bureau yields no money at all: Mr. Murdin’s lawyers and Referee Parker are on a first-name basis, barely look at the widow’s family, and conclude that “Eyetalian” laborers are unreliable, responsible for accidents, and therefore deserve no compensation (even though Geremio had tried to alert his boss to the many safety violations and the dangers of the job). As Murdin testifies: “The Eyetalians are good workers, when you watch and take care of them like a wet nurse. But when not personally supervised they get themselves into all kinds of trouble. They are careless like children” (Di Donato 175).

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15. The marriage begins with a lie and eventually is marred by a physical betrayal with Kathleen—both occurrences Annunziata is willing to overlook after pleas for forgiveness and vows to work harder. 16. There is none of this in the novel, where Geremio never betrays either wife or fellow co-workers and is respected by all. His death is particularly gruesome, but many others die on the job that fateful Good Friday of 1923, when Paul/Pietro is twelve, six years before the end of the novel and Paul’s rejection of religion in 1929, at the beginning of the Great Depression. What is never questioned is Geremio’s allegiance to ‘Job’ never mentioned with an article, as if it were as mysterious and worthy of respect an entity as God.

Works Cited Bondanella, Peter. Hollywood Italians: Dagos, Palookas, Romeos, Wise Guys, and Sopranos. Di Donato, Pietro. Christ in Concrete. Indianapolis, New York: The Bobbs-Merril Company, 1939. Dmytryk, Edward. Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten. Carbondale and Edwardsville. Southern Illinois University Press. 1996. Fazio, Michele. “‘Vomit Your Poison’: Violence, Hunger, and Symbolism in Pietro Di Donato’s Christ in Concrete,” MELUS, Vol. 32, Number 4 (2007), 115–137. Friedman, Lester D. and James M. Welsh. “A Very Narrow Path: The Politics of Edward Dmytryk.” Literature/Film Quarterly, Vol. 12, n. 4 (1984), 214–224. Krutnik, Frank, Steve Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter Stanfield. ‘Un-American’ Hollywood. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Navaski, Victor S. Naming Names. New York: Hill and Wang, 2003. Prime, Rebecca. Hollywood Exiles in Europe: The Blacklist and Cold War Film Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014.

Films Cited Christ in Concrete (Edward Dmytryk, 1949) Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1947) Paisan [Paisà] (Roberto Rossellini, 1946) Rome, Open City [Roma città aperta] (Roberto Rossellini, 1945)

CHAPTER 5

A Sting from the Past: Assimilation and Healing Rituals in Helen de Michiel’s Tarantella (1995) Daniele Fioretti

The years pass, and the women die. What do their daughters take with them? (Tarantella)

In the mid-1980s the sociologist Richard Alba published a book entitled Italian Americans: Into the Twilight of Ethnicity, where the term ethnicity should not be intended as a synonym for race, but as a reference to identity-­based ancestry. More specifically, ethnicity is founded on “a real or putative common ancestry and memories of a shared historical past, with a cultural focus on one or more symbolic elements defined as the epitome of one’s peoplehood” (Schermerhorn, 12). It is well known that the ethnicity of immigrants in the United States has been challenged since the day of their arrival: to be accepted, the immigrants were expected “to

D. Fioretti (*) Italian, 208 Irvin Hall, Miami University, Oxford, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Fioretti, F. Orsitto (eds.), Italian Americans in Film and Other Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47211-4_5

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throw off the cultures of their homelands, as so much old clothing that would no longer be needed in the benign environment of the New World” (Alba 1985, 5). Italian Americans discovered, at their own expense, that the environment was not so benign and that, more importantly, the process of assimilation was more complicated than a change of clothes. Many sociologists in the twentieth century believed that over time the melting pot would work its magic: all immigrants would assimilate into the mainstream society and lose their ethnic ties. This vision was inspired by the work of Robert Park, one of the most influential figures in early American sociology. In the 1920s Park focused his analysis on foreign immigrants in the United States and, based on this research, he claimed that trade, migration, and the advent of new technologies of communication, would eventually bring to an end ethnic differences and racial conflicts (Cornell and Hartmann, 4).1 However, things did not go as expected: after the 1960s the United States witnessed an important ethnic revival, to the extent that the sociologist Talcott Parsons wrote that “full assimilation in the sense of ethnicity’s becoming absorbed within a single category of ‘American’ is very little the case” (Jacobson, 6). The focus of this chapter is Italian American ethnicity which, according to several recent studies, proved itself very resilient to full assimilation.2 We have to keep in mind, though, that sociological studies rely on statistics and general trends, so they do not capture the complexity of the phenomenon at the individual level. With this caveat in mind, we must also remember that all ethnic minorities in the United States have a different history and that, over the years, many have been subject to various degrees of discrimination, based on race, color, and language. Northern European immigrants who spoke Germanic languages, for example, had an easier time assimilating to the American culture compared to Eastern and Southern Europeans, because of the similarities between their native tongues and cultures and the Anglo-Saxon one; Italians, whose language and customs were profoundly different, were perceived by the American mainstream population as aliens and subject for decades to harsh discrimination, even in terms of race. Italian “whiteness” has been called into question for decades: if in the early twentieth century the U.S.  Congress seriously debated if Italians were “full-­ blooded Caucasians” (Guglielmo, 6), in 1945 Lloyd Warner and Leo Srole, in their book Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups, still distinguished between “light Caucasians (like the South Irish and English Jews)” and “dark Caucasians like Sicilians” (Jacobson, 33). One of the

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reasons why many Italian immigrants resisted to full assimilation was probably the emphasis that traditional Italian culture places on family and community; nonetheless, the pressure was strong, and resisting assimilation could result in exclusion and marginalization. Amy Bernardy, who studied the life of Italian immigrants in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, expressed this concern in Italia randagia, a book written in Italian and published in 1913, when she wrote that Fortune, in America, is ‘nationalist’ and will not smile on the ‘dagoes’ if they do not Americanize, like the Irish, the Swede, and the Germans did before them (Bernardy, 234, my translation). Bernardy was right, of course, and she certainly captured the spirit of her time when she wrote that even the lowest Americans considered themselves superior to immigrants and looked down on every foreigner, either with contempt or with a patronizing attitude (ibid., 276). The situation was somewhat different for second-­ generation Italian Americans, who were born in the United States and therefore exposed to American culture not only through schools, but also through the social environment: friends, books, movies, music, and popular culture in general. Somatically, they looked like Anglo-Saxon Americans, and when they started speaking English as their first language, only the vowels at the end of their last names reminded people of their foreign origin. It was only normal that this new generation would end up entangled in a loyalty conflict between their family traditions and the requirements of the environment they were part of. This is how Alba summarizes the conundrum of the second generation: “caught between two cultural worlds, raised in an immigrant home but socialized on the streets and in the schools according to American ways, their fundamental dilemma was to define their identity” (Alba 1985, 75). Considering the high rate of intermarriage, and the decline of the use of Italian as the language for everyday use, Alba concluded that, in the mid-1980s, Italian Americans stood “on the verge of the twilight of their ethnicity” (ibid., 159). More than thirty years have passed since then, and Italian American families indeed look more and more like typical mainstream American families: Italian Americans statistically marry later than they did before (and frequently outside of their ethnic boundaries), divorce more often, and many gave up traditions like having meals together and speaking Italian at home.3 Ethnicity, especially for those coming from a mixed identity, is more the result of a choice than a destiny (Lieberson, Waters, 163). However, Italian roots did not disappear: the number of American citizens who identified themselves as Italian Americans in the census has steadily

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increased in the last decades: from 12 million in 19804 to almost 17 million in 2016.5 The resilience of the Italian American ethnicity has been remarkable, so that—in a more recent essay—Alba had to acknowledge that, far from following the usual trajectory, the case of Italian American culture forced scholars to redefine the entire model of the assimilation process: What the Italian experience reveals is the ultimate success of a gritty struggle to gain acceptance and middle-class status without surrendering aspects of identity, with each generation reaching beyond the achievements of the preceding one. The Italians are the paragon of generation-by-generation progression into the mainstream. (Alba 2018, 495)

However, one cannot deny that an erosion of the Italian ethnicity has happened over time. Cultural assimilation is a complicated process that does not happen without consequences; as Robert F. Foerster underlined in his study The Italian Emigration of Our Times, published in 1919, Americanization is a double-edged sword, because “America exacts for all she gives” (Foerster, 395) and it is imperious in its injunctions, so that the nature of Italians “must undergo atrophy or metamorphosis” (ibid., 395). Whatever you gain, in terms of social integration, you lose something in terms of traditions. It is not by chance that the number of movies that specifically address the Italian American experience has significantly declined in the last years: being of Italian origin has become, over the years, less and less an identity mark or a problem to discuss. Novels and movies related to Italian American culture in previous decades were mostly focused on the discrimination that Italian Americans had to suffer, and the sense of anger that came from being marginalized. In the first half of the twentieth century, Italian Americans had to fight the prejudice of mainstream Americans, only to discover that their efforts to gain full acceptance and acquire upper-level positions in society were hampered by their ethnicity. There were only a few exceptions to this rule, such as the politician Fiorello LaGuardia, the filmmaker Frank Capra, and the banker Amadeo Giannini. After the Second World War, thanks to the assimilation of the younger generations, this obstacle has gradually been removed, and many Italian Americans have become fully integrated, obtaining access to top careers in business and politics. Mission accomplished then, but is this a happy ending? Why the last chapter of the seminal study by Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreale, La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian

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American Experience (1992), is entitled: “At Home and Uneasy in America”? Because of the two-edged sword dynamic: adopting a more Americanized lifestyle resulted, for many Italian American families, in a loosening of those family and community ties that represented such a big part of their identity. The price of this assimilation has been paid, in great part, by the second-generation Italian Americans who grew up torn between conflicting messages and models of behavior coming from their families and the American social environment. A case in point is the influence of the school system. School educators, for decades, felt that their mission was to eradicate the ethnicity of immigrant school children to favor their assimilation into the American mainstream. If the intentions of these teachers were good, their point of view was essentially US-centric. The largely unintended result of these efforts was summarized by Leonard Covello, an Italian American educator who immigrated to the United States as a child in 1896. Describing his experience in the American school system at that time, Covello wrote: “[w]e were becoming Americans by learning how to be ashamed of our parents” (Covello, 48). Now that the battle is won, that the assimilation into the mainstream is almost complete, a consistent number of Italian Americans start to feel the pain—or at least the discomfort—that comes from the loss of their ethnic identity, and they begin to take action to reconnect with the culture of the previous generations before it is completely gone. There are few movies made in the last decades that address this issue; the vast majority either rely on stereotypes about Italians as Mafia members or represent Italian characters as good-natured clownish figures like in Robert Shallcross’ Uncle Nino (2004) dubbed, in a review published in 2005 on The New  York Times, “My Big, Fat, Italian Uncle”6 (Martel 2005). A significant exception comes from a movie that is, at the same time, intelligent, witty, sad, sincere, and deep: Tarantella (1995) by Helen De Michiel. If Uncle Nino depicts the discomfort of an assimilated Italian American family (the father is a workaholic and his family is falling apart) that needs the intervention of a relative from Italy to get in touch with its ethnicity, Tarantella deals with a similar angst in a completely different way. Diana, the protagonist (played by Mira Sorvino), is a photographer of Italian descent who works and lives far from the Italian American neighborhood where she grew up with her mother and her grandmother. At the beginning of the movie, we see Diana in an outdoor full shot while she is taking pictures of a building; her dress conforms to the corporate dress code to show her status as a young urban professional, and it looks rather

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masculine, not unlike the way career women dress in Mike Nichols’ 1988 Working Girl. Some children in the neighborhood stop and start asking Diana if she is a photographer and what she is doing, but she sends them away in a sort of brisk and snappy way. The children leave muttering: “What’s her problem?” The problem is that, at least at the beginning of the movie, Diana looks too absorbed in her job: her countenance is cold and devoid of sympathy; moreover, given the fact that the interlocutors are children, one could also infer that Diana shows no hint of maternal behavior. These details are important in the movie because Diana is almost immediately confronted with the theme of family ties; as soon as she comes home, she learns that her mother has died, so she has to go to her house and take care of the usual formalities: the funeral, the burial, selling the house, etc. Interestingly, Diana’s sadness for her mother’s death is mixed with anger and a bitter critique of the traditional southern Italian funerary customs. While packing, she shows her boyfriend Matt a black dress and asks: “How does it look? Is it Italian enough? Should I shroud myself in mourning for the rest of my life?” Diana is referring to the use of dressing in black typical of Sicilian widows in the past, and in fact, whenever we see flashbacks of the protagonist’s youth, both her mother and grandmother are always wearing black dresses. This scene gives the audience a hint that Diana has a difficult relationship not only with her mother but, more in general, with her ethnicity and with the role of women in a traditionally patriarchal society. The return of the protagonist to the Italian American neighborhood7 where she grew up is far from idyllic: Diana feels ill at ease in this environment, and the residents—who still remember her—look at her with a mixture of curiosity and reproach, probably because she left this ethnic microcosm to pursue her career instead of staying and conforming to the expectations of the community. Like she says to Jimmy, a longtime friend who works in a coffee bar: “The neighborhood hasn’t changed at all. All that staring.” And when Jimmy answers, “Consistency is good. Makes you feel secure” she retorts: “As long as you fit in.” She does not. Diana’s sense of displacement originates from a rebellion against the image of the traditional Italian housewife who stays at home, cooks, cleans, and takes care of the children that she interiorized as a child. This model of womanhood has been effectively and polemically described by the feminist scholar Louise DeSalvo, also an Italian American:

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I come from a family, from a cultural heritage, where women simply don’t go away to do things separately from men. That is not to say that men don’t go away doing things separately from women. They do. And often. But in the land of my forebears, women sit around and wait for their men. Or they watch the children and wait for their men. Or work very hard and watch their children and wait for their men. Or they make a sumptuous meal and they work very hard and they watch their children and wait for their men. But they don’t go anywhere without their men. (DeSalvo, 94)

DeSalvo stands for a completely different model of femininity, up to the point that she accepts to define herself with the derogatory epithet puttana (whore or prostitute) if such a definition means refusing the role imposed on women by patriarchal society. Similarly, choosing not to conform to the model of housewife/angel of the family, Diana ended up being isolated and refused by the entire community, which also frowns upon her for her “betrayal,” that is, the decision to leave her mother and the neighborhood. The parallel with DeSalvo suggests that the problem between the protagonist and her mother is more generational than personal. It was not uncommon in Italian American households, starting at least from the 1960s, to see young women taking distance from their mothers because they embodied a model of womanhood that the daughters refused; to use the definition by Marianne Hirsch, they dis-identified with “conventional constructions of femininity” (Hirsch, 11). From the refusal of a certain kind of womanhood, in Diana, comes the rejection of every aspect of her Italian ethnicity: this is why Diana neither learned to speak Italian nor to cook traditional Italian food. Pretty much like DeSalvo, Diana probably thinks that “you pretty well know how enslaved the women of every country are by the kind of preparation their traditional food requires. Any recipe that begins, ‘Take a mortar and pestle...’ now drives me into a feminist frenzy” (DeSalvo, 94). It is remarkable, though, that later in her life DeSalvo wrote an entire book analyzing her relationship with her Italian heritage precisely through food: Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family (2004). Diana, in Tarantella, starts reconnecting with her Italian heritage not cooking, initially, but eating homemade gnocchi prepared by her late mother’s friend and neighbor, Pina. The protagonist also confesses that she had forgotten how good they tasted. Here for the first time, Diana seems to acknowledge that food is more than an expression of the servitude of women in a patriarchal family: cooking involves pleasure, creativity, and

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care for others. If cooking is seen as a choice instead of a duty, it may become a way to express oneself without renouncing one’s freedom; it may also be a way to reconnect with the positive part of one’s own traditional culture. Rediscovering the family traditions in a non-repressive context will eventually help Diana to ease the internal conflict between her love for her mother and her freedom. One of the most interesting authorial choices made by De Michiel, stylistically speaking, is the insertion in the movie of some evocative scenes that represent Diana’s thoughts and fantasies; they are frequently focused on Diana’s childhood and her interactions with her mother and grandmother. Interestingly, De Michiel chooses not to shoot these scenes realistically. On the contrary, she makes use of non-naturalistic setting and lighting that make these sequences curiously uncanny: they fit Sigmund Freud’s definition of unheimlich (translated in English as “the uncanny”), that is, in Freud’s words, “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar” (Freud, 85). Everything in these fantasies is unsettling and at the same time strangely homely and familiar: more precisely, these fantasies are unsettling because they are homely and familiar. These visions are mostly about Diana’s family and childhood; the common elements in them are the internal contrast between the desire of the protagonist to fit in her cultural environment and her refusal of the stereotyped traditional model of womanhood. Both elements are present in the first one, where Diana tries to make her figure coincide with a life-size black-and-white image of her mother that appears in the background; the mother, in the picture, holds a bowl of food (probably pasta) that she is about to serve to her family and so does Diana, but the daughter fails in the attempt to perfectly match the maternal image and, frustrated, lets the bowl fall on the ground. In the meantime, female voices speaking in Italian remind Diana of how the family and the community judged her: some words are praises, like bellissima (beautiful), intelligente (intelligent), simpatica (nice, likable), but they are outnumbered by critical remarks like stupidina (silly), testona (hard-headed), and furba (sly, cunning). The voices also repeatedly say vergogna (shame), and this is the key point: Diana is supposed to feel ashamed because she does not conform to the expectations of the community around her. In another fantasy sequence, the protagonist (as an adult) is taking pictures of herself as a child, while her mother and grandmother lecture the young Diana, telling her that she has to be submissive, silent, and secretive, like a good woman: “See nothing, say nothing, betray nothing. The curious monkey

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only finds trouble.” The sense of frustration in this scene reaches its climax when the mother, unexpectedly, grabs the camera of the adult Diana, metaphorically denying her freedom of expression. In another—maybe even more revealing—fantasy we see Diana walking around a group of women sitting in a circle: it is clear that she is excluded from the community. The fact that this exclusion is the result of a voluntary decision does not ease the pain and the loneliness, because she keeps walking around these women, almost like she is looking for her place in the circle. These inserts are very important in the movie, even stylistically, because of the particular dreamlike quality of the cinematography that breaks the bleakness of the scenes that represent the everyday life in the neighborhood; from the point of view of the content, they are very revealing because they introduce the audience to Diana’s rich but conflicted internal world. Sometimes, in these transfigured memories, the sense of oppression is mixed with a touch of humor, like in the scene where Diana is dressed like the peasant that appears on the label of a famous brand of Italian pasta. Here food, tradition, and the role of women coalesce in an explosive mixture that triggers Diana’s frustration: her gesture to take off her head cover clearly shows the refusal of this traditional model of femininity. Diana’s moments of anger and rebellion hide complex, ambivalent feelings; it looks like the protagonist has an unconscious desire, and maybe an unspoken necessity, to reconnect with her mother’s figure and with her heritage; in short, to find a place in the circle that now excludes her. This desire becomes evident when Diana puts on her mother’s yellow cardigan, a detail that does not pass unnoticed by Pina, who comments that the color of the garment matches the color of her mother’s canary, Puccini. When Diana tells her that the cardigan is not hers, Pina simply answers: “I know; it’s your mother’s,” implying that she understands the protagonist’s hidden feelings and desires even more than Diana herself. It is also relevant that the bird, which bears the name of a famous Italian opera composer, refuses to sing for Diana, symbolizing her disconnection from her Italian roots. A shot that captures Diana’s internal situation is the close-up of her face staring into the bird’s cage; since the cage is placed between Diana and the camera, the audience has the impression that Diana is imprisoned behind the bars of the cage, conveying a sense of entrapment and discomfort. To escape from her stalemate, Diana needs the help of Pina, who plays a central and multifaceted role in the protagonist’s journey of reconnection with her past. Not only Pina spends a lot of time cooking with Diana:

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she is also the key to understanding her family, an essential mediator between the protagonist and the family book written over the years by her grandmother and her mother. The book is in Italian, a language that Diana never wanted to learn—as part of the refusal of her Italian identity—so she needs someone who introduces her to this world, an interpreter: Pina. Some of the most intriguing scenes of the movie are those in which the story written in the book and read by Pina (who serves as a voice-over narrator) is reenacted using puppets: a play in the play, a strategy that reminds of an Italian traditional form of entertainment, the teatro delle marionette or puppet theater. The story read by Pina, little by little, throughout the second half of the movie, becomes an essential part of Diana’s internal journey. The book is not only a collection of recipes and proverbs, as the protagonist initially thought: it also tells a tragic tale that gives to Diana an insight into what it was like to be a woman in southern Italy two generations before. The story is about Diana’s grandmother, called or nicknamed La Serena, a telling name that reveals the way women were expected to be: serene, calm, gracious, and submissive. La Serena’s dream is to go to America, but instead, her father decides to marry her to a rich, older man that she does not love, Bazzelloni: this is an example of the typical patriarchal exchange in which the woman is used as a commodity traded by two families, that is, two patriarchs, with no respect for her feelings and her opinion. La Serena has no choice but to obey and to keep her pain inside herself. On the outside, she is calm and gracious as ever, but her external appearance is just a mask: when the puppet that represents La Serena removes it, we see a horrible, devastated, and sad face. Bazzelloni is not only insensitive and mean: he is also jealous, and when he is drunk, he abuses his wife and beats her, finally threatening to kill her in front of her daughter (Diana’s mother). Fearing for her life and the life of the daughter, La Serena kills Bazzelloni poisoning his food, and escapes to the United States. This very dark tale represents a sort of epiphany for Diana because it leads her to a deeper understanding of what it meant to be a woman in a repressive patriarchal society: it shows how women’s personalities in the past were repressed but not annihilated. Sure, women like La Serena had to play along, maintaining a certain appearance of submissiveness on the surface level; nonetheless, they fought, as best as they could, a hidden battle against the oppressor. La Serena, apparently subjugated, is in truth a strong woman who takes her revenge with an act of rebellion against patriarchy that seems to resonate with Artemisia

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Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes (c. 1620), a painting that has become an icon of feminism.8 Listening to this story, Diana goes beyond the surface of traditional Italian gender roles, finds in her female ancestors an unsuspected strength, and starts to understand their silent resilience. The very act of leaving Italy and moving to the United States is a demonstration of her grandmother’s courage and desire to be free. Pina plays a crucial role in Diana’s change, and not only because of her role of interpreter of the family book: through her friendship with Pina, Diana also starts to re-evaluate her life and her relationship with her boyfriend Matt, good-natured but shallow. There is a moment in which Matt, after an argument with Diana, leaves the house saying that he will go explore the neighborhood to get “more of a clue” of who she really is, and maybe he is not wrong: indeed, Diana is changing, and her process of self-­ discovery puts a strain on their relationship. At this point, the spectator expects that Diana will change her life radically, maybe breaking up with Matt and moving into her mother’s house. Instead, De Michiel addresses the theme of change in a more complex and deep way: the past is past, and you cannot go back in time. This idea is expressed in a meaningful scene: Diana and Pina are walking down the street of the Italian neighborhood when they see three men playing a tarantella while a woman, who holds a glass of wine in her hand and looks a bit tipsy, dances at the music. The scene is very symbolic, and it is linked to the title of the movie; tarantella is a traditional popular Lucanian dance, known in several parts of Southern Italy under different names (tammurriata in the Campania region, pizzica in Apulia, sonu in Calabria, and ballettu in Sicily). There are several kinds of tarantella: the one used for courtship, the one that stages ritual knife battles, and the magic ritual to cure tarantism, which the Encyclopedia Britannica describes as “a disease or form of hysteria that appeared in Italy in the 15th to the 17th century”9 that people believed was caused by the bite of a spider (tarantola of taranta, hence the name tarantella). The Italian anthropologist Ernesto De Martino studied this last kind of tarantella in his book La terra del rimorso (1961), translated into English as The Land of Remorse. In his analysis, De Martino acknowledges that there is a relationship between the bite of the spider Latrodectus tredecimguttas and tarantism; however, he defines the ritual, in which the person affected falls into a trance, rolls on the floor, runs, or dances frantically at the music, as an exorcism based on music and dance (De Martino, 41). For the anthropologist, tarantism constitutes “a symbolic apparatus for evoking and configuring on the mythical-ritual level those psychic conflicts which had not

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found a resolution on the level of consciousness and which operated in the darkness of the unconscious, with the risk of appearing as neurotic symptoms” (ibid., 46). Tarantism, in this interpretation, is a way to unconsciously vent one’s repressed frustration; De Martino describes the case of one tarantata, Maria Di Nardò, in which the recurrent crises of tarantism were most likely connected to the fact that the woman was forced by her family to marry a man she did not love. For Maria, tarantism was a symbolic ritual, accepted by her culture, which allowed her to release her aggressive drives against an undesired husband, disrupting the patriarchal order and drawing the attention of the entire village on her drama. This particular interpretation of tarantella as a healing ritual explains the title of the movie: the entire story is about Diana trying to heal (metaphorically), that is, to solve the conflict with her mother and with her Italian heritage. The protagonist seems to become aware of this dynamic when, later in the movie, she says, apparently talking to her late mother: “you made me dance my own tarantella,” meaning that the protagonist sees her struggle as a part of a healing process partly orchestrated by the mother. It is also important that tarantella, among Italian Americans, represents a link with traditional Italian culture which is inextricably connected to nostalgia. Etymologically, nostalgia is a pseudo-Greek term coined in 1688 by the physician Johannes Hofer combining the words nostos (homecoming), and algos (pain or distress) to name the pathological homesickness he diagnosed in Swiss soldiers posted abroad (Giorgi, 12). It is not by chance, as noted by Kyra Giorgi, that the term nostalgia was created at the time of the birth of national states; it is nationalism, with its emphasis on the culture and the “spirit” of a nation that facilitates the proliferation of ideas of national difference (ibid., 20). We are who we are, as a people, because we are different from other people, and this difference marks our identity. However, Diana’s nostalgia is different from that of the exile—or the immigrant—because it is directed to the idea of a country that she never knew but that, nonetheless, still represents part of her identity. In this scene, tarantella does not symbolize the preservation, but the waning of the Italian American cultural heritage, a feeling that is regressive and fatalistic; Pina unceremoniously tells the half-drunk dancer to go away and comments with Diana that she is not even dancing a real tarantella, underlining the decadence of the memory and the loss of the tradition even in ethnic neighborhoods. Diana’s metaphorical healing dance, on the contrary, is moving in an opposite trajectory: instead of maintaining only the appearance of old customs, which are meaningless

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insofar they have lost the connection with their original significance, the protagonist is reconnecting with her ethnicity in a deep, critical way, not replicating old models but reinterpreting them in a new context. In fact, according to Giorgi, there are two ways to react to nostalgia: “one is to be active—to try to be competitive, to catch up, to remake the self. The other one is to be passive—to try to characterize the situation in positive terms, and to make a virtue to resignation to one’s fate” (ibid., 18). Diana’s reaction goes in the direction of the remaking of the self; a symbolic moment that marks the success of Diana is when the bird Puccini, all of a sudden, starts to sing; this is the sign that the protagonist has finally closed the gap with her ancestry. Significantly, this is also the moment in which Diana decides to cook for Pina. However, Diana’s success in reconnecting with her heritage does not mean that she wants to become like her mother or like Pina: on the contrary, going back to her roots is just the first step for Diana in the development of her own identity. Pina plays another central role in the movie: being the same age as Diana’s mother, and introducing the protagonist to the mother’s inner world, she eventually becomes a sort of substitute mother figure for Diana. From her, the protagonist learns that her mother suffered from a terminal disease but that she did not tell it to her daughter, in the last show of her secretive behavior. A big part of Diana’s grief comes from her sense of guilt for not having been next to her mother when she died. In this sense, it is very symbolic that Pina is also terminally ill, just like Diana’s mother. The identification mother-Pina becomes explicit in a very important sequence in the movie, which starts as a fantasy—Diana as a child who combs her mother’s hair—and reconnects to the present time when, in the following shot, we see the protagonist combing Pina’s hair, an act of deep affection and intimacy. Unlike Diana’s mother, Pina wants to take control of the end of her life: she does not want to die in a hospital bed. However, to achieve a buona morte (good death), she needs Diana’s help. The protagonist obliges, driving her friend to the seaside; Pina—who has taken a lethal dose of tranquilizers—falls asleep and dies peacefully on the seashore, while Diana is taking a long walk on the beach. When the young woman is back, a few hours later, Pina is already dead. Paradoxically, the decision to help Pina die helps Diana to atone for her absence at the moment of her mother’s death. At the same time, Pina’s decease has another strong metaphorical implication: through her death, Diana acknowledges the passing of a generation and a certain traditional idea of womanhood that she does not

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want to identify with. As she says in the movie: “The years pass and the women die. What do their daughters take with them?” This is the real question at the core of the movie: the permanence and the continual restructuring of cultural heritage, generation after generation. She discards some elements of traditional Italian culture, such as male dominance and female submissiveness, but she keeps the unsuspected strength and resilience of her grandmother La Serena, who had the courage to fight for her life and freedom, giving her offspring the chance to move to the United States, where Diana could develop herself taking the best from both Italian and American culture. In fact, Italian American culture in this movie—and, to some extent, even in a simpler movie like Uncle Nino—is not characterized by the fatalistic nostalgia for an Edenic place of origin that is lost forever, but by the fruitful encounter of two different cultures of which the second-generation subject can take advantage, choosing the best of both. Now that the process of re-awakening has ended, what part of this traditional heritage deserves to be maintained and passed to the next generation? At the end of her “healing” process, Diana needs to move forward, and, to do so, she has to sell the house and deal with all the stuff that her mother collected over the years, an allegory of a cumbersome past that Diana cannot simply let go: she has to sift through her heritage and select what is still useful for her. Throughout the entire movie, Diana is more than once depicted as uncertain, unable to deal with such a heavy task; eventually, after the death of Pina, she becomes more determined. She sells the house and decides to keep only a few things of all her mother’s possessions. Among those, the most notable is the family book, the memory of the strength and the resilience of the women of the past generations; to move ahead Diana does not need anything else. I think it is now clear why I see in this movie a powerful metaphor for the discontent of complete cultural assimilation. According to Cornell and Hartmann, Italian American ethnicity has become a “thin” identity, in the sense that the daily life of Italian Americans is now more shaped by class, gender, or profession than by ethnicity (Cornell and Hartmann, 74). In this situation, assimilation may very well result in the total annihilation of the traditional ancestral culture. Maybe some Italian Americans passed this threshold feeling no pain at all, maybe even with a sense of relief for the obtained full Americanization. However, I suspect that many others started feeling a sense of emptiness. Those who had—or still have—a close interaction with first-generation grandparents realize that their rich,

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complex, and maybe even controversial cultural heritage is passing with them, leaving behind a sense of loss and emptiness in those who remain. This is the drive that pushes second or third-generation Italian Americans to reconnect with their culture, learn the language, and maintain Italian foodways and traditions without renouncing their identity as Americans. Tarantella is, at the same time, a feminist movie and a deep and heartfelt analysis of the discomfort of the Italian Americans and their desire to reconnect with their ethnicity, re-evaluating and maintaining the part of the tradition that is still alive and useful for them. If this movie is a reflection on the “twilight of the ethnicity” described by Alba, Tarantella’s answer is neither to forget the Italian traditional heritage nor to transform it into an empty simulacrum: it is only through a re-evaluation and a critical re-interpretation that some core values remain vital and can be passed to the next generation. Many thanks to Michela Musolino (https://www.michelamusolino. com/—accessed April 12, 2023), folk singer and dancer, who graciously shared with me her knowledge and expertise on tarantella and who also suggested to me the link between this dance and nostalgia in the Italian American experience.

Notes 1. Not everyone agreed with Park. In the mid-1920s Horace Kallen, in his book Culture and Democracy in the United States, viewed assimilation as an absorption in an undignified and vacuous modern mass (Kallen, 84). 2. A comprehensive analysis of recent sociological and linguistic studies focused on Italian American culture can be found in Richard Alba’s “Italian Americans and Assimilation”, Rosemary Serra’s “Contemporary Italian American Identities”, and Nancy C. Carnevale’s “The Languages of Italian Americans”. All these contributions are in the book edited by William J. Connell and Stanislao Pugliese The Routledge History of Italian Americans. New York: Routledge, 2018. 3. In this last category, Nancy Carnevale notices that, since the 1980s, there has been a drop of 55% of Italian as a second language spoken at home, the fastest decline of any foreign language in the U.S. (Carnevale, 248). 4. See Mangione and Morreale (1992, 460). 5. See https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/2017/october/italian-­ american.html (accessed April 12, 2023).

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6. The title of the article, ironically, links the simplistic approach to ethnicity in Uncle Nino to the highly stereotyped depiction of Greek American customs in Joel Zwick’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002). See Martel (2005). 7. In a conversation that I had with the director, De Michiel said that the neighborhood is purposefully non-specified. The scenes were filmed in a location in New Jersey. 8. The painting, made in 1620, is now on display in the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence. 9. https://www.britannica.com/art/tarantella (accessed April 12, 2023).

Works Cited Alba, Richard D. “Italian Americans and Assimilation”. In The Routledge History of Italian Americans, edited by William J.  Connell and Stanislao Pugliese, 495–505. New York–London: Routledge, 2018. ———. Italian Americans into the Twilight of Ethnicity. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1985. Bernardy, Amy Allemand. Italia randagia, attraverso gli Stati Uniti. Torino: Bocca, 1913. Carnevale, Nancy C. “The Languages of Italian Americans”. In The Routledge History of Italian Americans, edited by William J.  Connell and Stanislao Pugliese, 239–251. New York–London: Routledge, 2018. Cornell, Stephen and Douglas Hartmann. Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, 1998. Covello, Leonard. The Heart is the Teacher. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1958. De Martino, Ernesto. The Land of Remorse. London: Free Association Books, 2005. DeSalvo, Louise. Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family. New York–London: Bloomsbury, 2004. ———. “A Portrait of the ‘Puttana’ as a Middle-Aged Woolf Scholar.” In The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian-American Women, edited by Helen Barolini, 93–100. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny”. Dialogues in Philosophy, Mental & Neuro Sciences, 2018, 11 (2): 84–100. Giorgi, Kyra. Emotions. Language and Identity on the Margins. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Guglielmo, Thomas A. White on Arrival. Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago 1890–1945. New York, Oxford University Press, 2003. Hirsch, Marianne. The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Jacobson, Matthew F. Roots Too. White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.

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Kallen, Horace. Culture and Democracy in the United States. New  York: Liverlight, 1924. Lieberson, Stanley; Mary Waters. From Many Strands: Ethnic and Racial Groups in Contemporary America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988. Mangione, Jerre; Morreale, Ben. La Storia. Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience. New York: Harper Collins, 1992. Martel, Ned. “My Big, Fat, Italian Uncle”. The New  York Times, February 11, 2005. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/11/movies/my-­big-­fat-­italian-­ uncle.html (accessed April 12, 2023). Schermerhorn, Richard. Comparative Ethnic Relations: a Framework for Theory and Research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Serra, Rosemary. “Contemporary Italian American Identities”. In The Routledge History of Italian Americans, edited by William J.  Connell and Stanislao Pugliese, 239–251. New York–London: Routledge, 2018.

Films and TV Series Cited My Big Fat Greek Wedding (Joel Zwick, 2002). The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972). The Sopranos (TV Series, 1999–2007). Tarantella (Helen De Michiel, 1995). Uncle Nino (Robert Shallcross, 2004). Working Girl (Mike Nichols, 1988).

CHAPTER 6

The Celluloid Closet: Sex, Power, and Coming Out Repression of the Italian American Closet in Nunzio’s Second Cousin (1994), Kiss Me, Guido (1997), and Mambo Italiano (2003) Ryan Calabretta-Sajder

Originally published in 1981, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies is a monumental work by Italian American scholar and activist Vito Russo who analyzed how film scholars considered homosexuality in Hollywood cinema.1 Organized into five main chapters, the massive manuscript addressed solely the representation of the homosexual male2 onscreen.3 Russo clearly creates conscious distance from discussing or evaluating in any way the homosexual as an actor or a director, focusing solely on how gay male characters have been portrayed in cinema,

R. Calabretta-Sajder (*) Department of World, Languages, Literatures, & Cultures, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Fioretti, F. Orsitto (eds.), Italian Americans in Film and Other Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47211-4_6

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underscoring what Judith Butler will coin as gender performance theory.4 Although stylistically encyclopedic, the work introduced film studies to gay readings and underscored the prejudice the homosexual community was forced to embrace, both consciously and subconsciously, from a historical perspective. Russo, therefore, remains at the forefront of any study revolving around gay cinema.5 Although established in the 1980s, not enough critical debate has been afforded to LGBTQIAA+ studies in Italian Americana. In fact, Italian American studies lack critical attention when exploring the concept of film and media studies; indeed, few monographs even exist.6 Moreover, Italian American studies have shied away from serious queer analysis; some gay artists deal with gay subjects, yet little queer theoretical analysis has been applied to these noteworthy works. To illustrate one pertinent example within literary studies, Peter Covino, an Italian American gay poet, has been anthologized in gay poetic anthologies within the US and received numerous grants and awards, yet Italian American scholars have yet to scholarly consider his opus.7 Luckily, Italian American studies is still a rather young field. When exploring topics of LGBTQIAA+ within the community, some literary works, as previously mentioned, exist. Yet when delving into cinema and media studies, does Italian American cinema and media even have a voice, punning from Vito Russo’s subtitle of his final chapter: “Take the Game Away from Hollywood: Find a Voice and Facing a Backlash”? Even well into this final chapter, Russo attacks Hollywood for only switching up the representational roles of the homosexual: yes, finally we are on stage, somewhat center stage, though still often minor characters; however, we are almost always ridiculed, laughed at, and even more directly attacked than ever before.8 What does the queer Italian American cinematic and media voice look like? One can easily apply a similar approach to Russo and closely explore the representation of homosexuality throughout Italian American cinema and media studies; a work like this would indeed be a needed and welcomed addition to the field. However, this chapter focuses on two diverse representations of Italian American ‘protagonists’ and their relationships with the closet. Through analyzing the closet and performativity by applying diverse theories in Nunzio’s Second Cousin (1994), Kiss Me, Guido (1997), and Mambo Italiano (2003), I demonstrate the struggle of being a repressed homosexual and argue that it is challenging for Italian

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Americans to break free from the closet. Many prefer the closet to the idea of fare una brutta figura.

Researching the Queer in Italian Americana9 When generally exploring the topic of Gender Studies within Italian American studies, scholars have studied the representation of Italian Americans through Masculinity Studies, which is academically aligned under Gender Studies as a whole, yet diverse nuances prevail. Noteworthy is Fred Gardaphé’s From Wiseguys to Wise Men: The Gangster and Italian American Masculinities (2006). Gardaphé’s work expands the critical discourse of gender within Italian American studies in numerous ways. In From Wiseguys to Wise Men, he analyzes the mobster/gangster archetype first and foremost according to Carl Jung’s famous structural organization and bridges this with Gender Studies. This work remains significant for bridging Italian American and Gender Studies together.10 Along with From Wiseguys to Wise Men, various scholars have contributed other important article-length pieces on Italian American masculinity. In “Cultural Stereotyping in Happy Days and The Sopranos” (2010), Courtney Judith Ruffner explores the character evolution of Arthur Fonzarelli, both from a sexuality and professional standpoint in the series Happy Days and how as Fonzie integrates with ‘normal’ US society, the ratings drop. She then draws similarities between the Fonzie character and Peter Paul ‘Paulie Walnuts’ Gualteri as the ‘Italian Stallion’ stereotyped archetype, bridging two very diverse television programs. Moving away from Masculinity Studies and focusing more directly on Gender Studies, minimal scholarship on homosexuality exists in Italian American Film and Media Studies. Continuing the discussion of the mafia, and The Sopranos in particular, George De Stefano explores the role of gender and the mafia first in An Offer We Can’t Refuse: The Mafia in the Mind of America (2007). De Stefano discusses the murder of certain bosses, in particular John D’Amato, who was caught frequenting a swinger’s club and having sex with men (De Stefano 2007, 223). In his later piece, “A ‘Finook’ in the Crew. Vito Spatafore, The Sopranos, and the Queering of the Mafia Genre,” De Stefano analyzes the homosexual character of Vito Spatafore through Judith Butler’s concept of gender as performative. Additionally, he explores the metaphoric nature of Spatafore’s character as a political motif for Italian American culture and religion.

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Two significant contributions about Nunzio’s Second Cousin (1994) are Anthony Julian Tamburri’s chapter “Italian/American Briefs: Revisiting the Short Subjects” (2011) and George De Stefano’s “Identity Crises: Race, Sex, and Ethnicity in Italian-American Cinema” (2010). Both Tamburri11 and De Stefano12 explore Tom DeCerchio’s short film Nunzio’s Second Cousin (1994), an understudied short film released in 1994 as part of a collection entitled Boys Life 2. Although both scholars approach the same text, Tamburri studies the short through semiotic symbols while De Stefano utilizes more critical race theory. Before concluding this section, it is important to remind the reader of Mary Jo Bona’s foundational piece entitled “Gorgeous Identities: Gay and Lesbian Italian/American Writers” in FUORI: Essays by Italian/American Lesbians and Gays (1996). Although much has evolved from the publication date of Bona’s theoretical piece, one must acknowledge how it challenged the way Italian American scholars and writers explored concepts of gender, sexuality, and identity. Playing off previous Cultural and Gender Studies scholars’ works like Stuart Hall and Diana Fuss, Bona intricately explores the “continual negotiation with their ethnic and sexual identities, less out of a sense of frustration or confusion, and more out of an appreciation of the possibilities of richness within their Italian/American and lesbian/gay cultures” (Bona, 1). Bona’s contribution remains critical for consideration as the field continues to evolve.

Theoretical Framework When exploring the boundaries of the closet, numerous aspects must be considered, as Mary Jo Bona and others have previously underscored, including public versus private space, as well as the so-called bella figura, as argued by Gloria Nardini in her Che Bella Figura! The Power of Performance in an Italian Ladies’ Club in Chicago (1999), when she discusses the huge division between the private and public lives of Italian American women in Chicago. As Nardini recalls in the “Preface,” women could lament, argue, and gossip before and after the Collandia meetings, but not during, “So for Toni a meeting defined itself as a playing-out-of-­ appropriate-roles by the officers in front of the general membership. Anything other than this presentation of unity she found in poor taste, almost disgraceful” (Nardini viii). This citation underscores what can be noted as performative nature within the Italian American community. In fact, Nardini observes exactly that in her micro-cosmic ladies’ club.

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In the chapter “A Definition of Bella Figura,”Nardini offers an in-­ depth examination of the term, with positive and negative aspects as well as an etymology in Italian literature. Fare una bella figura is an Italian expression that directly translates to “to convey a beautiful image” or “to look good,” which encompasses various meanings. In one of her interviews with Margherita Pieracci Harwell, gender differences are addressed: “She thinks that for men bella figura has to do with power and with sex— if a woman turns a man down, he will fare brutta figura. She thinks for a woman the issue has to do with a more extensive series of issues: gentility, grace, thinking about others” (Nardini, 11). To conclude the discourse on bella figura, Nardini examines the meaning of figura in both English and Italian and claims, “[B]ella figura is a social construction of identity that depends upon the public performance for its reification”—bella figura “becomes part of the real person’s creation and presentation of self. To oversimplify, the ‘real person’ is in the bella figura” (ibid.). In this sense, although the ‘real person’ is present, the ‘real person’ additionally becomes completely performative, returning us to Butler, Muñoz, and other gender performance theorists. On a similar, yet slightly different note, the concept of private versus public space is also compellingly argued in Graziella Parati’s Public History, Private Stories (1996). Parati offers insight into the gender difference which exists between men and women in these two worlds, underscoring Alan Ryan’s work13 and stating, “The public ‘play’ in which men are engaged is arbitrarily left behind to retreat into ‘privacy’, into the ‘male’ private sphere that man can abandon or reenter” (Parati, 7). In Nunzio’s Second Cousin (1994), Anthony’s life is similar to a play—he lives in various dimensions depending on his social sphere. Yet like the woman in Parati’s study, the homosexual male still becomes the object of the gaze, as we will see later. As a metaphorical representation of a physical place, the closet can be defined as a private space, often within the confines of another room, underscoring this ideology of privacy, or a frame within a frame. Nardini argues that “to think of social life as a theatrical performance implies a kind of learned appropriateness” (Nardini, 31), and she believes that these learned behaviors become part of the individual. Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) defines performance as “all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants” (Goffman, 15), highlighting the communal nature of both performance and society. Moreover, the

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connotation regarding the closet is darkness; no one sees inside your closet, hence the reinforcement of intimacy but with themself. Therefore, the role of the participant varies from frame to frame. The intertwining nature of gender performance and bella figura proves challenging for our protagonists as he fights an inner struggle to protect the family values; however, he does so at the expense of his own happiness. In an attempt to explore the confines of the closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick studies the concept of paranoia in her book Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (1997). In the introduction, she defines paranoia with adjectives such as anticipatory, reflexive, and mimetic (Kosofsky Sedgwick, 9). As her discourse continues, she underscores the intertwining nature of these characteristics arguing, “Concomitantly, some of the main reasons for practicing paranoid strategies may be other than the possibility that they offer unique access to true knowledge. They represent a way, among other ways, of seeking, finding, and organizing knowledge” (ibid.). Through her exploration of paranoia, we learn that not all motives are negative or positive, which is important to understand from a cultural perspective, unfair as it may be to the individual being affected. As we will notice in a variety of films, the closet for some offers comfort and serves as a safe zone on both macro- and micro-cosmic levels, while for most it is simply a repressive space.

I. Nunzio’s Second Cousin (1994) I have news for you Jimmy boy, bashing fags is not going to stop you from becoming one. Trust me, I tried it. Tony—Nunzio’s Second Cousin

As early as 1996, Professor Adams of the University of Georgia found evidence that suggested: “80 percent of men who are homophobic have secret homosexual feelings.”14 Adams published his findings in the US Journal of Abnormal Psychology, backed by the American Psychological Association. More recently, Richard Ryan of the University of Rochester has been adding to the research on homophobia for many years. Research on the subject is also happening at the University of California and Essex.15 All evidence points toward a connection with homophobes being homosexual, as suggested in Tony’s aforementioned citation from the short film Nunzio’s Second Cousin (1994).

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B. Ruby Rich defines the early 1990s as “Homo Pomo,” or as the age of New Queer Cinema (NQC), arguing: It was an approach in search of new languages and mediums that could accommodate new materials, subjects, and modes of production. Emanating from a (mostly) new generation, the NQC embodied an evolution in thinking. It reinterpreted the link between the personal and the political envisioned by feminism, restaged the defiant activism pioneered at Stonewall, and recoded aesthetics to link the independent feature movement with the avant-garde and start afresh. (Rich xv)

It is important to note that Nunzio’s Second Cousin partakes in this new movement. From its theme to style, this short challenges the issues of race, performative gender, and cultural stereotypes. Tom DeCerchio’s16 short (roughly 18 minutes) Italian American film Nunzio’s Second Cousin tells the tale of an attempted gay bashing gone ‘wrong’, or maybe ‘right.’ As Sgt. Anthony Randazzo (Vincent D’Onofrio) leaves the bar with his African American date Levon (Harry Waters Jr.), a group of white adolescents from the neighborhood follow the couple and threaten to gay bash them. Little do they know, Randazzo is an off-duty armed sergeant, and when the gang approaches, he decides to shoot his gun in the air to scare the ‘wanna-be’ gang. After threatening the posse with a series of embarrassing acts, Tony dismisses them, all but Jimmy Cerentano, whom he invites over to his mother’s house for Sunday dinner. Being scared out of retaliation, Jimmy seems obliged to attend and meets Anthony’s mother, Mrs. Randazzo (Eileen Brennan). Once the peculiar dinner is over, Anthony escorts Jimmy out and confronts him about his gay bashing and being a closeted homosexual, and after a big, wet kiss, Anthony sends Jimmy on his way. In 1994, Nunzio’s Second Cousin—one of four short films anthologized in Boys Life 2 (1997)17—premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and was presented at the Sundance Film Festival. Defined by critics as “a black comedy about hate crimes”,18 the short examines a variety of themes—such as race, gender, and ethnic identity— yet, in hopes to better analyze the film, it requires being analyzed through voyeurism and gaze theory, Hegel’s conception of the Master-Slave relationship, and the notion of gender performance. All three of these theoretical models aid in reading Nunzio’s Second Cousin and the repression of the homosexual characters in the film.

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The film is divided into two equal parts, each lasting roughly eight minutes. These two pieces seem rather odd at first glance, but in the end, the film is spliced together through the trope of family, a concept dear to Italian Americana. Ironically, or maybe not so much, in Nunzio’s Second Cousin, the Italian American family does nothing to help the protagonist come to terms with his identity. Anthony, like Jimmy, begins and ends in the closet. This repression experienced by both characters adheres to the framework of the bella figura; neither character is willing to break the bonds with family to find wholeness and happiness. Unlike most celebrated Italian American films that offer a family in peril that reunites, forgives, and moves forward, like Moonstruck (1987) or Big Night (1996), for example, this film creates the exact opposite sensation; there is no forgiveness or closure, only more peril and confusion. In fact, Anthony’s relationship with his mother represses his sexual emotions and forces him to remain in the closet, forced to perform a gender, one of hyper-­ masculinity, which is not his, as evidenced in the opening scene. Both halves underscore a performative nature on the level of gender and simultaneously through the conceptualization of bella figura, where Judith Butler’s and Jose Esteban Muñoz’s ideologies of gender performance are clearly present. When at his mother’s house, Tony must play the role of the good, heterosexual cop, even though both Jimmy and the spectator are privileged to another image of Anthony, that at night with his African American male lover dressed in chaps. From Gay Bashing to Tolerance Teaching Even though this short does not begin or end on a happy note, it offers a multi-layered reading which, as previously mentioned, occurs in two “stages”: the closet takes center stage in the first scene of Nunzio’s Second Cousin. The film opens in the darkness, as it is evening, creating a tone of mystery and danger and suggesting negative connotations for the protagonists’ future. The evening allows one to ‘hide in the shadows,’ which is exactly how all the characters are introduced in the film. The opening medium shot of a corner joint, shady in nature, underscores the desolate scenery; as the camera cuts from the darkness to a medium shot, the spectator is introduced to only one streetlight that is lite along with a sign reading “Cheeks” in bright pink. Anthony Julian Tamburri argues that the sign is clearly referring to a gay local; however, at first glance, little evidence exists to drive home this point (Tamburri 2002, 31). In fact, it

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could just as easily be argued that “Cheeks” could be a heterosexual strip club. On a closer reading, considering the location, which recalls a truck stop area, it would make more sense for it to be a heterosexual local, particularly since its realistic location is in Cicero, a well-known suburb of Chicago. Once very Italian in nature, with an Italian governing body with many connections to organized crime, it now hosts a large Latino community. It remains a suburb torn ethnically, and the comment of Mr. P in the second half of the film perfectly demonstrates this sentiment. Returning to the concept of place, which only two exist in the short film, Anthony’s exit and his date are ambiguous; that is to say, at first, it is unclear if Anthony’s date is male or female. This ambiguity, along with the sign “Cheeks,”, mentioned earlier, can be interpreted diversely through a semiotic reading and is the first trace of gender trouble within the short film. In Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999), Muñoz explains, “The cultural performers I am considering in this book must negotiate between a fixed identity disposition and the socially encoded roles that are available for such subjects” (6). The spectator observes this situation for Jimmy and Anthony as Italian Americans in Cicero. Within the public sphere, even though shot in a dark and mysterious backdrop, the gaze created among the characters and spectators is noteworthy and offers a level of interpretation for the film. According to film director and scholar Laura Mulvey and her concept of gaze theory, three levels of the gaze exist—protagonist, camera/director, and spectator—all are voyeuristically male.19 Thus, through Lacan’s early stages of psychoanalysis, Mulvey illustrates that gaze is always gendered, and men often still dominate women through the gaze.20 Although diverse lenses exist in exploring feminism today, the camera still produces a critical tool for analyzing gender representation. Various levels of ‘voyeuristic gazes’ still exist today both in society and on screen, and even if the camera should be a neutral apparatus, it definitely assumes characteristics, even beyond gender, including race and others, fundamental for reading a film. But what happens when the gaze no longer voyeuristically examines women, as in Nunzio’s Second Cousin? In this case, we need to step back and reconsider how the gaze may work. Once the couple exits “Cheeks” and begins flirting, it becomes clear they are two men as they enter into the light. In their private world of the evening, the importance of light is critical because, as spectators, we look at the couple (as I have argued elsewhere) even voyeuristically. Anthony

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gropes Levan’s behind in his leather chaps and starts pawing all over him. This activity, although public, remains in the dark, protecting their secret. In fact, Anthony never makes a pass or flirts in the sunlight, demonstrating indirectly that his homosexuality is repressed and that he is indeed closeted. Anthony and his date leave the bar, and as they exit the scene, a ‘gang’ of high schoolers enter, threatening to ‘gay bash’ the bi-racial couple. Examining the scene, which is unique, the spectator ‘follows’ the wanna-be gay bashers after charging the couple from behind. The visual aspects of the scene are noteworthy from a psychoanalytic point of view. The gang arrives at the couple from behind, many running with bats, assuming active domination of the ‘two’ homosexuals. However, Anthony quickly responds and puts these punks in their places. The baseball bats they carry remind the audience of the phallus. The director seems to be playing with both the characters and the spectators. The boys’ phallic-like weapons used to “beat them [the couple] back into yesterday” support the concept that gay-bashing friends may very well be not only homophobes but also homosexuals, as they rely on phallic-like objects for gay bashing. Additionally, Anthony’s ‘big gun’ suggests another rather openly sexual phallus reminder. However, to take the metaphor to another level, Anthony does not just wave the gun around and threaten the boys; rather, he immediately shoots as they charge. The ejaculation of the phallic symbol is crucial in understanding the scene, which shows Anthony’s power over the boys, arguing that this power is physical, emotional, and most clearly sexual. The sound of the gun initiates a master-servant relationship that will affect Jimmy Cerentano directly for the rest of the film. After the gunshot, Anthony makes the gang unarm themselves. Levon, the African American lover, tells him to “shoot those bitches” and continues stating that the boys are lucky he does not hold the gun, aka their fate in his hands. Levon’s character at this moment is laced with stereotypes. First, he is an African American gay male, and with this comes an aspect of stigma. In gay culture, many white men fetishize being with a Black man due to the stereotypical size of his penis. In this short, however, Levon seems to be the passive partner. Thus, within a psychoanalytic reading, one could easily see the comment based on rape culture—the ‘gang’ is lucky Levon, the Black gay male, is the bottom. Otherwise, he would rape the ‘gang.’ Moreover, this comment and its stigma only underscore the negative connotations used to define Black gay males. On the other hand, we still see that the white homosexual male police officer ‘dominates’ the

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Black gay male, underscored by the chaps, slaps on the bottom, and the discourse that prevails. To return to the symbolism of the gun, Anthony, or Officer Randazzo, is worried about losing his job and has a more creative punishment in mind to teach the gang a lesson. Their punishment is a series of embarrassing moments for the boys. Actually, Anthony attempts to un-­ heteronormalize these homophobic adolescents by making them repeat: I apologize to all the fags in the world. Gay people are good people. Michelangelo was gay and he was a freaking genius. Next time I’m in the boys’ shower and some guy gets a woody, I’m going to let it slide … right up my ass.

When the high schoolers end up at the last point, they are completely taken back and only one retorts in chorus. Now more upset than previously, Anthony forces the boys to their knees to recite the last sentence together, which they finally do without problems. This scene begs a master-­servant reading and provides the film with a richer concept of masculinity and dominance. The wanna-be fag bashers believe to be masculine and attempt to bash the protagonist and his date. Of course, they choose to do so with bats and weapons. However, when confronted with Anthony, the boys are blocked and forced to become Anthony’s bitches, highlighted most clearly when he physically places them into the submissive position, on their knees, saying to “slip it right up my ass.” That is the defying moment when Anthony metaphorically rapes them of their masculinity and continues to educate them. Masculinity is not related to gender identity or sexual orientation; rather, it is a self-contrived construct. Anthony brings the performance to an end, forcing them into submission while ironically pushing them to become more tolerant. Anthony’s power over both the wanna-gay bashers and even Levon, his date, is clear through his dominance, dress, occupation, and demeanor. Dinner at the Randazzos In the second half of the film, Anthony invites Jimmy to his mother’s house for Sunday dinner, and he obliges. Jimmy remains nervous and uncomfortable. As soon as Jimmy approaches the door, Anthony greets him with a big salami and taunts him about sexual relations and appetites, a pun intended by Anthony.21 Visually, Anthony is manhandling the

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phallus, teasing Jimmy before he can even enter the house. This scare tactic solidifies Anthony’s role: cop, active, dominant, and places Jimmy into his passive, submissive, and in a certain regard, poser role. During dinner, Jimmy shares how he is on the wrestling team, and Anthony’s mother beams with light since Anthony too was captain of the wrestling team. To that, Anthony shares how heated he got while wrestling and how it turned him on. Later during dinner, his mother probes Anthony about his recent date. It is rather clear how gender and racial performance manifest itself in an Italian American context as he describes his date as blonde and blue-­ eyed. Both protagonists are stuck within the confines of the closet in the private realm of the family home; a place that should be welcoming and comfortable is, in fact, the exact opposite. Anthony abhors being at Mrs. Randazzo’s home as much as Jimmy, to a certain degree. This sentiment is presented the moment Anthony returns to the neighborhood and encounters Mr. P and is intensified when he rings his mother’s doorbell and she pretends she does not know who is at the door because of Anthony’s infrequent visits. In the penultimate scene of the short film, Anthony’s mother serves the guys cannoli, a Sicilian pastry made of a fried, crunchy shell (thus usually darker in color) filled with ricotta cream with candied fruit e/o chocolate chips. Although Jimmy attempts to refuse, Anthony insists. The cannolo is another reminder of the phallus—a longer, dark shell filled of white cream—and works as a bookend to the evening. When Jimmy arrives, he is greeted with the salami; he is saluted by the cannolo when he leaves. When he tries to refuse the cannolo, Anthony acts as if he knows what is better for young Jimmy and tells his mother to serve it anyway. The cannolo in the penultimate scene acts as a reminder concerning Jimmy’s desires and a reference to ejaculation in the final scene: Jimmy is missing the phallus and needs to indulge himself in being satisfied. Before Anthony sends Jimmy home, Anthony walks Jimmy out and chats with him on the front lawn in the evening. Jimmy leaves carrying a pot full of leftovers with a foil cover. The foil cover is folded into a swan, reminding the spectator again of Jimmy’s refusal to accept the phallus. Anthony continues to embrace Jimmy closer and closer, telling him, “I have news for you Jimmy boy, bashing fags is not going to stop you from becoming one. Trust me, I tried it.” Then Anthony kisses Jimmy on the lips and trips him into the front lawn. As he trips backward, the covered pot with the foil phallus “explodes,” and the spaghetti ends up all over Jimmy’s chest as Anthony says, “See ya.”

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Forcing Jimmy into intimacy, Anthony metaphorically rapes him, again, culminating the evening’s foreplay. Thus, forcing the kiss and then making him ‘ejaculate over himself’ in the public sphere, the front lawn, figuratively demonstrates Jimmy’s own repression. The short film  ends with Jimmy laying on his back on the grass, a position which reminds the spectator of a prostitute, and Anthony looking down at him. The low- and high-angle shot/reverse-shot dynamic underscores two aspects. First, it maintains Anthony’s power, sexual and otherwise, over Jimmy physically through a psychoanalytic reading. Second, it underscores the thesis of this piece, the irony of the closet. Even though Anthony is a seemingly out homosexual in his personal life, i.e., with his partner Levon, no one else knows, and he remains repressed and truly angry or, at the very least, bitter in the closet. In fact, the film’s final scene occurs at night in the dark, underscoring the closeted nature of the protagonists. Nonetheless, he encourages young Jimmy to come out and accept himself, but he also attempts to out Jimmy, which is unacceptable. In the end, the film represents various negative consequences of being repressed and in the closet. Unfortunately, toxic masculinity, whether it be from Anthony or Jimmy, solves nothing, and growing up Italian American, at least in Nunzio’s Second Cousin, illustrates the difficulty of coming out of the closet and being positive about one’s sexual identity.

II. Kiss Me, Guido (1997) Written and directed by Italian American Tony Vitale in 1997, Kiss Me, Guido is often described as an independent film that takes place between the Bronx and Manhattan, in New York City.22 However, Kiss Me, Guido is perhaps more of an indie film, at least according to Alisa Perren’s Indie Inc. Indeed, Perren argues for a difference in terminology between an ‘independent film,’ which is directly dependent on a foundational media corporation, and an ‘indie,’ which she defines as a film viewed and marketed as independent but affiliated with a critical media company.23 As an indie film, distributed by Paramount Pictures, Kiss Me, Guido grossed $1,918,497 at the box office worldwide and had a rather small budget of $740,000, which allowed it to be edgy. The protagonist, Frankie Zito, works at a local pizzeria in the Bronx, lives with his Sicilian family in an apartment, and is an aspiring actor, wanting to become the next Al Pacino or Robert De Niro, as he is often caught citing them. He is about to propose to his girlfriend, but he catches her

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cheating on him with his brother.24 This event inspires him to leave the Bronx and find a roommate in Manhattan. By chance, he responds to an ad looking for a “GWM,” meaning a “gay white male” as a roommate but Frankie understands it to mean “guy with money.” After a series of misunderstandings, and stereotypical concerns, Frankie about Warren’s homosexuality, and Warren about Frankie’s “Guido nature,” Warren allows Frankie to move in with him. Warren’s ex, Dakota (a director), returns to the scene and begs Warren to star in his new play. With hesitation, Warren finally agrees, but later he and Frankie are caught in a gay-bashing attempt and Warren is injured, not allowing him to perform. Frankie must assume his role in the play but there is a gay kiss in the final scene. Although Frankie succeeds in character, he hesitates at the time of the gay kiss and his stage partner hisses under his breath stating, “Kiss me, Guido!” to a crowded audience which includes his very Italian/Sicilian family, who have finally accepted his desire to be an actor. Before jumping into the analysis, it is critical to address the concept of authenticity. Although the film has been criticized for its one-dimensional stereotypical presentations of both the gay and Italian American protagonists, it is noteworthy for its strong presence of Italian American actors. In the acting world, especially most recently, various scholars and critics have debated the role of hiring non-Italian American actors to fulfill Italian American roles.25 In Kiss Me, Guido, Vitale and his team have actively pursued Italian American actors to play all the prominent roles, particularly that of Frankie (Nick Scotti) and Warren (Anthony Barrile), although Warren does not seem to be Italian American within the film. This aspect of the film proves significant because, whether Italian American or not, the characters represent this aspect of New York life. Beyond ethnicity, performance is at the heart of Kiss Me, Guido. Before the film even develops or Frankie is properly introduced, the audience observes him quoting a few noted citations from Pacino, De Niro, and Pesci from some of the most noted Italian American films as he is taking orders at the pizzeria. Although lighthearted, this early scene solidifies the stereotypical nature of our protagonist: Frankie represents this ‘Italian Stallion’ façade; he wants to grow up and become one of the main mafia actors. Thus, Frankie performs a certain Italian American stereotype, as his character can be read as a bit over the top. In the Bronx, Frankie is very aware of the bella figura, especially when physically still there. As he leaves that neighborhood and moves to Greenwich Village, all of this begins to change.

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Upon Frankie’s arrival at Warren’s apartment for the first time to check out the place, he begins to perform a role he does not understand. Dakota pops in on Warren unexpectedly to discuss his place and asks Warren to take the lead role while he assumes Dakota is there to take him back. In an awkward moment, Dakota shares that he is already partnered again, and is only interested in Warren for his play. Warren’s best friend Terry tells Dakota that Warren also has a new boyfriend, so as not to worry about him. In the middle of this bickering, Frankie enters the apartment and Warren immediately acts like they are a couple, even though Frankie does not understand. Another theme then that infiltrates the entire film is the concept of a play within a play, i.e., Frankie essentially becomes Warren’s coach as they repeat lines together so much so that only Frankie can serve as Warren’s understudy and take over the role. In the end, Frankie takes on Warren’s lead role. The irony, however, is that Frankie is not homosexual, but must play one on stage. Although Frankie is shocked when Warren shares that he is a “USDA Grade A homosexual,” Frankie does not want to return to the Bronx. In fact, once he gets settled, only once does he briefly return for a handball game with Jimmy Chips. As each share time together, they come to understand each other better. Thus, in Greenwich Village, Frankie plays two roles: ‘Warren’s boyfriend’ in front of Dakota and, in essence, ‘Warren’ on stage—two homosexual roles. As Gloria Nardini has studied, la bella figura embraces a huge part of Italian and Italian American culture. Once Frankie breaks up with his girlfriend and leaves the Bronx, his family begins to assume he is homosexual because he refuses to share with his parents that his own brother had sexual intercourse with his girlfriend. In this sense, Frankie attempts to act nobly as he has no intentions of shaming his girlfriend, or his own brother for that matter. Rather, he realizes at that moment that he must change his future for the better. In the hopes of pursuing his dream to become an actor, then, he is willing to sacrifice various things to achieve his goal. At first, Frankie is performing and he does not even realize it. After his arrival at the apartment, the two ‘couples’ grab a coffee. In this sense, Warren forces Frankie to perform and truly uses him, underscoring the ruthless side of the homosexual community. Frankie, confused, blurts out over coffee, “This is a play about faggots?”, and Warren brings Frankie to the apartment and explains the entire situation. At this moment, Frankie finally figures out that Warren, Dakota, and his boyfriend are all homosexual. Also previously mentioned, this initially freaks Frankie out but as he gets to know Warren better, he mellows out. In the same conversation,

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Frankie learns that Warren acted in Mafia Kickboxer, part 3. Albeit not a focus of the film, the director once again returns to Italian American stereotypes revolving around the mafia; however, in this particular case, Warren does not seem to be an Italian American. Still, we encounter a focus on the mafia; although in this situation the director also seems to be sarcastic as he plays with the concepts of both mafia and kickboxer. Later in the film, when Pino, Frankie’s brother, comes looking for him, he finds Meryl instead, the landlady who is looking for some male attention. When they begin chatting, Meryl asks if Pino is Italian due to his last name, and Pino retorts, “Sicilian,” to which Meryl responds, “Are you mafia?”. Once again, we note this emphasis on the mafia and Pino just feeds her assumptions. Yet, it is significant to note that no true mafiosi are ever present within the film, nor any type of organized crime. The conceptualization of the mafia is never developed or highlighted like so many other Italian American films. Even though not a major point within the film, Warren does criticize Dakota for being closeted when they started dating. This aspect of Dakota’s character is never fleshed out and considering the rather feminine nature of both Warren and his current partner, it could have been worthwhile to develop that storyline more. Importantly however, the concept of the closet existing even in New York City via the big screen is significant as numerous queer viewers, whether Italian American or not, flocked, and continue to do so, to NYC in hopes of being accepted and starting a new chapter in their life. The concept of space is noteworthy in Kiss Me, Guido because it exists in both realms, both public and private, even though Frankie is not gay. When Frankie joins Warren, Dakota, and his boyfriend in public spaces for meals, it is assumed that he, too, is homosexual. Although this is not true, from a performative aspect, Frankie is considered to be part of that community. There are various scenes in which Frankie and Warren are practicing lines outside, near the Hudson River. In one scene, the two hug and two ignorant heterosexuals start insulting them. When Frankie confronts them, they start to fight and in the end, Warren sprains his ankle and is unable to perform in the play. In this scene, stereotypes are maintained: Frankie, the hot-headed Italian Stallion ‘protects’ Warren as well as his own reputation, while Warren, the ‘fragile’ homosexual ends up hurting himself. Here we note some growth from the perspective of Frankie as he is willing to protect his friend from a gay bashing, yet it remains a savior-­ like narrative. The true homosexual character is the one who encounters harm and the heterosexual is there for the rescue.

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Once the decision is made that Frankie must fill in for Warren, Warren and Terry work hard to prepare him for the play. Frankie has retained his very masculine, or as Warren calls it, “butch” nature and they attempt to make him a bit more feminine from his walk to his hand gestures. These very brief scenes underscore Butler’s concept of gender performativity and how important it can be to put on a façade for others. Here Frankie is learning to present as a homosexual and wearing a mask to convince others. Although Butler’s conceptualization considers the contrary situation to Frankie’s, it is still noteworthy to explore Frankie’s performativity.26 In the end, Frankie does an amazing job filling in for Warren, the play is a success, and he convinces even his family that he is gay. In the last scene of the play, Frankie must kiss Dakota’s character in the play. Although Frankie hesitates, he looks at Warren who encourages him, as well as Dakota muttering, “Kiss me, Guido” under his breath. As Frankie kisses Dakota, Frankie’s mother faints in the audience and the typical Italian American melodrama comes to a close. The reaction of Frankie’s mother will be repeated in Mambo Italiano (2003). This reaction to the Italian American gay child is a trope and has been seen in various mediums. In the penultimate scene, Dakota tries to pressure Warren to move back in, after trying to patch up his current relationship without success. When Warren refuses, Dakota gets loud and obnoxious. Once again, Frankie returns to the rescue and pulls the limping Warren away. Dakota puts his hands on Frankie and they get into a little fight; Frankie remains unharmed and the scene closes with Frankie and Warren’s friendship becoming stronger and with them continuing to be roommates. Jimmy Chips ends up having a sexual relationship with Terry, who was dressed as a woman the previous night, and claims he may be in love. In this second scuttle, I argue that Frankie moves beyond his savior complex and rather arrives at true friendship with Warren. In this penultimate scene, Frankie and Warren no longer need to perform. Rather, they have developed into the characters they wanted to become and have adjusted to living together.

III. Mambo Italiano (2003) Émile Gaudreault’s 2003 film Mambo Italiano is an adaptation of Steve Galluccio’s theatrical play by the same name. The film and theatrical interpretations are based on Galluccio’s personal experiences growing up Italian Canadian in Montreal.27 The first production of the play occurred in French on December 13, 2000, at the La Compagnie Jean-Duceppe in

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Montreal, Quebec, while the first English language production was by Centaur Theatre Company in Montreal, Quebec, on September 27, 2001. The film version was partially financed by the Canadian government, particularly with support from the Harold Greenberg Fund, a national funding organization that financially assists the development of Canadian dramatic feature films. This governmental funding was helpful in allowing Mambo Italiano to reach its viewer scope and reception. Although the film version received mixed reviews, the movie is significant for numerous reasons. First and foremost, it is one of the very few Italian American28 films, which portrays a positive, strong homosexual Italian American protagonist. In effect, Mambo Italiano demonstrates an evolution of the experience of the homosexual. The film is a bit over the top from a dramatic point of view, acting a bit as a parody, but it reveals numerous cultural aspects of integration into a new society. The tale follows the gay bildungsroman of Angelo Barberini, son of Gino and Maria, brother to Anna. The film’s narrative is partially told in a flashback, half chronologically, charting Angelo’s childhood relationship with Nino Paventi, who disowns Angelo during high school due to rumors that he may be gay. Fast-forward chronologically, Angelo and Nino reconnect, but the moment they step out of the ‘closet,’ Nino is unable to accept his newfound role and ends up marrying Pina, a girl from high school. Angelo and Nino’s parents have trouble accepting that their sons are homosexual, which unravels throughout the film. Nino returns to the closet and marries Nina, pleasing his mother, while Angelo dates a ‘non-Italian boy’ and proudly struts him publicly in town. In the end, Maria and Gino realize their treatment of Angelo was unfair, and all reconcile happily, as in most Italian American films. Space and Place in Mambo Italiano Being gay and Italian is a fate worse than …. Actually, there is no fate worse than being gay and Italian. Angelo Barberini—Mambo Italiano

Public and private spaces play a foundational role in Mambo Italiano; the concept of bella figura additionally intersects with space. The film begins and ends in the communal garden, underscoring various aspects of Italian American culture. First, we note that Italian Americans live in a

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community. Beyond simply living, we view them interacting, helping each other out in the garden, but also playing bocce ball and inquiring about each other’s children. Thus, the family togetherness aspect creates tension around la bella figura and comfort. Functioning as an establishing shot, the film’s opening introduces the quaint, tranquil Italian Canadian neighborhood in Montreal in which everyone knows each other and people stop to chat. This scene focuses on ‘parents’—i.e., the parents of Angelo but also Teresa’s, who Angelo recently went out on a date. Once Teresa’s parents inquire about Angelo’s well-being, considering he never followed up with their daughter, the scene cuts to Angelo frenzied and seeking advice from the Gay Helpline, a phone-in service for queer people who need to talk. The Gay Helpline becomes crucial for Angelo and the narration of the film: Angelo shares his story with the operator as well as the spectator, informing the operator of his past and how difficult it is to be gay, Italian American, as well as being in the closet. At the end of the call, Angelo has a realization: “But I’m sick and tired of pretending. … I feel that with every day that goes by, I lose bits and pieces of myself and I’m afraid that if this goes on, I feel I’ll lose myself altogether.” With that, Angelo understands that he must ‘come out,’ as Nino states later in the film, because the anxiety and paranoia that comes with the closet, as Sedgwick notes, becomes overly consuming for Angelo. While Angelo speaks with the Gay Helpline, he remains inside his apartment. Angelo’s call remains anonymous, hiding his real identity from the operator. Later, Nino moves into Angelo’s apartment, where the two gentlemen are a couple, but remain closeted. Angelo attempts to explore public homosexual spaces like the Gay Village; when he comes home to share his experiences with his boyfriend, Nino becomes frustrated and angry, pushing him further away emotionally. Nino’s emotional state continues to unravel the more people find out. Anna discovers Angelo and Nino’s relationship first because she enters their apartment without prior notice and catches them in the act. These two actions contribute to a reading of the confessional, which only intensifies as the film continues. Their apartment can be read as a Foucauldian confessional on a deeper level. Foucault believed, “[T]he obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points … that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us” (Foucault 1978, 60). Thus, Western civilization adopted this belief that power constrains the individual and society, holding us back and that only through truth by confession can we reveal all

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that is inside us, which leads to freedom.29 This belief has been adopted into mainstream culture not only for heterosexuals but also for homosexuals; truth thus leads to a sense of self-freedom. Angelo’s bildungsroman evolves as he searches not only for his own sexual identity, but also the ability to live it openly. Following the call, Angelo goes to his parent’s house for dinner and plans to come out to them. His sister, Anna, walked in on the couple previously, so she already knows and becomes the confidant for the couple, individually fielding growing concerns of being known as publicly homosexual through a series of medium shots which are cut back and forth between the two men. The rapid, short scenes underscore the chaotic and disruptive nature of the act; Angelo is concerned but also excited about moving forward with his decision, while Nino is increasingly worried about perpetuating a brutta figura. In fact, Anna supports Angelo’s desire to come out of the closet. In one conversation prior to doing so, she states, “Being in the closet is being fucked up,” as she convinces him to tell their parents. As Angelo confesses his truth to Anna, he grows in confidence, which allows him to explore the Gay Village and share it with his parents. Anna remains supportive of Angelo and instills a sense of pride in being gay. Once Angelo tells his parents that he is gay, they attack him verbally and emotionally, playing off all the stereotypes revolving around homosexuality. Gino called Angelo “brainwashed” and blamed being gay on moving out of the house and being exposed to others. He also blamed Maria for not pushing Angelo to play sports as a child, stating, “Hockey would make him normal.” In this intense scene, Angelo’s parents force concepts of toxic masculinity on his lifestyle, particularly Gino. Moreover, by using rhetoric like “brainwashing,” the spectator notes how traumatic a situation Angelo encounters, which is heightened later in the film. As Angelo returns to his shared apartment with Nino, he confides about the dinner discourse with his partner, concluding that his parents took the news rather well. Angelo’s assessment of the evening is problematic because by no means is the situation fine, but Angelo compares it within an Italian American context. Nino becomes additionally upset because now Angelo’s entire family knows, and he is deathly afraid that Angelo’s parents will tell his mother. In this scene, Nino’s concern escalates from anger to embarrassment and unease about his own identity. In fact, he decides not to sleep with Angelo, the first of many steps to ostracize the concept of a happy homosexual Italian American couple. Nino retreats into denial of

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his identity and is additionally worried about embarrassing his mother. Eventually, Angelo’s parents invite Nina, Nino’s mother, to discuss their children. Maria and Gino inform Nina that Nino is gay and partnered with Angelo in this conversation. The discussion quickly becomes ugly and transforms again into an exchange of toxic masculinity, but this time between Nina and Gino. Nina declares that Nino “is doing the banging,” ie. is the active partner, and Gino attempts to protect his son’s honor and masculinity, retorting with, “And who says Angelo’s not doing the banging?” This back and forth highlights the layered homophobic sentiment present within the film and the Italian and Italian American communities at large. It is bad enough that one’s son is gay, but he cannot be the receiver of penetration because he is then seen as the more feminine of the couple. This issue connects to Leo Bersani’s 1980s theory of dismantling binary constructions that match or play off of heteronormative models. Bersani argues that the homosexual community is not the same as the heterosexual community, nor should it try to be.30 Thus, the gay community needs to create its own markers and language to celebrate uniqueness and individualism. However, in this scene, we see a return to stereotypical norms as seen by the heterosexual community on the homosexual one. Following the outing of Nino, Nina approaches Maria and Gino with a plan to ‘normalize’ their gay sons—organize a dinner party in which Nina finds a woman for Angelo and Nino could date Anna because “if he can fall for the brother, why not the sister, too.” The dinner party begins with a discussion of hockey between Gino and Nino; Nino played hockey even at the university level, and Maria makes a comment negating the influence of sports, or not, on homosexuality. As the evening continues, Pina arrives, and it quickly becomes public that Nino cheated on Angelo with Pina after meeting at a bar. Nina becomes ecstatic that her son is “no longer” gay, and Gino and Maria realize that Angelo’s heart has been truly broken. They invite him to move back home, to which Angelo attacks them and their beliefs, saying he will not return to “the prison of guilt and fear and lies,” with which he associates their home. The scene brings about a world of hurt and pain for Angelo as Nino has already broken off relations in high school with him once. Moreover, Angelo learns of Nino’s infidelity with a girl from their high school, another trigger for him. Angelo leaves and returns to his own apartment. Nino returns to his mother’s house. Angelo and Pina constantly contact him to reignite their relationship. In the end, Nino ends up marrying Pina, and Gino and Maria are invited to the wedding. Various comedic scenes are interestingly revolving around

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the marriage; however, I will address only one more crucial scene: the confessional. Maria regularly attends confession, and instead of the priest, Angelo assumes the priest’s stall, and Anna is on the other side. Because Maria takes too much time, Gino also enters the confessional. Angelo attempts to apologize to his parents, and he also requests they do the same to him for trying to set him up with Pina. Worried about what others will say, the family exits the confessional simultaneously, hoping to make some type of stance in doing so. Once done, they realize no one is paying attention to them. This scene demonstrates the weakness of the bella/brutta figura. The more attention you allow it to consume your life, the less important it truly is. In the end, the Barberini family has faded in the wind. Foucault believed that “sexual interdictions are constantly connected with the obligation to tell the truth about myself” (Foucault 1988, 16). Thus, the confession/confessional is the vehicle for inner secrets, and truth becomes the means by which sex is manifested. Additionally, the confessional unites the family—each member apologizes for their wrongdoings, and all come back together. Finally, within the confines of the church, Angelo’s parents accept him. Even more, Gino thanks God for having his son back, showing how much he loves his son and family. Reconciliation, and as such rebirth, only occurs once the entire family confesses in the confessional. The Barberini’s sense of unity only increases as they exit the confessional together. The film continues with Nino’s wedding and simultaneously cuts with Angelo pursuing the guy from the Gay Helpline. Angelo finally scores a screenplay role for a television show (his childhood dream), and Anna sees the same therapist twice. Both events demonstrate these individual characters’ truths. Angelo becomes one with himself, not only from a gender perspective but also professionally, as he dedicates his life to writing and successfully sells a screenplay. While at the same therapist’s office for the second time, Anna reflects on her desires; she underscores the masculinity that Nino exudes as she bumps into him, Pina, and Nina all together in a park. She begins by stating, “I think living in denial is an Italian tradition,”and continues to mention all his positive characteristics; the last is camping buddy, and we understand that Nino has not given up his interest in men but returns to the repressed closet. However, the film does end on a positive note as Angelo and his boyfriend, Peter, walk hand-in-hand with his mother strolling through the community garden where the film first began—a complete circle concerning the time and space of the film.

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The film’s ending is crucial for considering the concept of both the confessional and private versus public. The film returns to the same space where it opened, a garden. The garden symbolizes rebirth, and the spectator observes this reading as the family publicly enters this space and walks through it happily united. While Angelo was being sent on a date with a woman in the opening scene, in this last scene, the focus is on Angelo and Peter truthful to themselves and the community. The last line of the movie is not a derogatory comment about the homosexuality of the couple. Rather, Concetina’s mother states to her husband: “Couldn’t Angelo find a nice Italian boy?”—turning the issue to ethnicity,’ rather than gender identity. In this manner, the film celebrates the Italian American homosexual protagonist, not without struggle.

Concluding Thoughts Although Italian American Literary Studies boast a plethora of gay and lesbian authors, Italian American Cinema Studies lack a rich repertoire. Italian American cinema has provided little space for producing films that address the Italian American queer experience. Maybe this situation has to do with a lack of queer Italian American directors, or there remains a stigma about being queer in the Italian American community. In either situation, more attention is needed concerning the films and media which we currently have available. In these films, being gay and Italian American, as Angelo reminds us, is a fate that is unmatched. We know that the bella/ brutta figura issues feed the difficulty of coming out and often force characters to lie to themselves and hide their sexual identity from everyone. In Kiss Me, Guido, we experience the nuance of gender as a performance. Although Nunzio’s Second Cousin and Mambo Italiano vary in degrees of truth about the characters’ lives, Anthony and Angelo understand their homosexuality and react to the level they feel comfortable. With Anthony, we see that he accepts who he is and, in his own way, is proud of who he is. Otherwise, he would not have had the gay bashers repeat the line about Michelangelo. Even if he cannot share his identity with his mother, he does pursue relations with his friend/date Levon. In the end, he forewarns Jimmy of his future if he sustains his status of repression. Kiss Me, Guido is a lighthearted comedy that explores identity, but also clichés and assumptions. While at times it truly does overly stereotype both the homosexual and Italian American characters, the director’s aim is to remove preconceived notions, learn from one another, and appreciate

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the individual for what he/she/they bring to the table. In Mambo Italiano, we observe a similar, but different situation. Here we have one protagonist forced to live in the closet, married to a woman but sustaining relations with gentlemen on the side. Ironically, he is characterized as the masculine partner, yet he persists in gay sexual relations while married to his wife. Nino’s character is the classic Italian American male who longs to be heterosexual but is either bisexual or gay. On the other hand, Angelo is inspired to follow his true path, confess, and embark on a happy life with a gay partner. Even though Angelo’s journey is challenging, there is a lot of truth to his tale; many queer ethnic folx have had similar coming-out experiences. Through the process of the confessional, Angelo can forgive his parents and all reconcile happily. Despite its Hollywood ending, the film provides some glimpses of reality for the queer Italian American community. Although Angelo’s story is not everyone’s, and many stories of queer Italian Americans end in silence and self-loathing, the Italian American community does indeed celebrate family, and for many more, blood is still thicker than sexual identity, even more so when the person regularly remains private about his/her/their identity. Not everyone can live with the truth.

Notes 1. The Celluloid Closet was originally published in 1981 and saw a revision in 1987. In his “Introduction” to the revised edition, Russo addresses various issues and concerns brought to life from the first edition. The “Introduction” itself is useful to understand the mentality of the LGBT community at the time as Russo himself is best described as a militant and activist. It was first translated into Italian in 1999 with the title Lo schermo velato. L’omosessualità nel cinema. 2. In retrospect, the fact that Russo focuses solely on gay male characters underscores, and maybe more accurately, highlights, the various problems the LGBTQIAA+ community faced as a movement, particularly in the 1980s (pre-AIDS). Excluding lesbian characters, which may have also been a more difficult task due to the ability of gay women to mask/closet easier than men historically, further separates the cause, creating tension rather than unity. 3. It is important to note the chapter titles of the work: “Introduction: On the Closet Mentality”, “Who’s a Sissy? Homosexuality According to Tinseltown”, “The Way We Weren’t. The Invisible Years”, “Frightening the Horses Out of the Closets and into the Shadows”, “Struggle, Fear and

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Loathing in Gay Hollywood”, and “Take the Game Away from Hollywood Finding a Voice and Facing Backlash”. 4. See Vito Russo, “Introduction: On the Closet Mentality” for a deeper discussion on the topic. 5. For more information on Vito Russo and his activist agenda as well as his scholarly role, see Michael Schiavi’s Celluloid Activist: The Life and Times of Vito Russo (2011) and Jeffrey Schwarz’s documentary, Vito (2012), which is based on Schiavi’s biography. 6. The earliest and most robust to date is Peter Bondanella’s Hollywood Italians: Dagos, Palookas, Romeos, Wise Guys and Sopranos (2004). Although less critical, it offers a huge panoramic of Italian American cinema by category, similar to Russo’s gay version. See also Jonathan Cavallero’s Hollywood’s Italian American Filmmakers: Capra, Scorsese, Savoca, Coppola, and Tarantino (2011). 7. It is important to remind the reader that a few anthologies on homosexual Italian American writers do exist. The earliest is FUORI: Essays by Italian/ American Lesbians and Gays, edited by Anthony Julian Tamburri and introduced by Mary Jo Bona (1996). Immediately following, Giovanna (Janet) Capone, Denise Nico Leto, and Tommi Avicolli Mecca edited Hey Paesan! Writing by Lesbians & Gay Men of Italian Descent (1999), which was a much more robust collection when considering participation and genres included. The last anthology on gay Italian American writing is Our Naked Lives: Essays from Gay Italian American Men (2013), edited by Joseph Anthony LoGiudice and Michael Carosone. Still, in 2013, the gay male community finds it necessary to separate the stories according to binary gender lines. 8. Russo most clearly uses the AIDS epidemic as a way to evidence this argument. 9. This piece does not consider queer characters in Italian American cinema, rather Italian American films with  homosexual male protagonists. More research is needed within the field. 10. When regarding cinema, Gardaphé’s work focuses on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather trilogy; Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973), Goodfellas (1990), and Casino (1995); Michael Cimino’s The Sicilian (1987); David Case’s HBO series The Sopranos; and Robert De Niro’s A Bronx Tale (1993). 11. This chapter (129–148) is included in Anthony Julian Tamburri, Re-viewing Italian Americana: Generalities and Specificities on Cinema (2011). 12. Most recently, George De Stefano also wrote “Fuori per Sempre: Gay and Lesbian Italian Americans Come Out” in The Routledge History of Italian Americans (2018). Although the piece focuses on literature and the evolu-

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tion of the field in an academic sense, it remains critical for its detailed development of gay and lesbian Italian Americana. 13. See also Alan Ryan, “Private Selves and Public Parts” (1983). 14. “Most Homophobes are Gay.” September 15, 2016. https://www.ipce. info/library_3/files/homophobes.htm (accessed April 10, 2023). 15. It is also important to remember Alfred Kinsey’s ‘Kinsey Scale’, or ‘Heterosexual-Homosexual Rating Scale’, a system he created to rate one’s sexual orientation. One would take a survey on sexual desire and the response would range from 0 (meaning exclusively heterosexual) to 6 (exclusively homosexual). In the end, Table 147 of the study showed that 11.6% of white males aged 20–35 were given a rating of 3 for this moment in their lives. Additionally, 10% of American males were “more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55”—within the 5–6 range (Kinsey et al., 651). Kinsey’s research suggests a homophobic attitude or, at least, a fear of living as a declared homosexual. 16. The director, Tom DeCerchio, is a seasoned writer for top Hollywood production companies, among the likes of MGM, Universal Studios, Columbia Pictures, and Walt Disney Pictures, and is the founder of Incubator Films. 17. See http://www.incubatorfilms.com/press/press_tom.html (accessed April 10, 2023), and Anthony Julian Tamburri, Italian/American Short Films and Music Videos: A Semiotic Reading (2002), especially 29–52. 18. http://www.incubatorfilms.com/press/press_tom.html 15 September 2016 (accessed April 10, 2023). 19. See Mulvey (1975). 20. Mulvey’s framework assumes a ‘classic film spectator’ and a ‘classic narrative cinema’, generally excluding any type of ‘gendered’ spectator. For more information on the gendered spectator, see Caroline Evans and Lorraine Gammon, “The Gaze Revisited, or Reviewing Queer Viewing” (1995). 21. Through his semiotic reading, Anthony Julian Tamburri underscores the shape and color, a dark salami, referring to both Levon, his Black lover, and Jimmy. 22. It is important to note that CBS took Kiss Me, Guido from the big to the small screen in 2001, with the title Some of My Best Friends (2001). The show was still written by Tony Vitale and Marc Cherry, known for Desperate Housewives (2004–2012), but was canceled after one season. 23. See Jessica Segal, “Film and Digital Media. A Multi-Author Discussion of the Creative Industries in the Digital Age.” https://filmanddigitalmedia. wordpress.com/2014/02/11/556/ (Accessed September 4, 2023). 24. Pino, Frankie’s brother, is completely stereotyped in the film as an ‘Italian Stallion’ who continually sleeps with women outside of relationships. The

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fact that he sleeps with his own brother’s girlfriend is also exceptionally low. Then he comes to Manhattan and sleeps with his landlord. This negative stereotyping reinforces the negative image of Italian American men and masculinity on screen. 25. Italian American author and actor Michael Carosone has continually argued for the importance of hiring Italian American actors to play Italian American roles at various conferences and venues in NYC as well as via social media. 26. See Butler’s Bodies that Matter (1993) and Gender Trouble (1990). 27. Steve Galluccio is an Italian Canadian screenwriter. He has written Mambo Italiano, the theatrical script, and collaborated on the film version, along with Surviving My Mother (2007) and Funkytown (2011). He has additionally written the screenplay for the television series Ciao Bella (2004–2005). Galluccio assumes an active role in writing and composing music for his films, earning two Genie Award nominations for Best Original Song: “Montréal Italiano” in Mambo Italiano (2003) and “Waiting for Your Touch” in Funkytown (2011). 28. I use Italian American to include Italian Canadian. 29. See Peter Fletcher (2010). 30. See Bersani (2009), especially 3–31.

Works Cited Bersani, Leo. Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Bona, Mary Jo. “Gorgeous Identities: Gay and Lesbian Italian/American Writers.” In FUORI: Essays by Italian/American Lesbians and Gays, edited by Anthony Julian Tamburri, 1–12. West Lafayette: Bordighera, 1996. Bondanella, Peter. Hollywood Italians: Dagos, Palookas, Romeos, Wise Guys, and Sopranos. New York: Continuum, 2004. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990. Capone, Giovanna (Janet), Denis Nico Leto, and Tommi Avicolli Mecca (edited by). Hey Paesan! Writing by Lesbians and Gay Men of Italian Descent. Oakland: Three Guineas Press, 1999. Cavallero, Jonathan. Hollywood’s Italian American Filmmakers: Capra, Scorsese, Savoca, Coppola, and Tarantino. Urbana Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2011. De Stefano, George. “Fuori per Sempre: Gay and Lesbian Italian Americans Come Out.” In The Routledge History of Italian Americans, edited by William J.  Connell and Stanislao Pugliese, 565–580. New  York-London: Routledge, 2018.

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———. “A ‘Finook’ in the Crew. Vito Spatafore, The Sopranos, and the Queering of Mafia Genre.” In The Essential Sopranos Reader, edited by David Lavery, Douglas L.  Howard, and Paul Levinson, 114–123. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2011. ———. “Identity Crises: Race, Sex and Ethnicity in Italian-American Cinema.” In Mediated Ethnicity: New Italian-American Cinema, edited by Giuliana Muscio, Joseph Sciorra, Giovanni Spagnoletti, and Anthony Julian Tamburri, 159–170. New York: John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, 2010. ———. An Offer We Can’t Refuse: The Mafia in the Mind of America. New York: Faber and Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Evans, Caroline, and Lorraine Gammon. “The Gaze Revisited, or Reviewing Queer Viewing.” In A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men and Popular Culture, edited by Paul Burston and Colin Richardson, 13–56. London: Routledge, 1995. Fletcher, Peter. “Foucault on Confession.” August 10, 2010. https://peterfletcher.com.au/2010/08/10/foucault-­on-­confession/ (accessed September 4, 2023) Foucault, Michel. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Edited by Luther H.  Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H.  Hutton. Amherst: Massachusetts Press, 1988. ———. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books, 1978. Gardaphé, Fred. From Wiseguys to Wise Men: The Gangster and Italian American Masculinities. New York: Routledge, 2006. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New  York: Doubleday, 1959. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You.” In Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1–38. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. LoGiudice, Joseph A. and Michael Carosone (edited by). Our Naked Lives: Essays from Gay Italian American Men. New York: Bordighera Press, 2013. “Most Homophobes are Gay.” 15 September 2016. https://www.ipce.info/ library_3/files/homophobes.htm (accessed April 10, 2023). Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, Volume 16, Issue 3 (1975), 6–18. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Muscio, Giuliana, Joseph Sciorra, Giovanni Spagnoletti, and Anthony Julian Tamburri (edited by). Mediated Ethnicity: New Italian-American Cinema. New York: John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, 2010. Nardini, Gloria. Che Bella Figura! The Power of Performance in an Italian Ladies’ Club in Chicago. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.

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Parati, Graziella. Public History, Private Stories: Italian Women’s Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Perren, Alisa. Indie Inc.: Miramax and the Transformation of Hollywood in the 1990s. Austin: University of Austin Press, 2012. Rich, B. Ruby. New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Ruffner, Courtney Judith. “Cultural Stereotyping in Happy Days and The Sopranos.” In Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture, edited by Edvige Giunta and Kathleen Zamboni McCormick, 231–236. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2010. Russo, Vito. Lo schermo velato: L’omosessualità nel cinema. Milano: Baldini & Castoldi, 1999. ———. The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, Revised ed. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1987. Ryan, Alan. “Private Selves and Public Parts.” In Public and Private in Social Life, edited by Stanley I.  Benn, and Gerald F.  Gaus, 135–154. New  York: St. Martin’s, 1983. Schiavi, Michael. Celluloid Activist: The Life and Times of Vito Russo. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. Segal, Jessica. “Film and Digital Media. A Multi-Author Discussion of the Creative Industries in the Digital Age.” https://www.filmanddigitalmedia/wordpress. com/2014/02/11/556/ (Accessed September 4, 2023). Tamburri, Anthony Julian. Re-viewing Italian Americana: Generalities and Specificities on Cinema. New York: Bordighera Press, 2011. ———. Italian/American Short Films and Music Videos: A Semiotic Reading. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2002. ———. FUORI: Essays by Italian/American Lesbians and Gays. Edited by Anthony Julian Tamburri. New York: Bordighera Press, 1996.

Films and TV Series Cited Big Night (Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci, 1996). Boys Life 2 (Mark Christopher, Tom DeCerchio, Tom Donaghy, Nickolas Perry, 1994). A Bronx Tale (Robert De Niro, 1993). Casino (Martin Scorsese, 1995). Ciao Bella (TV Series, 2004–2005). Desperate Housewives (TV Series, 2004–2012). Funkytown (Daniel Roby, 2011). The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972). The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974). The Godfather Part III (Francis Ford Coppola, 1990).

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Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990). Happy Days (TV Series, 1974–1984). Kiss Me, Guido (Tony Vitale, 1997). Mambo Italiano (Èmile Gaudreault, 2003). Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973). Moonstruck (Norman Jewison, 1987). Nunzio’s Second Cousin (Tom DeCerchio, 1994—Segment of Boys Life 2). The Sicilian (Michael Cimino, 1987). Some of My Best Friends (TV Series, 2001). The Sopranos (TV Series, 1999–2007). Surviving My Mother (Émile Gaudreault, 2007). Vito (Jeffrey Schwarz, 2012).

CHAPTER 7

From True Love (1989) to Union Square (2011): Recovering the Exploded Family in Nancy Savoca’s Films Gloria Pastorino

It should not come as a surprise that women film directors “are not given the same support and opportunities as their male counterparts,” (Hankin, 59) as Kelly Hankin argues in her awareness-raising article “And Introducing … the Female Director.” This truism, easily extensible to all male-dominated fields, could be even truer if a woman director’s ethnic background places her in a subordinate position in her culture of origin. Even more so, if that perception is confirmed by films that depict a kind of masculinity that glorifies violence and relegates women to either the domestic sphere or the role of wanton seductresses, as mafia movies do. Several Italian American women feature filmmakers opt for a disavowal of their ethnicity, regardless of how Italian-sounding their last names are. Among others, Penny Marshall,1 Sara Colangelo,2 Sofia Coppola,3 and her

G. Pastorino (*) Department of Literature, Languages, Writing, and Humanities, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Fioretti, F. Orsitto (eds.), Italian Americans in Film and Other Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47211-4_7

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niece Gia Coppola4 have all chosen to distance themselves from their Italian American origins in the plots of their films. Those filmmakers who have, instead, opted to embrace and portray their heritage on film, most notably Nancy Savoca, Anne Bancroft,5 Helen De Michiel, and Marylou Tibaldo-Bongiorno, have confronted stereotypes about Italian families and have taken issues with traditional interpretations of women’s roles either debunking them or showing how Italian-Americanness is just one extra element in the depiction of women’s realities. Bancroft’s film, Fatso (1980), ironically emphasizes Italian American cultural habits related to food consumption and over-the-top emotiveness, while exploring the damage that body dysmorphia can have on both men and women. The latter two directors, along with documentaries and impressive socially engaged initiatives, have directed one feature film each. De Michiel in Tarantella (1995) affirms the power of a matrilinear transmission of memories and traditions that cannot be contained by a traditionally imposed silence about women’s activities, while Tibaldo-Bongiorno in Little Kings (2003) explores issues of hyper-masculinity eventually reined in by an all-­ powerful idea of family that must be appeased, even though it does not seem to grant a happily ever after ending. Nancy Savoca, instead, has directed several films that look at ethnicity (Italian American or of women from South American countries) as a fundamental element of the development of her characters that aims at depicting the struggles of all women (regardless of ethnicity) to find their places and voices in American society. Career women, mothers, brides, daughters, nuns, servants, ‘dogs’, entrepreneurs, or ditzes, Savoca’s women find, in their very fragility, the strength to try to redefine their roles. From her first film released in 1989, True Love, to her latest one, Union Square (2011), Savoca, who usually also authors the screenplays of her films, documents her female protagonists’ struggles to affirm themselves and break away from the domestic walls that confine them and from the far-reaching, chafing family ties that prevent them from living life on their own terms. While her first two films, True Love and Dogfight (1991), depict incomprehension and a “constant, complex battle of the sexes” (Reich, 11), from Household Saints (1993) the focus shifts to the difficult negotiations women have to undergo daily to affirm their rights and to not conform to societal expectations sometimes reinforced by cultural mores. All of Savoca’s films portray women who are limited in their choices, either trapped within domestic walls or trying to balance life as professionals with the demands of their households. Among the films that do not depict the

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lives of Italian American characters, Dogfight tells the story of a group of Marines on the eve of being deployed to Vietnam. Their last night of debauchery starts with a rather cruel party, where the Marine who brings the ugliest woman wins a monetary prize. This is the premise for what turns out to be an unexpected love affair between two people, Rose and Eddie, who decide to get over appearances and conventions to see what is at the core of human relations. Rose’s life is split between working in the diner her mother owns and the apartment above it. When Eddie comes back from Vietnam, he still finds her in the same spot in San Francisco, where the fashion has changed but Rose’s role has not. The HBO episodic film If These Walls Could Talk (1996) illustrates the difficult choice of three women who live in the same house (in 1952, 1974, and, 1996) to terminate unplanned pregnancies. The three protagonists have jobs that require a degree and specialized skills (a nurse, a graduate literature student, and an undergraduate artist), but must face the possibility of relinquishing their independence. The nurse, a war widow, resorts to an illegal abortion that kills her. The mother of four who could finally devote herself to her studies and her teaching ends up keeping the baby she could legally abort. The undergraduate impregnated by her cowardly, married professor gets her abortion at a clinic, where her doctor is brutally murdered minutes afterward by a deranged man. The 24 Hour Woman (1999) depicts the stressful and frustrating attempt of a TV morning-show producer to balance her career, pregnancy, her show co-host husband’s vanity, and her Latina family’s expectations. Grace documents every stage of her pregnancy on the show she produces, The 24 Hour Woman, but once the baby is born, she is left home dealing with her job via phone, and her mother and mother-in-law who seem to criticize more than help out. Dirt (2004) shows the precarious life of Dolores, the undocumented Salvadorian maid of a woman who, after using her services for nine years, fires her to run for Congress on an anti-immigration platform. Dolores must deal with the pain of not being able to make ends meet and being away from her country, her language, her family, hiding in other people’s houses, stuck cleaning their dirt. In all these films, the household walls close in on the protagonists’ lives, limiting their mobility: Rose’s diner is a public extension of the kitchen, the quintessential woman’s space; the house whose walls would have a lot to say acts as a tomb for the 1952 woman, as the negation of the 1974 woman’s dreams of a job other than being a mother and housewife, and as the constricting attic where the undergraduate artist fights with her Christian roommate over not keeping the baby; Grace’s

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Manhattan apartment becomes even smaller once she is confined in it with a crying, insomniac baby; and Dolores is a silenced ‘prisoner’ in foreign apartments. Savoca’s focus is always on what prevents her female protagonists from having the life, recognition, and respect they would like. Her choice of topics is varied and bold, but never obvious, never preachy. As she has stated in several interviews,6 including one with Anna Camaiti Hostert, “What I hate to do in movies is to tell you what I think, and that is the way you should see it. The reason why I make movies, and I love making them, is not because I know something, but because I don’t know something” (Camaiti Hostert, 143). It is in this investigative spirit that she made her three films that expand her interest in women’s issues to include the limitations imposed by their Italian American heritage: True Love, Household Saints, and Union Square. The first is the story of the last few days leading up to Donna and Michael’s wedding; the second explains the healing properties of the mythical Santangelo sausages through three generations of Santangelo women, Carmela, an Italian immigrant, Catherine, married to Carmela’s son Joseph, and their daughter Teresa; the last shows the difficult reconciliation of two estranged sisters, Lucy and Jenny. In these films as well, women are tied to an idea of domesticity that limits their ability to become something other than wives and mothers. While the first two are solidly anchored in their Italian Morris Park Bronx neighborhood,7 Union Square is set in Manhattan, as the title suggests, where one of the two protagonists, Lucy, visits her sister, Jenny, coming from that very neighborhood in the Bronx (since she takes the n. 5 subway to get there). Escaping one’s house or neighborhood becomes an act of defiance that seldom yields happiness: the protagonist of True Love, Donna, cannot bring herself to do it and settles for a life of unhappiness; Teresa, in Household Saints, forbidden to join the Carmelites escapes through death (and possible sainthood); Jenny, in Union Square, can only go so far before being reminded of where she comes from and what her responsibilities to her family of origin are. Almost as if the comfort of operating from her own cultural turf gave her license, these three films are Savoca’s most experimental ones in terms of narrative technique and camera work. True Love is framed by home movies, in the beginning and end titles, shot by Donna’s father to commemorate the engagement party and the wedding day; the story of the Santangelo family in Household Saints is told within a present-day narrative frame, while the most emotionally charged moments are marked by

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daydreams, visions, symbolic explosions of color, or out-of-body experiences with (literally) floating signifiers defined by Irena Makarushka as “magic realism” (Makarushka, 83)8; and Union Square, about 80% of which takes place in one room of a small apartment, is shot using a Canon 5D digital camera, at times purposely getting in and out of focus, and ending with a home movie shot on a cell phone, documenting one of the protagonists’ mother’s last days. The hand-held camera that defines domestic moments in home videos adds to a sense of shaky reality as Lucy walks away from Union Square toward her sister’s apartment a few blocks south. The presence of actual home movies, shot by men (Donna’s father or Lucy’s husband), also indicates a desire to “domesticate” reality, to confine memories of special occasions outside the house (engagement party, wedding, etc.) within a home space. As Donna’s father states, with the new technology he does not need a Super 8 projector but can see his creations on his TV set; twenty years later, Lucy’s husband, instead, can consecrate Lucy and Jenny’s mom’s unadorned domesticity by broadcasting it on Facebook, while his emotionally unstable wife, Lucy, shows spectators the perils of leaving her home life looking for thrills in other men’s arms and Jenny reveals the shakiness of living an uprooted life. Savoca’s framing choices define the way her characters perceive reality and add to the feeling of entrapment, magic, or claustrophobia she wants to convey. Each film uses a different recurring idea to establish a mood: True Love makes use of windows and screens, Household Saints relies on overhead shots, and Union Square focuses on the claustrophobic limited space of a studio apartment to underscore the characters’ feelings of entrapment. One of the early scenes of True Love shows Donna and her girlfriend JC having lunch at a pizzeria, while two of Michael’s friends, Brian and Kevin, “stalk them” from a car parked on the other side of the street (Brian is infatuated with JC). From the boys’ point of view, the girls sitting by the window are on display, advertising their still unmarried desirability. The camera shot of the girls looking at the parked car shows them caged in, looking out of a window (on which the name of the pizzeria, Louie’s, is clearly readable, creating an arc above their heads that further frames their existence within the window frame). A later shot shows a frustrated Donna making a phone call to try to reach her fiancé; she is sitting on the windowsill of the room that will become the kitchen in her new apartment: the window has bars and Donna looks in, framed by the window and caged.

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Women’s limited choices are highlighted by the way they are portrayed. Two similar shots show the different options life gives to men and women: as Michael and Donna run around settling the last details for the wedding (venue, menu options, rings, tuxedo, etc.), Donna’s mother, her friend Grace, and Donna stare at tuxedos in a window. The perspective is from inside the shop, so that a couple of jacket sleeves create a sub-frame through which the three women are seen looking in; Donna, then, returns with Michael in front of the same window only to be told that he would not wear a tux that matches the wedding’s color scheme, but a black one with a white shirt; finally, she returns with Grace and her mother (in reverse order: Donna, Grace, mother) to be convinced that he has the right to choose what to wear at his own wedding. A similar technique is used in two subsequent shots filmed, respectively, looking out through the screen of a jukebox and of a bank ATM: in the first one, Michael chooses a song to dance to at his post-bachelor party get-together at his friend Dom’s bar, while in the second he withdraws sixty dollars to continue the party in Atlantic City.9 The first one frames just Michael, while the second also shows Dom, Brian, and Kevin. A similar shot that shows spectators the desire felt by looking at an image through a lens is the viewing of a pornographic film at Mickey’s bachelor party held by his uncle Benny. The camera pans left, showing the faces of the men’s reactions to the projected images of women they will never have, which also consolidates the Madonna/whore complex implicit in a culture that glorifies motherhood as something separate from sexual desirability.10 Both Donna and Michael look through a glass or a screen, but while she looks into a future that will seal her fate as a married woman living inside another set of walls, he looks at entertainment and escapism on the outside, with people. Several shots in Household Saints show Savoca’s signature moves, from a gesture that reveals a seamless editing into a different scene, to things being framed from above to add to omniscient narration a more precise view of key elements of the story. As Donna is taking off her nightgown in a tradition-defying lovemaking session the night before her wedding, the copious amount of white fabric held by arms raised above her head morphs into the fabric of the wedding dress, as her mother helps her get dressed and her arms come back down. Similarly, the old man taking over the telling of the Santangelo story in Household Saints pours wine into a glass. The red liquid becomes the wine poured in the next scene where Joseph Santangelo, his future in-laws, Lino Falconetti and his son Nicky, and a friend are playing pinochle, as revealed by an overhead shot of the square

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table and players. It is a particularly hot night in 1949 and the San Gennaro festival drags on in the heat. A painterly, perfectly composed long shot shows a man sleeping on a second-floor fire escape on the right of the frame, while a festival band plays from an awning-covered stage on the left and a single middle-aged couple slow-dances in the heat. Cut to three elderly women and two men on the stoop in front of a building, and an overhead shot of zeppole dough being dipped in hot oil leads to the shot of a Ferris wheel that recalls the roundness of the frying pot. No matter how hot the day, traditional zeppole must be prepared and sold; the shot from above, showing the dough sizzling in oil instead of the finished product, emphasizes the importance of traditional food over meteorological impediments. Tradition, neighborhood gossip and rhythms, and superstition are all part of the world that creates these characters. Forty years after the setting of this scene, in True Love, women are still sitting on building stoops (Donna and JC) or just outside a building with no steps, on folding chairs (five elderly ladies), to share comments on the day gone by, as they used to do in tenement housing at the beginning of the twentieth century.11 The sausage-making process, whether done by Joseph’s mother Carmela or his wife Catherine, is shot from above, to focus on the precise, almost religious ritual of mixing ingredients by hand while reciting the recipe/magic formula/incantation as a woman’s hands expertly combine ingredients. The badly cooked pasta Carmela makes for the family toward the end of her life, in a meal that mirrors the inedible ‘engagement dinner’ prepared by Catherine near the beginning of the film, is shot from above as well and its glued-together strands show the irony of the overly critical mother-in-law disparaging women who cannot cook. Or, again, the mirror gesture of pulling out the soft part of the bread and leaving the crust (still shot from above), done by Carmela first and about eighteen years later by her granddaughter Teresa, establishes a kinship between the first and third generation of Italian American women in this family. The tie between the two blood relatives (which bypasses Teresa’s mother, who is a Falconetti, not a Santangelo) is already established on the Easter day. Teresa is conceived while her grandmother dies: Carmela’s superstitions and religious fervor are reborn (appropriately, given the day) in her granddaughter and anachronistically enhanced in a girl who aims at saintliness rather than the earthly pleasures her mother discovers in marriage. The bond between these two women who never met is also present in their names, which are Italian (Carmela, Teresa) and not Americanized like Catherine (or Joseph, for that matter, following a

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typical immigrant instinct and desire for assimilation of their offspring into the host country’s culture). The bond is further affirmed when Teresa is starving herself to strongarm her father into letting her become a nun12 and her dead grandmother cooks three sausages for her in the middle of the night to save her life.13 The title indicates “saints,” plural, possibly documenting this inter-generational passing of the baton, which is also physically signified by restoring grandma’s crucifix and religious images put in a box by Catherine before Teresa’s birth, in a de-cluttering frenzy that Makarushka aptly, and humorously, sees as an exorcism (Makarushka, 86). Teresa is often shot from above when she humbles herself for the Lord, lying askew on her bed and praying for Jesus to give her a sign, or face down on the floor in a white nightgown, arms spread like a crucifix in the pose of a supplicant nun, to indicate the presence of God above her. Savoca’s point of view emerges strongly not in an offered interpretative key for the events she narrates, but in the way they are told. The open-­ ended conclusions, the ‘objective’ storytelling in which no one turns out to be entirely right or wrong, and the pressure under which her characters operate all contribute to involving spectators and leaving them reflecting on what they watched. All her films go against the grain of easy explanations of a character’s motives based on type, ethnicity, or logical reaction. This is particularly true in the three films that depict Italian American life. The director is playful with some stereotypes, which get debunked or kindly mocked, and inserts film citations that give spectators a false sense of recognition of archetypes. The profession of the male protagonists of True Love and Household Saints, deli employee and butcher, brings to mind the opening scene of Delbert Mann’s 1955 Academy Award winner Marty, whose protagonist’s shyness is replaced by the charm and cheekiness of Michael and Joseph, respectively. Marty’s storyline and attention to the lives of ordinary Italian American people establishes an unavoidable connection between the classic film and Savoca’s late 1980s/early 1990s films. The shy butcher shamed by the neighborhood women because still unmarried and looking for love is replaced by a young, responsibility-­ averse but engaged man about to be married at the end of the ’80s and a well-off, flirty butcher who is struck by the total innocence of the woman he won in a pinochle game and who is not even remotely thinking about marriage in the late ’50s. The theme is still finding a wife, though, and Savoca plays also with the idea of the jealous overbearing friend, citing Angie’s selfishness in Marty in her depiction of Michael’s friend Kevin. Unlike Angie (Angelo), whose

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obsession is with Marty and the fear of remaining the only one who can never get (and hold on to) a girl, Kevin fears any change that would disband or alter the dynamics of his tight-knit group of four. When he and Brian are in the car discussing the latter’s interest in JC, he goes into a tirade: “What is it with these guys? The first girl they meet and, boom!, it’s all over. Look at Mickey. He’s been led all over town like a dog on a leash.” He interrupts Donna and Mickey’s lovemaking while they are babysitting for Mickey’s sister, lets Mickey know that (sex) “it’s not as fun when it’s legit,” points out to a perennially late Michael, still not dressed 20  minutes before getting to church, that “some guys [i.e.,  Michael’s father] can’t wait to watch [him] walk the plank,” thus equating marriage with a death sentence. Kevin is also the first one to adhere enthusiastically to Mickey’s idea of going to the bar when the wedding is over, against Dom’s advice. Dom seems to be the only one of the friends who understands that once one gets married he has to “adjust to things,” as he says to a reluctant Michael, who unburdens his fears by telling him about “crazy Roy,” who seems reborn now that “his old lady died three weeks ago,” finally liberated from the shackles of married life. The culture of eternal male adolescence14 is confirmed by uncle Benny, who gives Michael the keys to his Lincoln and some money to go have fun with his close friends after the bachelor party in his basement, his “man cave” (not called such in the ’80s, but literally a separate space in the house just for men to bond without women, ironically watching women on films and talking about them). Close friends aside, all family dramas depicted in these films have an audience, almost a Greek chorus composed of extended family, neighborhood, and invited guests, commenting on people’s behavior and life choices. In Union Square, which is set far from Italian American neighborhoods, the role is left to passersby, who witness Lucy’s explosions and meltdown at the beginning of the film. This constant surveillance contributes to the feeling of constraint and judgment that all of Savoca’s women characters experience. Bystanders’ judgment extends to Household Saints Catherine’s brother Nicky, whose less “masculine” sensitivity determines his ultimate demise. He sits in front of his store (as women do in front of their house), dreams of Madama Butterfly as he shares a bed with his father, and idealizes the quintessentially submissive woman in Puccini’s opera as the epitome of beauty, grace, and perfect passive love. Not surprisingly, the scene he dreams of is Cio-Cio-San singing: “Vogliatemi bene. / Noi siamo gente avvezza / alle piccole cose / umili e silenziose, /

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ad una tenerezza / sfiorante e pur profonda / come il ciel, come l’onda del mare!”15 A war veteran, possibly shell-shocked, Nicky identifies with Pinkerton in his dreams (they are both officers in the American army in a time of war), and with Cio-Cio-San in real life.16 Madama Butterfly kills herself because she cannot hide her shame (she has a son and a sham marriage with the now-remarried Pinkerton), so she sacrifices herself honorably for an ideal and to let him live the life he wants with his new wife.17 Nicky’s suicide with a katana follows the realization that his clumsy attempt to court the Chinese dry cleaner by bringing her a radio to listen to Madama Butterfly, his people’s music, is thwarted by her father, who turns the dial to Chinese opera, which sounds cacophonic and foreign to Nicky’s idealization of the Orient through the lens of Puccini’s orientalism. The neighborhood gossips comment that “That’s what happens when you think you’re too good for your own kind.” His sacrifice seems as deranged as Teresa’s later psychotic episode, when she talks to Jesus and receives the miracle of the multiplication of the hideous red-and-white checkered shirt she was ironing for her boyfriend. The drama of everyday life is barely contained by domestic walls, where women are confined and, at times, explode, as remarked by the old lady’s daughter in the coda of Household Saints, when she tells her mother: “You know, Ma, I could name a list of women as long as my arm who went crazy cooking and cleaning and trying to please everybody. So she saw Jesus at the ironing board: that makes her a saint?”18 As Laura Ruberto suggests, there is nothing liberating about “labor connected to the domestic space of the kitchen” (Ruberto, 173). In fact, Teresa’s vision of Jesus involves a delightfully absurd dialogue, possibly prompted by her obsessive-­ compulsive devotion to household chores, as exemplified by the scene where she cleans her boyfriend’s toaster with a toothbrush. The conversation with Jesus and the pinochle game she plays, once hospitalized, with him, God, and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux confirm the patriarchal structure of Catholicism, where women, at best, can aspire to be servants with no rights. Teresa’s obsession with being married to Jesus indicates a perverted idea of family, in which the wife aspires to “love [her] nothingness” (Saint Thérèse of Lisieux) and subordinates her life to that of her spiritual husband. Jesus rewards her when she offers to wash his dirty shroud—which she believes was held in Turin. He also explains that he has to wear it to keep up appearances with the angels, adding his own layer of ‘bystanders’ passing judgment on his family and aligning the Sacred Family’s experience with Teresa’s understanding of the world. It turns out that God and

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Jesus cheat playing pinochle with the two “Little Flowers,” and Thérèse lets them win (“That’s a saint for you!” comments Joseph), much to Teresa’s dismay, who would expect them to play fair. God’s greatest pleasure is oddly in line with her father’s habits: “tipping the scales and cheating at pinochle.” In the conflation of family and Catholic lore, Teresa dies emanating a smell of roses, possibly sent by Saint Thérèse, whose mission after death is to “spend my heaven doing good on earth. I will let fall a shower of roses.” Teresa’s obsession may be an ironic commentary on the cloistered life ordinary women are supposed to lead, as the quoted final lines of the film seem to suggest and as the law student Leonard Villanova states, trying to court her: “But Teresa, why shut yourself off from life? Didn’t it ever occur to you that a woman can serve God and her family at the same time? All these things you mention—the floors, the dishes—they can be done in a home of your own for a family of your own and God will be just as pleased.” As he advocates for the willing, enthusiastic servitude that all the generations of women before Teresa have entered for the sake of the family, the irony of his statement is lost on him but not on spectators. In fact, Teresa wants to follow Saint Thérèse’s path in the Carmelite monastery,19 but she is actually following the rule of another Carmela, her grandmother, in her house-chore obsession (early on in the film, Carmela reprimands Catherine for having left unwashed dishes in the sink for two hours). The names of the main characters are not casual. Joseph is the quintessential patient father and devoted husband and the first one to believe in the sainthood of his daughter once he witnesses the blooming of the flowers outside the hospital; Catherine develops the strength and mediating abilities of her namesake saint from Siena: self-taught and political, just as Catherine, she teaches herself to abandon superstition, document herself, and rationalize her daughter’s death when faced with a suddenly mystically inclined husband. She keeps the peace, like her namesake. To a degree, all the women in these three films are “cloistered,” with different levels of autonomy, depending on the setting and era, but still confined by their duty to the household. The space designated for women within the house is specifically the kitchen, which is their domain not just to create meals to feed the family but for any kind of expression. Savoca does not indulge in the stereotypical representation of elaborate dinners, testament to the Italian obsession with food. Every time food is present, it is there for a purpose. In True Love, food is sold at the deli, it is a slice of pizza shared by Donna and JC or burgers shared by the guys (fast food is

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this generation’s food of choice), it is the ricotta cake eaten by the women of Donna’s family (mother, sister, and aunts) while discussing man trouble, or it is the ridiculously dyed, baby-blue mashed potatoes of the very last image of the film that prompt Michael’s little niece to say “That’s disgusting!” as a little boy eats them. This final scene also reverses the dynamics between men and women in the film: girls are taught to want the “dream wedding” with the poofy dress with a long train that makes walking impossible, shiny things, elaborate settings, and food dyed to match the wedding’s color scheme. The little girl who does not read magazines like Cosmopolitan finds baby-blue potatoes rightfully unappealing, just as Michael did when they were first suggested to him, along with other nonsensical choices imposed by the multi-million-dollar wedding industry.20 The men in the film seem more interested in drinking than eating. No romantic view of food is present in Household Saints or Union Square either. Santangelo’s sausages are the stuff of legend after Teresa’s death, but at the beginning of the film, they are much more prosaic. Joseph uses them to try to shock young Catherine by playing with one suggestively and it is her complete innocence and ignorance of what a sausage-shaped male body part could do that prompts Joseph’s vision of her in a wedding dress. He wins her from her father at pinochle, but it is her innocence that wins him. Her brother Nicky hopes Catherine likes sausages because “This is your life from now on,” as he tells her, commenting on the lack of beauty of a life sustained by less noble cuts of meat: “For some guys life is beautiful, like opera […] All we have is sausage and pinochle”—which may not be so bad, since even God declares that that is what he loves most, according to Teresa’s card-playing vision. Otherwise, food is either the badly cooked meals Catherine prepares or the mythical shells Carmela picked out of the garbage when she and her husband were poor immigrants, with which she “made a delicious soup,” to underscore her superiority as a woman who knows her place and duty in life. In Union Square, organic food is what Jenny and her future husband, Bill, sell; the food she cooks marks an absence (of meat and of pesticides, theoretically) and is part of a different philosophy of life than the Italian American food the sisters grew up eating. It is totally alien to her sister Lucy, who finds the smell of the Indian spices Jenny uses offensive and is a “vegetarian virgin,” as she declares when she shares a meal of curried tofu with the couple. Lucy does not know how to pronounce half of the vegetables Jenny looks for at the Union Square market to prepare a

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vegetarian dinner for Thanksgiving with her in-laws. They end up not showing up for dinner because their daughter gives birth, but Lucy does, bringing a vegetarian lasagna, along with her husband and child, as a Thanksgiving peace offering that unlocks Jenny’s last resistance, bringing her back to her roots: “You cook just like ma. She never taught us …” Food is functional to the plot and to character development, rather than becoming the obsessive, aesthetically pleasing plot focus of many contemporary films. The kitchen, though, is only partly the place where women prepare food that the family consumes: it is the inner sanctum where the lives of women unfold. In True Love, ten pivotal scenes take place in either Donna or Michael’s family kitchen or in the room that will be the married couple’s kitchen in their new home. Male and female activities are separated by locales (bar, man cave, the streets for men, and mostly kitchen or bedroom for women) and by rapid cuts between scenes taking place at the same time; as Edvige Giunta notes: “through the technique of cross-­ cutting […] the two worlds are juxtaposed, but they hardly interact with each other” (Giunta, 79). The first time we see characters in a kitchen is at Michael’s mother’s house. Donna is reading Cosmopolitan and tries to drag Michael into the typically feminine ’80s magazine activity of quiz-­ taking to see if they have ‘the perfect match’. Michael, whose amorous intentions are blocked both by Donna and his mom, participates but changes the rules of the game, adding option D to each answer, demystifying the cookie-cutter ideal of the perfect couple, but also already signaling what he considers ‘perfect’: “a night at Dom’s bar watching The Honeymooners, the original 39” and “a two-family house in the Bronx”— which is also Donna’s dream. However, his perfect evening is with his pals, not with her, and the two-family house is probably only good if either family or one of his friends’ family occupies the other half of the house. It is in Donna’s family kitchen that wedding invitations are written up, that her mother and sisters discuss their men’s sexual expectations, and that Donna has a tender moment with her mother the day before the wedding, after a vicious fight with Michael. Her mother, who is happily singing as she prepares supper, dispels some misgivings about the imminent wedding by showing that her shotgun wedding did not turn out badly in the end. She also gives Donna a lovely white nightgown once they move to her bedroom. The kitchen is, therefore, a place for intimacy, as seen in the evening of Michael’s bachelor party, when Donna calls her mom after watching a male striptease with her girlfriends and sister: seated at the

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kitchen table, her mother is putting on a moisturizer in semi-darkness—an activity better suited for a bathroom or a bedroom, but seeming perfectly natural here. Or, yet, the night before the wedding, when Donna and Michael make up, by making love on a kitchen chair—which seems to either prove that it is, indeed, bad luck to see the groom the day of the wedding or that the marriage is already consummated, so Michael is entitled to spend his wedding night at the bar with his friends. In Household Saints, the kitchen is also an extension of the Santangelo family business, since it is the place where Carmela prepares her sausages, thus making public a private activity (preparing food) that almost turns into a séance once Carmela dies and Catherine continues the tradition. She recites to herself, channeling her mother-in-law’s voice which, in the Italian Catherine does not really speak, sounds like an incantation from another world: “Dodici spicchi d’aglio, tre o quattro pugni di sale, un po’ di pepe non è male, mischia mischia …”21 In the kitchen Carmela dies, by the stove where sauce is burning, and in the kitchen her spirit cooks the sausages that bring Teresa back to life. It is also there that Teresa’s curiosity and aspirations are denied first by the Pope, whose revelations in a letter by Saint Thérèse are not published fast enough for the impatient pre-pubescent girl, and then by her father, who refuses to let her adolescent daughter become a Carmelite. Her hunger strike begins and ends in the kitchen as well. It is the place of life, death, and nourishment for the family and the neighborhood, but, ultimately, in this film, it takes on more of a symbolic meaning than in True Love. In Union Square, the kitchen extends to the whole apartment, since it is a large studio, and Jenny is confined in it, taking care of her and her fiancé’s business, “Millstone Organic Foods.” Manhattan is far from the old neighborhood (“forty minutes on the ‘5,’” says Lucy), and Jenny has reinvented herself far away from the whole family, pretending to be from Maine: soft-spoken, controlled, as “Anglo” as she can be. Her aseptic house (and life) is turned upside down by her bipolar estranged sister, who tries to follow the many house rules but ends up breaking most of them and making Jenny do the same (no shoes, no smoking, no pets, no alcohol, no kids—only the no-shoes rule stands). Notwithstanding the façade of independence, Jenny is still confined to a kitchen: her internet-based food business boxes her in as much as Carmela’s food preparation for the downstairs butcher shop does. Bill is mobile: his work for their business is outside and, when he gets home, he goes for runs. Jenny takes care of online customers and accounting, prepares food, and keeps the house

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clean and in order. As Lucy remarks, she is “passing,” recalling with this word the century-old discussion on the racial profile of Italian immigrants: “You’re like a different person with him. […] You are trying to pass, Jenny. You’re trying to be something that you’re not. […] You should be honest with him.” Jenny’s behavior does imply that there is something wrong with being loud, boisterous, and a bit unfiltered, like her sister and mother, as the audience discovers in the home video at the end of the film. When she learns possibly the main reason why Lucy went to see her— to let her know that their mother died of lung cancer—she goes out to a nightclub with her sister and witnesses Lucy’s unhinged behavior: dancing and kissing strangers first and then, outside at dawn, almost throwing herself in the river. Jenny, who seems to be the balanced one and who manages to get her sister back from the edge, after this scene begins to unravel. Before going out, the sisters are brought together by smoking a cigarette by the window (which gives viewers a hint of the old Jenny) and by (gallows) humor: to Jenny’s statement that their mother was a hypochondriac, Lucy replies, “Yeah, well, she was finally right.”22 Going out for a non-­ household-­related reason reminds Jenny of the woman she used to be, before reinventing herself three years prior. Back into her bed at dawn, she is told by a half-asleep Bill that her “hair smells like cigarettes and booze.” Her immediate reaction is to take a shower, before going back to bed, to decontaminate from the world outside, and go back to her protected house cocoon. However, she is forced to walk her mother’s poodle that Lucy brought with her, go to the market with her sister who objects to chia seeds (“Chia pets?”), mesclun (“Mescaline? What are you going to make, the in-laws high?”), and Brussels sprouts (why not  “broccoli! A good Italian vegetable!”), and receive a free hug from a guy with a sign (“Do it! She’s an orphan!”). The tipping point is cutting through her future mother-in-law’s wedding dress as she opens the box in which it came. It should be her own mother who passes down her wedding dress, not a virtual stranger, so the cutting of the dress is quite symbolic if, as Freud tells us, there are no accidents. Her accent starts reverting to a Bronx lilt and she has to take Valerian to calm down after her sister’s twice-­ repeated declaration of love. Her sister’s visit is an earthquake. Lucy’s escape from the neighborhood and from the confines of house and motherhood is through affairs. At the beginning of the film, spectators hear her fight over the phone with “Jay,” who is not too happy about getting a potential visit and who has to have dinner with his wife; later on, when she has given up the idea of killing herself in the river, she receives a

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call from “Mike.” These men are short-lived distancing opportunities that do not change the base reality of Lucy’s existence in the neighborhood. Her mood swings and her need to break away may be episodes smaller in scale than the one experienced by Teresa in Household Saints, but they indicate a similar necessity to transcend not just cultural impositions on one’s time, but also the forced confinement to the life of a housewife. Jenny’s world may seem fancier, but she is just as contained as if it were impossible for women to get away from the role of homemaker. Her clean life, ‘monochromatic’ clothes, as Lucy calls them (“Is Bill into the Amish or something?”), and obsessive-compulsive rules (which Bill shares, recording heartbeat, miles run, BP, etc. for every run) are just a re-­ packaging of the rules with which she grew up. After confessing to Bill that they are not from Maine, she used to do drugs, and her family is messed up, she watches the tribute to her mother Nick and Lucy posted on Facebook. Hearing her mother’s voice prompts her to stop arguing with Bill, so that they can both join the rest of her family to watch one of the last days of her rather gruff mother. Dead too young, at sixty-one, her mentioning Jenny several times, telling her she needs her home and that she loves her reiterates the importance of family ties and of working on relationships while one still can. Family may be crazy, but in this Thanksgiving dinner, Jenny reconnects with her roots and re-learns the importance of family, finding herself in the broken elements of her family of origin and the nephew she did not know she had, and in the new, accepting elements of her new life. Lucy rediscovers her own husband, who clearly loves her, and states her descendance matter-of-factly: “Who else was I gonna cook like?” Of course her food tastes like her mother’s: culinary tradition is passed on through smells and taste memory. One always tries to reproduce the food that made her (or him) feel loved. Lucy’s final barely avoided meltdown when she says that their mother is watching over them, happy that they are reconciled, sews the family back together, making her mother actually appear, thanks to Nick and his suggestion that they watch the tribute on Facebook. Even though the mother’s advice is “Don’t have children. Well, at least, don’t have girls,” a new, perhaps dysfunctional but united family is recomposed. The trajectory of the couples’ journey from True Love goes from total incomprehension of one another’s needs, to helping out with the sausage part of the business and having a loving marriage in Household Saints, to an actual business partnership in Union Square or, in the case of Lucy, the belated realization that her husband Nick is a good man. Savoca’s films tell us that

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nothing is as simple as it looks from the outside23: a lavish wedding with lots of loving people may be the celebration of an obligation rather than true love, while a broken house may harbor hearts full of love.

Notes 1. Her father’s last name was Masciarelli. Even though she played Italian American Laverne DeFazio in the TV series created by her brother Garry, Happy Days (1974–1984), and in its spin-off Laverne & Shirley (1976–1983), the films she directed—Jumpin’ Jack Flash (1986), Big (1988), Awakenings (1990), A League of Their Own (1992), Renaissance Man (1995), The Preacher’s Wife (1996)—shy away from any trace of Italian Americanness, with the possible exception of Riding in Cars with Boys (2001), based on Beverly Donofrio’s memoir (1990), where ethnicity, however, seems like an afterthought. 2. Screenwriter and director known for Little Accidents (2014), The Kindergarten Teacher (2018), and Worth (2020). 3. Academy Award recipient for the screenplay of her film Lost in Translation (2003), also director of The Virgin Suicides (1999), Marie Antoinette (2006), Somewhere (2010), The Bling Ring (2013), The Beguiled (2017), On the Rocks (2020), and Priscilla (2023). Somewhere (awarded the Golden Lion at the 67th Venice International Film Festival) deals with the protagonist’s Italian heritage marginally. For an insightful discussion of Coppola’s subtle Italianness in her films, see Colleen Ryan (2021), “What’s Italian About Sofia Coppola?” in Italian Americans on Screen. Challenging the Past, Re-Theorizing the Future (Calabretta Sajder, Ryan and Alan Gravano, eds.), Lexington Books, 2021. 4. Director of Palo Alto (2013) and Mainstream (2020). 5. Née Anna Maria Luisa Italiano (an Ellis Island last name given to her father, emigrated from Potenza with her mother), Bancroft is famous for her outstanding career as a theater and screen actress. In 1980, she made her directorial début with Fatso (in which she also stars as the sister of the protagonist Dom De Louise). 6. Including on the filmed interview with Anthony Tamburri on Italics on CUNY TV for Women History Month—March 8, 2018, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=sLizLIQaWBU (accessed April 10, 2023), and on a zoom invited talk at the NJCU hosted by Edvige Giunta on September 17, 2020, https://www.njcu.edu/community/center-­arts/digital-­ content (accessed April 10, 2023). 7. Incidentally, the neighborhood where Nancy Savoca grew up, in an Italian family; her father emigrated from Argentina to New York.

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8. The definition is not entirely appropriate, since the visions Teresa has are either psychotic episodes or visions of a saint, while the floating-in-the-­ clouds bed as Catherine is experiencing the pleasure of her first sexual encounter with her husband or the superimposed tiny coffins moving right while Joseph is carrying the one containing his stillborn child are metaphors rather than inexplicable events unremarkably coexisting with reality. 9. It is 1989: $60 go a long way, compared to present times. 10. At the beginning of the story, an old man in the deli tells Michael he better look at Donna now, because “after the first kid she’s gonna blow up like a balloon.” The stereotype seems to be confirmed by Donna’s aunt’s tale about the kind of filthy movies her husband Vinnie brings home, such as Last Tangle [sic.] in Paris or Deep Throat, which should not give him any strange ideas, since “they pee through that thing.” 11. Mario Puzo describes this kind of neighborhood life in great detail in The Fortunate Pilgrim. Mickey and his friends too sit on a sidewalk in Atlantic City, eating ‘White Castle’ burgers and listening to Mickey’s complaints about Donna’s ideas on how to furnish the new apartment. However, they are outside, far from any home, free from constraints, while women are always tied to a building. 12. To strengthen their assertion that Teresa’s hunger strike is akin to female mystics’ resistance to patriarchal control, Aaron Baker and Juliann Vitullo quote Rudolph Bell and Caroline Bynum, who compare “the attempts of mystics to gain power through the control of food with the anorexia of contemporary adolescents” (Baker and Vitullo, 64). Joseph’s motives are seen as just as self-serving as her boyfriend’s later on in the film: why work to line “the Pope’s pockets” (ibid.) when she could do it for the family? 13. The scene is quite clever: whether it is Carmela who actually makes the sausages and wakes up Teresa, who is then caught in the kitchen by her mother, or it is Teresa, sleepwalking and dreaming that she was awakened by the smell of her grandma’s cooking is left to the viewers’ interpretation. Catherine watches from behind the woman who cooks at the stove in the middle of the night and, at first, it is her mother-in-law who turns around and then her daughter. The two are wearing the exact same nightgown. 14. Francesca Canadé Sautman argues that the men-women dynamics in the film show a desire to prevail both in the family and the community, but end up creating a sort of child-parent relationship between “women [who] feel superior and [are] forced to play up to the whims of half-grown little boys” (239). If the fight is to retain power in the ‘domus’ (as Cavallero, Orsi, and Bona maintain), men’s domestic spaces are recreated away from the conjugal roof, with mates who understand and, for the most part, share the same Peter-Pan complex.

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15. Love me. We are people used to little things, humble and silent, to a soft but deep tenderness, like the sky, like the sea’s waves (my translation). 16. His hyper-masculine dreams of having a subservient, acquiescent wife clash with his own ‘feminized’ reality of an adult, unmarried son living with his father in a subservient role. As Baker and Vitullo (63) note, his envy of his brother-in-law’s success is based on the wrong assumption that Joseph’s hyper-masculinity is entirely self-reliant, while his “production relies on gender roles that require the self-sacrifice of the Santangelo women” (mother and wife). 17. Much like Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid, who kills herself, renounces getting the immortal soul she desired, and lets the prince live with his new wife instead of killing him and getting what she wants. Celebrated tales of self-sacrificing women abound. 18. Her old mother’s reply is: “She saw God in her work. How many of us can say that?” to which her granddaughter, holding a baby, replies: “Not me, that’s for certain.” The baby causes a wine glass to spill and the white tablecloth gets stained, just like Leonard’s sheets after he deflowers the failed “Little Flower” Teresa. The loss of innocence, the proof of being caught in an endless cycle of labor for the sake of the family is sealed by the spilled blood of a virgin as much as by the spilled wine, the blood of Jesus, who died for our sins that did not cease to take place. Salvation, the end of toil, is in death and glorification after it. 19. Thérèse died at age 24 in the Carmelite monastery of Lisieux; Teresa dies even younger. 20. Michael feels that a lot of avoidable expenses are imposed on him: 200 guests, half of whom he does not know, matching rings and golden gifts for bridesmaids and groomsmen, etc. 21. Twelve cloves of garlic, three or four handfuls of salt, a little pepper doesn’t hurt, mix, mix … (my translation). 22. As Savoca tells Anthony Tamburri in the Italics interview, “When it’s really painful, it’s good to go to comedy.” 23. In several interviews, including the one in the DVD extras, Savoca has stated that her film is inspired by both Roberto Rossellini’s episode “The Human Voice” in his film L’amore (1948) and by The Real Housewives of New Jersey (2009–present). The apparently flippant comment reveals her method of digging deeper into characters since fiction is definitely truer than “reality TV,” badly scripted and acted by non-actors. In an interview in Filmmaker Magazine, she tells Scott Macaulay: “I wanted to bring our audience in close with some difficult women. Maybe it’s a reaction to socalled reality TV, which makes us see people as either crazy, stupid, uptight, or bitchy. […] That’s why, at the start of our movie, the characters fit a stereotype and you can quickly judge them. But by the end, you are in it

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and you are with them—for better or for worse” (Macaulay 2012). Similar sentiments are expressed in Stephen Saito’s interview for The Moveable Fest. The film’s coda, after the end titles, playfully shows the typical interviews of the two feuding sisters of a reality show Lucy watches religiously and that Jenny ends up watching while she prepares the Thanksgiving dinner. One says she was defending her sister: “Family, you know? Family. Blood is thicker than water,” while the other replies: “This is what you do: you deal with drama, you get drama” (Saito). Savoca’s film shies away from these formulaic, easy archetypes.

Works Cited Baker, Aaron and Juliann Vitullo. “Mysticism and the Household Saints of Everyday Life” in Voices in Italian Americana (VIA. A Literary and Cultural Review), vol. 7, number 2 (1996), 55–68. Calabretta-Sajder, Ryan and Alan Gravano (edited by). Italian Americans on Screen. Challenging the Past, Re-Theorizing the Future. Lanham, Boulder, New York, London: Lexington Books, 2021. Camaiti Hostert, Anna. “Gender and Ethnicity in Italian/American Cinema: Nancy Savoca and Marylou Tibaldo-Bongiorno.” In Mediated Ethnicity. New Italian American Cinema, edited by Giuliana Muscio, Joseph Sciorra, Giovanni Spagnoletti, Anthony Julian Tamburri, 141–148. New York: John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Studies in Italian Americana 2. Canadé Sautman, Francesca. “Women of the Shadows: Italian American Women, Ethnicity and Racism in American Cinema.” In Differentia: Review of Italian Thought, Combined Issue 6–7, number 6 (1994), 219–246. Cavallero, Jonathan J. Hollywood’s Italian American Filmmakers. Capra, Scorsese, Savoca, Coppola, and Tarantino. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2011. Giunta, Edvige. “Discussion with the Filmmaker Nancy Savoca.” NJUC, September 17, 2020. https://www.njcu.edu/community/center-­arts/digital-­ content (Accessed April 10, 2023). ———. “The Quest for True Love: Ethnicity in Nancy Savoca’s Domestic Film Comedy.” MELUS, Vol. 22, No. 2 (1997), 75–89. Hankin, Kelly. “And Introducing… the Female Director: Documentaries about Women Filmmakers as Feminist Activism.” NWSA Journal, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2007), 59–88. Macauley, Scott. “Five Questions with Union Square Director Nancy Savoca.” Filmmaker Magazine, July 13, 2012, https://filmmakermagazine.com/48182-­ five-­questions-­for-­union-­square-­director-­nancy-­savoca-­2/#.ZChuOi-­B0vo (accessed April 10, 2023).

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Makarushka, Irena. “Tracing the Other in Household Saints.” Literature and Theology, Vol. 12, No. 1 (1998), 82–92. Puzo, Mario. The Fortunate Pilgrim. New York: Ballantine Books, 1997. Reich, Jacqueline. “Nancy Savoca: An Appreciation.” Italian Americana, Vol. 13, No.1 (1995), 11–15. Ruberto, Laura E. “Where Did the Goodfellas Learn How to Cook? Gender, Labor, and the Italian American Experience.” Italian Americana, Vol. 21, No. 2 (2003), 164–176. Ryan, Colleen. “What’s Italian About Sofia Coppola?” in Italian Americans on Screen. Challenging the Past, Re-Theorizing the Future, edited by Ryan Calabretta-Sajder and Alan Gravano, 13–36. Lanham, Boulder, New  York, London: Lexington Books, 2021. Saito, Stephen. “Interview: Nancy Savoca Finds a Home in Union Square.” The Moveable Fest, July 10, 2012, https://moveablefest.com/nancy-­savoca-­ interview-­union-­square/ (accessed April 10, 2023). Tamburri, Anthony Julian. “Interview with Nancy Savoca.” Italics, CUNY TV, March 8, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLizLIQaWBU (accessed April 10, 2023).

Films & TV Series Cited L’amore (Roberto Rossellini, 1948). Awakenings (Penny Marshall, 1990). The Beguiled (Sofia Coppola, 2017). Big (Penny Marshall, 1988). The Bling Ring (Sofia Coppola, 2013). Dirt (Nancy Savoca, 2004). Dogfight (Nancy Savoca, 1991). Fatso (Anne Bancroft, 1980). Happy Days (TV Series, 1974–1984). Household Saints (Nancy Savoca, 1993). The Kindergarten Teacher (Sara Colangelo, 2018). Jumpin’ Jack Flash (Penny Marshall, 1986). If These Walls Could Talk (Nancy Savoca, 1996). Laverne & Shirley (TV Series, 1976–1983). A League of Their Own (Penny Marshall, 1992). Little Accidents (Sara Colangelo, 2014). Little Kings (Marylou Tibaldo-Bongiorno, 2003). Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003).

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Mainstream (Gia Coppola, 2020). Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006). Marty (Delbert Mann, 1955). On the Rocks (Sofia Coppola, 2020). Palo Alto (Gia Coppola, 2013). Priscilla (Sofia Coppola, 2023). The Preacher’s Wife (Penny Marshall, 1996). The Real Housewives of New Jersey (TV Series, 2009–present). Renaissance Man (Penny Marshall, 1995). Riding in Cars with Boys (Penny Marshall, 2001). Somewhere (Sofia Coppola, 2010). Tarantella (Helen De Michiel, 1995). True Love (Nancy Savoca, 1989). The 24 Hour Woman (Nancy Savoca, 1999). Union Square (Nancy Savoca, 2011). The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999). Worth (Sara Colangelo, 2020).

CHAPTER 8

A Realistic Tale of Improbable Friendship. Notes on Matthew Bonifacio’s Amexicano (2007) Claudia Peralta and Fulvio Orsitto

Preliminary Notes Amexicano is an independent film, directed by Matthew Bonifacio, written by Carmine Famiglietti,1 and produced by “The Brooklyn-Queens Experiment”, Bonifacio’s and Famiglietti’s own production company.2 The movie—starring Famiglietti as Bruno, Raúl Castillo as Ignacio, and Jennifer Peña as Gabriela—premiered at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival and won the 2007 Jury Award at the Sonoma Valley Film Festival, getting a limited theatrical release and high praises by critics from Variety, The

C. Peralta Department of Literacy, Language and Culture, Boise State University, Boise, ID, USA e-mail: [email protected] F. Orsitto (*) Villa Le Balze, Georgetown University, Fiesole, Firenze, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Fioretti, F. Orsitto (eds.), Italian Americans in Film and Other Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47211-4_8

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New York Times, The Village Voice, and New York Daily News.3 This low-­ key tale of an improbable friendship between an out-of-work Italian American and a young undocumented4 Mexican takes place in Queens, and also features a barely sketched love story between the former and the latter’s sister (Gabriela). Bruno, a lonely Italian American living in his friend Alex’s basement, is late with his rent and has no more unemployment benefits. Faced with the prospect of being evicted, he has to accept Alex’s off-the-books construction gig, for which his friend suggests getting a Mexican laborer to help him. Bruno hesitantly agrees. While the first guy he picks up from a corner of Northern Boulevard (Diego) lives up to some of his ethnic prejudices, when he hires Ignacio (a competent and hard-working guy who speaks very little English) things change. Soon the two become best buddies, teaching each other English and Spanish, and playing soccer together. Eventually, Gabriela starts hanging out with the duo as well. Bruno is a good friend to the two Mexicans, attending Ignacio’s birthday party, and at one point also going with him to the Boulevard, looking for a job. He is the odd ‘white fella’ liked by most of Bruno’s friends, except Diego, who has his papers in order and, because of that, constantly threatens everyone to call the migra5 (immigration authorities) when someone stands up to him. Later in the movie, Diego lands Ignacio in the hospital, creating a chain of events that leads Ignacio to be deported to Mexico, and then to hire a coyote6 to help him cross the desert and get back to the US. Unfortunately, despite Bruno’s help and a seemingly well-thought-of plan, the perils of the desert will prove fatal.

Theoretical Framework Migration and the Border as Themes The emergence of motion pictures and the phenomenon of world migration are profoundly interrelated: their threads span from social and economic history to racial politics and film aesthetics. (Bertellini, 1)

As noted by Giorgio Bertellini, films are an enormous repository of implicit and explicit information about the projected and recognized racial, cultural, and ethnic identities of individuals and groups—a repository that spans across time and events. American films engaged with racial differences as “self-defining visual and narrative resources” deploy “migrations’

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racialized subjects into stories, dramatic and comedic, of sought-after adaptation and precarious assimilation” (ibid., 2). Films affect the way people perceive and understand others, specifically regarding stereotypes or prejudice. Viewers assimilate or interpret a film according to their values, beliefs, and needs, and in these processes, they make inferences or generalizations influencing what they will remember and learn over a long time (Cowen, 354). Further exploring the influence of the cinema medium, López (1991) points out that Hollywood has served as an ethnographer of American Culture. Moreover, she maintains that “Hollywood does not represent ethnics and minorities; it creates them and provides its audience with an experience of them” (López, 405–406). In sum, Hollywood has incredible power “as ethnographer, as creator, and translator of otherness” (ibid., 406). In Amexicano the audience is asked to look at otherness through the phenomenon of migration using images and narratives, familiar to most, reproducing the ‘im/migrants’7 as media objects. Unfortunately, as Pérez Melgosa (2012) shares, “As they set out to denounce the violence and aggression that migrants suffer, these films end up naturalizing the position of real migrants and their bodies as affective focalizes: they are depicted as vessels ready to receive the negative affects produced in both their birth and host societies” (Pérez Melgosa, 177–178). So, what are the parallels and negative effects produced in the host society for Italian-­ Americans and Mexicans? And how are they portrayed in this film? Both Italians and Mexican im/migrants came to the US looking for better economic opportunities; however, their experience was markedly different. From the 1800 to the 1920s, 25 million Europeans moved to the US fleeing the imperials wars, violence, famines, and/or simply seeking a better life (Aviña, 97). In the first two decades of the twentieth century alone, more than three million Southern Italians entered the US through Ellis Island (PBS). They were teenagers and young men, who were not planning to stay in the US and were known as the ‘birds of passage’ (ibid.).8 However, after several trips across the ocean, they decided that the US provided them with better opportunities (ibid.).9 Scholars of whiteness studies10 argue that workers of Eastern and Southern European origin in the mid-1900 started to organize as ‘whites’, due to two important events. One was a clear perception that racism could go as far as to provoke its victims’ death. Said perception was triggered by late 1800s lynchings11 and early 1900s social injustices and events such as the biased and unfair trial that led to the execution of Italian American anarchists

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Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927. Second, the programs that started in the 1930s as part of the New Deal.12 What’s more, the G.I Bill (officially the Servicemen Readjustment Act of 1944) gave Italians and other i­m/ migrants—such as Eastern Europeans, Jews, and Greeks—loans to invest in businesses, pursue an education, or buy houses in the new suburbs (Wirth, 22). Adding to this argument, Guglielmo asserts that even though Italians were initially perceived as racially unpopular, their experiences were markedly different from many others (especially Latinos) because they were ‘white on arrival’. Italians who came before the Quota Acts13 could apply for US citizenship, apply for jobs, vote, live in certain neighborhoods, and occupy certain social spaces (i.e., theaters, restaurants, summer camps, beaches, etc.). Although they received negative attitudes, the laws didn’t reflect them as they were able to marry Americans and live in nonsegregated neighborhoods (Guglielmo, 15). Mexicans, on the other hand, were already inhabitants of what is now California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and most of Arizona and Colorado. The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which officially ended the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), required Mexico to give 55% of its territory, so the Mexican population was given the choice to relocate south of the new border or remain on the land accepting US sovereignty. The treaty also guaranteed Mexicans who chose to stay all the rights of US citizens based on the authority of the principles of the Constitution. However, one by one all of those guarantees were either broken or violated, thus the Mexican community fell victim to racial and ethnic prejudices, class conflict, and violence (Maciel, 95). Americans resented the wealth Mexicans possessed so, through legal and extralegal methods, the subjugation of the Mexican population started, resulting in a colonial relationship. When railroads reached border cities (e.g., Nogales, Arizona, and El Paso, Texas) in the early 1800s, the expansion of mining, ranching, and commerce followed, requiring large numbers of laborers. Moreover, Mexicans who lost their land during President Porfirio Díaz regime (1876–1910) began working in the mines and in agriculture (Aviña, 97). Many lived in company towns while others lived in areas outside of town or colonias (Worrall, 112). Then, “The Immigration Act of 1929 made unauthorized entry a misdemeanor and subsequent attempts after deportation a felony punishable by fines and prison” (Lytle Hernández 2017, 92—as quoted in Aviña, 100). In sum, “US capitalism generated the social reality it needed (and profited from): workers deemed illegal or temporary and thereby more exploitable” (Aviña, 101). Mexicans have always represented a more

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desirable laborer because in general they always wanted to go back home. As a Florida sugar planter said: “We used to own our slaves, now we rent them” (Grandin 2019, 182—as cited in Aviña, 101). In the beginning, Italians and Mexican im/migrants did not have any intent to give up their citizenship as they saw this situation as temporary, but eventually, they understood the importance of acculturation.14 However different these experiences are, the negative racialization of Mexican Americans continues to provide cultural texts that sell, entice, and allure audiences. “Mexican-immigrant replenishment makes it impossible for ethnic Mexicans, even if they are several generations removed from their immigrant origins, to change their racial status as European-­ origin groups did” (Jiménez, 186). Thus, the presence of recent im/ migrants plays a crucial role in how Americans view older generations of im/migrants and how this view is influenced by the negative characteristics attributed to them, specifically undocumented ones. The persistent influx of Mexican im/migrants during the last century has introduced a consistently large group of Mexican newcomers who reinfuse ethnic raw materials into the Mexican-origin population but who also renew the link between ‘Mexican-ness’ and the struggles associated with assimilation. What distinguishes the population of Mexican origin from other former im/migrants groups is not that they face these struggles at all, but that these struggles never quite go away (ibid., 187). Jiménez further argues that Mexican Americans’ assimilation and acceptance by US society would look very different if this migration had stopped just as it did for Europeans. The US-Mexican border es una herida abierta [an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the halfdead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the ‘normal’. Gringos in the US Southeast consider the inhabitants of the borderlands transgressors, aliens—whether they possess documents or not, whether they’re Chicanos, Indians or Blacks. Do not enter, trespassers will be raped, maimed, strangled, gassed, shot. The only ‘legitimate’ inhabitants

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are those in power, the whites and those who align themselves with whites. Tension grips the inhabitants of the borderlands like a virus. Ambivalence and unrest reside there and death is no stranger. (Anzaldúa, 3–4)

In this quote, Chicana15 writer Gloria Anzaldúa refers to the wounds shaped by the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe which cut Mexico in two. However, the wound has not stopped bleeding. Politics, economic treaties, and environmental pollution continue to deepen this laceration. Inherent to this border culture some blockades privilege the movement of transnational corporations and the containment of people. People on the US-Mexican border have a fraught relationship because of the legacy of US imperialism and the ongoing action that violently displaces people from their land, communities, and families. “In the writings of cultural critics, the concept of borders draws attention to the historically and socially constructed borders and spaces we inherit and that frame our discourses and social relations” (Fregoso, 66). Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a Mexican performance artist, talks about borderlands as a transcultural experience, spotlighting that it is not only the space where cultures intersect but the experience of ‘crossing’ be it by people crossing across the border or crossing as the effect of the mixing of cultures (ibid., 1993). Mary Louis Pratt calls these spaces ‘contact zones’.16 In the case of Matthew Bonifacio’s film, one cannot but acknowledge that Amexicano magnifies the social space where two cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other—to use Pratt’s words. Physical and metaphorical borders are indeed at the center of this movie. As Aviña reminds us, “In a sense, borders historically work to racially differentiate and structure exploitation of social relations within the US by demarcating externally who does not belong, who suffers deportation, who is policed, who is incarcerated, who dies in the crossing attempt” (Aviña, 107). However, it is important to clarify that this crisis didn’t begin at the US-Mexico border but rather began 500 years ago when what we call ‘the West’ materialized and expanded through colonialism, conquest, slavery, capitalism, and imperialism (ibid., 96). Even though Amexicano tries to humanize the im/migrants’ experience,17 attempting to shed some light on the abuses and injustices they suffer, one must ask, “What effect does the reiterated representation of migrants as suffering bodies and corpses have on the social perception of real migrants and migration?” (Pérez Melgosa 2016, 219). Perhaps the answer lies in “what Mbembe terms a necropolitical log-

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ics: that is, the symbolic use of a constant threat of death to wield power over the living (39–40)” (as quoted in ibid., 219).

Film Analysis Bruno Transisi and Ignacio: From Pervasive Mistrust to the Collapse of Trust and Obsession Bonifacio immediately introduces the two protagonists via a mise en scène that connotates in visual terms where they stand physically, but also metaphorically, in their lives. After two brief segments during which Bruno scratches a lottery ticket and exits from a betting place, we see him in an alley cramped with all sorts of objects that he is trying to organize while having a hopeless phone conversation with a labor officer (who coldly but politely calls him Mr. Transisi, flattening his individuality). This failed attempt to extend his unemployment benefits is balanced by the character’s positive attitude, shown by his effort to put some order in his life. Nonetheless, despite no lack of trying and despite walking back and forth in the alley, he appears visually stuck in a confined (and overcrowded) space. In other words, Bruno is literally (and metaphorically) going nowhere. We will also soon discover that this character lives alone, in the basement of one of the two buildings on the sides of the alley, in a sort of semi-hidden interstitial space that highlights his in-between condition of an individual that Mexicans perceive as fully American, but that Americans (at least his friend Alex, the only American with some meaningful screen time) still treat as a ‘child of a lesser god’.18 By contrast, Ignacio is introduced to the audience while waiting (with Gabriela) for the subway in an open-air section of the latter. By so doing, Bonifacio highlights this character’s sociability and family ties, associating him with the idea of openness and, most importantly, with that of movement, which will brand this Mexican im/migrant19 (for better or for worse) for the rest of the film. Regardless of his Italian American background and the history of migration that ‘colored’ his family as well, Bruno is no stranger to racist comments. When Alex encourages him to hire a Mexican worker for the gig he just offered him, Bruno exclaims: “A fence jumper…? No, no,” adding, “How am I going to communicate? Learn Spanish?” Then, to Alex’s ironic response, “With a screwdriver, hammer, cerveza…you’ll figure it out”, he retorts: “Yeah, I am going to pick a Mexican with a criminal background, and next thing you know I am laying on a pool of blood with

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a slit throat in a corner somewhere”. When Alex explains the power they (as Americans) have over im/migrants, Bruno seems to be convinced, especially when his friend reminds him that: “They are here illegally, they keep quiet, they keep their mouths shut, and take whatever money you give them”. If one pauses to analyze this brutal comment, one cannot but conclude that it perfectly symbolizes how the fictional undocumented im/migrants visible in this film are seen (at least initially) as mere commodities, whose value is measured by their labor power, and whose worth exists only as long as they can be exploited. In other words, the fictional undocumented im/migrants in Matthew Bonifacio’s Amexicano are what Zygmunt Bauman (2004, 2007) calls ‘human waste’, which is the collateral damage of economic progress. The life on the border—be it a physical border or a metaphorical one (the one that divides American culture from the im/migrants’ cultural milieu of provenance)—experienced by these individuals causes great anxiety and fear (whether real or imagined). This situation also causes instability, eventually leading to pervasive mistrust and the final collapse of trust, which then generates exclusion for the unwanted and an obsession with security for the ones living inside the border. All of these emotions (the collapse of trust, pervasive mistrust, and obsession) are palpable throughout the movie also because Alex and Bruno’s initial depiction of Mexican im/ migrants is overwhelmingly negative. Described as criminals, fence jumpers, murderers, and drunks, the Mexicans emerging from this dialogue are perfectly reproducing the harmful stereotype of im/migrants that cultural studies pioneer Stuart Hall believed was the result of the limited representation that the hegemonic elite (media producers in power) gives us, trying to establish a dominant meaning in society (Hall). Indeed, pervasive mistrust permeates the early scenes of the film. In Bruno’s second attempt to get a helper, he picks Ignacio. Without hesitation, as soon they get to the job site, the latter begins to dig the holes for the fence posts and keeps on working even while Bruno takes off for a lunch break. When the protagonist is eating a gyro while reading the newspaper he gets a call from Alex, who is furious to learn that Ignacio was left alone at the work site. Such comment implicitly recreates the image of the Mexican as a criminal—the one Bruno so clearly described in the previous conversation. After a frantic drive from the restaurant, the protagonist can only ascertain that Ignacio has kept on working. Relieved by what he found out, Bruno tells him to eat his lunch and continues the job by himself.

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At the end of the day, Alex arrives to check on the fence and admits to being very pleased by the duo’s performance, promising them more jobs to come, while showing off his new toy, a laser level for which his wife paid $200. While Bruno shakes his head in disbelief at how much the laser costs, Ignacio smiles in approval. Soon after, Alex gets a call from his wife while unloading his tools in his car. Scolded for being late, Alex keeps making excuses while Ignacio (sensing the man’s frustration) without being asked loads the rest of the tools in the car. Throughout the scene, we see Alex’s disapproving gaze following Ignacio’s every move, denoting mistrust. It doesn’t take long for the collapse of trust to occur. A few days later, Alex goes to the new work site and accuses Ignacio of stealing the laser level, stating: “Little Mexican guy snagged it”. Bruno tries to calm him down unsuccessfully, so he asks Ignacio in Spanish to come and talk to him. Ignacio denies taking it in English (in the meanwhile, he and Bruno had started teaching each other the respective languages), and Alex becomes furious “Holy shit! It’s a freaking miracle. Somebody speaks English. You speak English now […] You earned your spit stereotype”. However, Alex’s obsession becomes evident when he says “You know what, I should call immigration. You are a wetback”,20 topping a dialogue that reproduces the power dynamics between the dominant group and the racialized minority group, which reflects the deficit framework ongoing in public discourse. Even though later in the narrative we will discover that Alex had simply misplaced the laser level, his first instinct can only be that of accusing Ignacio, ‘the illegal alien’,21 of being a thief. Finally, language plays an important role at first in separating the two main characters, but later in bringing them closer. “Ah, what, say that again?” retorts Bruno when Ignacio tells him his name, and then adding with a paternalistic tone: “Is that Mexican?... Let me give you some advice, you are not going to get far in America if you don’t speak English. If it was for me, I would take all of those signs down, Korean, Greek, whatever…I will take them all down”. In practical terms, even though Bruno does not tell Ignacio to ‘speak English’ in so many words, he makes comments that are only interpretable as a demand for instant assimilation, concealing the not-so-hidden assumption that the Mexican guy should not be stubborn, and just learn quickly how to speak English in order to fit in. Bruno’s initial attitude is further accentuated by a dialogue between him and Gabriela during which he candidly asks her why her English is so much better than her brother’s. The woman’s response—“That is because

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he wants to go back to Mexico someday to buy a house; when we have enough money”—is almost apologetic, as if she needed to excuse her brother for not speaking English. Both comments, unfortunately, emphasize the image and claims by politicians, commentators, and the general public that Mexican im/migrants do not want to learn English because they are not interested in being considered American. What the general public does not know is that the vast majority of im/migrants would very much like to learn English,22 but regrettably are not able to find English classes that are neither affordable nor accessible. According to a 2018 report by the Migration Policy Institute, public adult education is only able to serve less than 4% of the need (McHugh and Doxsee). Moreover, when classes are available, im/migrants may find it difficult to attend because they work long hours or more than one job, and they may lack transportation, as is the case for Ignacio. It must be noted that despite Bonifacio’s effort to give us a film informed in a deep and honest verisimilitude, Amexicano highlights the fundamentally wrong idea that if one denies one’s ‘foreignness’—in this case, speaking Spanish—it is easier to become American. Bruno Sammartino: From Large to Larger-than-Life However, in that same dialogue with Gabriela, Bruno shares that he is of Italian origin but does not speak the language, admitting: “I am just like Ignacio, I don’t want to learn Italian, he doesn’t want to learn English”. Moreover, when Bruno asks Gabriela if they are in the US ‘illegally’, he soon after says “I do not care. My great-grandparents did the same thing. It wasn’t easy for them either, new country, new language, but they never stopped believing in the dream…It came true for them and their kids”. Truly, the mirroring process that has led Bruno to propose this similitude had begun a while earlier, and can be traced back to the first night he drives Ignacio back to his place. Once the Mexican exits the car and is about to approach his doorstep, we see his shadow, framed through Bruno’s open car window. One second later, the boy’s shadow is substituted by Gabriela’s friendly face waiving thankfully at the Italian American guy.

From this moment on, driven by the development of his friendship with Ignacio—and, arguably, also by a possible romantic relationship with the guy’s sister—Bruno is the one who physically starts crossing the ‘border’. He goes more and more frequently to the two Mexicans’ neighborhood, having dinner with them and celebrating Ignacio’s birthday at a

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restaurant with some of their friends. He also crosses the border in metaphorical terms, given that his need to communicate with the two of them pushes him to learn Spanish on his own on the Internet. Ultimately, an out-of-work Bruno will also follow Ignacio’s suggestion and go with him to Northern Boulevard in search of a daily gig. In sum, what happens is that Bruno Transisi—the large23 and lonely, kind of racist, and somewhat lazy Italian American we saw in the first part of the film—has now turned into a larger-than-life figure, perhaps into that very Bruno Sammartino mythical luchador (fighter) figure his dad named him after. Indeed, it is no coincidence that he starts befriending Ignacio talking about his father’s interest in the Italian American and world-champion wrestler, and that soon after Ignacio starts calling him affectionately ‘Bruno Sammartino’ as well. Nonetheless, while Amexicano shifts ‘the border’ between welcoming and exclusion, with Ignacio being welcomed by Bruno (but excluded by Alex and the US at large), things are not so easy and a happy ending for the two guys and Gabriela just isn’t in the cards. Bruno’s fluidity in crossing borders is not mirrored by Ignacio, especially once (after being stabbed by Diego and brought to a hospital) he gets deported back to Mexico. The new Bruno that inhabits the second part of the film is indeed a ‘Sammartino’, a champion of goodness, one his father would have certainly been proud of. As such, he wires his friend some money to hire a coyote and cross once again the US-Mexico border, while he is supposed to be waiting for him with a car on the US side of the frontier. Unfortunately, after much searching by foot and by car, Bruno finds Ignacio’s hat and, ultimately, his dead body. Ignacio (probably because of his stab wound, which reopened during the desert crossing) did not make it. His newfound mirror image, ‘Bruno Sammartino’, can only lean back on the sand, hold his head and wonder how to tell Gabriela that her brother is dead. By exploiting a certain kind of sentimentality and reaching out for the audience’s empathy toward the plight of im/migrants, Matthew Bonifacio ends his movie with a bleak vision that, on the one hand, gives the story a more robust kind of verisimilitude, but on the other dismisses the suffering and brutal death of Ignacio in favor of a focus shift that, once again, downplays the issues of the racialized minority in favor of those affecting the majority. In other words, Bruno Transisi manages to turn into Bruno Sammartino only temporarily and, as such, can only momentarily abandon his ‘Americano’ status to become an ‘Amexicano’ (able to mirror his life experiences into Ignacio’s). Despite the open horizon which constitutes

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the background of the film’s ending, he ultimately has to go back to square one, stuck once again, only not in a cramped alley but in the vastness of the desert.

Notes 1. As reported in an interview available on IndieWire.com, Famiglietti wrote the Amexicano script after he dreamed about befriending an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who fell in love with his wife. In writing the story he drew from experiences when he was younger and unemployed, and picked up day laborers from the street corners to help him with his side jobs. Moreover, he recounts a time when he worked side by side with a laborer for a couple of months, and then one day the guy was just gone. That individual was the inspiration source for the Ignacio character (IndieWire). 2. For more information on the duo, see Alexander Dworkowitz’s article (2002), in which he details how “Bonafacio and Famiglietti met as extras on the set of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X”, adding that “The two call their company the Brooklyn Queens Experiment, or BQE” (Dworkowitz). 3. For more information on Bonifacio’s work, consult “Matthew Bonifacio. Biography” on IMDB.com—see https://www.imdb.com/name/ nm1313756/ bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm (accessed April 23, 2023)—his profile on TV.Apple.com—see https://tv.apple.com/cl/ person/matthew-­ bonifacio/umc.cpc.2ykvog173bynru5pr4xn040r0 (accessed April 26, 2023)—and his faculty webpage on the website of Pace University, where he teaches as an adjunct in the School of Performing Arts—see https:// www.pace.edu/dyson/departments/school-­of-­performing-­arts/faculty-­ and-­staff/adjunct-­faculty/matthew-­bonifacio (accessed April 26, 2023). 4. We prefer to associate the word ‘undocumented’ to a migrant’s status instead of the term ‘illegal’ (the latter is, unfortunately, used throughout the movie) because the adjective ‘illegal’ is implicitly connected to the world of criminality, while an individual’s existence can never be ‘illegal’. Moreover, migration is not a crime (PICUM). 5. A derivative of the Spanish term migración (migration). The term refers to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agencies as well as patrol officers, and immigration officers who perform inspections of cars crossing the border or look for undocumented people in places of business. When the term migra is used in a conversation is often to complain about an encounter with immigration officials—see https://transpanish.biz/translation_blog/meaning-­o f-­l a-­m igra/ (accessed April 20, 2023).

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6. Coyote is the slang label used for a trafficker, a person who commits the crime of organizing the trafficking or movement of migrants from Latin America to the United States. 7. We are purposefully using Arzubiaga et al. (2009) term ‘im/migrant’ to define individuals labeled emigrants, immigrants, migrants, and refugees, including the undocumented. As Arzubiaga et  al. (2009) explain, these identities are not mutually exclusive or permanent, but their distinction is paramount because it carries legal implications. 8. Besides being used as the title for a recent Colombian film (a drug gangster saga directed by Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra in 2018), the expression ‘birds of passage’—as Simona Frasca reminds us—has been adopted “by American historians as a metaphor for immigrants during the epoch of mass immigration at the start of the twentieth century” (Frasca, 109). More specifically, as Richard F.  Cavallaro states, birds of passage were “immigrants who went back and forth between America and Italy several times before deciding to bring their families to America” (Cavallaro, 51). Among the unnumerable possible references, one may also highlight that this expression also informs Michael J. Piore’s (1979) and Joe Giordano’s (2015) eponymous books and, in the context of Mexican immigration, Camille Guerin-­Gonzales’s book-length study (1996), especially Chapter II, titled “Mexican ‘Birds of Passage’: Representation of Mexicans as Foreign Sojourners.” 9. See the PBS documentary The Italian Americans and, more specifically, the clip also entitled “Birds of Passage” (2015). In this context, it must be noted that Cavallaro argues that not everybody decided to stay in the US. Indeed, many im/migrants felt “that their time in America was only temporary”, leading to the fact that many of them “never became American citizens because it was not their intent to stay in America” (Cavallaro, 51). 10. See, for instance, Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno (2003). 11. Such as the infamous 1891 New Orleans lynching that led to the murder of 11 Italian Americans by a ferocious mob. 12. The New Deal encompassed a series of programs and projects that President Roosevelt enacted between 1933 and 1939 to restore prosperity in America. Among these, one must mention the Wagner Act, the Social Security Act, the Federal Housing, and the GI Bill. 13. Quota Acts (or The Immigration Act of 1924) limited the number of immigrants entering the US through a quota that varied according to the country of origin. It provided immigration visas to two percent of the total number of people of each nationality as of the 1980 census. It completely excluded immigrants from Asia (Office of the Historian, Foreign Service Institute).

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14. Acculturation is defined as the process of acquisition and adaption that takes place when two cultural groups interact, or when an individual assumes the norms and values of the host culture (Lueck and Wilson, 187). 15. The adjective Chicana is used to define an American woman or girl of Mexican origin or descent. 16. Mary Louise Pratt introduced the concept of the “contact zone” to define “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery or their aftermaths as they lived out in many parts of the world today” (Pratt, 34). 17. As shared by actor Raúl Castillo (playing Ignacio): “I am a child of immigrants and a byproduct of a true American Dream, so I am partial to the element of the film that treats immigrants with compassion and exposes us as the hardworking, family-oriented people that we really are” (González). 18. It is interesting to note that the first shot of Bruno in the basement where he lives is a meta-cinematic reference to Bonifacio’s previous film (also starring Famiglietti) titled Lbs. (2004), in which the actor-writer shares his personal struggle with weight loss. Indeed, by visually encasing Bruno inside his bedroom door on the right-hand side of this first frame and, by so doing, juxtaposing him to (on the left-hand side of the frame) a painting that reproduces the poster of the other film (starring the same actor), Bonifacio brilliantly conveys the idea of a character—perhaps even Famiglietti himself, if one were to push this reading even further—once again being stuck. 19. According to Sironi, Bauloz, and Emmanuel, a migrant is a person “who moves away from his or her place of usual residence, whether within a country or across an international border, temporarily or permanently, and for a variety of reasons. The term includes a number of well-defined, legal categories of people, such as migrant workers; persons whose particular types of movements are legally-defined, such as smuggled migrants; as well as those whose status or means of movement are not specifically defined under international law, such as international students” (Sironi, Bauloz, and Emmanuel, 132). 20. A derogatory name used to refer mostly to Mexicans living in the US without official documentation. 21. ‘Illegal alien’ is “a dehumanizing political construction of migrants that drew on a long American tradition of imagining migrants as simultaneously impoverished ‘public charges’ and ‘job thieves’ willing to tolerate hyper-­exploitation” (Hirota 2017—as cited in Aviña, 103). By the mid1970s, the term had become common in television news clips and printed media” (Dunn 1996, 18–19—as quoted in ibid., 103). 22. See, for instance, Olga Khazan (2021).

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23. On more than one occasion another aggressive and antagonistic Mexican laborer, Diego (who specializes in bullying everyone) calls him gordito (which means ‘fatty’).

Works Cited Anzaldúa, Gloria. “The Homeland, Aztlán.” Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 3–4. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Arzubiaga, Angela E., Noguerón, Silvia, C. and Sullivan, Amanda L. “The education of Children in Im/migrant Families.” Review of Research in Education, Vol. 33, No. 1 (2009), 246–271. Aviña, Alexander. “The Border is the Violence. War, Empire and Migrants in the Making of the US-Border.” In Migration and Torture in Today’s World, edited by Fabio Perocco, 93–114. Venice: Edizioni Ca ’Foscari / Venice University Press, 2023. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Times. Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Oxford: Polity Press, 2007. ———. Wasted Lives. Modernity and its Outcasts. Oxford: Polity Press, 2004. Bertellini, Giorgio. “Film, National Cinema, and Migration.” In The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, Vol. 3, edited by Immanuel Ness and Marlou Schrover, 1–6. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2013. Cavallaro, Richard F. My Sicilian Legacy. The Struggle and Joys of Three Generations. Bloomington: AuthorHouse. 2008. Cowen, Paul S. “A Social-Cognitive Approach to Ethnicity in Films.” In Unspeakable Images. Ethnicity and the American Cinema, edited by Lester D. Friedman, 353–378. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Dunn, Timothy. The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1978–1992. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. Dworkowitz, Alexander. “Flushing filmmaker debuts film in Manhattan.” Queens News, Sports, Entertainment and Community (September 25, 2002). https:// qns.com/2002/09/flushing-­filmmaker-­debuts-­film-­in-­manhattan/ (accessed April 26, 2023). Frasca, Simona. Italian Birds of Passage. The Diaspora of Neapolitan Musicians in New York. New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2014. Fregoso, Rosa Linda. “From Il(l)egal to Legal Subject. Border Construction and Re-construction.” In The Bronze Screen. Chicana and Chicano Film Culture, 65–92. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Giordano, Joe. Birds of Passage. Los Angeles: Harvard Square Editions, 2015. González, R. H. “Anecdote: Amexicano Protagonista is a McAllen Native”. Texas Border Business. (July, 2018). https://texasborderbusiness.com/anecdote-­ amexicano-­protagonist-­is-­a-­mcallen-­native/ (accessed April 28, 2023).

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Grandin, Greg. The End of the Myth. From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019. Guerin-Gonzales, Camille. Mexican Workers and American Dreams. Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1990–1939. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996. Guglielmo, Jennifer, and Salvatore Salerno (edited by). Are Italians white?: How race is made in America. London: Psychology Press: 2003. Guglielmo, Thomas A. “Introduction.” White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945, 1–14. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Hall, Stuart. “Stuart Hall in Lecture. Representation and the Media.” YouTube Video, Lecture Filmed at the University of Manchester (2021). https://www. youtube.com/watch? v=84depWskwu0 (accessed April 28, 2023). Hirota, Hidetaka. Expelling the Poor. Atlantic Seaboard and the Nineteenth-­ Century Origins of American Immigration Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. IndieWire. “IndieWIRE INTERVIEW ‘Amexicano’ Director Matthew Bonifacio and Writer Carmine Famiglietti.” (September 19, 2008). https://www. indiewire.com/2008/09/ indiewire-­interview-­amexicano-­director-­matthew-­ bonifacio-­and-­writer-­carmine-­famiglietti-­71747/ (accessed April 16, 2023). International Organization for Migration, UN, Global Migration Data Analysis Centre. “Key Global Migration Figures 2019–2013.” https://www.migrationdataportal.org/sites/g/ files/tmzbdl251/files/2023-­02/One-­pager-­2023-­ EN-­Final.pdf (accessed April 16, 2023). Jiménez, Tomás. Replenished Ethnicity: Mexican Americans, Immigration and Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Khazan, Olga. “Learn English. But U.S. Policy Makes that Hard.” The Atlantic, June 4, 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/06/why-­ cant-­immigrants-­learn-­english/619053/ (accessed May 13, 2022). López, Ana M. “Are All Latins from Manhattan?: Hollywood, Ethnography, and Cultural Colonialism.” In Unspeakable Images. Ethnicity and the American Cinema, edited by Lester D.  Friedman, 404–424. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Lueck, Kerstin and Wilson, Michelle. “Acculturative Stress in Latino Immigrants: The Impact of Social, Socio-psychological and Migration-related Factions.” International Journal of Intercultural Relations, Vol. 35, No 2 (2011), 186–195. Lytle Hernández, Kelly. City of Inmates. Conquest, Rebellion and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017 Maciel, David R. “Pochos and Other Extremes in Mexican Cinema; or, El Cine Mexicano se va de Bracero, 1922–1963.” In Chicanos and Films. Representation

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and Resistance, edited by Chon A. Noriega, 94–113. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. McHugh, Margie and Doxsee Catrina. “English Plus Integration: Shifting the Instructional Paradigm for Immigrant Adult Learners to Support Integration Success.” Migration Policy Institute (2018) https://www.migrationpolicy. org/research/english-­plus-­integration-­instructional-­paradigm-­immigrant-­ adult-­learners (accessed April 18, 2023). Office of the Historian, Foreign Service Institute. United States Department of State. “The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act).” https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-­1936/immigration-­act (accessed April 26, 2023). Pérez Melgosa, Adrián. “Low-Intensity Necropolitics: Slow Violence and Migrant Bodies in Latin American Films.” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Vol. 20 (2016), 217–236. ———. Cinema and Inter-American Relations: Tracking Transnational Affect. New York: Routledge, 2012. PICUM. “Why Words Matter.” https://picum.org/words-­matter/ (accessed April 10, 2023). Piore, Michael J. Birds of Passage. Migrant Labor and Industrial Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession, (1991), 33–40. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). “Birds of Passage.” In The Italian Americans (2015). Clip: Season 1, https://www.pbs.org/video/italian-­americans-­birds-­ passage/ (accessed April 16, 2023). Sironi, Alice, Céline Bauloz, and Milen Emmanuel (edited by). “Glossary on Migration.” International Migration Law, No 34. International Organization for Migration (IOM), Geneva, 2019. https://publications.iom.int/books/ international-­migration-­law-­ndeg34-­glossary-­migration (accessed April 10, 2023). Wirth, Christa. “Why the Hyphen? Individual and Collective Memories of Italianness in the United States at the Intersection of Class and Generation.” Immigrant Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2016), 22–48. Worrall, Janet E., “A Comparative Study of Hispanics and Italians in the Southwest.” In Italian Americans. A Retrospective on the Twentieth Century, edited by Paola Alessandra Sensi-Isolani and Anthony Julian Tamburri, 110–126. Chicago Heights: American Italian Historical Association, 2001.

Films and TV Series Cited Amexicano (Matthew Bonifacio, 2007). Birds of Passage (Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra, 2018). Lbs. (Matthew Bonifacio, 2004). The Italian Americans (PBS, 2015).

PART II

Italian Americans in Other Media

CHAPTER 9

Italian American Gangsters Taking on a New Line of Work in Luc Besson’s The Family (2013) Rosetta Caponetto Giuliani

Set in present-day Normandy and directed by French filmmaker Luc Besson, The Family (2013) is a film that takes the gangster genre to a new terrain while also serving as a vehicle for its director’s obsession with Hollywood gangster films. An adaptation of Tonino Benacquista’s French novel Malavita, the film revolves around embattled Italian American mobster Giovanni Manzoni (Robert De Niro), who after tipping off rival mafia boss Don Lucchese (Stan Carp) moves to France with his wife Maggie (Michelle Pfeiffer) and two children to live under witness protection. Viewers of the film can pry into the private life of this twenty-first-­ century gangster captured by binoculars and wiretap as the family is surveilled by FBI agents led by Captain Stanfield (Tommy Lee Jones). Life undercover transforms the family of this gangster into exotic predators in

R. C. Giuliani (*) Department of World Languages, Literatures & Cultures, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Fioretti, F. Orsitto (eds.), Italian Americans in Film and Other Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47211-4_9

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a zoo, free to roam in their cage but forced to stay within reach.1 Similarly, half of Giovanni’s criminal family2 in New York physically serve life sentences, and half are symbolically trapped in a never-ending chase for their traitor. The audience has also access to the characters’ daily errands, away from the watchful eye of the FBI. On one hand, the family members are reminiscent of characters in reality television shows whose daily lives are on display for entertainment. On the other, undetected by the watchful eye of the FBI, their violent behavior reminds the spectators that these characters are capable of much more than mere entertainment. Looking for ‘a new line of work’ is a recurrent theme that encapsulates the questions raised by a film in which an Italian American mobster has no regrets for his past life, and only agrees to live under the pretense of a new identity and profession to ensure his family’s survival. After finding a typewriter in his new home, Giovanni decides to present himself as a writer working on the Normandy landing, while in reality writing his memoir. Entrapped in life at odds with his former self, Giovanni retreats into writing about a past in which he finds the freedom to be true to himself. Echoed in Giovanni’s process of documenting his past life, Besson’s film also travels back in time, to revisit the Hollywood gangster movies that preceded it. Self-awareness in this film is palpable with Robert De Niro as Giovanni Manzoni invited to oversee the screening of Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas, a film that features this same actor in the role of wiseguy Jimmy Conway. Under witness protection, survival depends on changing identity and finding a new line of work to secure the cover, and Luc Besson’s gangster film undergoes the same transformation. This chapter will examine the ‘new line of work’ for a genre in danger of becoming extinct, and the mediatic disguise envisioned by Luc Besson to enable the survival of gangster movies in the twenty-first century. Italian Americans were perceived as less than the average white American at the turn of the twentieth century, as recounted by historians Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno in their Are Italians White? (2003). Italian Americans were often misrepresented as individuals driven by emotions, self-serving workers who never stood up for American labor rights, and traitors to the United States during World War Two, as historian Stefano Luconi recalls following their struggles to find a home in America (Luconi, 37–39). It is no wonder that Niccolò Machiavelli’s lesson3 on the necessary measures to seize power and secure respect within a community (“It’s better to be feared than loved”) becomes a narrative trigger in Hollywood gangster movies to leverage fear and violence in portrayals of

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Italian Americans pursuing the American Dream. As assimilation advances each generation of Italian Americans within American society, a different fear takes precedence for the consequences of leaving the past behind in exchange for social integration. Examining their advancement in American society, Francesca De Lucia discusses the evolution of the Italian American cultural identity from the postwar era to the present day and raises the question of whether younger generations have lost their ties to their heritage (De Lucia, 29–32). Even in Besson’s film, Giovanni’s family is mostly American, their Italian identity nearly as extinct as the gangster genre. Telling the truth of who they are is kept hidden from the surrounding French community because assimilation is the only way to secure their survival. However, whether Besson is making references to the historical assimilation of Italian Americans or the vanishing of Italian American identity is not as important a question here, as is how this cultural fear is transformed into artistic angst. The Family, under the direction of Luc Besson, is an expression of fear about a younger generation of spectators losing their ties to a cinematic genre that had lasting effects on Besson’s artistic sensitivity.4 A reverence for the ancestry of Hollywood gangster movies is at the heart of The Family. In his own words, Besson classes his film as an homage to Martin Scorsese (“It’s really a love letter to Scorsese. I am a huge fan of the master”).5 As a result, most reviews of the film focus on his blatant references to Scorsese’s cinema, with GoodFellas quoted in the meta-cinematic manner of showing a film within a film. However, a closer look allows a viewer well versed in the genre to notice echoes of several gangster films that influence the storyline in a subtler but no less poignant way. Besson pays his respects to Hollywood gangster movies with tongue-­ in-­cheek hints at his spectators, while also looking back at his own filmography. A self-referential series of clues is built into the storyline to tease the spectators on several levels, in some cases expecting them to make a connection between Hollywood gangster movies and Besson’s oeuvre. For example, his 1994 work Léon: The Professional is a film featuring a hitman named Léon (Jean Reno) commissioned by Italian American Tony (Danny Aiello) who uses his Little Italy restaurant as cover for his other business. Léon dies at the hands of a DAE agent named Stanfield (Gary Oldman), leaving his life savings to twelve-year-old Mathilda (Natalie Portman) to secure her a future away from crime. Robert De Niro’s 1993 A Bronx Tale, released a year before Léon, addresses the same question about the future of seventeen-year-old

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Calogero (Lillo Brancato) who idealizes mafia boss Sonny (Chazz Palminteri). As he grows up, Calogero struggles with Machiavelli’s quote, wondering whether it is better to be feared, like Sonny, or loved, like his father Lorenzo (Robert De Niro). While providing an enticing shortcut to the American Dream, the gangster lifestyle in A Bronx Tale prevents the Italian American community from making any significant advancement. In a lengthy sequence, Sonny drives backward through the Bronx in a convertible Cadillac, unconcerned of traffic signs, in a bold action that proves his tight hold on his neighborhood. This sequence encapsulates the duality of representations that A Bronx Tale shows side by side. Director Robert De Niro pays homage to the gangster genre while also offering an alternate image to the gangster with bus driver Lorenzo, who makes an honest living driving his bus forward, contrasting Sonny’s reverse driving as allusive of a lifestyle that holds the Italian American community back.6 In the closing sequence, Calogero pays farewell to Sonny at his funeral (“wasted talent”) suggesting that his mentor could have had a brighter future if not for his “line of work”. Since the popularity and the downturn of gangster movies cannot be separated from the complex social, racial, and economic history of Italians in the United States, one must examine the cultural relevance of Besson’s gangster. For scholar Fred Gardaphé, the rise and decline of the gangster genre are inherently linked to the historical marginalization of Italian Americans and the gradual reclamation of their representations in cinema and media outlets. Why, then, does Besson bring on screen one of the most infamous stereotypes that Hollywood cinema used in the depiction of the Italian American community? The inextricable relation between gangster movies and the Italian American diaspora leads one to question where The Family can be situated within the genre, and how convincing this portrayal of an Italian American gangster is in the twenty-first century. With this question in mind, I draw upon Gardaphé’s analysis of the popularity of gangster representations in American cinema and television, ranging from films that dispense reductive stereotypes of Italian Americans to works that mock the gangster figure to debunk it. Hollywood gangster films are examined by Gardaphé in three phases, with each stage representing the struggles of Italian Americans for economic and cultural survival, and their ascension in the American socio-­ economic hierarchy. The first stage starts with films such as Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931) and Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932), depicting Italian immigrants as villains played by non-Italian actors (Gardaphé, 58).

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Gardaphé compares this early version of gangster films to blackface minstrel shows and theater productions that relied on white actors to steer caricatured representations of African Americans during the nineteenth century (ibid.). Blackface minstrel shows aimed to soothe white audiences’ fears by controlling the image of those who instilled such angst (ibid.). Where blackface minstrel shows disseminated deprecating clichés about African Americans, early gangster movies presented Italian Americans as male characters wearing mostly dark suits, rather than actual black faces, in order to convey the presence of non-white, deceitful, foreign bodies (ibid.).7 These disparaging representations gave way to a second stage in the evolution of the gangster genre that begins when Italian Americans themselves produce films and novels portraying their community (ibid., 59). In the second stage, films such as The Godfather (1972) provide a different outlook on criminal life, one that allows for social mobility of a community faced with unjust treatment by a discriminatorily corrupt society, as the film opening exemplifies (ibid.). Even from the opening sequence, which portrays hard-working entrepreneur Bonasera, director Francis Ford Coppola presents Italian Americans in a new light. These men and women are like any other Americans, looking after their family and community, making an honest living. They abide by the law, only  resorting to non-legal methods like Bonasera does when the law ignores their right to justice. In its last stage, the genre shifts to comedy, with the revival of past gangster figures providing consolatory strength to Tony Soprano in the eponymous series, and with humor becoming a means of repudiating the genre and the earlier clichés, in films such as Analyze This (1999) and Analyze That (2002) (ibid., 61). Gardaphé’s analysis poses the question of how the genre advances after the parody stage, and what stage four entails. In a 2016 interview with Bryan Crecente, Besson confesses his aversion to video games and Virtual Reality (“I’ve never played a video game. I don’t play games at all. […] I’m a very  old-fashioned artist. I’m like a painter […]”).8 He explains that as a filmmaker, he likes to exercise exclusive control over his story without switching roles with the viewer (Crecente). Yet, we must wonder whether one of the most innovative filmmakers of digital-era cinema truly distrusts gaming, and why a director who makes playful films would reject the idea of playable movies? It is possible that Besson may not so much be concerned with losing the authorship of his works as he is worried about how his films are viewed and experienced. The stylistic feature that marks his cinema is the ability to

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create a multifaceted film that references various media and contains different levels of reality, including a reality beyond what is represented on screen. Before this interview, Besson must have been aware of the gangster genre being subsumed by new platforms, as the release of The Godfather (2006) and Mafia (2010) action-adventure video games exemplified. Ultimately, he is worried about the dissolution of the multilayered viewing experience that films like The Family stimulate, a stylistic mark that he is afraid would be flattened by gaming. But being the innovative director that he is, Besson knows how much his cinematic style is geared toward gaming. Therefore, Besson’s interview underscores what can be described as a conflicted relationship with gaming. Although he is concerned about gaming adaptations of his films limiting the experience of the spectators, he cannot help but adopt some features that belong to the videogame platform. The Family is caught in this tension between asserting the superiority of cinema over gaming and envisioning ways for cinema to make the next ‘line of work’ of the gangster genre a more artistically playful and enjoyable experience. In her seminal book Gaming Film (2013), Jasmina Kallay argues that cinema has not yet reached the stage of being as interactive as video games. She explains that the major differences between cinema and video games are the ways that they engage their audiences—“films are watched while games are played” (Kallay, 1)—and the degree of agency granted to viewers in their interaction with the storyline (ibid., 2). While still relying on traditional narrative strategies (ibid., 33–34), contemporary cinema is heavily influenced by video games, adopting features (ibid., 32–33) that engage viewers with the task of unraveling the puzzle presented by the storyline (ibid., 34–35), simulating the venture of “solving a game” (ibid., 46). Kallay points out that computer software is not the only means of prompting players’ participation in the game, since agency entails “a meaningful action  which carries consequences at the narrative level” because “interactivity” requires a type of immersion in the narrative that leads to its transformation (ibid., 2–4). Since having the ability to transform is key to interactivity, Kallay explains that in truly interactive works, such as video games, viewers are allowed to take on a different identity. For example, when they adopt an avatar to access a fictional world, they become completely immersed in the narrative, and they are encouraged to manipulate the content of the narrative (ibid., 4). From the Latin trans (beyond) formare (to form), ‘transform’ carries inherent the idea of form as expandable, in so that the shape or structure

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of something is changed beyond its original purpose or vision. Keeping this in mind, I will turn to a discussion of interactivity and expansiveness in The Family. In his film, Besson engages the viewers with a storyline that expands beyond the linear flow of events to create a multilayered story that could be equated with various levels of difficulty or diverging paths offered to players in a video game. With close attention, Besson’s viewers can intrude into this family’s private life, viewing them using police surveillance through the house window and phone line. Spectators are also aware that the view inside the house is deceiving when compared to the violent actions occurring away from the watchful eye of the FBI agents. Along with the family’s contrasting conduct inside and outside the house, the storyline further expands, as Giovanni’s writing and Maggie’s confession to the town priest open additional dimensions. The game of searching for meta-clues or Easter eggs,9 those of Besson’s appropriation of other cinematic works, adds another layer to the storyline. If The Family were to be screened in a mafia film course, showing the film at the beginning, middle, or end of the class would affect the ways students experience the movie since a deeper grasp depends on familiarity with the genre and the ability to recognize the layout of this multilayered narrative. Perhaps the most striking similarity between The Family and gaming is the use of transmedia features. Kallay points out that transmedia cinema combines different media platforms to create a storyline that expands beyond the screen (ibid., 61–63). These different communication tools interact using their juxtaposition, each bringing a dimension to the narrative (ibid.). Transmedia cinema may incorporate such diverse media as animation, advertising, print news, and broadcasting, and also encourages viewers to add their personal touch to the plot as the story unfolds. The Family interacts with cinema itself and with other media blatantly, with sequences that show Maggie watching classic Hollywood films and Giovanni viewing GoodFellas, and the use of footage of actual 1950s newsreel to narrate Giovanni’s family history. Other times, the interplay between the film and other media is subtle, as in the case of FBI surveillance footage, which employs a trope of reality television, or the graphic element of the hired killers sent by Don Lucchese. Like life-size cardboard cutouts, men-in-black hitmen coming out of a comic book,10 these New York gangsters arrive in the French town to dispense fear. Although Besson does not show actual animated characters in the film, he achieves the same effect as incorporating animation in the plot when he plays

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diegetic music by the famous virtual band Gorillaz as a backdrop to this group of hitmen exiting a train. Several visual aspects offer additional elements that bring a “game-like feel” (Kallay  80) to the film. In their volume on Luc Besson’s cinema, Susan Hayward and Phil Powrie note that French critics coined the expression ‘cinema du look’ to label a way of making films that invests in the aesthetics of a “spectacular and technically brilliant mise-en-scene” at the cost of the storyline (Hayward, Powrie, 1–2). Besson’s cinematic production is considered an example of ‘cinema du look’ since the characters, “much like comic-strips characters […], seem to be spectacular images cut loose from any clear historical context—spectacle for spectacle’s sake” (ibid., 1). His characters are empty vessels, reduced to décor objects, not unlike the picturesque setting of the film itself, chosen for its aesthetic juxtaposition as a background for graphic violence (ibid.). The priority given to look over narrative and character development is also a characteristic of gaming, especially mafia-themed videogames. When the Mafia II game was first released in 2010, videogame critic Seth Schiesel described it as a “pastiche of tropes, stereotypes and entire scenes cut from the movies and television shows that form the pantheon of Mafia folklore” (Schiesel). Undeniably, Mafia II is a mashup, offering gamers the role of Vito, named after Coppola’s Godfather (1972) character. Vito is a war veteran, like Michael Corleone in the eponymous film, and moves through scenarios (disposing of a body; cooking in prison) that are reminiscent of Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas (ibid.). The game recreates with impeccable mastery “the architecture and the geography of New York City” during the 1950s and the mannerism of Italian American gangsters with “Hollywood vernacular of Italian mob-talk” (ibid.). Aside from this visually attractive backdrop, Schiesel notes, the game lacks real engaging activities. Gamers are made to drive from one side of the city to another with no “complicated combat situations” and no actual opportunities to spend the money they earned as the story unfolds (ibid.). The game runs short on “narrative creativity or enough gameplay depth to make it a real Mafia kingpin” (ibid.). The most common controversy raised by video games is their use of graphic violence. Kallay discusses the double standard suffered by gaming when it comes to violence that is condoned within the fictional cinematic world, but it is demonized in video games (Kallay, 4). In cinema, the spectator is a bystander looking at violence and having adults providing parental guidance, while in video games the presence of adults disappears and

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young gamers are believed to be affected by the violent behavior of the perpetrators (ibid., 22–24). Although dealt with playfully, violence is omnipresent in Besson’s film, with Giovanni and his family indulging in a bloody mission to punish everyday mistreatment during their stay in France. When Giovanni and his family lash out against their French perpetrators, viewers almost feel like being in a video game where characters/ gamers enter a scene, blow up buildings, beat up their adversaries, and leave the scene with no real consequences. In other moments, the storyline gives the viewers two possible options of which they can fantasize, for example, Giovanni’s next move in the face of an act of injustice. At the family cookout, Giovanni could grill the face of the French neighbors who question his barbecue skills or respect their comments and maintain civil behavior. In these sequences, The Family adopts the forking-path technique typical of gaming in which “gamers are presented with a choice, which is in effect a branching point” and as they play the game again, they could experiment with those optional paths (ibid., 44). In video games, Kallay continues, these forking-path options “are not as varied as the acting of choosing may suggest” due to the limitations of video game development and cost (ibid., 44). Therefore, just like spectators of The Family, who cannot choose the second path opened up by Giovanni’s fantasies, real gamers cannot always “take more than just the one route” (ibid., 51) despite the seemingly endless directions being offered to them. In terms of violence, Besson relies on a cinema age-rating system that prevents minors from watching the film, and on the mutual understanding that violence in his films is dealt with playfully. As Raphaël Bassan points out, the combination of excess violence and humor makes any display of carnage improbable in Besson’s film (Bassan, 18). Whereas video games lack the comedic relief of The Family that marks the violence as unrealistic, they are nevertheless driven by the unspoken agreement that characters can be resuscitated as many times as the gamers want. The display of excessive violence in a comedy offers an opportunity to understand Besson’s wavering stance between adopting narrative features that are typical of video games, and proposing strategies to handle extreme violence, a point of controversy that, for many years, earned video games a bad reputation. Similar to video games, The Family does not offer closure or an ending to the story because Giovanni’s family does not perish, leading to the possibility of a film sequel. The Family is not so much about how the story ends, as it is about how many clues or Easter eggs viewers can recognize. What is unexpected, though, is that reviews of Mafia II express disappointment

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for the game being unable to replicate the experience of bloody mafia-like violence (Schiesel). In a reversed act of borrowing, The Family provides prompts for gamers to adjust the content of their mafia games to make up for the engaging combat scenes that are missing. In doing so, the film proves that by setting a contextual framework, such as the one provided by comedy, displays of graphic violence can hardly be taken seriously. It is no coincidence that in his 2016 interview on video games, Besson compares himself to a painter, asserting the convention that cinema is a “window to the world” while referencing fifteenth-century humanist Leon Battista Alberti, who describes the role of painting as “opening a window on the world” in his treatise On Painting (1435). I rely here on architects Francesco Galletta and Maurizio Galluzzo and their discussion of Leon Battista Alberti’s “window” which described the painting techniques necessary to create a three-dimensional perception of a represented object. With his assertion, Alberti identified a threshold through which the painted space and the space of the viewer met, this being the frame of the window that marked the boundaries between the two spaces (Galletta). For Alberti, the window separated and, at the same time, united the inside and the outside (Galluzzo). This line of demarcation, notes art critic Marisa Prete, was intended to simultaneously exist and not exist. The goal of the artist was to “create the impression of continuity between the represented space and the external space occupied by the viewer” (Prete). Alberti’s prospettiva or perspective encapsulated the arduous task of the artist who, on one hand, needed to consider the boundaries between “the represented space and the surroundings,” but on the other hand made that line disappear, creating the illusion of a “proximity between the image and the space” of the physical life of the viewer (ibid.).11 It is interesting that when Kallay discusses cinema’s relentless search for interactive experiences, she mentions fifteenth-century artist Andrea Mantegna and his painting Presentation at the Temple (ca. 1455), which attempts the same feat as contemporary cinema: to transcend the confines of the silver screen (Kallay, 9). Mantegna makes use of the window motif in his painting to literally frame a Madonna holding Jesus; her elbows and the baby’s foot extend through the confines of the window, stepping between the represented and the physical spaces (ibid.). The comparison between Mantegna’s painting and Besson’s film is salient when describing the multiple dimensions that their respective works open through their storytelling. Similar to Besson’s film, Mantegna’s painting uses a well-known scene, that of the Madonna and child, to tell a story in which multiple levels of reality appear.

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First, notes Klaus Krüger, is the spiritual dimension, which the artist entrusts to the viewer. The spectator is invited to imagine how the scene expands beyond what is visible to gather the transcendental dimension alluded to by the presence of the Madonna (Krüger, 229). Characteristics of pictorial production in the 1400s included the custom of referencing, as a sign of respect, the works of other artists (ibid., 235) and including a self-referential element such as a self-portrait. In Mantegna’s Presentation, references to the works of other artists and the cameo appearance of Mantegna himself in the painting confer an additional dimension to the storyline (ibid.). According to Krüger, this painting undoubtedly brings to mind Donatello’s Madonna Pazzi (ca. 1425), because Mantegna not only depicts the same scene, but he also adopts the sculptural painting style, which imitates Donatello’s “shallow relief carving” or “rilievo schiacciato”, to give depth to his painted figures (ibid.). This tribute to Donatello, Mantegna’s cameo, and the references to other works were all intended to establish a mutual understanding between the artist and viewer, the latter of whom would have had to collect these clues (ibid.). This unspoken agreement between artist and viewer, and the game by which it is reached, conferred yet another dimension to the work (ibid.). However, notes Krüger, in Mantegna’s painting, the line of separation between inside and out delineated by the window never disappears; the painting keeps the observer in the space of the threshold (ibid., 237). In Presentation at the Temple, the painting techniques confer the illusion of depth to the scene—underlining the multifaceted storyline and the three-dimensionality of the characters, who appear to push through the frame, ready to escape from the window (ibid.). The painted subjects move toward the viewer (ibid.), but the painting does not encourage the opposite movement—it does not invite the viewer to attempt to pass through the threshold and invade the space inside the window frame, as do the trompe-l’oeil paintings of the subsequent era. In an article on painting as an illusion, Sybille Ebert-Schifferer describes the three-­dimensionality of seventeenth-century trompe-l’oeil paintings, which, due to their life-­ like effect, encourage the observer’s tactile engagement to verify whether the painting is real or painted (Ebert-Schifferer, 33–34). Similar to Mantegna, Besson creates a film with an expandable storyline allowing spectators to experience a multi-dimensional narrative without them crossing over to invade the space where the story unfolds, an act of trespassing permitted in video games. The threshold separating the inside and outside of the screen/window is crucial for Besson because it is where

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the “interpretative act of viewing” (Krüger, 229) takes place. In this space of reflection, viewers realize that they are not merely watching a film, they are witnessing a journey through a threshold surrounded by well-known actors, scenes, and famous phrases from past Hollywood gangster movies. Making connections between The Family and previous gangster movies is a crucial part of experiencing the film. Spectators can look into the private life of gangster families pitted against each other and even make personal connections with some of them through the close-up view offered by the surveilled window. Even when given the vantage point of looking into the private life of this family, spectators remain in the threshold space and are not allowed to step into the space in which the story unfolds. This retrospective display of characters, actors, and scenes from past movies causes viewers to distance themselves from the story.12 As they search for clues, they realize that they are watching a film that refers to other films. They also understand that they are watching a family who is aware of being watched. Finally, they become aware that they are looking at actors who watch themselves on the screen, as De Niro (Giovanni) stares at himself playing GoodFellas’ Jim Conway. This chapter has explored the reasons for reviving Italian American gangsters and taking them out of the geographical and historical context that contributed to the rise and decline of Hollywood gangster movies. Why another gangster film? What are the implications of Italian American mobsters relocating to France? Does the gangster genre have a place in the twenty-first century? My examination has revealed that French director Luc Besson revisits Hollywood gangster films to refresh our memory and test our familiarity with them. His appropriation of scenes, names, and actors offers the opportunity to revisit old stereotypes and sometimes counter them, as when Besson transforms men-in-black mobsters into cartoonish villains or portrays Italian American gangsters as typically American. In an ironic reversal, not American but French society controls the image of this foreign family, labeling them as unsophisticated Americans with questionable taste and unhealthy diet (Dougherty). Societal control over the way they are perceived is reflected in the feeling of entrapment the family experiences in the tiny village in Normandy. Looking back to the past liberates the family from a present that feels like a prison and an uncertain future. Though the family relocates frequently, their living arrangements under witness protection stay the same in each new place they visit. Similar to the future of this family, without closure or expectation of progress, The Family foreshadows for the gangster genre

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a hyperbolic imitation of its former self, unless the genre migrates to video games. Though, a topic of contention is the quality of mafia-themed video games, incapable of measuring up with their cinematic counterparts. When Besson says, “I’ve never played a video game”, he really means that video gamers and developers alike should play his film first, to understand the rich history of the gangster genre and adopt strategies that would make mafia-­themed gaming a more complex and artistically enjoyable experience.

Notes 1. Mark Orme’s article “Imprisoned Freedoms” addresses this feeling of entrapment in his analysis of Luc Besson’s Subway (1985) and La Femme Nikita (1990) featuring characters who, like Giovanni and his family, live under a disguised identity and experience the space of their everyday life as a prison. Similar to exotic animals caged in a zoo, the characters of Nikita and Fred have enough space to move within the perimeter of their stifling life, but no possibility of freeing themselves. 2. In her article “Italian American Cinema: Between Blood Family and Bloody Family”, Ilaria Serra (2010) makes an interesting distinction between the family in which the gangster is born into (blood family) and the acquired family of their criminal organization (bloody family). 3. Sixteenth-century political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli lived in Florence during turbulent times that led to his writing of The Prince, a treatise in which he describes the indispensable attributes for leadership, which emphasize seizing power and maintaining stability. Machiavelli’s quote “It’s better to be feared than loved” is mentioned in Robert De Niro’s A Bronx Tale by mafia boss Sonny, when justifying to his young protégé Calogero his own use of fear as the only effective tool to keep his men, and the Bronx community, in line. 4. In a 2013 interview titled “De Niro and Pfeiffer Star in The Family”, by Steve Dougherty’s for The Wall Street Journal, Besson confesses with a tone of reverie that, at a very young age, he watched Martin Scorsese’s gangster movies and that afterwards his life changed forever (Dougherty). 5. The full interview appears in “Interview: Luc Besson Talks Scorsese’s Influence on The Family” by Drew Taylor for Playlist, Sept 12, 2013. It is worth mentioning that Martin Scorsese is one of The Family’s executive producers and references to his work punctuate both the film and the trailer, which borrows GoodFellas soundtrack. 6. This iconic sequence in A Bronx Tale lends itself to multiple interpretations. I owe some of the insightful comments about Sonny reversing his

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Cadillac to my students in the course “Cinematic Representations of Italian Americans”. 7. Fred Gardaphé’s comparison of early gangster films to blackface minstrel shows does not intend to conflate the histories of African Americans and Italian Americans. Gardaphé’s original analysis only suggests that similar strategies to control the visual representations of Italian Americans were adopted. 8. For the full interview, see “Luc Besson Will Never Make a Videogame” by Brian Crecente for Polygon (2016). 9. ‘Easter eggs’ or ‘Easter egg hunt’ is an expression commonly used to describe the search for hidden images, references, and messages in media outlets, including video games and cinema. I owe Rachel Perry for suggesting the expression and for editing, as well as helping with the translation of some sections of this article. 10. On the presence of comics and the ways they affect Luc Besson’s films, see Raphaël Bassan’s article “Three French Neo-Baroque Directors” (2006). 11. English translation of Marisa Prete’s quotes is mine. 12. Here I draw upon Elise Morrison’s fascinating analysis of the interplay of surveillance, window views, and voyeurism in cinema and theater productions, in her book Discipline and Desire (2016). Examining the play Contains Violence, Morrison highlights the ways author David Rosenberg places spectators in the active role of witnesses of an imminent murder in an apartment building (Morrison, 56–62). From a rooftop across the apartment building, spectators watch and hear the tragedy as it unfolds, with binoculars and wiretaps (ibid.). Similar to Besson’s spectators who can look into the private space of Giovanni’s family but cannot engage with the story, Rosenberg’s theatergoers are unable to prevent the murder from happening. More importantly, Rosenberg’s audience becomes aware of its role as spectators prying on characters who are aware of being watched.

Works Cited Alberti, Leon Battista. On Painting. London: Penguin Classics, 1991. Bassan, Raphaël. “Three French Neo-Baroque Directors: Beineix, Besson, Carax, from Diva to Le Grand Blue.” In The Film of Luc Besson. Master of Spectacle, edited by Susan Hayward and Phil Powrie, 11–21. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Benacquista, Tonino. Malavita: A Novel. London: Penguin Books, 2013. Crecente, Brian. “Luc Besson Will Never Make a Video Game. He’s Never Even Played One.” Polygon 7 Oct 2016. https://www.polygon.com/ 2016/10/7/13201310/luc-­besson-­video-­games (accessed April 12, 2023).

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De Lucia, Francesca. Italian American Cultural Fictions. From Diaspora to Globalization. New York: Peter Lang, 2017. Dougherty, Steve. “De Niro and Pfeiffer Star in The Family. Luc Besson’s Dark Comedy Puts American Mobster in France.” The Wall Street Journal, August 29, 2013. Ebert-Schifferer, Sybille. “Finestra e velo. Pittura come illusione.” In Inganni ad arte. Meraviglie del trompe l’oeil dall’antichità al contemporaneo, edited by Annamaria Giusti, 33–45. Firenze: Mandragora, 2009. Galletta, Francesco. “Una finestra sul mondo. La prospettiva in pittura.” Arte/ Vitæ 13 Nov. 2017. https://artevitae.it/una-­finestra-­sul-­mondo-­la-­prospettiva-­ in-­pittura/ (accessed April 12, 2023). Galluzzo, Maurizio. “La metafora della finestra” 11 May 2011. https://www. mauriziogalluzzo.it/la-­metafora-­della-­finestra (accessed December 24, 2023). Gardaphé, Fred. “The Gangster Figure in American Film and Literature.” In Mediated Ethnicity. New Italian American Cinema, edited by Giuliana Muscio, Joseph Sciorra, Giovanni Spagnoletti, Anthony Tamburri, 57–63. New York: John Calandra Italian American Institute, 2010. Guglielmo, Jennifer and Salvatore Salerno (edited by). Are Italians White? How Race is Made in America. New York: Routledge, 2003. Hayward, Susan; Phil Powrie. Introduction. The Film of Luc Besson. Master of Spectacle, edited by Susan Hayward and Phil Powrie, 1–9. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Kallay, Jasmina. Gaming Film. How Games Are Reshaping Contemporary Cinema. New York: Palgrave: New York, 2013. Krüger, Klaus. “Andrea Mantegna: Painting’s Mediality.” Art History 37.2 (2014), 222–254. Luconi, Stefano. “Anti-Italian Prejudice in the United States. Between Ethnic Identity and Racial Question.” In Mediated Ethnicity. New Italian American Cinema, edited by Giuliana Muscio, Joseph Sciorra, Giovanni Spagnoletti, Anthony Tamburri, 33–64. New  York: John Calandra Italian American Institute, 2010. Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince. New York: CreateSpace, 2014. Morrison, Elise. Discipline and Desire. Surveillance Technologies in Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. Orme, Mark. “Imprisoned Freedoms: Space and Identity in Subway and Nikita.” In The Film of Luc Besson. Master of Spectacle, edited by Susan Hayward and Phil Powrie, 121–134. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Prete, Marisa. “L’immagine prospettica.” Finestre su arte, cinema, e musica. July 2018. https://finestresuartecinemaemusica.blogspot.com/2018/07/ (accessed April 12, 2023).

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Schiesel, Seth. “It’s the Same Old Mob, Now Sampled for Gamers.” The New York Times. September 5, 2010. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/06/arts/ television/06mafia.html (accessed April 12, 2023). Serra, Ilaria. “Italian American Cinema: Between Blood Family and Bloody Family.” In Mediated Ethnicity. New Italian American Cinema, edited by Giuliana Muscio, Joseph Sciorra, Giovanni Spagnoletti, Anthony Tamburri, 189–200. New York: John Calandra Italian American Institute, 2010. Taylor, Drew. “Interview: Luc Besson Talks Scorsese’s Influence on The Family.” The Playlist 12 Sept 2013. https://theplaylist.net/interview-­luc-­besson-­talks-­ scorseses-­influence-­on-­the-­family-­r eturning-­to-­sci-­fi-­not-­getting-­paid-­for-­ nikita-­20130912/ (accessed April 12, 2023).

Films and Performances Cited Analyze That (Harold Ramis, 2002). Analyze This (Harold Ramis, 1999). A Bronx Tale (Robert De Niro, 1993). Contains Violence (Performance Directed by David Rosenberg—London, April 27-May 26, 2008). The Family (Luc Besson, 2013). The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972). GoodFellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990). La femme Nikita (Luc Besson, 1990). Léon. The Professional (Luc Besson, 1993). Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931). Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932). Subway (Luc Besson, 1985).

CHAPTER 10

The Transnational Puppet: From Italy and Back Federico Pacchioni

This chapter investigates the implications of the image of the puppet within Italian American cinema by tracing the origins and evolution of key interlocked associations—folly, otherness, power, memory, and identity— within European and American aesthetic constructs. In both European and American cultures, puppet and puppetry have been and continue to be linked to the idea of folly; though, different traditions emphasize and apply this idea in different directions—madness in terms of perception of reality (Northern/Eastern Europe), madness caused by the experience of otherness (United States), politically motivated and anarchic madness (Italy). All these threads fuse in the Italian American cinematic image of the puppet in unique ways, which reveals the layered possibilities and creative potential of puppetry in expressing and exploring diaspora experience and culture.1 While a discussion of intermedial uses of puppetry more broadly is needed to understand the ways in which this artform expresses

F. Pacchioni (*) Department of World Languages and Cultures, Chapman University, Orange, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Fioretti, F. Orsitto (eds.), Italian Americans in Film and Other Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47211-4_10

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concerns inherently linked to immigrant experiences, the link to Italian American culture becomes more immediate in the case of the southern Italian marionette or the pupo. The function performed by this unique kind of popular puppet theater in Italian American society and cinema reconfirms it as a ritualistic moment able to recover and safeguard a cultural history of origin.

Puppet and Madness in the Broader Aesthetic Mediascape In European culture, puppetry is often connected to the testing of the limits of human rationality and perception. The very concept of the uncanny was devised to describe the sensation one feels in front of an ontologically ambiguous object that lies between the inanimate and the animate, just as in the case of puppets and verisimilar automata. Since the first studies of this phenomenon—that is, the essay of 1906 by Ernst Jentsch followed by the more famous essay by Sigmund Freud in 1919— the sensation of the uncanny has not been limited to direct encounters with the object; it has also been analyzed in the literary field, for example, in the emblematic story The Sandman, by E. T. A. Hoffman, which attests to the beginning of the relevance of this concept in the artistic field.2 The link between puppetry and the uncanny directly impacts film production in deep and interesting ways, specifically around the concept of the uncanny valley.3 As is well known, the latter relationship, which has reached its most acute and strident levels in the horror genre, explores the primitive roots of the phenomenon by playing at times with alchemical myths—see the extended series of The Puppet Master (1989–2020) with its varied cast of lethal puppets—and at other times with the transmigration of the spirit, exemplified by the successful series Child’s Play (1988–2020) with its terrifying serial-killer doll Chucky. In Italy, the pioneers of horror have certainly not been alien to the expressive potential of the uncanny in relation to the puppet, as evidenced by the numerous cases of mechanical puppets and dolls in the hands of special effects geniuses such as Mario Bava (1914–1980), Carlo Rambaldi (1925–2012), and Dario Argento (1940–). The uncanny effect remains an element to be treated with caution in film productions that employ puppets, as well as in digital animation—as the problematic cases of photorealistic films such as Robert Zemeckis’ The

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Polar Express (2004) and Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin (2011) teach us—because it can risk making the viewing unpleasant if not disturbing. The effect of the uncanny is considered one of the impediments that have hindered the development of a genre of puppet films beyond the sphere of the deliberately experimental film, in which the Czech Jiˇrí Trinka (1912–1969), Jiˇrí Barta (1948–), and Jan Švankmajer (1934–) excel. The explicit use of puppets in film (that is, where they are identified as puppets and not simply a type of special effect) continues to be strongly connected with avant-garde and aesthetic research in perception. This is clearly demonstrated by Strings, released in 2004 and directed by the original Danish director Anders Rønnow Klarlund. This film is an adventure with an epic scope: a young prince comes to uncover, after a long journey, the plot that has led his people to believe that a group of peaceful natives are enemies to be persecuted. The film, made with the help of numerous puppet masters from various parts of Europe, finds in the marionette an ideal instrument to express a spiritual conception of the world, where the strings that mysteriously lose themselves in the sky help explain the cosmic bond that unites all beings, including the two conflicting peoples in the film’s story. Strings clearly alludes to and reinterprets, through a new-age lens, concepts that once attracted European philosophers, writers, and theater practitioners to puppetry, from the romantic realm that extended from Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) to Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966).4 The film I Am Suzanne!, directed by Rowland Lee (1933), expresses the link between madness, puppetry, and otherness, particularly Italian American otherness. The film stages a tormented love story between an Italian American puppeteer, Tony Malatini (played by Gene Raymond), and the dancer Suzanne (played by Lilian Harvey). After an accident, Suzanne must retire from the stage for a time and undergoes an identity crisis accentuated by her growing involvement with the puppeteer and the world of his theater. Marionettes are used to weave the deep psychological plot of the film, which is linked to the dimension of Suzanne’s nightmares. This happens, for example, in the sequence in which the dancer is put on trial by the marionettes and in which the human characters of the film are called to serve as witnesses to the accusation. In the nightmare, their human nature is mixed up with the inanimate puppets, as their legs dangle in the void and the actors’ words become repetitive. These facts generate the anguish expressed by Suzanne’s face shot in close-up, making explicit

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the feeling of the uncanny. Furthermore, I am Suzanne! contains numerous scenes that express the uncanny effect in explicit ways, among which the film’s finale stands out for its spectacular infernal dance where human bodies alternate with marionettes and where Suzanne is transformed from an objectified victim, and therefore a puppet, into a triumphant figure who emerges in all her physical glory, having finally regained her ability as a dancer. The exceptional puppetry present in I Am Suzanne! is realized through an international collaboration between the famous Italian company of Vittorio Podrecca and American Yale Puppeteers.5 Italian artistry not only creates the stage effects but also functions as a central theme and is linked to the Italian American figure, which is also the case of the 1939 Italian film Marionette directed by Carmine Gallone, another romance film centered on the figure of the opera singer Beniamino Gigli (1890–1957), who returns from the Americas seeking a new life in incognito in his country of origin. This film too involves an intermedial collaboration between cinema and theater, this time the company of Yambo (a.k.a. Enrico Novelli), leading to remarkable theatrical shots, such as those of a crowded and grandiose marionette theater staging of the musical opera Fra Diavolo, during which the singer lends his voice to the actor playing the bandit for the famous aria. Madness and puppetry are also associated with social and political undertones, especially in the Italian tradition and as it pertains to the Neapolitan figure of Pulcinella. The roots of this discourse rest in the function of street art and Commedia dell’Arte and in Naples’ intense and troubled history with power. Over the years, countless testimonies have been given about the trickster quality of Pulcinella, an antiauthoritarian and anarchic mask and a catalyst of fears and deep desires. For Italian filmmakers, Pulcinella has often been the emblem of theatrical representation as a metaphor for social history and class struggle, the banner of an art socially committed to giving space to the suffering of minorities and the oppressed.6 These are the positions intensely expressed by Roberto Rossellini’s voluminous and unrealized screenplay Pulcinella o le passioni, le corna, e la morte [Pulcinella or Loves, Betrayals, and Death] (written with Jean Gruault in the period probably starting from 1970 and ending in 1987) and by the film loosely based on it, L’ultimo Pulcinella [The Last Pulcinella], directed in 2008 by Maurizio Scaparro. Rossellini’s screenplay is a clear and eloquent example of Pulcinella’s revolutionary value. In this story, set in seventeenth-century Naples

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during the revolt of Masaniello (1620–1641), a painter named Michelangelo inherits the mask of Pulcinella from an old and honored comedian, presented to him not only as an instrument “to always tell the truth” (Rossellini and Gruault, 272), but as the truth’s symbol. After having assisted the tragic end of Masaniello, Michelangelo escapes with a group of actors, traveling the peninsula northward to reach the court of Louis XIV in Paris. Here, spurred by the Sun King to stage a representation full of artifices that may culminate in the apotheosis of the monarchy over the republic (where Tarquin violating Lucretia should be the emblem of the ideal world), Michelangelo decides, faithfully to the character of his mask, not to do as he is told and instead replaces the ending with an invective against the injustices perpetrated by those in power. The moral legacy of the popular theater of Pulcinella concerns the defense of minority rights and of the weakest, a vocation that is strongly expressed in Rossellini’s script and that has been picked up by director Maurizio Scaparro in his L’ultimo Pulcinella. In Scaparro’s work, Massimo Ranieri plays a traditional Neapolitan actor who insists on carrying on the tradition of Pulcinella in modern times and who travels to Paris to follow his son. There, the actor becomes involved with a group of young activists who occupy an abandoned theater and begin producing a show that applies Neapolitan comedy to the racial and class tensions experienced by immigrants in the suburbs of the European metropolis. Building on the international perspective of a transcultural Pulcinella, already contained in Rossellini’s script, in L’ultimo Pulcinella, the mask offers to the different Mediterranean cultures represented in the Parisian youth the possibility of peacefully channeling their demands for justice and inspiring humanity and compassion in the police to avoid violence. The stubbornness, cunningness, and aggressiveness of Pulcinella’s rebellious spirit in the face of devastating and humiliating attacks are only accentuated in his incarnation as a glove puppet, a form of theater that has its roots in the sphere of the zanni and, as we have seen, in the most unfortunate among them, the character of Burattino.7 Whether referring to the specific puppe theater of Pulcinella, the Neapolitan theater of the guarattelle, or to other types of glove puppets but also, joined with other associations, with marionettes, the Italian puppet always carries a strong antiauthoritarian potential.

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The Emigrated Pupo and Italian American Film In Italian American culture, where, for historical reasons, the main form of puppetry of reference is the pupo, these political tones are nonetheless present, though blended with other associations, which taken together poignantly meet diasporic expressive needs. Indeed, in the work of Italian American filmmakers, the three types of associations between puppetry and madness, linking with perception, otherness, and power, blend in unique ways, that is, with an added idiosyncratic tone of estrangement, born out of marginality from nationhood and the sense of liberation coming from the discovery of an image finally capable of merging collective and individual dimensions. Historians have pointed out that one of the main reasons why the opera dei pupi established itself as the main form of puppet theater in southern Italy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the “strong emotional charge that characterizes the relationship between the character of the opera and the public” and the “mythical function” that the pupi’s vicissitudes assumed within the popular worldview (Buttitta, 33).8 The culturally homogeneous public, formed mostly by males belonging to subordinate classes (peasants, artisans, and proletarians), found in the cycle of representations a ritual of belonging where themes such as struggle, survival, friendship, hatred, and betrayal were codified and at the same time transported into the sphere of myth (ibid., 31–32).9 The function performed by the pupo in Italian American cinema does not detach itself from the ritualistic quality proper to this form of theater; on the contrary, it confirms it for the purpose of recovering and safeguarding a cultural history of origin. This means that, in recent times, the pupo has continued to live on in the Italian American imagination, serving as an instrument to forge a new bond between America and Italy. One of the peculiarities of the metaphorical value of the pupo that can be found in the American context is its manifestation within artistic works marked by independent modes of production. In these cases, in an attempt to break free from the limitations of the commercial schemes of Italian American-themed films, a line of continuity is observed that connects the cinema to the work of Italian immigrant puppeteers and American avant-garde theater. European migrants brought their traditions of popular theater with them across the ocean. The first puppeteers to land on the American continent were Spanish, following the expedition of Hernán Cortés in the early sixteenth century, followed by the English, who established the glove

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puppet tradition along the East Coast during the eighteenth century.10 The first appearances of Italian puppeteers were recorded in the early nineteenth century when Italian immigration began to grow. The family of Agrippino Manteo staged regular pupi evening shows in their successful theater of Mulberry Street, in the heart of New York’s Little Italy, from the late 1920s to the late 1940s, with a traditional Catanese repertoire known for the erudite relationship to literary sources and the attention given to lyrics. The plays, meticulously redacted by the puppeteers, draw from the vast body of Italian Renaissance chivalric poetry (from Barberino, Pucci and Boiardo, to Ariosto and Tasso) adapted in narrative prose by Giuseppe Leggio in his Storia dei paladini (1895–1896, and subsequent expansions).11 The Italian American community continued to appreciate this form of entertainment and the literary memory that it voiced, favoring its function as a ritual of identity, confirming both cultural and linguistic codes and a sense of cultural belonging. The pupo had a particular vitality in North America, influencing even the domains of experimental theater. Indeed, the Sicilian exodus of those years coincided with the development of influential avant-garde perspectives in stage theater inspired by puppetry, particularly the call to move beyond naturalism by British actor Edward Gordon Craig. Craig’s bold 1907 manifesto, The Actor and the Uber-Marionette, identifies the puppet, thanks to its capacity to increase the symbolic and expressive value of performance, as one of the primary tools for the renewal of Western theater.12 In the multicultural heart of New York City, puppet theater contributed to the development of modern American theater through a number of young puppeteers who knew how to combine tradition and experimentation, as demonstrated by the fascinating case of Remo Bufano (1894–1948), who transported the Sicilian American puppets of Mulberry Street into the international theatrical avant-garde. Bufano, who moved with his family to New York City at an early age, grew up in the shadow of the Manteo family’s shows and exhibited a strong interest in the construction and manipulation of puppets from a young age. Working in various stable, itinerant, traditional, and experimental contexts, Bufano collaborated with the famous symbolist theater company Provincetown Playhouse, inspired by Craig’s ideas (his sets with masks, animated objects, and puppets for Vote the New Moon: A Toy Play of 1920 are worthy of mention). Bufano then played a central role in the international success of Spanish composer Manuel de Falla’s play Retablo de Maese Pedro, presented in 1925 and centered on the well-known scene

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from Don Quixote in which the knight-errant attends Master Puppeteer Pedro’s show where a princess is kidnapped by soldiers; mistaking the play for a real event, Don Quixote intervenes by destroying the marionettes. To highlight and expand the discourse on folly, perception, and representation of reality at the heart of Cervantes’ text (and, as we have seen, of the European puppet metaphor), Bufano drew on his knowledge of puppetry in an extremely original way, staging all the characters—the princess, the soldiers, Mastro Pedro, and Don Quixote himself—with large pupi of various sizes manipulated with the help of assistants. Remo Bufano was also responsible for staging puppets for Brock Pemberton’s melodrama Puppets (also titled The Marionette Man and The Knife in the Wall, 1925), in which an Italian puppeteer is drafted into the army during World War I and, upon return, eventually discovers that his loved one has betrayed him. The play was adapted into a film titled Puppets, directed in 1926 by George Archimbaud, which is now considered a lost film.13 According to reviews of the time, the film depicted the dwelling and theater of the Italian puppeteer.14 Most of the contact between puppets and cinema in the first half of the twentieth century occurred in Europe, especially within expressionist and impressionist cinematic currents. In classical Hollywood cinema, such contact occurred much less due to the dominating interest in perfecting narrative continuity rather than exploring abstraction. The case of Archimbaud’s Puppets and Lee’s I Am Suzanne! (previously analyzed) were exceptions, the former possibly aiding the latter; furthermore, in both films, the puppet increased the aura of danger and madness surrounding Italian American figures.15 Interestingly, the puppet resurfaces within the gangster genre to evoke the sense of primitive violence perceived as inherent in Sicilian culture, which increases the tragic and mythical tone of this genre. Take, for example, the famous scene of the stalking and killing of Don Fanucci (Gastone Moschin) by the young Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro) in Coppola’s The Godfather Part II (1974), when Vito follows his victim with a feline step from the rooftops of Little Italy while he walks on the street through the feast of San Gennaro where a pupi show (staged by the Manteo family) is taking place. In the crosscutting of this famous sequence, the puppets’ struggle parallels Vito Corleone’s charge of violence and evokes the idea of ancient feuds and desires for revenge. The pupi, as an expression of archaic violence, return in Godfather Part III (Francis Ford Coppola, 1990), this time as a counterpoint to Michael Corleone’s (Al Pacino) failing attempt to make his ex-wife Kay (Diane

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Keaton) trust him again as a family man. While Michael is showing Kay the town of Corleone, they bump into a wedding celebration which leads Kay to address the topic of their daughter Sofia’s love affair with her cousin Vincent, which Michael strongly disapproves of. In the following scene, they stop in front of a pupi performance, where a Count is punishing his daughter with death for having had a secret affair with her cousin. At the cruel spectacle, Kay makes a sneering remark meant to point out to her ex-husband the hypocritical and destructive traits of Sicilian “honor.” It must be noted that this sequence features Mimmo Cuticchio (1948–), perhaps the most prominent Italian puparo, in the role of cuntista (oral storyteller) narrating the events around the puppet show while brandishing a sword according to tradition. Subsequently, Italian American filmmakers have effectively turned to l’opera dei pupi as a stylistic source in an attempt to create a new ethnic image on the big screen and a cinematic identity of their own. The examples of Tarantella, directed by Helen De Michiel in 1995, and Rehearsal for a Sicilian Tragedy, a 2009 documentary created by Roman Paska and John Turturro, offer clear evidence of the way that Sicilian pupi and cinema have intersected in order to reveal a new Sicilian and more generally Italian identity in the United States. De Michiel’s debut feature Tarantella is the story of Diane (Mira Sorvino), a young photographer who, upon hearing the news of her mother’s death, returns to her childhood home after a long absence. Centering on the story of the women in Diane’s family, Tarantella is a rare example of an attempt to recover the female perspective of Italian American immigration. With the help of an old friend, Diane reads in her mother’s diary the dramatic story of her grandmother, who fled the country of her birth after poisoning her violent husband. As Diane proceeds to read the diary, past events are shown through the device of a pupi show, the same pupi that Diane later finds among her mother’s possessions and decides to take with her at the end of the film. Among the various fantasies of the protagonist that contribute to giving the film its considerable narrative depth, the pupi show is the most extensive and significant. As it has been noted, the pupi show functions in Tarantella, in a manner analogous to culinary recipes, as an instrument of recollection and, simultaneously, as an ethnic-artistic bildungsroman (Russo, 152–153). Showing past plot events, which take place in Calabria, through a pupi show instead of flashbacks with real actors was certainly a good solution for this limited-fund, independent production. The sensibility of the

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Italian American director De Michiel is combined with her attendance at the shows of the “Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre” in Minneapolis under the direction of Sandra Spieler, where De Michiel had seen shows with poignant atmospheres linked to various themes of social justice. Working with Sandra Spieler, Helen De Michiel designed a series of scenes with pupi, elaborated and enriched, thanks to the research the director had carried out in Calabria, photographing faces and recording traditions. In an interview, I conducted with the director, De Michiel lucidly described the aesthetic reasons behind the choice of puppets. My research in Calabria convinced me that puppetry would link the past with the present, the ancestors with the current realities, the memories with the history of these women. I wanted to evoke a sense of time-out-of-time and dig into their emotional realities through these non-human entities. Plus, the story was so distant and furtive, that using puppets made it seem plausible in a counter-intuitive way.16

Here the pupo opens the doors to a distinctly poetic and symbolic representation aimed at evoking a mythical past beyond history. This poetic value reveals the transmedial and transnational vitality of the repertoire specific to this type of popular theater, where historiography and imagination are mixed in an Ariostoesque manner. In Tarantella, the scenes with pupi relate directly to the fantastic reconstruction of the family history that takes place in Diane’s mind. The symbiotic relationship between cinema and theater develops through an exchange that influences the film on various aesthetic levels. For example, the reduced plasticity typical of the pupi, operated by a metal bar at the head and another at the hand, expresses the static nature of the figures of Diane’s family’s past, who she must learn to accept for who they are. Even the gory characteristics of pupi theatricality—where we traditionally see severed heads and limbs, eyes poking out, and bodies split in half—are cleverly used in the film, giving life to an overall adventurous and tragic narrative but also giving rise to particularly touching scenes, such as the one in which the grandmother’s pupo removes its face, showing underneath another face marked by the secret of a monstrous pain. The search for an Italian American aesthetic in cinema also led John Turturro (1957–) to delve into the mine of the opera dei pupi, this time the Palermo one, which, among other unique characteristics, also presents the manipulation of the pupo from the sides of the scene, thus reinforcing

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in a certain way the transfer between the pupo and the puparo (the pupi puppeteer) as an actor. Rehearsal for a Sicilian Tragedy is a diary film that collects notes for a future film about the sorrowful love story of a Sicilian puppeteer. As a guide in his research, Turturro chose puppeteer extraordinaire Mimmo Cuticchio, already mentioned in connection to Coppola’s generational mafia masterpiece. Turturro’s case, too, exemplifies a search for artistic roots, as is made clear in the scene of the director’s return to his mother’s house and during the dialogue with the puparo’s son, Giacomo Cuticchio, who explains his total dedication to the family tradition. The relationship between father and son embodies the continuity between traditional identity and artistic vocation that Turturro had already highlighted in his directorial debut, Mac, in 1992. Turturro dedicated the film to his father, a bricklayer, who defended the artisanal and skillful quality of his work against the laws of business; this is part of an authentically and revolutionarily Italian American legacy of moral and artistic knowledge also voiced by Pascal D’Angelo’s Son of Italy (1924) and Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete (1937), but visible also in other films like Big Night, directed by Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott in 1996. The theater has taken on increasing importance in Turturro’s cinema; one need only think of the comic-philosophical vicissitudes of the company of theater actors in Illuminata (1995) and the New  York musical drama Romance and Cigarettes (2005), a film that then led Turturro in 2010 to explore the Neapolitan musical scene in Passione. In his roles, Turturro delivers a theatrical performance aimed at a hyper-dramatic, sometimes grotesque quality. In both Mac and his other films, Turturro seems to model himself on the character of a crazed Orlando, modernly obsessed with the quest for a fulfillment that is at once aesthetic, cultural, and ideological. Rehearsal for a Sicilian Tragedy definitively clarifies the relationship Turturro seeks between cinema and theater, between craft and art, and between America and Italy. The pupo as a model for acting unites all these levels. In the film, Turturro approaches the specific techniques of the puparo to give new vigor and a Sicilian flavor to his performance. There are sequences where the actor tries to master the acting methods and the breath of the puparo—in particular, the technique of the lamentu, the vibration of the voice to communicate drama—and where he shares the stage with the pupo imitating his gestures. One may like to imagine, together with Turturro, his future film based on the notes he

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collected, where he will perhaps split into the character of the puparo and the pupo itself. Finally, this return to the transmedial application of the pupo in cinema, along the lines of historical and meta-historical reflection, is to be considered an exquisitely Italian American reinterpretation of an element that we had already noted in the Italian cinematic tradition. In this return through Italian American screens, the pupo continues to serve as a tool to explore and express the folds of Italian identity, straddling distant geographical and temporal dimensions. The Sicilian puppet brings with it the ability to reconnect with the island’s past, identity, and artistic vocation. Just like opera dei pupi metabolized a history of foreign invasion for the inhabitants of Sicily, this type of puppetry is revealed to be today, in these cinematic texts, a device for the preservation and reinterpretation of identity.

Notes 1. This chapter elaborates on previous research published in article and book format; see Pacchioni (2017, 2020, and 2022—especially chapters 4 and 11). 2. See Jentsch (1997), Freud (1998), and Hoffmann (1963). 3. The concept, first used in robotics to measure the level of perceived naturalness of human simulacra, points to an area of humanoid likeness where the simulacrum, too close to a real human figure yet clearly still nonhuman, causes cognitive confusion and anxiety. See Masahiro Mori (99–100). 4. This is a guiding thread that leads to a fuller appreciation of the spiritual and ecological value that the metaphor of the marionette expresses, even if indirectly, in films such as James Cameron’s Avatar (2009). The protagonists in this last case virtually animate extraterrestrial bodies to save an alien indigenous culture capable of living, unlike the terrestrial one, in harmony with the network of natural relationships. 5. Podrecca’s company’s Teatro dei Piccoli, then one of the best-known Italian theatrical troupes, internationally influenced different artistic domains, including the work of the futurist Fortunato Depero (1892–1960), who drew from Podrecca’s techniques and ideas for his well-known Balli Plastici [Plastic Dances] (1917). For an in-depth study on Podrecca’s influence, see Cipolla and Moretti (2003, especially 169–181). 6. Rossellini integrates an explicit reference to puppetry to address minority issues, this time in connection to the African American experience, and through the employment of Southern marionettes known as pupi, in the

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second episode of his Paisà (1946). In a famous sequence of this episode, a black American GI enters a crowded theater to observe the marionette of a paladin of Charlemagne praising the attack against the Saracen Moors for defending the values of civilization and justice. Recalling a political inverse of Don Quixote’s error in which the knight attacks marionettes, mistaking them for real Saracen soldiers, the soldier loses control of himself and goes on stage to defend the Moorish knight from Orlando. The soldier’s reaction, apparently caused by inebriation, is motivated by real frustrations and the need for revenge for the racial conflict he already knows—namely, the segregation he will return to in the United States. The pupi show, therefore, acts as a sort of psychodrama for the African American solider, stimulating in him a new awareness about oppression. It is fascinating how a traditional aspect so rooted in local southern Italian theatrical culture can effectively enter into a dialogue with the social dynamics of a distant society’s racial tensions. To increase the power and evocative depth of the film, Rossellini here resorts to the moral legacy of the popular Italian opera dei pupi, which is discussed in greater detail below. This unique traditional puppet show is thus not only an element of everyday Neapolitan life but also a powerful intermediary device—a strategy that unfolds in the blending of theatrical and cinematic conventions on the level of repertoire and staging. The intermedial complexities of the pupi show sequence in Paisà exemplify the mechanisms underlying the expressive power of this neorealist cinema classic and its ability to express local problems in a vernacular language, masterfully transposing them onto a universal plane. 7. See Pacchioni (2017). 8. For an overview of the opera dei pupi, also consult Cavallo (2012). 9. See also Pasqualino and Vibaek (1984, especially 109–115). 10. For general information on the Manteo family see McPharlin (1949, especially 6, 7, and 37), and also John Bell (2008, 75). 11. Jo Ann Cavallo has recently published a systematic study of the puppetry of Agrippino Manteo and his family, focusing especially on the scripts and literary sources. The annotations contained in the new published scripts (as well as in the numerous other extant scripts preserved at the Italian American Museum of New York City), and the new lyrical compositions that the puppeteers composed to complement materials from the original source texts can now also be studied from the point of view of generational diasporic dynamics; see Cavallo (2023). 12. Included in Craig (82–86). 13. For more information on this film, consult Bell (71–81). 14. See reviews archived in the Media History Digital Library, https://mediahistoryproject.org (accessed April 10, 2023).

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15. From the early representation of the absentminded and bestial immigrant Beppo (George Beban) in The Italian (Reginald Barker, 1915) to the many wild gangster figures from the 1930s to today (think of the characters played by Paul Muni, James Caan, Joe Pesci, etc.), or from the explosive and temperamental brothers of Mac (John Turturro, 1992) to the lunatic characters of Ronny Cammareri (played by Nicholas Cage) in Moonstruck (Norman Jewison, 1987), there is a recurrent cinematic portrayal of Italian American characters as deviant, violent, and unable to control their emotions to the point of bordering, in extreme cases, on insanity. 16. The quote comes from an unpublished interview that occurred on March 11, 2012.

Works Cited Bell, John. American Puppet Modernism: Essays on the Material World in Performance. New York: Palgrave, 2008. Buttitta, Antonio. “L’opera dei pupi come rito.” I pupi e il teatro - Quaderni di teatro Vol. IV, No. 13 (1981), 30–34. Cavallo, Jo Ann. The Sicilian Puppet Theater of Agrippino Manteo (1884–1947): The Paladins of France in America. London: Anthem, 2023. ———. “Sicilian Puppet Theater.” The Literary Encyclopedia, 16 January 2012. http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID= 17676 (accessed 10 April 2023). Cipolla, Alfonso and Giovanni Moretti. Commedianti figurati e attori pupazzani: Testimonianze di moralisti e memorialisti, viaggiatori e cronisti per una storia del teatro con le marionette e con i burattini in Italia. Turin: Linea Teatrale, 2003. Craig, Edward Gordon. Craig on Theater. Edited by J. Michael Walton. London: Methuen, 1983. Jentsch, Ernest. “On the Psychology of the Uncanny.” Angelaki, Vol. 2, No. I, (1997), 7–16. Freud, Sigmund. Il perturbante. Napoli: Theoria, 1998. Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus. “The Sandman.” In The Tales of Hoffmann, 1–34. New York: Frederick Ungar Publisher, 1963. McPharlin, Paul. The Puppet Theater in America: A History 1524–1948. Boston: Plays Inc., 1949. Mori, Masahiro. “The Uncanny Valley (From the Field).” Translated by Karl F.  MacDorman and Norri Kageki) IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2012), 98–100. Pacchioni, Federico. The Image of the Puppet in Italian Theater, Literature, and Film. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. ———. L’immagine del burattino: Percorsi fra teatro, letteratura e cinema. Pesaro: Metauro Editore, 2020.

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———. “Il pupo emigrato: dal teatro allo schermo.” Italian Canadiana. Vol. 31 (2017), 155–164. Pasqualino, Antonio and Janne Vibaek. “Registri linguistici e linguaggi non verbali nell’opera dei pupi.” In Semiotica della rappresentazione, edited by Renato Tomasino, 109–158. Palermo: Flaccovio, 1984. Rossellini, Roberto and Jean Gruault. “Pulcinella o le Passioni, le Corna e la Morte.” Filmcritica (1987), 257–376. Russo, John Paul. “Director’s Cut: Italian Americans Filming Italian Americans.” In Mediated Ethnicity: New American Cinema, edited by Giuliana Muscio, Joseph Sciorra, Giovanni Spagnoletti, and Anthony Julian Tamburri, 149–157. New  York: John D.  Calandra Italian American Institute / Queens College, CUNY, 2010.

Films and TV Series Cited The Adventures of Tintin (Steven Spielberg, 2011). Avatar (James Cameron, 2009). Big Night (Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott, 1996). Child’s Play (TV Series, 1988–2020). The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974). The Godfather Part III (Francis Ford Coppola, 1990). I Am Suzanne! (Rowland Lee, 1933). Illuminata (John Turturro, 1995). The Italian (Reginald Barker, 1915). Mac (John Turturro, 1992). Marionette (Carmine Gallone, 1939). Moonstruck (Norman Jewison, 1987). Paisà (Roberto Rossellini, 1946). Passione (John Turturro, 2010). The Polar Express (Robert Zemeckis, 2004). The Puppet Master (TV Series, 1989–2020). Puppets (George Archimbaud, 1926). Rehearsal for a Sicilian Tragedy (Roman Paska and John Turturro, 2009). Romance and Cigarettes (John Turturro, 2005). Strings (Anders Rønnow Klarlund, 2004). Tarantella (Helen De Michiel, 1995). L’ultimo Pulcinella (Maurizio Scaparro, 2008).

CHAPTER 11

Comfortable and Uncomfortable Fictions: Italian Americans in the First Decades of Television Fulvio Orsitto

Magazines, newspapers, vehicles, buildings, and books all seemingly address the powerless observer with a continuous variety of impressions, options, and alternatives. In this confused marketplace of ideas, television emerges as one of the loudest voices. It has the advantage of captivating the undivided attention of its viewers in the intimacy of their own homes. (Brizzolara 1980, 160)

Preliminary Notes on the Viewing Experience As highlighted by the first few lines of Andrew Brizzolara’s seminal reflection on Italian Americans on television, the most peculiar aspect of this communication medium characterized by the transmission of visual images The expression “comfortable fictions” used in this chapter’s title is borrowed from James Craig Holte (Holte 1984, 101).

F. Orsitto (*) Villa Le Balze, Georgetown University, Fiesole, Firenze, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Fioretti, F. Orsitto (eds.), Italian Americans in Film and Other Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47211-4_11

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is linked with the feeling of intimacy it conveys, which allowed it to go from a rare commodity in the late 1940s to replacing radio as the dominant broadcast medium in the 1950s—quickly invading the vast majority of U.S. households.1 Television’s pervasiveness is indeed what allowed the TV set to be soon perceived as a family member of sorts, one able to command attention by being entertainingly loud (as Brizzolara suggests) but also to insinuate closeness by whispering to one’s ear commercial messages and lifestyles.2 These considerations Brizzolara proposed on the medium in 1980 are accurate yet dated, especially given television’s evolution in the following decades, the parallel rise of the Internet in the 1990s, and the proliferation of streaming platforms in the new millennium.3 The fact that the TV viewing experience would amount to an average of ten years of a person’s life (ibid.)—albeit oftentimes in concert with other activities—seems less than stunning by nowadays standards, especially given the current intertwining of television and the Internet, which has made TV sets ‘smart’ and (in many ways) similar to computers, with which they often share the streaming experience. To be sure, television and smartphones have been the ultimate tools to complete the Internet invasion of households, given that thanks to them even the few Baby Boomers who did not buy a computer (and perhaps even some members of the Silent Generation) were able to surf the web and enjoy, among other things, streaming and binge-watching of TV series and news. Overall, if, on the one hand, the television viewing experience of Americans might perhaps amount to fewer hours than the previous millennium’s peak, on the other one must ponder on the proliferation of monitors and devices that exceed the limitations of the old TV set and that constantly broadcast and stream shows, news, and series (among other things). In light of this change, the individual’s viewing experience has dramatically increased in terms of hours, becoming intrinsically linked to a new way of life, one in which all these monitors of variable size accompany the individual 24/7, at the workplace just like at home, for work but also for information and entertainment purposes. In sum, the pervasiveness mentioned by Brizzolara is present more than ever, especially if one considers that television today is a hybrid medium, one whose borders with the Internet medium are porous, one whose old favorite delivery tool (the TV set) has been sometimes replaced and, more often, complemented by other delivery tools. The latter’s omnipresence (particularly in the case of tablets and smartphones) has moved the intimacy of the home viewing experience from the living room and bedroom to previously unthinkable

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parts of the house (i.e., the bathroom) and, in general, to any space one could go to carrying a device with a small screen—bringing (paradoxically speaking) the intimacy of the home viewing along even when one is away from home, exercising at the gym, or traveling on any means of transportation.4 In a way, Giambattista Vico’s theory of the recurring cycles in the history of civilization can interestingly be applied to the viewing experience present in cinema, television, and digital media. After all, from (a) the early motion picture exhibition devices (i.e., Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope, Edison’s kinetoscope, and Dickson’s kinetograph—just to mention the most important ones) which were made for individual use to (b) cinema (i.e., what followed the Lumière brothers’ idea to use the same technology to project films to an audience), (c) television (which reduced said audience to friends and family in its early years, and only to the family when it became a common commodity), and, today, (d) the novel hybrid of television and digital media that inhabits our lives through a plethora of variable-­ size screens, one may notice that quite often the abovementioned audience is, once again, an audience of one. In other words, the fragmentation of the viewing experience at large has brought us back to the intimacy of the early days of motion pictures, to a type of individual fruition that, rather than happening in nickelodeons, can now take place virtually wherever we want. Now, considering that “Italian Americans have been a consistent presence on U.S. TV screens” (Cavallero and Ruberto (2019), 161), the question is: has this change affected their depiction? And if so, how? Before trying to answer these inquiries, an overview of their representation on television is quite necessary. Indeed, at the time of Brizzolara’s study, the author could affirm that the portrayal of “Italian and Italian Americans on television has been increasingly frequent” and that this medium “has produced its own collection of Italian American types in the guise of cops, detectives, and rebellious teen-agers” (Brizzolara 161). Moreover, “despite the variety of examples available for discussion and observation”, he was also able to conclude that “there is no clear consensus that prejudice toward Italians does exist on television” (ibid.). However, that has not always been the case.

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The Early Years of Television In 1948 a young Los Angeles TV station, KFI-TV, premiered a sitcom starring Anna Demetrio as Mama Rosa, an Italian immigrant widow who runs a boarding house in Hollywood for aspiring actors. About a year later ABC picked up Mama Rosa, broadcasting it live from Los Angeles without a studio audience. The program ran for only one season (April to June 1950), and beyond such simple details, little is known about the show. We do not know why it failed or what impact it had socially, culturally, or economically on the then-young medium of television, but from that moment Italian Americans would become part of the evolving nature of the small screen itself. (Cavallero and Ruberto 2016, 160)

Given the prejudices toward Italian immigrants and anti-immigrant discrimination in general, in the U.S., “Italian Americans retained an ambiguous racial status for many decades” (ibid., 163).5 In Thomas J. Puleo’s view, it is in the work of Italian American director Frank Capra (who notably included only a handful of Italian American characters in his vast filmography),6 and more specifically in his 1946 movie It’s a Wonderful Life, that we see an archetypical couple of immigrants from Italy, Mr. and Mrs. Martini, who benefit from the film protagonist’s and his wife’s assistance. In Puleo’s words: “In many ways, the Martinis set the stage for the next eight decades of portrayals of Italians as humble, disadvantaged, and needy outsiders, what some social scientists would refer to as an ‘other’ to the stock American character who bears an opposite list of attributes: proud, comfortable and self-reliant. This characterization was influenced at least in part by the experience of American soldiers who served in Italy during World War II, as well as by depictions of Italy and Italians in Neorealist cinema” (Puleo 2020). From the mid-1950s on, Italian Americans shifted “to a more firmly planted position of whiteness” (ibid.) while maintaining a position of difference that allowed them to still be labeled as ‘ethnic’ (Di Biagi 2010, 34).7 As Anthony Julian Tamburri maintains, “Italian Americans first appeared in primary roles on TV in the United States in 1948 when NBC decided to televise (i.e., simulcast) Perry Como’s radio program, The Chesterfield Supper Club” (Tamburri 2011, 54). In 1950, it was Frank Sinatra’s turn with The Frank Sinatra Show (1950–1952; 1957–1960), while performer Dean Martin 1960 (née Dino Crocetti) first rose to TV fame as a comic straight man (a stock character in a comedy performance) in The Colgate Comedy Hour (1950–1955) and later hosted The Dean

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Martin Show (1965–1974). As Gordon Alley-Young reminds us, on the small and the big screen, Martin often “portrayed a playboy though in life he rarely drank socially and preferred family time to nightclubs” (AlleyYoung 2021, 325). Speaking of Italian American performers, it must also be noted that Annette Funicello was the most popular Mouseketeer in The Mickey Mouse Club (1955–1958), appearing in her own multi-segmented series entitled Annette (and later transitioning into films and commercials), and that Lou Costello (née Louis Francis Cristillo), of the comic duo Abbott and Costello, after being very successful in the radio and movie business, starred (with Bud Abbott) in the televisual version of their most famous radio show, The Abbott and Costello Show (1952–1957). Television presented its audience with several Italian and Italian American actors and actresses.8 Besides Sinatra, perfect examples of this trend are given by Anna Demetrio—the Italian-born protagonist of the already mentioned sitcom Mama Rosa9—and by three other short-lived television series: Papa Cellini (1952), Bonino (1953), and The Continental (1952–1953) also starring Italian-born actors like Carlo De Angelo, Ezio Pinza, and Renzo Cesana, respectively. To be clear, while the first two were innocuous ethnic variations of more famous (and long-lasting) sitcoms,10 the latter was based on “an obnoxious gigolo who engaged in a one-way flirtatious conversation with the housewives who presumably watched the show”,11 plainly recycling the old Latin lover stereotype and effectively producing an “image-damaging comical performance” (ibid.).12 Hence, one may easily conclude that, during the early years of television, the portrayal of Italian Americans was “contradictory” (Cavallero and Ruberto 2016, 163) to say the least. One must consider that “U.S. commercial television, in its first years, became a central location where popular culture took advantage of shifting notions of ethnicity and difference in the United States” (ibid., 160). Hence, as Kevin Hagopian—harking back to the work of several cultural historians of television13—suggests, “the failure of these shows to retain audiences after 1953 implied that the postwar shift from an understanding of ethnicity rooted in cultural otherness and working-class standing to assimilated and aspirational middle classness had made these shows embarrassing” (Hagopian 2016, 238). In the first examples of popular sitcoms,14 it is evident that ethnic traits are often exploited for questionable comedic purposes, even though in adapting these shows from radio (where most of them started) to television many stereotypes were already toned down (ibid.). In the case of Life with Luigi (1952–1953), viewers regularly

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empathized with the Italian American protagonist—played by Italian American actor Vito Scotti (née Vito Giusto Scozzari), who deftly played the “little immigrant” sympathy card—oscillating, just as often, “between laughing with and laughing at” him and Italian Americans in general (Candeloro 2010, 78). Arguably, one of the most honest and compelling televisual portrayals of a member of the Italian American community was given by American actor Rod Steiger, who played the title character in Marty (1953), a television play written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Delbert Mann. This 23rd episode of Season V of The Philco Television Playhouse (1948–1956)— which a couple of years later will be turned into a multi-Oscar winning movie starring Italian American actor Ernest Borgnine (née Ermes Effron Borgnino), also written by Chayefsky and directed by Mann—focuses on a hard-working Bronx butcher in search of a love interest and, just like his film counterpart, stands out for being one of the most stereotype-free depictions of Italian American life. Moreover, both works offer “a nice illustration of the process through which Italians became ‘white’” (Puleo 2020).15 It is also worth mentioning that another episode of The Philco Television Playhouse, “The Five Fathers of Pepi” (S3.E31, directed by Elliot Silverstein in 1956), in adapting for the small screen Ira Avery’s (1955) eponymous novel deals with Italy and Italianness, just like the “Lucy Gets Homesick in Italy” (S5.E22) and “Lucy’s Italian Movie” (S5. E23) episodes of the I Love Lucy show (1951–1957), in which the protagonist Lucy Ricardo (played by Lucille Ball) famously ends up stomping grapes. Unfortunately, in the early 1950s “the national broadcast of congressional hearings, many of which became known by the names of their ‘star’ conveners like Senators Eugene McCarthy and Estes Kefauver” (Cook Kenna 2016, 205), were also very popular with television audiences. More specifically, the New York City hearings led by Senator Kefauver’s Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, a.k.a. the Kefauver hearings, represented narcotics as “the life’s blood of the Mafia” (Frontani 2016, 173) and garnered huge success eliciting a “narcotic fascination on the viewer at home” (Gould 1951). As a consequence, the old connection between Italian Americans and organized crime was also revamped. The most infamous of stereotypes,16 dating back to the early years of cinema,17 during these 1951 nationally televised hearings was given a face-lift and, with an unprecedented touch of realism and veracity, was able to attract viewers willing to buy into “an international

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ethnic crime conspiracy headquartered in Sicily with interests pursued in this country by syndicates of Italian and Italian American racketeers” (Frontani 2016, 173). As Laura Cook Kenna recalls, they offered “new entries into the iconography of the American gangster that included diagrams illustrating syndicate hierarchies and a reluctant star witness, crime boss Frank Costello, whose face was often hidden from cameras”, concluding that the hearings’ ratings range from 17 to 30  million viewers, which was “more than the 1951 World Series18—a massive audience in an era when the number of televisions in use in the United States was short of 8 million” (Cook Kenna 2016, 205). In sum, despite the numerous attempts to portray other facets of Italian American life, American televisual audiences seemed to be more attracted to the violent and more exotic traits of the stereotypical connection between this ethnic group and criminality, ‘imagining’ this community (to echo Benedict Anderson’s 1983, notion)19 as a simulacrum intersecting “public menace and public fantasy” (Cook Kenna 2016, 204). It also became clear that television “held important potential as a tool for governance, not just entertainment” (ibid., 206)—a tool that many Italian American organizations feared, in light of the prolonged dissemination (and exploitation) of Mafia images somewhat connected with their people. However, by the end of this decade—when the commercialization of the stereotype in shows like The Untouchables (1959–1963) became even more evident—they were finally ready to respond.

The Late 1950s and 1960s In depicting the story of the fictional Joe Bucco, a Mafia boss losing his grip on the reins of power, The Untouchables not only gave an Italian name to a made-up gangster but also used a number of devices that linked organized crime to people of Italian descent. Italianness was something audiences could supposedly see in the swept-back, black hair and dark, conservative clothes of Mrs. Bucco, as well as in Mr. Bucco’s bespoke suits, hand ­gesturing, and enthusiastic deportment. Italian ethnicity could also be heard throughout the underworld in lilting cadences, accents, and foreign words. The Italian word omertà, for example, named the criminal code of silence that prevented a widow from talking to the police about her husband’s murder. (Cook Kenna 2016, 208)

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In the post-World War II (WWII) period, “Italians have come to be accepted as never before in various walks of life, such as sports, politics, entertainment, etc.” (LaGumina 1973) 16). Nonetheless, as Salvatore LaGumina states in his book-length study on anti-Italian discrimination in the U.S., “Broadcasting companies, publishers, and journals that would not be willing to invest their time and money in an examination of other features of Italian-American life are quick to jump at material that concentrates on crime and the Italian-American milieu” (ibid., 17).20 Moreover, for most of the 1960s, “Italians were still an exotic subculture in the United States, particularly given the large influx of immigrants that followed the Second World War” (Puleo 2020). As a consequence, the thirst for violence, exoticism, and intrigue already instigated in the early 1950s by televised government hearings was only going to be quenched by a spectacular series like The Untouchables (1959–1963),21 which quickly became “one of the most popular dramas on television […] and the industry gold standard for action sequences” (Cook Kenna 2016, 208–209). In his study on ethnic stereotypes, James Craig Holte claims that television has borrowed a well-established cinematic formula, according to which criminals, as urban ethnics, are defined by “clear divisions—the gangsters are Italian, the policemen Irish, the judges and district attorney Wasps—with the exception of some more recent films, Blacks do not exist” (Holte 1984, 104). In Holte’s view, The Untouchables adopted the formula so completely that “it caused the birth of several national Italian American organizations to protest the one-sided depiction of Italian Americans” (Holte 1984, 104). Indeed, this time around organizations— led by the Order of Sons of Italy in America (OSIA)—were able to coalesce and fight back. After threatening to boycott all sponsors of the show— guilty of using “ethnic-barbed titles such as ‘Wops and Robbers’ and ‘Guinea Smoke’” (Martin 1960)—by the end of 1960 producers agreed that “unless a criminal character was an Italian American historical figure, an Italian last name would not be used” (Cook Kenna 2016, 209), and that characters with Italian names who advanced the American way of life would get more screen time (ibid.; and Wolters 1961). Ultimately, though, despite creating a subgenre of television programs that “have occasionally been referred to as ‘cops and wops’ shows” (Tamburri 2011, 55), and notwithstanding the recurring use of ‘artistic’ license and stereotyping of Italian Americans, one must not forget that “this television series was backed by historical documentation, selective to be sure, that cannot be disputed or hidden” (Brizzolara (1980), 162).

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In the 1960s, Italian American actors were still cast to play marginal roles on television. A notable exception is represented by Kaye Ballard (née Catherine Gloria Balotta), who co-starred as an Italian American mother Kaye Buell in The Mothers in Law (1967–1969) and also appeared in a few episodes of The Doris Day Show (1968–1973) as Angie Pallucci, who owned an Italian restaurant with her husband in Day’s apartment building. While Ballard’s character in the latter show is simply loud, in the former her Kaye Buell is particularly unpleasant and, apparently, mostly because she is of Italian origin. In Michael Barrett’s words: “Quick to take offense, she bellows, rants in the mother tongue, and makes rude gestures with thumbs and teeth. She’s a little theatrical pit bull with bangs. Her running gag is that she keeps pounding her fist, seemingly quite painfully, into her husband’s chest or shoulder” (Barrett 2010). Later, Ballard candidly admitted that both shows “got her typecast as a loud Italian when she’d previously had a more sophisticated reputation” (ibid.), implicitly admitting to having willingly contributed to such a cliché with her roles. The Romeo figure (see Bondanella 2004, 2010, and Tamburri 2010), which in itself is an evolution of the Latin lover stereotype already discussed concerning the 1950s show The Continental, is also present in Garrison’s Gorillas (1967–1968), thanks to one of the protagonists, Italian-born actor Cesare Danova,22 playing a handsome con man. Inspired by the 1967 movie The Dirty Dozen, this series focuses on allied prisoners recruited for World War II military missions, bringing to the small screen a WWII setting similar to its film predecessor and (albeit without comedic tones) to the popular Hogan’s Heroes (1965–1971). In sum, even with a “second-hand idea”, “third-degree violence”, and “ludicrous one-­ sidedness”, this one was (to complete the numerical imagery) a “first-rate show” (Altschuler and Grossvogel 1992, 56).23 Toward the end of the decade, the melting-pot squad (which had been consistently starring in many WWII battle films) also moved from cinema to television, featuring cops instead of soldiers (Holte 1984, 105), as visible in many popular series that will continue in the 1970s and the early 1980s, such as Ironside (1967–1975), The Mod Squad (1968–1973), Kojak (1973–1978), and Barney Miller (1975–1982), often showing marginal Italian American characters. Finally, it must be noted that it had also become “commonplace for television shows to increasingly use Italian American music in their productions, sonically evoking cultural nostalgia, the binary between high or low culture, and/or to sell products” (Alley-Young 2021, 325).

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Despite the “rebirth of ethnic sensitivity in the 1960s, due primarily to the Civil Rights movement, Italians and Italian Americans continued to appear on a fairly regular basis in a negative role: gangster, villain, buffoon, inarticulate, blue-collar worker only” (Tamburri 2011, 55). As Hagopian reminds us, “Beginning with the 1968 season, ethnic characters were starting to succeed within the WASP mainstream, and both comedy and conflict in these shows now sprang from scenarios of integration, not segregation” (Hagopian 2016, 238). Hence, in the 1970s things changed and, despite some backward-looking television shows and series, one may notice a more consistent presence of Italian American law-abiding and educated characters.

Notes 1. As highlighted by Robert Putnam in his analysis of the pace of introduction of selected consumer goods, it only took television seven years to go from 1 percent of American households in 1948 to 75 percent (Putnam 2000, 217). 2. As Cavallero and Ruberto point out: “First, television was most prominently a domestic medium, most often consumed and experienced in a private home and therefore connected with family and community in unique ways. Second, it was regularly integrated into viewers’ other activities—from reading to cooking to socializing” (Cavallero and Ruberto 2016, 161). 3. As Cavallero and Ruberto remind us, “The burgeoning popularity of digital video recorders (DVRs), on-demand television, and various streaming possibilities have changed the ways viewers interact with television (and other media, like film), and these changes have challenged previous arguments about the specificity of the TV medium” (Cavallero and Ruberto 2016, 162). Moreover, even “as algorithms persistently track viewer choices and recommend new programs”, nowadays viewers have “greater control over television (and other media)” (ibid.). 4. Indeed, if the intent to exploit many devices’ portability has made their screens smaller, the size of TV sets (especially the ‘smart’ ones) has gone in the opposite direction, turning them into wannabe movie theaters’ screens, allowing the concept of ‘home cinema’ (also thanks to the growing affordability of top-of-the-line sound systems) to pervade American households and compete with the movie theater experience—whose cost has, in turn, exponentially increased (especially for large families), making it less and less affordable. 5. See also Guglielmo and Salerno (2003) and Luconi (2010).

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6. In truth, the discussion of Frank Capra’s Italian Americanness is more complex than it may seem at first. For a more nuanced and detailed treatment of this aspect, see Jonathan J. Cavallero’s book (2011)—especially Chapter I, titled “Frank Capra: Ethnic Denial and Its Impossibility” (11–44)—and his essay “Frank Capra’s 1920s Immigrant Trilogy: Immigration, Assimilation, and the American Dream” (2004), but also John Paul Russo’s book chapter “An Unacknowledged Masterpiece: Capra’s Italian American Film” (2002), and among the many research projects that Vito Zagarrio (2011) dedicated to this director, his book in English (2011) and the two book-length studies in Italian (2009 and 1995) must be mentioned. 7. Also paraphrased in Cavallero and Ruberto 163. 8. In this context, it is interesting to note that while Anthony Julian Tamburri (one of the most prominent figures in the field of Italian American Studies) maintains, “Television did not appear to reject Italian or Italian American actors as cinema did at the beginning of its century-long existence” (Tamburri 214)—implying that Italian Americans were basically absent from early cinema—other scholars, like Giuliana Muscio (2019), propose a totally different interpretation: arguing that Italian and Italian American actors have often been cast in American productions since the early cinema era. 9. For a more detailed discussion of this first televisual portrayal of an Italian American woman, see Ruggieri and Leebron (2010). 10. While Papa Cellini (1952) could be considered an Italian American version of The Goldbergs (1949–1956), Bonino (1953) was an ethnic variation of The Danny Thomas Show (1953–1965). 11. Cesana’s video gigolo character inspired 1950s comedian Ernie Kovac’s parody ‘The County-Nental’, about an unsophisticated country gigolo who wore overalls and poured moonshine from a jug, and later resurfaced on many skits for Saturday Night Live (1975–) played by Billy Crystal, Christopher Walken, and others (see Tamburri 2011, 55). 12. A stereotype connected to the iconic image of Rodolfo Valentino, and that is also discussed (blended with the ‘Romeo’ image) by Bondanella (2004 and 2010) and Tamburri (2010). 13. Consider Lipsitz’s (1989) analysis of American popular culture (especially, 40–41), Sterritt’s 2009, study on The Honeymooners (1955–1956—particularly, 55–56), and several sections of Brook’s (1999) book-length study on The Goldbergs (1949–1956). 14. Cavallero and Ruberto (160) mention, among others, The Goldbergs (Jewish American, 1949–1956), Amos ‘n’ Andy (African American, 1951–1953), Mama (Norwegian American, 1949–1957), The Life of Riley (Irish American, 1949–1950; 1953–1958).

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15. For a more detailed analysis of this TV production, see Cavallero (2017). 16. Especially if one considers the incredibly small percentage of Italian Americans truly associated with criminal organizations, vis-à-vis the enormous corpus of films and televisual representations of Italian American criminals. 17. The association between Italian Americans and Organized Crime goes as far back as The Black Hand, directed in 1906 by none other than David Wark Griffith (who also made several other films exploiting similar stories), and it became a cliché during the 1930s—with movies like Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy 1931) and Scarface (Howard Hawks 1932). 18. Speaking of the 1951 World Series, it must be noted that some of its most prominent stars were Italian Americans, consider, for instance, Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto, and Vic Raschi. 19. See Anderson’s influential book. 20. A case in point is given by Mario Puzo’s admission that—even in the 1970s—writing about organized crime is what publishers want. In his words: “It was really time to grow up and sell out, as Lenny Bruce once advised. So I told my editors okay, I’ll write a book about the Mafia, just give me some money to get started” (Puzo 1972, 22). 21. For a more detailed analysis of this series, see Jonathan J. Cavallero’s essay “Playing Good Italian/Bad Italian on ABC’s The Untouchables” and also Vahimagi’s (1998) and Tucker’s (2000) book-length studies. 22. Born in Rome to an Austrian father and an Italian mother, this actor interestingly chose his mother’s last name as his stage name (discarding his father’s: Deitinger)—arguably, to facilitate being typecast according to the Latin lover/Romeo stereotype (also given his good looks). 23. Altschuler and Grossvogel quote TV critic Cleveland Amory’s words in his review of the show published on TV Guide on January 20, 1968.

Works Cited Alley-Young, Gordon. “Italians, Italian Americans, and Television.” In Race in American Television: Voices and Visions that Shaped a Nation, Vol. 1, edited by David J.  Leonard, Stephanie Troutman Robbins, 324–330. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO Greenwood, 2021. Altschuler, Gleen C., and David I. Grossvogel. Changing Channels: America in TV Guide. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Anderson, Benedict O’G. A. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Avery, Ira. The Five Fathers of Pepi. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company Inc., 1955.

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Barrett, Michael. “‘The Mothers-In-Law’: Just for Good Measure, We’ll Give Everyone The Intelligence of A Radish”. Popmatters.com, (August 30, 2010) https://www.popmatters.com/130369-­zz-­the-­mothers-­in-­law-­the-­complete-­ series-­2496145423.html (accessed April 10, 2023). Bondanella, Peter. “Palookas, Romeos, and Wise Guys: Italian Americans in Hollywood.” In Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture, edited by Edvige Giunta and Kathleen Zamboni McCormick, 217–222. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2010. Bondanella, Peter. Hollywood Italians: Dagos, Palookas, Romeos, Wise Guys, and Sopranos. New York: Continuum, 2004. Brizzolara, Andrew. “The Image of Italian Americans on U.S. Television.” Italian Americana, Vol. 6, No. 2 (1980), 160–167. Brook, Vincent. “The Americanization of Molly: How Mid-Fifties TV Homogenized the Goldbergs.” Cinema Journal, Summer (1999), 45–67. Candeloro, Dominic. “What Luigi Basco Taught America about Italian Americans.” In Anti-Italianism: Essays on a Prejudice, edited by William Connell and Fred Gardaphé, 78–85. New York: Palgrave, 2010. Cavallero, Jonathan J. “Playing Good Italian/Bad Italian on ABC’s The Untouchables.” In Mafia Movies: A Reader, Second Edition, edited by Dana Renga, 58–63. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. Cavallero, Jonathan J. “Written Out of the Story: Issues of Television Authorship, Reception, and Ethnicity in NBC’s Marty”. Cinema Journal, Volume 56, Number 3 (2017), 47–73. Cavallero, Jonathan J., and Laura E. Ruberto. “Introduction to the Special Issue on Italian Americans and Television.” In Special Issue on Italian American and Television, edited by Jonathan J.  Cavallero and Laura E.  Ruberto, Italian American Review, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2016), 160–172. Cavallero, Jonathan J. Hollywood’s Italian American Filmmakers. Capra, Scorsese, Savoca, Coppola, and Tarantino. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2011. Cavallero, Jonathan J. “Frank Capra’s 1920s Immigrant Trilogy: Immigration, Assimilation, and the American Dream.” MELUS Vol. 29, No. 2 (2004), 27–53. Di Biagi, Flaminio. Italoamericani: Tra Hollywood e Cinecittà. Milano: Le Mani Editore, 2010. Cook Kenna, Laura. “TV Gangsters and the Course of the Italian American Antidefamation Movement.” In Special Issue on Italian American and Television, edited by Jonathan J.  Cavallero and Laura E.  Ruberto, Italian American Review, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2016), 203–228. Frontani, Michael R. “‘Narcotic’: Constructing the Mafia  – The Nationally Televised New York Hearings of the Kefauver Committee, March 1951.” In Special Issue on Italian American and Television, edited by Jonathan J. Cavallero and Laura E. Ruberto, Italian American Review, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2016), 173–202.

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Gould, Jack. “The Crime Hearings. Television Provides Both a Lively Show And a Notable Public Service Timely Narcotic Participation” New York Times, (March 18, 1951) https://www.nytimes.com/1951/03/18/archives/the-­ crime-­hearings-­television-­provides-­both-­a-­lively-­show-­and-­a.html (accessed April 10, 2023). Guglielmo, Jennifer, and Salvatore Salerno, eds. Are Italians White?: How Race Is Made in America. New York: Routledge, 2003. Hagopian, Kevin. “Toma to Baretta: Mediating Prime-Time White Ethnicity in the Post-Civil Rights Era.” In Special Issue on Italian American and Television, edited by Jonathan J.  Cavallero and Laura E.  Ruberto, Italian American Review, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2016), 229–267. Holte, James Craig. “Unmelting Images: Film, Television, and Ethnic Stereotyping.” MELUS, Vol. 11, No. 3 (1984), 101–108. LaGumina, Salvatore J. WOP: A Documentary History of Anti-Italian Discrimination in the United States. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1973. Lipsitz, George. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Luconi, Stefano. “Anti-Italian Prejudice in the United States: Between Ethnic Identity and the Racial Question.” In Mediated Ethnicity: New Italian-­ American Cinema, edited by Giuliana Muscio, Joseph Sciorra, Giovanni Spagnoletti, and Anthony Julian Tamburri, 33-44. New York: John D. Calandra Italian American Institute / Queens College, CUNY, 2010. Martin, Pete. “I Call on Mr. Untouchable.” The Saturday Evening Post, (July 9, 1960). https://theuntouchables.co/i-­call-­on-­mr-­untouchable/ (accessed April 10, 2023). Muscio, Giuliana. Napoli/New York/Hollywood. Film Between Italy and the United States. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. Puleo, Thomas. “Italians in TV.” Italics Magazine (December 11, 2020). https:// italicsmag.com/2020/12/11/italians-­in-­tv/ (accessed April 28, 2023). Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Puzo, Mario. “The Godfather Business.” New York Magazine, Vol. 5, No. 34 (1972), 22–29. Ruggieri, Dominique G., and Elizabeth J. Leebron. “Situation Comedies Imitate Life: Jewish and Italian American Women on Prime Time.” Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 43, No. 6 (2010), 1266–1281. Russo, John Paul. “An Unacknowledged Masterpiece: Capra’s Italian American Film.” In Screening Ethnicity. Cinematographic Representations of Italian Americans in the United States, edited by Anna Camaiti Hostert and Anthony Julian Tamburri, 291–321. New York: Bordighera Press, 2002. Sterritt, David. The Honeymooners. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009.

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Tamburri, Anthony Julian. Re-Viewing Italian Americana. Generalities and Specificities on Cinema. New York: Bordighera Press / John D. Calandra Italian American Institute / Queens College, 2011. Tamburri, Anthony Julian. “A Contested Place: Italian Americans in Cinema and Television.” In Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture, edited by Edvige Giunta and Kathleen Zamboni McCormick, 209–216. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2010. Tucker, Kenneth. Eliot Ness and the Untouchables: The Historical Reality and the Film and Television Depictions. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2000. Vahimagi, Tise. The Untouchables. London: British Film Institute, 1998. Wolters, Larry. “Those Untouchables Touched by Pressure.” Chicago Daily Tribune, (March 23, 1961), QTD: in Cook Kenna (2016). Zagarrio, Vito. The “Un-Happy Ending”: Re-viewing the Cinema of Frank Capra. New York: Bordighera Press, 2011. Zagarrio, Vito. Il cinema americano tra sogno e incubo. Venice: Marsilio, 2009. Zagarrio, Vito. Frank Capra. Milan: Il Castoro, 1995.

Films Cited The Black Hand (David Wark Griffith, 1906) The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich, 1967) It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946) Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931) Marty (Delbert Mann, 1955) Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932)

TV Series and Shows Cited The Abbott and Costello Show (1952–1957) Amos ‘n’ Andy (1951–1953) Barney Miller (1975–1982) Bonino (1953) The Chesterfield Supper Club (1948–1950) The Colgate Comedy Hour (1950–1955) The Continental (1952–1953) The Danny Thomas Show (1953–1965) The Dean Martin Show (1965–1974) The Doris Day Show (1968–1973) “The Five Fathers of Pepi” (S3.E31—The Philco Television Playhouse, 1948–1956) The Frank Sinatra Show (1950–1952; 1957–1960) Garrison’s Gorillas (1967–1968) The Goldbergs (1949–1956)

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Hogan’s Heroes (1965–1971) The Honeymooners (1955–1956) I Love Lucy (1951–1957) Ironside (1967–1975) Kojak (1973–1978) The Life of Riley (1949–1950; 1953–1958) Life with Luigi (1952–1953) “Lucy Gets Homesick in Italy” (S5.E22—I Love Lucy, 1951–1957) “Lucy’s Italian Movie” (S5.E23—I Love Lucy, 1951–1957) Mama (1949–1957) Mama Rosa (1950) “Marty” (S5.E23—The Philco Television Playhouse, 1948–1956) The Mickey Mouse Club (1955–1958) The Mod Squad (1968–1973) The Mothers in Law (1967–1969) Papa Cellini (1952) The Philco Television Playhouse (1948–1956) Saturday Night Live (1975–present) The Untouchables (1959–1963)

CHAPTER 12

Looking Back, Moving Forward: Italian Americans on Television from the 1970s to the 1990s Fulvio Orsitto

Shifting Stereotypes in the 1970s In the 1970s and 1980s. Italian Americans relived the 1950s and 1960s with Fonzie (Henry Winkler), the lovable ‘guido’ figure of Happy Days, and Laverne De Fazio (Penny Marshall) in Laverne and Shirley. In both cases, we witness familiar stereotypes: Fonzie as the streetwise high school dropout, a greaser from the old neighborhood who is also the working class answer to the Latin lover; Laverne as the street-smart, occasionally wise-­ cracking woman who suggests a certain sexuality that, for the show’s setting, might be considered a bit risqué. The two characters also share working-­ class employment: Fonzie is an auto mechanic and Laverne works on an assembly line in a beer factory. (Tamburri 2010, 215)

F. Orsitto (*) Villa Le Balze, Georgetown University, Fiesole, Firenze, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Fioretti, F. Orsitto (eds.), Italian Americans in Film and Other Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47211-4_12

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As Anthony Julian Tamburri highlights in the previous quotation, one of the most iconic TV series in the history of American television, Happy Days (1974–1984)—whose success paved the way for eight spin-offs (one somewhat unofficial1 and seven official2 ones)—was undoubtedly characterized by a ‘looking-back’ attitude, given by the show’s temporal setting and, perhaps most importantly, by the recovery of old stereotypes. One of the most evident ones is an old-fashioned film depiction left over from the late 1930s, the so-called dead-end kid characterization visible in the 1937 hit film Dead End (based on the eponymous 1935 Broadway play) and in many movies that tried to exploit the same formula.3 In Happy Days this negative cliché is embodied by the most charismatic character of the show: the Fonz. As Andrew Brizzolara points out, “While some may find him lovable and good-natured, he embodies all of the qualities that have traditionally been associated with Italian Americans on television. Little has changed. The Fonz hates school, he overreacts to situations that threaten his peer image, and he is constantly preoccupied with the preservation of his aggressive control over those around him through fear and intimidation” (Brizzolara 1980, 164). Moreover, “This character is a slick high school drop-out who speaks incorrect English, cares only about girls and motorcycles, never is without his black leather jacket, exhibits his short temper at regular intervals in addition to his lack of manners. In essence, he is the embodiment of many stereotypes the mass media has dubbed on the Italian American population” (ibid., 165). While this backward-looking attitude is perfectly represented by the Arthur Fonzarelli character—and, to a point, also by his younger cousin Charles ‘Chachi’ Arcola (Scott Baio), who also stars in the spin-off Joanie Loves Chachi (1982–1983)—it must be noted that the ‘Happy Days universe’ is also populated by more open-minded and realistic Italian American types, like Laverne DeFazio. Played by Penny Marshall—also starring in the popular spin-off Laverne & Shirley (1976–1983)—Laverne is permeated by an authenticity that lies in her daily struggle to make ends meet and, perhaps, also in her (already mentioned) sexuality “a bit risqué” (Tamburri 2010, 215) because it must be underlined that (along with her pal Shirley) she is one of television’s first liberated women (Ruggieri and Leebron 2010, 1273–1274).4 Finally, one must consider that—albeit in comedic terms—this series was indeed also looking forward, given the futuristic encounter with an alien, Mork (Robin Williams), who appears regularly on the main series and soon gets his spin-off, titled Mork & Mindy (1978–1982).

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If in the mid-1950s certain comedy series had failed to retain audiences because by laughing at (more than with) a specific ethnic group5 they had become “embarrassing” (Hagopian 2016, 238), in the 1970s the evergrowing shift “from an understanding of ethnicity rooted in cultural otherness and working-class standing to assimilated and aspirational middle classness” (ibid.) inspired a much-needed change, one that would finally put Italian American characters undoubtedly on the right side of the law— avoiding even the slightest reference to the ‘adorable rascal’ cliché embodied by the Fonz. According to Brizzolara’s analysis of the situation, there were also economic factors at play: The powers in control of television are attempting to populate the medium with a host of law-abiding Italian Americans. This move can be attributed to television’s desire to ruffle as few feathers as possible. With the need to attract the largest possible viewership, producers cannot afford to anger any segment of a potential or real audience. This resulting policy has given viewers Columbo, Toma, Baretta, and Petrocelli. (Brizzolara 1980, 162)

Nevertheless, a closer look at many of these characters may persuade us to question the real depth of this transformation, inducing us to conclude that “all that television has done is change the ‘roles’ of Italian American characterizations. They have altered one variable out of a legion of stereotypes that still remain in effect” (ibid.). Indeed, “Even though the new heroes are frequently law-enforcement agents, they typically engage in violent, questionable, or illegal tactics themselves. In these roles, then, they continue to express an older stereotype of Italian American behavior. Other aspects of their personalities, such as their arrogance, or their physical characteristics, such as their short stature, reinforce the stereotype” (Juliani 1978, 100). If it is indisputable that the most recurring Italian American characters of this decade are cops, it must be highlighted that while some of them confirm the cliché described in the previous quotation, some initiated a new strand of televisual Italian American types, characterized by the fact that they were smart—not necessarily street-smart, but astute and intelligent. One of the most long-lived ones is certainly blue-collar homicide detective Columbo (Peter Falk) who, after two pilot episodes (in 1968 and 1971), finally got his show running for seven seasons on NBC between 1971 and 1978. This series’ rights were then bought in 1989 by ABC, which produced three more seasons and a long list of special episodes that

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bring this Italian American icon—characterized by an unassuming demeanor, but also by a sharp intellect—well into the new millennium (with the last episode airing in 2003). Another example of this new trend is given by attorney Anthony J. ‘Tony’ Petrocelli (Barry Newman), starring in the eponymous TV series Petrocelli (1974–1976), about a Harvard-­ educated lawyer from Boston who sets up shop in an Arizona town. Although he is not exactly an officer of the law, he is definitely on the right side of it and, to uphold it, uses his brain, not his muscles. Using brute force is, on the other hand, a prerogative of many of the Italian American cops populating the small screen during this decade. Among these, one of the most interesting figures is certainly detective David Toma (played by Italian American actor Tony Musante), whose eponymous TV series is based on (and named after) the real-life story of a New Jersey detective with the same name. According to Kevin Hagopian— who claims that second-generation Italian Americans in this decade started to define themselves “most meaningfully in terms of American whiteness, rather than Italian origin” (Hagopian 2016, 231)—Toma (1973–1974) represents an important “post-‘contributions’ understanding of Italian American identity as part of a broad shift from the perpetual foreignness of immigrant status to the pluralist stakeholding of ethnicity” (ibid., 230).6 Unfortunately, because of Musante’s fear of being trapped into playing the same character for a long period, this series only lasted one season, and— although a replacement was soon found in Robert Blake (née Michael James Gubitosi)—ABC ultimately decided to revise the whole ‘Toma concept’, giving birth to a very different show: Baretta (1975–1978). With “the transformation to Baretta, the Toma concept was fully redrawn as an action show, with a charismatic loner male hero working outside existing liberal political systems to affect victim restitution and vengeance upon the guilty” (ibid., 230). Moreover, these changes affecting the series’ main character “indexed a radical shift in the understanding of the politics of white ethnicity in the post-civil rights era, from mediation and conciliation to confrontation and conflict” (ibid., 229). More Italian American police officers played leading roles in lesser-known shows like Serpico (1976–1978) and Delvecchio (1976–1977). The former is a series about a maverick New York City detective inspired by the success of Sidney Lumet’s 1973 film of the same title starring Al Pacino. The latter revolves around Italian American LAPD detective Dominick Delvecchio, who also studies to become a lawyer (closing an ideal circle with the previously mentioned Petrocelli character).

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Italian Americans were also central characters in several sitcoms outside of the ‘Happy Days universe’, providing very often less stereotypical depictions of Italian Americanness. Some of these series were short-lived, like The Montefuscos (1975)—a show revolving around three generations of an Italian American family living in Connecticut—and Joe and Sons (1975–1976)—an Italian American variation of the family relationship already present in the more successful and coeval Sanford and Son (1972–1977). In this case, rather than a widowed junk dealer living in Los Angeles with his thirtysomething son, we see another working-class widower, Joe Vitale, raising his teenage boys in Hoboken, New Jersey. During this period, the most successful example of a sitcom centered around an Italian American character is One Day at a Time (1975–1984), which was recently picked up by Netflix for a remake—also titled One Day at a Time (2017–2020)—that substitutes Italian American divorcée Ann Romano (Bonnie Franklin) with recently separated Cuban American Penelope Alvarez (Justina Machado). Finally, as Sebastiano Marco Cicciò reminds us, the huge popularity of the film Saturday Night Fever (1977) not only launched Italian American actor John Travolta into planetary stardom but also inspired sitcoms like Joe and Valerie (1978–1979) and Makin’ It (1979), “starring Italian working-class young men who frequent the disco clubs at night” (Cicciò 2015, 107). However, Travolta—as Vinnie Barbarino—was already very well known to the general public given the success of another sitcom: Welcome Back, Kotter (1975–1979). As Cicciò recalls, this character is “vain and not very smart, but his ability with women is a source of amusement and envy among his classmates. Vinnie comes from a very poor Sicilian family and he is proud of his origins” (ibid., 105). At one point he openly states: “I got my own idea of what God is like. I know he’s a sharp dresser. He’s good-lookin’. And of course, he’s Italian.”7 Toward the end of the show, Vinnie becomes less of a cliché, turning into a more serious and responsible individual, who gets a part-time job as a hospital orderly. Indeed, comic stereotypes continue to persist during the 1970s, as Anthony Mark ‘Tony’ Banta (Tony Danza) can confirm. This character (a kind-hearted and slow-witted Vietnam veteran and boxer) is co-starring with Louie De Palma (Danny DeVito) in a very successful sitcom titled Taxi (1978–1983), in which the latter plays the supervisor of a cab company. While the career of these two Italian American actors will continue in two different (yet successful) directions, with DeVito becoming a renowned Hollywood film actor and director, it is interesting to note that

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Tony Danza will stay connected to the small screen, portraying more Italian American characters (and sometimes even himself) on the decades to come. Examples of Danza’s work are The Tony Danza Show (1997–1998)—a sitcom in which he plays sportswriter and father of two daughters Tony DiMeo—the daytime variety talk also titled The Tony Danza Show (2004–2006), and Teach: Tony Danza (2010), a reality show in which Danza co-instructs a tenth-grade English class at Northeast High School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His most famous and long-lasting role, however, is Tony Micelli, the retired-baseball-player-turned-into-­­ housekeeper protagonist of Who’s the Boss? (1984–1992). Finally, it is also worth mentioning the strong and confident middle-class Italian American Angie Falco (Donna Pescow), a waitress who falls in love with (and eventually marries) a rich doctor protagonist of a Cinderella story titled Angie (1979–1980).

The 1980s and 1990s During these two decades, TV series continued to have a two-face Janus kind of approach, with stereotypes being displayed in massive doses (especially in comedies and crime shows, but also in a large group of Mafia-­ related characters), coexisting with more progressive portrayals or, simply, with ‘regular Joes’. Unlike the 1970s, during which TV programs “were populated almost entirely by poor and working class characters” (Puleo 2020), these next-door Italian Americans now also happen to be successful entrepreneurs, doctors, etc.—widening the Petrocelli and Columbo’s array of Italian American characters who prefer using brains over muscles. Renewed examples of this trend are represented by figures like Dominic Santini—an Italian American helicopter pilot who owns an Air Charter service played by Ernest Borgnine (née Borgnino) in the action drama Airwolf (1984–1988)—and by Dr. Annie Cavanero (Cynthia Sikes), a young physician and outspoken feminist present in several episodes of the popular hospital drama St. Elsewhere (1982–1988). Even the very successful soap opera Melrose Place (1992–1999)8 has an Italian American physician, Dr. Michael Mancini (Thomas Calabro), while another lawyer, Joe Celano (played once again by Tony Danza), is the protagonist of Family Law (1999–2002). Indeed, the new wave of Italian American characters climbing the social ladder is confirmed by a marked transition of the majority of them toward a middle-class milieu in the 1980s, a trajectory that solidifies even more in

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the following decade. As Puleo recalls in his analysis of the iconic series Doogie Howser, MD (1989–1993)—which centers around child prodigy Doogie Howser (Neil Patrick Harris), whose father is also a physician—if one looks closely at the protagonist’s best friend Vinnie Delpino (Max Casella), one can easily notice that the latter’s father (who owns a wholesale plumbing supply) “makes nearly as much as or perhaps even more than Dougie’s father” (Puleo 2020). By giving us a textbook example of Italian American otherness, which leads to economic success “not through the privileged lanes of American society, namely university education and professional employment, but through bootstrap commerce” (ibid.), the show does not hide class differences. On the contrary, the latter is highlighted by “the fact that Vinnie speaks with a Brooklyn accent, a signifier of the working classes, even though both he and Dougie live in Los Angeles” (ibid.). In sum, one could consider Vinnie Delpino, like Vinnie Barbarino, as “an extension of Laverne DeFazio, the character that was developed by Penny Marshall, who despite the anglicized name came from an Italian American family whose original surname was Masciarelli” (ibid.). Nonetheless, despite a growing number of portrayals that place Italian Americans “in a more professional and, we might add, more positive light” (Tamburri 2011, 56), there are still Italian American characters on TV that “held low-status jobs, did not speak proper English, […] were criminals”, and that “only one in seven held an executive or managerial business position” (Ruggieri and Leebron 2010, 1269). In 1994, a charming and seemingly innocuous character, Joey Tribbiani (Matt LeBlanc), debuts on the hugely popular sitcom Friends (1994–2004). Despite this character’s success with the audience—which will also grant him a short-lived eponymous spin-off: Joey (2004–2006)9—Tribbiani does not do the Italian American community a favor. Indeed, at a closer look—as Silvia Giagnoni reminds us—“Joey is a ‘buffoon’ and a ‘Latin Lover’, a ‘Romeo’ as Bondanella calls this stereotype: naïve and perennially good-humored. He is one of many contemporary Latin lovers with a last name that ends in a vowel” (Giagnoni 2010, 259). Once again, clichés might be revised, but they never truly disappear, and even though Joey is goodhearted and sweet, he is also not particularly bright and foolish.10 A similar observation can be made regarding another famous Italian American character of an almost coeval show: George Costanza, one of the four stars of Seinfeld (1989–1998). An incredible repository of Italian American clichés, Costanza is not just a buffoon, he is also subjugated by his parents and—as the (in)famous series finale confirms—he is also a very

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selfish and mean individual. Essentially, he has no redeeming qualities at all. Nonetheless, according to a survey conducted by TV Guide magazine to establish the 50 Greatest TV characters of all time,11 he is so funny in his cartoonish-ness that he ranks number 10 on the list.12 As Tamburri warns us: A variety of images have, throughout the years, been considered ‘positive’ only because they did not underwrite the Mafia figure. Nevertheless, some of these seemingly positive portrayals might end up proving just as damaging. One seemingly ignored Italian American on television […] is the George Costanza character from Seinfeld; a more cumbersome figure would be difficult to create. He is socially awkward, self-loathing, stingy, neurotic, and dominated by his parents, characteristics we may readily associate with the Italian mammone (mamma’s boy). (Tamburri 2011, 59)

Speaking of somewhat cliché, but way less harmful comic depictions of Italian Americans, one must consider Mama Malone (1984)—a short-­ lived comedy about an Italian American housewife who hosts a live cooking show from her apartment in Brooklyn—and, most importantly, it must be mentioned that in one of the most successful sitcoms of all time, Cheers (1982–1993), there are a couple of prominent Italian American characters: Nick and Carla Tortelli. The former will also lead a short-lived spin-­ off, The Tortellis (1987), in which he relocates to Las Vegas, continuing to elicit laughs by banking on certain stereotypes, causing television writer Bill Kelley to assert: “The Italian American Anti-Defamation League should be about as enchanted with Nick Tortelli as it was with The Untouchables” (Kelley 1987, 8E). The latter (Carla Tortelli) will be in all 271 episodes of the series, in the pilot episode of the already mentioned spin-­off, and in an episode of the most successful of Cheers’ spin-offs: Frasier (1993–2004). As proof of this cynical waitress character’s popularity, one must consider that she also appears in one episode of the hospital series St. Elsewhere (1982–1988) and one episode of The Simpsons (1989– present). Notably, Cheers features another Italian American character, bartender Ernie ‘Coach’ Pantusso who, unlike his sarcastic colleague, “is affable and caring, listens to people’s problems and tries to solve them with advice and analyses” (Cicciò 2015, 106). Another extremely popular sitcom straddling between these two decades, The Golden Girls (1985–1992), also featured two well-liked Italian American characters, namely the show’s main protagonist Dorothy

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Zbornak (Bea Arthur)—an educated, strong-willed, and independent second-­ generation Italian American—and her mother Sophia Petrillo (Estelle Getty), whose intelligence lies more in her being street-smart. A smart aleck of sorts, Mrs. Petrillo steals the scene every time she appears on screen, with quips and one-liners that (albeit at times banking on some supposedly Italian clichés about jealousy and superstition) make her—just like Carla Tortelli—a character able to exceed the borders of the show that first introduced her. In effect, Sophia Petrillo will return in the show’s spin-offs Empty Nest (1988–1995), Nurses (1991–1994), and The Golden Place (1992–1993), but also in one episode of Blossom (1991–1995)—a sitcom about an Italian American teenager by the same name and her life with her overprotective single father and her brothers. The team behind The Golden Girls (made of Barry Fanaro, Mort Nathan, Kathy Speer, and Terry Grossman) will also produce a guy version of the series titled The Fanelli Boys (1990–1991), which will present the audience with definitely less-inspiring Italian American characters (four grown-up brothers living under one roof with their recently widowed mother). The old ‘good guys versus bad guys’ dynamic also re-emerges in some series that celebrate law enforcement officers and in others that abuse the old stereotypical connection between Italian Americans and organized crime. As representatives of the latter group, one must mention mini-­ series like The Gangster Chronicles (1981), The Last Don (1997), and The Last Don II (1998)—these last two feature Danny Aiello in the main role and are based on Mario Puzo’s eponymous novel. It must also be noted that a remake of The Untouchables (1993–1994) was made in the early 1990s, but only lasted a couple of seasons. A great example of a ‘cop show’ is certainly Hill Street Blues (1981–1987) which, according to Holte, “is far from a perfect reflection of reality, but when viewed as a development of the image of ethnic America on prime-­ time television, it is a significant breakthrough” (Holte 1984, 106). Indeed, despite many mono-dimensional characters inhabiting this TV series, “the majority of the ethnic characters are not confined to stereotypes […] they may be ethnically identifiable, but they are not confined by their ethnicity” (ibid.).13 A questionable exception is perhaps represented by one of the main protagonists, Italian American captain Frank Furillo (Daniel J. Travanti), who is often labeled ‘pizza man’ by his mistress, “a moniker in itself pregnant with ambiguity vis-à-vis Italian Americans” (Tamburri 2011, 56)—a moniker that, however, many critics and scholars (including Tamburri) mostly interpret as endearing, rather than

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discriminatory.14 A few years later, detective Nick Bonetti (Jack Scalia) will star in Tequila and Bonetti (1992), a short-lived show featuring the unusual pairing of a cop and a dog, which will also be reprised in a soft reboot titled The New Adventures of Tequila & Bonetti (2000) set in Italy. Finally, among the grittiest and more convincing (also more innovative) series of this period, one must include Wiseguy (1987–1990) and Crime Story (1986–1988).15 The first one represents “a different kind of show. Instead of just running a continuing story, there was an ‘arc’ of stories—several episodes focusing upon one underworld character” (Blackwood 2006, 324). Moreover, one of the series’ more popular characters, Vinnie Terranova, was not a conventional undercover agent. Not “a straight arrow in his private life”, on more than one occasion he was “very attracted to the glamour and glitter of the gangster lifestyle” (ibid., 325). Crime Story (1986–1988), on the other hand, was “created with the help of some Chicago police and ex-criminals” and represents “a different kind of TV series about cops and gangsters” (ibid., 321), especially given its realistic treatment of the personal battle against crime—and gangster Ray Luca (played by Tony Denison—née Anthony John Sarrero)—led by Italian American Lieutenant Michael Torello (Dennis Farina).

Notes 1. Despite the Mork & Mindy (1978–1982) crossover, and notwithstanding its main character, Random, appearing in one episode of the main series, Out of the Blue (1979) has always been considered (by fans and critics alike) an unofficial spin-off. 2. Among these seven, there are two short-lived ones, like Blansky’s Beauties (1977) and Joanie Loves Chachi (1982–1983), two very successful ones, such as Laverne & Shirley (1976–1983) and Mork & Mindy (1978–1982), and even three animated series: The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang (1980–1981), Laverne & Shirley with Special Guest Star the Fonz (1982–1983), and Mork & Mindy/Laverne & Shirley/Fonz Hour (1982–1983). 3. After Dead End, as Richard Roat recalls, Warner Bros, made six more films featuring the line ‘The Dead End Kids’ at the top of the credits between 1938 and 1939 (Roat 2009). Later, the same formula was exploited by Universal, spanning a new series named ‘Little Tough Guy’ films (1938–1943), which then overlapped with other strings of movies with similar content—see ‘The East Side Kids’ films, ‘The Bowery Boy’ films, and ‘The Harlem Dead End Kids’ films that used this movie recipe until 1958.

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4. It is interesting to note that this series duplicates a pattern that also informed Happy Days: the stark contrast between Italian American characters like Laverne and the Fonz (less sophisticated, brassier, and often sexualized) and their Irish American counterparts Shirley and Richie Cunningham. The duality between Fonzie and Richie is deepened even further in the interactions between Laverne and Shirley, with the former being streetwise (often crude) and sensual and the latter being naive, more refined, and shy—but also fundamentally repressed. 5. In terms of ethnically inspired 1950s TV comedy series one must mention Life with Luigi (1952–1953), Papa Cellini (1952)—an Italian American version of The Goldbergs (1949–1956)—and Bonino (1953)—an ethnic variation of The Danny Thomas Show (1953–1965)—with respect to the Italian American community. Regarding other ethnic groups, as Cavallero and Ruberto remind us (Cavallero and Ruberto 2016, 160), one must consider Amos ‘n’ Andy (African American, 1951–1953), Mama (Norwegian American, 1949–1957), The Life of Riley (Irish American, 1949–1950; 1953–1958), and, once again, The Goldbergs (Jewish American, 1949–1956). For a more detailed discussion of TV series in the 1950s, see the previous chapter “Comfortable and Uncomfortable Fictions: Italian Americans in the First Decades of Television”. 6. As Hagopian recalls, the idea of “contributions” advanced by the school of public discourse on European American ethnicity “was founded on a melting pot ideology in which all immigrant populations were alleged to offer equal contributions to American identity. In practice, however, ‘successful’ non-English European immigrant ethnicities were presented as adhering to an Anglicized notion of civic nationalism, subsuming Italianness (or Irishness, or Polishness, or any distinctive national culture) within the larger sphere of ‘American’ customs” (Hagopian 2016, 230). 7. https://imgflip.com/i/1btctd (accessed April 10, 2023). 8. This soap opera—born as a spin-off of the even more popular Beverly Hills, 90210 (1990–2000)—was reprised in the new millennium with the same title, lasting only two seasons (2009–2010). 9. In the spin-off, Joey moves to Los Angeles to advance his acting career and often interacts with his sister Gina (Drea de Matteo), a hairdresser portrayed as a typical Guidette in light of her “hard look, stressed by tight pants and heavy make-up”, accompanied by the fact she speaks “in a high voice and is often judged to be trashy” (Cicciò 2015, 107). For more details about the definitions of Guido and Guidette, see the next chapter “Italian Americans on Television in the New Millennium: From Small to Smaller Screen(s)” and the section dedicated to the discussion of Jersey Shore (2009–2012). 10. For a more detailed analysis of Joey’s character, see Ryan Calabretta-­ Sajder (2021).

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11. See https://www.listal.com/list/tv-­guides-­50-­greatest-­tv (accessed April 28, 2023). 12. Other notable entries in this list are the already mentioned Lt. Columbo (from Columbo, #7), Fonzie (from Happy Days, #4), and Louie De Palma (from Taxi, #1). In other words, if we add George Costanza we cannot avoid noticing that we have four out of the first ten greatest TV characters of all time that happen to be Italian American. 13. As Holte reminds us, one must remember that it is thanks to this series’ success that “the multi-ethnic unit has moved out of the police station” (Holte 1984, 107) and entered the world of public hospitals with, among others, the already mentioned St. Elsewhere (1982–1988). 14. Unfortunately, Italian Americans are not new to cuisine-related monikers. Consider, for instance, the regular presence in Laverne & Shirley of Shirley’s high school sweetheart Carmine Ragusa (Eddie Mekka), often labeled ‘The Big Ragù’. 15. Speaking of these two shows, it is also worth mentioning that one of the most prominent Italian American actors and cultural icons nowadays, Stanley Tucci—whose show business and Internet persona will be analyzed in two chapters of this volume authored by Alan J. Gravano—participated in both. In Crime Story, Tucci played non-Italian American character Zack Lowman, in the episode “Battle of Las Vegas” (1987) S1.E17, while in Wiseguy he played ruthless gangster Rick Pinzolo in five episodes. Moreover, Tucci played two different characters in the very popular TV series Miami Vice (1984–1989): Steven Demarco in “Baby Blues” (1986) S3.E9 and Frank Mosca in “Contempt of Court” (1987) S4.E1 and “Blood and Roses” (1987) S4.E19. Tucci also played enigmatic and morally ambiguous philanthropist Richard Cross in twenty-three episodes of Murder One (1995–1997), a fairly popular legal drama to which Italian American director Nancy Savoca contributed as well, by directing the episode “Chapter Five” (1995) S1.E5.

Works Cited Blackwood, Bob. From the Silent Era to ‘The Sopranos’: Italian American Gangsters in Trend-Setting Films and Television Shows. Baltimore: PublishAmerica, 2006. Brizzolara, Andrew. “The Image of Italian Americans on U.S. Television.” Italian Americana, Vol. 6, No. 2 (1980), 160–167. Calabretta-Sajder, Ryan. “Who’s Laughing at Whom? Masculinity, Humor, and Italian American Lives on Mainstream Television: Friends”. In Italian Americans On Screen: Challenging the Past, Re-Theorizing the Future, edited by Ryan Calabretta-Sajder and Alan J.  Gravano, 117–139. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2021.

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Cavallero, Jonathan J., and Laura E. Ruberto. “Introduction to the Special Issue on Italian Americans and Television.” In Special Issue on Italian American and Television, edited by Jonathan J.  Cavallero and Laura E.  Ruberto, Italian American Review, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2016), 160–172. Cicciò, Sebastiano Marco. “Everybody Loves Guido. The Italian Characters on Modern U.S.  Sitcoms”. Iperstoria  – Testi Letterature Linguaggi, Issue 5  – Spring (2015), 103–111. Giagnoni, Silvia. “Tony, Ray, and the Others: The Italian American on TV.” In Mediated Ethnicity: New Italian-American Cinema, edited by Giuliana Muscio, Joseph Sciorra, Giovanni Spagnoletti, and Anthony Julian Tamburri, 253–264. New  York: John D.  Calandra Italian American Institute / Queens College, CUNY, 2010. Hagopian, Kevin. “Toma to Baretta: Mediating Prime-Time White Ethnicity in the Post-Civil Rights Era.” In Special Issue on Italian American and Television, edited by Jonathan J.  Cavallero and Laura E.  Ruberto, Italian American Review, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2016), 229–267. Holte, James Craig. “Unmelting Images: Film, Television, and Ethnic Stereotyping.” MELUS, Vol. 11, No. 3 (1984), 101–108. Juliani, Richard N. “The Image of the Italian in American Film and Television.” In Ethnic Images in American Film and Television, edited by Randall M. Miller, 99–104. Philadelphia: The Balch Institute, 1978. Kelley, Bill. “You’ll Love to Hate Case of ‘Cheers’ Spinoff”. Sun-Sentinel, (January 1, 1987), 8E. https://www.sun-­sentinel.com/news/fl-­xpm-­1987-­01-­228701050193-­story.html (accessed April 10, 2023). Puleo, Thomas. “Italians in TV.” Italics Magazine (December 11, 2020). https:// italicsmag.com/2020/12/11/italians-­in-­tv/ (accessed April 28, 2023). Roat, Richard. Hollywood’s Made to Order Punks. Part 2. A Pictorial History of: The Dead End Kids, Little Though Guys, East Side Kids, and The Bowery Boys. Orlando: BearManor Media, 2009. Ruggieri, Dominique G., and Elizabeth J. Leebron. “Situation Comedies Imitate Life: Jewish and Italian American Women on Prime Time.” Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 43, No. 6 (2010), 1266–1281. Tamburri, Anthony Julian. Re-Viewing Italian Americana. Generalities and Specificities on Cinema. New York: Bordighera Press / John D. Calandra Italian American Institute / Queens College, 2011. Tamburri, Anthony Julian. “A Contested Place: Italian Americans in Cinema and Television.” In Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture, edited by Edvige Giunta and Kathleen Zamboni McCormick, 209–216. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2010. TV Guide. “TV Guide’s 50 Greatest TV Characters of all Time”. https://www. listal.com/list/tv-­guides-­50-­greatest-­tv (accessed April 28, 2023).

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Films Cited Dead End (William Wyler, 1937) Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977) Serpico (Sidney Lumet, 1973)

TV Series

and

Shows Cited

Airwolf (1984–1988) Amos ‘n’ Andy (1951–1953) Angie (1979–1980) “Baby Blues” (S3.E9—Miami Vice (1984–1989) Baretta (1975–1978) “Battle of Las Vegas” (S1.E17—Crime Story, 1986–1988) Beverly Hills, 90210 (1990–2000) Blansky’s Beauties (1977) “Blood and Roses” (S4.E19—Miami Vice (1984–1989) Blossom (1991–1995) Bonino (1953) “Chapter Five” (S1.E5—Murder One (1995–1997) Cheers (1982–1993) Columbo (1968; 1971–1978; 1989–2003) “Contempt of Court” (S4.E1—Miami Vice (1984–1989) Crime Story (1986–1988) The Danny Thomas Show (1953–1965) Delvecchio (1976–1977) Doogie Howser, MD (1989–1993) Empty Nest (1988–1995) Family Law (1999–2002) The Fanelli Boys (1990–1991) The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang (1980–1981) Frasier (1993–2004) Friends (1994–2004) The Gangster Chronicles (1981) The Goldbergs (1949–1956) The Golden Girls (1985–1992) The Golden Place (1992–1993) Happy Days (1974–1984) Hill Street Blues (1981–1987) Jersey Shore (2009–2012) Joanie Loves Chachi (1982–1983) Joe and Sons (1975–1976) Joe and Valerie (1978–1979)

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Joey (2004–2006) Just Shoot Me! (1997–2003) The Last Don (1997) The Last Don II (1998) Laverne & Shirley (1976–1983) Laverne & Shirley with Special Guest Star the Fonz (1982–1983) Life with Luigi (1952–1953) The Life of Riley (1949–1950; 1953–1958) Makin’ It (1979) Mama (1949–1957) Mama Malone (1984) Melrose Place (1992–1999; 2009–2010) Miami Vice (1984–1989) The Montefuscos (1975) Mork & Mindy (1978–1982) Mork & Mindy/Laverne & Shirley/Fonz Hour (1982–1983) Murder One (1995–1997) The New Adventures of Tequila & Bonetti (2000) Nurses (1991–1994) One Day at a Time (1975–1984) One Day at a Time (2017–2020) Out of the Blue (1979) Papa Cellini (1952) Petrocelli (1974–1976) St. Elsewhere (1982–1988) Sanford and Son (1972–1977) Seinfeld (1989–1998) Serpico (1976–1978) The Simpsons (1989–present) The Sopranos (1999–2007) Taxi (1978–1983) Teach: Tony Danza (2010) Tequila and Bonetti (1992) Toma (1973–1974) The Tony Danza Show (1997–1998) The Tony Danza Show (2004–2006) The Tortellis (1987) The Untouchables (1993–1994) The War at Home (2005–2007) Welcome Back, Kotter (1975–1979) Who’s the Boss? (1984–1992) Wiseguy (1987–1990)

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CHAPTER 13

Italian Americans on Television in the New Millennium: From Small to Smaller Screen(s) Fulvio Orsitto

From the Sopranos to the Barones and the New ‘Non-ethnic Ethnics’ Although it technically started in the previous millennium, The Sopranos (1999–2007) is included in this chapter because it stood for a long time as the newest (and best accomplished) example of ‘art television’, because— as such—had an immense influence on all the shows that followed, and because it basically “changed American television” (Puleo 2020). As Puleo recounts, this series marks “a watershed in the evolution of the medium, aided in large part by being the product of HBO, which operated outside of the network system, whose reliance on formula in crafting its half hour comedic and one hour dramatic programs had run dry” (ibid.). The main characters are mostly Italian Americans although, just like in The Godfather saga, this series frequently engages “with the relation of Italian Americans to Italians, whether they be forebears, relatives or associates” (ibid.).1

F. Orsitto (*) Villa Le Balze, Georgetown University, Fiesole, Firenze, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Fioretti, F. Orsitto (eds.), Italian Americans in Film and Other Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47211-4_13

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Despite being rooted in the most infamous of stereotypes (i.e., the association between Italian Americans and organized crime), The Sopranos exceeded the mono- (or at best two-) dimensional portrayal of Italian Americanness that characterized all the previously analyzed television shows, providing “a three, even four, dimensional rendering that was never before seen on American television. Crucial to its success was its engagement with the psychological lives of its characters”, especially Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), through whom viewers had “a look into the Italian and Italian American experience, and into the human psyche, that it had never given before” (ibid.). Echoing Fred Gardaphé’s analysis (Gardaphé 2002, 64–67), Jonathan J. Cavallero summarizes this series’ iconicity and importance in contemporary American culture at large by stating that Tony Soprano (the modern-­ day gangster who lives in the suburbs and sees a psychotherapist) and his cohorts “symbolize the assimilation of Italians into American society, as Tony and his family confront many of the same issues that non-ethnic Americans face today” (Cavallero 61). One of the most recognizable faces of the show—actor/musician Steven Van Zandt (née Lento), aka Little Steven, who used to play Silvio Dante in The Sopranos—a few years later will star in the crime comedy-drama titled Lilyhammer (2012–2014). His interpretation of Frank Tagliano, a New York mobster who hides in the Norwegian town of Lillehammer after testifying against his former associates, successfully turns the Mafia theme into a dark comedy. Speaking of (more traditional) comedies, one must certainly consider the one widely regarded as the last classic sitcom: Everybody Loves Raymond (1996–2005), which centers around the life of Raymond Barone (played by Ray Romano), a sportswriter living with his wife and three children across the street from his parents’ house. While some of “the situations in the show are based on the real-life experiences of Ray Romano and of creator/producer Phil Rosenthal” (Cicciò 2015, 108), when discussing the ethnic background of his script, Rosenthal states: “I think we consciously avoided trying to pigeonhole into any type of ethnicity. In fact, CBS wanted to populate the cast with what they called ‘non-ethnic ethnics’. They didn’t want to scare away Middle America”2 (Romano and Rosenthal 2004, 9). Romano also adds, “CBS wanted the wife to be more blond [sic], middle-American-not ethnic. They wanted my last name not to end with a vowel. So we fooled them with Barone. It still ends with an ‘e’, but it’s a silent ‘e’” (ibid.). In truth, as noted by Ellen Sandler in her study on the Raymond character and his possible crypto-Jewishness,3

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while the last name Barone is obviously an Italian name, “in Italy, it is, in fact, a Jewish name” (Sandler 2002). Sandler further argues that, since Phil Rosenthal is Jewish, he perhaps has (albeit unconsciously) “brought his own family to the characters”, concluding, nonetheless, that “Everybody Loves Raymond does not have an Italian sensibility or a Jewish sensibility. It has an American sensibility, where cultures don’t so much melt together but rather overlap each other, and the lines blur” (ibid.). In sum, this series’ conscious effort to portray universal themes and narratives “presents a world where the family’s cultural roots are deemphasized” and even when the Barones “speak both Italian and English during a family trip to Italy, the characters’ experiences mirror that of other white Americans” (Alley-Young 2021, 327). As Alley-Young reminds us, “Some critics celebrated the show as a favorable representation of Italian Americans, especially in comparison to The Sopranos. Depicting the Barones as honest, hard-working, educated, and law-abiding professionals (e.g., Ray is a writer; brother Robert is a cop), who might bicker but are loyal to each other, Everybody Loves Raymond represents Italian Americans as fundamentally assimilated Americans” (ibid.). Nonetheless, scholars like Tamburri compare the often-cartoonish comedy style of this show to the previously criticized clowning attitude that informed the George Costanza character in Seinfeld (1989–1998), stating that “buffoonery, simplicity of thought, and, to some extent, goofiness also prove to be part and parcel of the ‘Italian’ family of Everybody Loves Raymond” (Tamburri 2011, 59).4 There are two more interesting sitcoms of the late 1990s and early 2000s that feature Italian American characters with dynamics analogous to the Barones: Just Shoot Me! (1997–2003) and The War at Home (2005–2007). The first one is a workplace comedy that centers on Maya Gallo (Laura San Giacomo), “a New York hot-tempered feminist writer who reluctantly takes a job at the glamour magazine Blush, owned by her father, the Donald Trump-like Jack” (Cicciò 2015, 109). The cast includes another Italian American character, photographer Elliot DiMauro (Enrico Colantoni). The second one, The War at Home, follows “the Italian-­ Jewish family Gold, living in Long Island. The mother Vicky (Anita Barone), a part-time receptionist of Italian origins, spends her time dealing with the unreasonable, often paranoid and bigoted behavior of her husband Dave (Michael Rapaport)” (ibid.). Since in both series the ethnicity of the characters is there, yet “is never clearly expressed” (ibid.), Maya and Vicky essentially join the ranks of the Barones, becoming the

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“non-ethnic ethnics” Phil Rosenthal was talking about—although, chronologically speaking, they anticipate them. More ‘non-ethnic ethnics’ are also visible in the satirical sitcom 30 Rock (2006–2013) and in the police procedural comedy series Brooklyn 99 (2013–2021), where Italian Americanness is limited to certain characters’ last names. Among other programs with Italian American characters, one must consider cop shows like Falcone (2000)—a miniseries whose credibility was mostly given by its literary source, the book Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia, written by FBI agent Joseph D.  Pistone (which had already inspired Mike Newell’s 1997 film Donnie Brasco, with Johnny Depp and Al Pacino)—and The Beat (2000), a drama television series starring Mark Ruffalo as Italian American cop Zane Marinelli. There are also several examples of comedy-drama, like That’s Life (2000–2002)— about a New Jersey bartender who is not happy about her life and decides to break off her engagement and goes to college—and Related (2005–2006), which focuses on four close-knit sisters of Italian descent raised in Brooklyn who now live in New York City. Italian American characters are also present in popular legal dramas like The West Wing (1999–2006)5 and The Practice (1997–2004). In the latter, Italian American actor Michael Badalucco plays attorney Jimmy Berlutti for 166 episodes, appearing also as Berlutti in several crossover episodes with other TV series like Ally McBeal (1997–2002), Boston Public (2000–2006), and Gideon’s Crossing (2000–2001).6 Finally, more Italian American characters are visible in Made in Jersey (2012)—in which street-smart Martina Garretti (Janet Montgomery) tries to compete with cultured and sophisticated colleagues at a prestigious New York law firm—and in the fantasy-­ drama Heroes (2006–2010) which features both Italian American characters like Nathan and Peter Petrelli (the latter played by Milo Ventimiglia) and Italian American actors (besides Ventimiglia, also Hayden Panettiere).

Non-fictional Italian American Characters: Reality Shows, Chefs, and Entertainers Thanks to the growing popularity of the reality-show genre, the new millennium is also characterized by an invasion of Italian American individuals who call themselves Guidos and Guidettes, reclaiming what used to be a slur as “a moniker of cultural pride” (Alley-Young 2021, 326). As Cicciò maintains, in the new millennium “the word Guido has come to refer to a

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particular youth subculture, a life style that is distinguished by the Italian ancestry of its actors. It has a predominantly expressive character, it is not committed to any ideology or political program and flourishes in heavily Italian American areas, ranging from largely blue-collar districts to middle-­ class suburban sections” (Cicciò 2015, 104).7 The program that started this phenomenon is Jersey Shore (2009–2012), a reality television series that portrays the lives of eight friends spending time in various locations (season 4 was filmed in Italy). While the show “was praised for saving the struggling MTV network”, it was also attacked for “celebrating stereotypes and irresponsible behavior” (Alley-Young 2021, 326). In particular, Italian American organizations deeply criticized Jersey Shore’s emphasis on “binge drinking, promiscuity, violence, physical attractiveness, and superficial lifestyles (e.g., characters described their daily routines as involving ‘GTL’ meaning gym, tanning, and laundry) as the main characteristics of Italian Americans’ lives” (ibid.). Despite all of the above, the show’s winning formula was imitated by MTV across Europe and Latin America, and generated numerous spin-off programs—suffice it to mention: Jersey Shore: Family Vacation (2018–present). Similarly produced reality programs (or docuseries) like Brooklyn 11223 (2012), Mama’s Boys of the Bronx (2012), Long Island Medium (2011–2019), Jersey Couture (2010–2012), Jerseylicious (2010–2013), Rambug (2012); Cake Boss (2009–2016), Mob Wives (2011–2016), and Real Housewives of New Jersey (2009–present) also followed, maintaining “a continued history of shows featuring comic, loud, aggressive, eccentric, and/or intrusive Italian American characters” (ibid.). Speaking of Italian American non-fictional characters, that is, of Italian Americans playing themselves on television, one would be remiss not to mention the constant popularity of TV shows dedicated to Italian foodways, with Italian American hosts guaranteeing the quality of ingredients and the authenticity of recipes—while implicitly promoting their books, their businesses, and their personas.8 While several studies across many disciplines have established that foodways are a foundational component of ethnic identity in the United States—i.e., Gabaccia (1998), Counihan (2002, 2010), and Diner (2002), among others—for what specifically concerns Italian Americans, it is Hasia Diner’s breakthrough study Hungering for America that persuasively argues that “the widespread starvation and deprivation of Italy and the comparative bounty of the United States powerfully shaped both the Italian American experience of emigration and assimilation and also the foodways that came to constitute Italian

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American cuisine” (Marinaccio 2016, 270). In Diner’s words: “Feasting upon dishes once the sole preserve of their economic and social superiors enabled [Italian immigrants] to mold an Italian identity in America around food. Plentiful, inexpensive American foods transformed the formerly regional contadini [peasants] into Italians and their food into Italian food” (Diner 54). In this context, Simone Cinotto further contends that “food— its production, distribution, consumption, rituals, protocols, symbolic values, and imaginative and material effects—shaped Italian [American] identity and made a diasporic Italian nation by embodying a distinct pattern of domesticity and intimacy” (Cinotto 2013, 3). Nowadays it is widely acknowledged that for many immigrant groups (and for Italian Americans in particular) “the kitchen is a primary locus for the performance of ethnic identity” (Marinaccio 2016, 270). Hence, within this chapter’s analysis of the portrayal of Italian Americans on television, it is appropriate to discuss at least a couple of the most famous Italian American TV personalities: Lidia Matticchio Bastianich and Giada De Laurentiis.9 A regular contributor to Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) cooking shows since 1998,10 Bastianich is a well-known television host, celebrity chef, author, and restaurateur. She specializes in Italian and Italian American cuisine, and she has successfully managed to present herself in the United States (and be recognized as such) as an iconic representative of both cultures. As proof of this twofold identity, one needs only mention that—besides participating as a celebrity judge on the show MasterChef USA (2010–present)11—she also appeared as a judge on Italian television programs like Junior MasterChef Italia (2014–2016), La Prova del Cuoco (2000–2020), and Family Food Fight (2020–2021). The Italian side of both Bastianich and her cuisine is emphasized in her shows “through the varying incorporation of recognizably Italian music, cookware and tableware, and mealtime protocols such as trademark close: ‘Tutti a tavola a mangiare!’ (Everyone to the table to eat!)” (Marinaccio 2016, 272). She never hides her ethnic identity. In point of fact, she celebrates it, mesmerizing viewers with her cooking style. As Brafman and Brafman observe (inducing the more attentive readers to draw a comparison between Bastianich’s style and the Italian Slow Food movement), “She takes her time, explaining to her audience where [emphasis mine] she got her ingredients and how she plans to use them to re-create an old family recipe” (Brafman and Brafman 2010, 90). At the same time, one must not forget that “Bastianich has consistently cast herself as a representative Italian

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American immigrant” extending this trait “to her careful management of her persona as a familiar Italian American nonna (grandmother). Beginning her restaurant and TV career as a markedly Italian American chef, she rolled out her Istrian and even her regional Italian cooking slowly, preferring instead to work a culinary terrain familiar to the mass American restaurant and TV audience” (Marinaccio 2016, 275). Consequently, thanks to Bastianich’s dual identity, viewers gain “a more complex understanding of the roots of Italian America and of Italy’s regional cuisine, while Bastianich continues the national rebranding of her persona as an Italian (and not simply Italian American) chef and entrepreneur” (ibid., 284). Truth be told, Bastianich’s identity is even more multifaceted. As Marinaccio reminds us, “Bastianich is an ethnic Italian, but her Istrian roots make her a Yugoslavian national; at her entry to the United States, after two years in a refugee camp in Trieste, she and her family were classified as displaced persons” (ibid., 274). Hence, “Bastianich powerfully self-identifies as a successful immigrant, casting her own story as a triumph over her limited origins”, and becomes “somewhat paradoxically, simultaneously the most conventional and the most atypical figure” (ibid.) among Italian American television personalities. Indeed, if one notes “her accented English, her grandmotherly air, tinged with an occasionally steely matriarchal snap”, and the fact she is often “surrounded by her children and grandchildren, in the studio kitchen set in her actual Queens home”, one cannot but notice how—in a typically Italian and Italian American fashion—“she cultivates an every-grandmother appeal!”, despite the fact that her last name, “lacking that final vowel, tweaks viewers’ conventional expectations” (ibid.). Giada De Laurentiis, host, contestant, coach, and judge on various shows, proposes an even more carefully constructed TV persona. As Marinaccio remarks, “the precisely calibrated seasoning of accented Italian upon her otherwise clearly American English is a conscious choice: an aspect of an on-air character shaped for viewer consumption, crafted in light of the cultural capital an Italian pedigree brings to the De Laurentiis brand” (ibid., 268–269). As it happens, De Laurentiis is ‘selling’ a very different image of Italy (and Italian cuisine) and represents a very different case of Italian Americanness. Besides belonging to a younger generation (or perhaps because of it), she does not embody the ‘immigrant who made it’ trope (to be clear, the one that made Bastianich so well liked and relatable to many viewers). On the contrary, her belonging to a wealthy family, her being totally bilingual, and even her looks, rather than eliciting

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empathy, have often caused controversy among viewers, inducing some to consider her pretentious and some to doubt her legitimacy as a cook because she looks more like a model than a nonna. Although to some she appears to be speaking affectedly—in what Byhoff calls a “faux-Italian”, characterized by a “contrived” accent (Byhoff)—one must acknowledge that her “character and culinary premise are ‘Americanized’” (Marinaccio 2016, 275). In her successful Food Network show Everyday Italian (2003–2008)— and in her other programs not discussed here for brevity’s sake—there also many points of contact with Bastianich’s more traditional Italian Americanness. As Cinotto points out, her kitchen too is often “a stage where generational conflict [is] dramatized in a sort of theatrical mise-en-­ scène of the cleavages in the immigrant family” (Cinotto 2011, 17). Unlike Bastianich’s, her table often becomes a ‘contested’ one (ibid., 19), given that “rarely does De Laurentiis’s aunt, with her thick accent and her disapproving looks, endorse her niece’s ‘untraditional’ recipes” (Marinaccio 2016, 276).12 However, rather than simplistically arguing that her shows are “the most visible manifestation of De Laurentiis, Inc., whose primary goal is to move the chef’s signature cookware into the kitchens of falsely conscious status seekers across the United States”, one should focus on the fact that “dumping those canned beans in the pasta fagioli [sic], accompanied by the shocked protests of her queenly aunt, is hardly an upmarket move, evoking instead the more complex history of generational rebellion and negotiation with American values that characterizes not simply the Italian American experience but the experience of all ethnic groups in the United States” (ibid., 279–280). To conclude the discourse on Italian Americans playing themselves on television, one must at least mention in passing the many singers and entertainers that have always populated American television. Indeed, as Anthony Julian Tamburri reminds us, in an analysis that exceeds this chapter’s temporal limitations and could be applied to the whole history of television: The one TV genre in which Italian Americans most clearly abounded was the variety show, and here I have in mind the likes of Tony Bennett, Perry Como, Jimmy Durante, Dean Martin, Julius La Rosa, Liza Minnelli, Henry Mancini, Guy Lombardo, Frank Sinatra, Louis Prima, and, last but not least, Sonny Bono. Como, Martin, and Sinatra, for example, each had successful runs of variety shows that featured theirs and other, non-Italians’ singing

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talents. In other cases, such as La Rosa and Minnelli, Italian Americans were frequent visitors if not regulars on other people’s variety shows. Guy Lombardo ushered us into many a New Year’s eve; and Henry Mancini serenaded us through his numerous scores for TV.  Finally, Sonny Bono, along with his wife Cher, transformed the classic variety show into what we might consider a more ‘hip’ rock’n roll show. These entertainers and others who appeared on the small screen, too numerous to mention here, contributed to a more positive imagery of the Italian American, if only because he no longer portrayed the gangster or dimwit; or, in the case of the female, she no longer was relegated to the role of wife, factory worker, or gum-snapping girlfriend. (Tamburri 56–57)

‘Ubiquitous Images’ on Smaller Screen(s)… Possible Consequences Today the ways in which television helps to construct ethnicity remain powerful despite a shift in how video images are circulated, distributed, and exhibited […] television’s power to mold cultural identities and communities may be enhanced by changing models of media exhibition, and fluid notions of media and viewership. After all, smartphones, tablets, gaming platforms, the Internet, virtual reality devices, and other forms of technology make video imagery even more ubiquitous. (Cavallero and Ruberto 2016, 161)

If one agrees with Daniel Boorstin’s comments on the influence of a medium such as television, which “regulates when Americans eat, sleep; how they raise their children; what Americans do and buy; what society thinks about lawyers, doctors, policemen, criminals and itself” (Boorstin 1976), one must concur that “what an Italian American sees on television as the medium’s image of his ethnic group becomes his barometer of reality” (Brizzolara 1980, 166). Hence, the many stereotypical portrayals discussed in the three chapters of this volume devoted to the portrayal of Italian Americans on television should be carefully weighed for what they are, that is “powerful influences in the absence of any simultaneous artistic showing of truthful images” (ibid.). Given that shame “stays with a person, or ethnic group, forever” (ibid.)13—especially in an age when those images are more and more “ubiquitous” (Cavallero and Ruberto 2016, 161)—the need to counteract stereotypes with honesty is real. Nowadays perhaps more than ever. Especially when the solution to reduce conflict proposed by the new hybrid TV medium only leads to the watering down of ethnicity through a plethora of ‘non-ethnic ethnics’.

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As highlighted at the beginning of the chapter titled “Comfortable and Uncomfortable Fictions: Italian Americans in the First Decades of Television”, television today is a hybrid medium, one whose borders with the Internet medium are porous, one whose old favorite delivery tool (the TV set) has been sometimes replaced and, more often, complemented by other delivery tools. As a consequence, TV shows are experiencing profound changes as well. On the one hand, Cavallero and Ruberto are correct in stating that we are surrounded by “ubiquitous images”. Adding a temporal reference, one might also say that this happens almost on a 24/7 basis. On the other hand, however, it must be highlighted that streaming companies like Netflix and Prime Video, in their attempt to conquer global audiences, present us with universal themes and narratives, which generate the abovementioned array of ‘non-ethnic ethnics’ (whose cultural roots are deemphasized at best). A perfect example of this trend (regarding Italian Americanness) is given by one of the first Netflix productions,14 comedy-drama Orange Is the New Black (2013–2019), which featured an Italian American character named Lorna Morello (Yael Stone) whose only tie to her cultural roots was represented by her thick New York accent. This tendency is somewhat counteracted by a subscription video-on-­ demand (SVOD) company like Paramount+, whose agenda seems to be inspired by the attempt to provide some resistance to the attenuation of ethnicity previously discussed. Arguably because, as an SVOD, Paramount+ is targeting a niche audience (vis-à-vis the global audience targeted by streaming giants like Netflix and Prime Video), its approach to portraying ethnicity seems to be more old-style, both in terms of faces (i.e., actors hired) and of themes informing its shows. Recently, Paramount+ has signed Italian American icon Sylvester Stallone to star in a reality show, The Family Stallone (2023), which should focus on his and his family’s daily routine. Stallone was already playing the protagonist role in another Paramount+ production, the crime-drama titled Tulsa King (2022–present), which represented the actor’s first leading role in a television series and also marked the return of the organized crime stereotype (in the show he plays a crime boss who just got out of prison and tries to recreate his organization in Tulsa, Oklahoma). Also related to the Mafia cliché (and, in this case, its film representation) is the Paramount+ biographical drama miniseries The Offer (2022), which focuses on the development and production of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972).

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Finally, speaking once more of ‘non-ethnic ethnics’, it is worth remarking that Italian American brothers Anthony and Joe Russo, after directing four of the most successful movies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe,15 decided to direct some episodes and become executive producers of Citadel (2023–present) for the Prime Video streaming service. This series’ peculiarity lies in its model of ‘glocal’ pervasiveness—given that it will soon have a string of parallel ‘local’ shows (with local actors) produced in India, Spain, Mexico, and Italy that will still be streamed on a ‘global’ scale by Prime Video. The hope, since ‘glocal’ could (and should) be a powerful and revolutionary ‘concept’, is that the ethnicity transpiring from these local appendixes will be more genuine. The fear, since oftentimes ‘glocal’ is just a portmanteau ‘word’, is that said ethnicity will be once more flattened to avoid scaring global audiences and to match their preconceived ideas about these cultures.16

Notes 1. It is interesting to note that “Italian male and female characters are presented more positively than Italian Americans on The Sopranos in terms of their appearance, character, personal lives, and/or professional lives” (Alley-­Young 327). 2. To explain the ‘non-ethnic ethnics’ reference, Alley-Young comments that this expression’s most probable meaning is “someone who is obviously from New  York, but doesn’t look too Jewish or Italian” (Alley-Young 327—also qtd. in Laurino 2000, 31). 3. As Cicciò explains, “Crypto-Jews are characters whose portrayals may lead viewers to believe that the character is Jewish, but the role is never defined as such; this ambiguity is thought to be appealing to larger audiences. Another crypto-Jewish character is considered to be George Costanza […] Though his father is Italian born, the character of George was originally based on Seinfeld Jewish co-creator Larry David” (Cicciò 2015, 108). 4. As Cicciò reminds us, “Italian characters’ personal traits have been consistent for over forty years in American situation comedies. They have presented a mixture of positive features such as loyalty, independence, cheerfulness, tough attitude and negative ones such as excitability, boorishness and idiocy. Those portrays can actually lack realism” (Cicciò 2015, 110). The reason arguably lies in the fact that “dress, eating habits, and language accents are exaggerated to surround the character with an outer framework that is hollow, one dimensional, and unreflective of reality” (Brizzolara 162).

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5. A case in point is the Bruno Gianelli character, a smart consultant and political operative played by non-Italian American actor Ron Silver. 6. Badalucco played the Berlutti character also in “I Know Him by Heart” (S2.E23—Ally McBeal, 1997–2002), “Chapter Thirteen” (S1.E13— Boston Public, 2000–2006), and “Flashpoint” (S1.E17—Gideon’s Crossing, 2000–2001). 7. Here Cicciò (2015) also refers to an essay by Donald Tricarico titled “Guido: A Fashioning an Italian-American Youth Style” (see Tricarico 1991, 44). 8. Urging us to keep in mind that the television medium provides us with entertainment but is also inextricably linked to consumerism, Newman reminds us: “A TV show’s audience is not only a collection of a large number of persons […] but also a commodity whose attention is sold by the TV station or network to the advertisers who want to reach those persons with commercial messages. Making meaningful and entertaining television content may be the agenda of those who create it, but to succeed commercially, TV shows need to attract audiences who are desirable to advertisers in terms of age, gender, and income, among other traits. One central purpose of television in American society is thus to promote consumption of the goods and services advertised during the commercial breaks. Seen this way, television is a consumerist medium, encouraging us to spend our money on burgers and sodas, movie tickets and jeans, smartphones and videogames, vacations and cars” (Newman 2013, 329). 9. While this chapter’s focus is on Bastianich and De Laurentiis, it should be mentioned that among the many Italian American chefs that deserve further study, food icons like Mario Batali, Rachel Ray, and Michael Chiarello must also be included. 10. Bastianich started working for public television in 1998 with her archetypal show Lidia’s Italian-American Kitchen (1998–2004), which was later declined in different variations such as Lidia’s Family Table (2005–2006), Lidia’s Italy (2007–2011), Lidia’s Kitchen (2013–2020), and Lidia Celebrates America (2011–2021). 11. A spinoff of the original UK version MasterChef (1990–2001; 2005–present). 12. To further emphasize the differences between Bastianich’s and De Laurentiis’s metaphorical tables, Marinaccio argues that “the Bastianich clan, where mamma, and not the Americanized upstart, is in charge, offers a striking alternative to the representation of the Italian American family on display in the De Laurentiis kitchen. In contrast to the generational tensions that bubble to the surface when De Laurentiis reaches for the butter, such departures from the matriarch’s traditional standards are rarely visible in the Bastianich family” (Marinaccio 2016, 286).

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13. For a more detailed analysis of this discourse on shame, see Papaleo (1978). 14. Speaking of the streaming giant’s productions, it must be highlighted that while Netflix has always contributed to bringing many (pre-existing) Italian TV series and films to a worldwide audience, in the last few years it has also produced just as many that have said worldwide audience in mind: from Suburra: Blood on Rome (2017–2020) to Baby (2018–2020) and the more recent The Law According to Lidia Poët (2023–present); to say nothing of the forthcoming The Leopard (a remake of Luchino Visconti’s 1963 classic film) that Italian cinephiles seem to be dreading. 15. In chronological order: Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), Captain America: Civil War (2016), Avengers: Infinity War (2018), and Avengers: Endgame (2019), which is, to date, the second-largest-grossing film in history. 16. One can only hope that the same ethnicity-flattening process will not affect Giada De Laurentiis who, after a 20-year collaboration with the Food Network, has recently signed a multi-year deal to create and produce unscripted programming with Amazon Studios to broaden the streaming service’s portfolio of cooking and lifestyle content (see Petski (2023) and Trainor (2023)).

Works Cited Alley-Young, Gordon. “Italians, Italian Americans, and Television.” In Race in American Television: Voices and Visions that Shaped a Nation, Vol. 1, edited by David J.  Leonard, Stephanie Troutman Robbins, 324–330. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO Greenwood, 2021. Boorstin, Daniel J. “The Great Electronic Dictator.” New York Times Book Review, February 19, 1976. Brafman, Ori, and Brafman, Rom. Click: The Forces Behind How We Fully Engage with People, Work, and Everything We Do. New York: Broadway Books, 2010. Brizzolara, Andrew. “The Image of Italian Americans on U.S. Television.” Italian Americana, Vol. 6, No. 2 (1980), 160–167. Byhoff, Mike. “Giada De Laurentiis Turns Over-Enunciation into an Art Form.” Gawker, November 18, 2009. https://www.gawker.com/5406687/giada-­de-­ laurentiis-­turns-­over-­enunciation-­into-­an-­art-­form (accessed April 28, 2023). Cavallero, Jonathan J., and Laura E. Ruberto. “Introduction to the Special Issue on Italian Americans and Television.” In Special Issue on Italian American and Television, edited by Jonathan J.  Cavallero and Laura E.  Ruberto, Italian American Review, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2016), 160–172. Cavallero, Jonathan J., and Laura E. Ruberto. “Gangsters, Fessos, Tricksters, and Sopranos: The Historical Roots of Italian American Stereotype Anxiety.” Journal of Popular Film and Television, Vol. 32, No. 2 (2004), 50–63.

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Cicciò, Sebastiano Marco. “Everybody Loves Guido. The Italian Characters on Modern U.S.  Sitcoms”. Iperstoria  – Testi Letterature Linguaggi, Issue 5  – Spring (2015), 103–111. Cinotto, Simone. The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Cinotto, Simone. “Sunday Dinner? You Had to Be There!” In Italian Folk: Vernacular Culture in Italian-American Lives, edited by Joseph Sciorra, 11–30. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011. Counihan, Carole. A Tortilla Is Like Life: Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. Counihan, Carole. (edited by). Food in the USA: A Reader. New  York: Routledge, 2002. Diner, Hasia. Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Gabaccia, Donna R. We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Gardaphé, Fred L. “A Class Act: Understanding the Italian/American Gangster.” In Screening Ethnicity: Cinematographic Representations of Italian Americans in the United States, edited by Anna Camaiti Hostert and Anthony J. Tamburri, 48–68. Boca Raton: Bordighera Press, 2002. Laurino, Maria. “From the Fonz to ‘The Sopranos’. Not Much Evolution”. New York Times. (December 24, 2000), Section 2, 31. Marinaccio, Rocco. “Cucina Nostra: Italian American Foodways on Television.” In Special Issue on Italian American and Television, edited by Jonathan J.  Cavallero and Laura E.  Ruberto, Italian American Review, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2016), 268–295. Newman, Michael Z. “Everyday Italian: Cultivating Taste.” In How to Watch Television, edited by Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell, 330–337. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Papaleo, Joseph. “Ethnic Pictures and Ethnic Fate: The Media Image of Italian Americans.” In Ethnic Images in American Film and Television, edited by Randall M. Miller, 93–97. Philadelphia: The Balch Institute, 1978. Petski, Denise. “Giada De Laurentiis Inks Overall Unscripted Production Deal with Amazon Studios.” Deadline (February 9, 2023). https://deadline. com/2023/02/giada-­d e-­l aurentiis-­o verall-­u nscripted-­p roduction-­d eal-­ amazon-­studios-­1235254794/ (accessed April 30, 2023). Puleo, Thomas. “Italians in TV.” Italics Magazine (December 11, 2020). https:// italicsmag.com/2020/12/11/italians-­in-­tv/ (accessed April 28, 2023). Romano, Ray, and Phil Rosenthal. Everybody Loves Raymond: Our Family Album. New York: Pocket Books, 2004. Sandler, Ellen. “Raymond Barone, Cripto-Jew?” Jewish Journal (24 January 2002). https://jewishjournal.com/culture/arts/5412/ (accessed April 28, 2023).

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Tamburri, Anthony Julian. Re-Viewing Italian Americana. Generalities and Specificities on Cinema. New York: Bordighera Press / John D. Calandra Italian American Institute / Queens College, 2011. Trainor, Daniel. “Giada De Laurentiis Is Leaving Food Network After 20 Years.” Eonline (February 10, 2023). https://www.eonline.com/news/1364618/ giada-­de-­laurentiis-­is-­leaving-­food-­network-­after-­20-­years (accessed April 30, 2023). Tricarico, Donald. “Guido: a Fashioning an Italian-American Youth Style.” The Journal of Ethnic Studies, Vol. 19 No.1 (1991), 44–66.

Films Cited Avengers: Endgame (Russo Brothers, 2019) Avengers: Infinity War (Russo Brothers, 2018) Captain America: Civil War (Russo Brothers, 2016) Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Russo Brothers, 2014) Donnie Brasco (Mike Newell, 1997) The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974) The Godfather Part III (Francis Ford Coppola, 1990) The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, 1963)

TV Series

and

Shows Cited

30 Rock (2006–2013) Ally McBeal (1997–2002) Baby (2018–2020) The Beat (2000) Boston Public (2000–2006) Brooklyn 99 (2013–2021) Brooklyn 11223 (2012) Cake Boss (2009–2016) “Chapter Thirteen” (S1.E13—Boston Public, 2000–2006) Citadel (2023–present) Everybody Loves Raymond (1996–2005) Everyday Italian (2003–2008) Falcone (2000) Family Food Fight (2020–2021) The Family Stallone (2023) “Flashpoint” (S1.E17—Gideon’s Crossing, 2000–2001) Gideon’s Crossing (2000–2001) Heroes (2006–2010)

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“I Know Him by Heart” (S2.E23—Ally McBeal, 1997–2002) Jersey Couture (2010–2012) Jerseylicious (2010–2013) Jersey Shore (2009–2012) Jersey Shore: Family Vacation (2018–present) Junior MasterChef Italia (2014–2016) Just Shoot Me! (1997–2003) The Law According to Lidia Poët (2023–present) The Leopard (forthcoming) Lidia Celebrates America (2011–2021) Lidia’s Family Table (2005–2006) Lidia’s Italian-American Kitchen (1998–2004) Lidia’s Italy (2007–2011) Lidia’s Kitchen (2013–2020) Lilyhammer (2012–2014) Long Island Medium (2011–2019) Made in Jersey (2012) Mama’s Boys of the Bronx (2012) MasterChef (1990–2001; 2005–present) MasterChef USA (2010–present) Mob Wives (2011–2016) The Offer (2022) Orange Is the New Black (2013–2019) The Practice (1997–2004) La Prova del Cuoco (2000–2020) Rambug (2012) Real Housewives of New Jersey (2009–present) Related (2005–2006) Seinfeld (1989–1998) The Sopranos (1999–2007) Suburra: Blood on Rome (2017–2020) That’s Life (2000–2002) Tulsa King (2022–present) The War at Home (2005–2007) The West Wing (1999–2006)

CHAPTER 14

The Goddess and the Huntress: Diana and DC’s Helena Bertinelli Felice Italo Beneduce

The vast majority of Italian American characters present in DC and Marvel, long the dominant publishing houses of Sequential Art in the US, has been, with few exceptions,1 stereotypically made of Mafiosi.2 The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate that, notwithstanding an explicit connection to the mafia, many of the features present in the DC character the Huntress reverberate with themes and features connected to the Italic deity Diana, goddess of the hunt, of the countryside, the Moon, and of women with offspring or expectant mothers (Green, 122). In other words, I will endeavor to connect the Italian American character—through her Italian American creator—to a heritage deriving from the Italian peninsula.3

F. I. Beneduce (*) Department of Italian, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Fioretti, F. Orsitto (eds.), Italian Americans in Film and Other Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47211-4_14

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A Matter of Terminology Beaty insightfully describes the origin of the term ‘comics’ as an early twentieth-century description of periodic strips which were often humorous, hence the emergence of the synonymous term ‘funnies’. Currently, the term is used to define the entire medium, yet, in so doing, it creates what Beaty defines as a “cognitive dissonance” whenever ‘comics’ describe works that may be attributed to a variety of genres “such as tragedy, romance, or the epic” (Beaty, 131). In a similar vein, the term ‘comic book’ today refers to any type of publication containing ‘comics’, although ‘graphic novel’, which collects several issues of any given series, is also a widely used term. For the purposes of this chapter, I will not use ‘comics’ but the expression ‘Sequential Art’, coined by one of the most influential cartoonists and writers of the twentieth century, Will Eisner, who first used this term in his book Comics and Sequential Art (1985).

The Medium The inherent complexity of Sequential Art, always characterized by a plurality of messages, contrasts with its persistent dismissal as simplistic and unsophisticated, claims which have long been detrimental to the critical assessment of the medium. Following decades of cultural scorn, Sequential Art finally emerged in the 1980s as a respectable literary form (Witek, 11), although condescension toward the medium persists to this day. Notwithstanding the inherent difficulties in the formation of a definition for Sequential Art—such that Groensteen has named it an “impossible definition” (Groensteen, 12)—theorists for decades have nonetheless attempted to pinpoint a comprehensive description of the medium. The primary point of contention among these theorists is the importance of the text in Sequential Art. Carrier underscores the significance of the text for a complete comprehension of the story, a role that distinguishes Sequential Art from a cycle of frescoes (Carrier, 317). Kunzle instead proposes a definition according to which a work of Sequential Art, in order to be considered as such, must include a sequence of separate images that appear in a reproductive (i.e. mass) printed form (Kunzle, 2). Finally, McCloud, author of the seminal Understanding Comics, quite correctly does not consider the text (which must be perceived) as crucial to the medium and emphasizes instead the predominance of the image, which he defines as received information (McCloud, 49).

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Sequential Art uniquely presents a formal heterogeneity that emerges from the multilayered relationship of interdependent images. In other words, the images of Sequential Art display an “iconic solidarity” (Groensteen, 18), i.e. sequential interdependency, whose underlying complexities render interpretation a formidable task for the reader and necessitate a variety of reading strategies. Since the single image of a work of Sequential Art clearly functions as both an isolated point in time and as a constituent part of a sequence (Hatfield, 48), a full comprehension of the work entails the reader’s invocation of learned competencies and cultural assumptions which must be used in a rarely recognized but nevertheless daunting task. The reader must engage in a translation of the author’s visual sequence into a narrative sequence but the interdependent relationships mentioned above are a matter of convention, not inherent connectedness (Nodelman, 17). If successful in this task, the reader achieves what McCloud defines as closure or a process of inferring connections between images, i.e. “observing the parts but perceiving the whole” (McCloud, 63).

The Superhero One of the most common associations of Sequential Art—perhaps inextricably so—is with the figure of the superhero, who typically combines attributes such as physical size with extraordinary strength, endurance, and courage. However, this figure has undergone profound transformations throughout the decades: the rigidity and uncompromising stance of the Golden Age4 superhero gradually transformed into a character bestowed with a greater sense of humanity, as may be discerned in the Silver Age superheroes of Stan Lee’s Marvel. In the post-Bronze Age period of Sequential Art (mid-1980s), creators increasingly infused cynicism and skepticism into their narratives and characters. Emblematic of this shift was Alan Moore’s groundbreaking Watchmen, a tale of tarnished superheroes in an era of social and political decay. This demolition of the superhero mythos is discernible not only in the original series (later collected into a graphic novel) but also emerges forcefully in Zack Snyder’s film adaptation of Watchmen,5 especially in the prequel sequence, poignantly set to Bob Dylan’s “The times they are a-changing”, in which a darker side of costumed heroes—the debauchery, transgression of societal mores, and indeed the silliness—is potently put on display. A further reflection of this moral decline in the 1980s is the

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gradual transformation of many superheroes into governmental operatives rather than pursuing their missions independently. Although DC already had narratives centered on human government agents in the 1950s, for instance, the original Suicide Squad, in the rebirth of the same group in the 1980s, the members were recruited superheroes. In other words, the post-Bronze Age period increasingly saw narratives positing the subjugation of superhuman characters to the whims of political power, regardless of propriety of the orders imparted. It is possible to observe this subordination to the diktats of politicians in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns with the writer’s interpretation of Superman. It is also present in Watchmen in which Moore envisions the passing of an act of Congress— the Keene Act—to outlaw non-government affiliated “costumed adventuring”.6 Notwithstanding the changes brought about in the post-Bronze Age, the core of the DC character has remained fairly constant.7 Peter Coogan succinctly describes the fundamental criteria of the superhero figure, beginning with the mission, which must be altruistic, remain within the confines of societal mores, and eschew personal gain (Coogan, 31–32). The second criterion Coogan proposes is that of superhuman “powers”, either physical or mental, while the third element central to the superhero is the costume that very often markedly declares the character’s identity, particularly through a chevron or insignia that explicitly represents the character’s assumed identity (ibid., 254). Unlike the pulp hero predecessors to the superheroes (e.g. Zorro and the Shadow) whose heroic identities did not explicitly externalize their alter egos (ibid., 32), the iconicity of the modern superhero’s identity through the costume has remained consistent and is conducive to a process of “amplification through simplification” that reduces an image to its essential meaning, thereby allowing it to pass into “the world of concepts” (McCloud, 30 and 41).

The Divinities of Sequential Art The figure of the modern superhero has been repeatedly connected throughout the years to the hero of ancient myth. LoCicero’s view of the contemporary superhero as an amalgamation of a number of archetypal images (LoCicero, 6) is a reflection of the opinion of Umberto Eco, according to whom the superhero character is “an archetype, the totality of certain collective aspirations” (Eco, 110). While it is my contention that Cavalieri drew upon attributes pertaining to the myths surrounding the

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Italic deity Diana to create the character of Helena Bertinelli, he was not at all the first or the only to connect Greco-Roman mythology to characters of Sequential Art. On the contrary, these characters have always been heavily influenced by folklore and mythology since the very inception of the medium. This influence may be of different varieties, the first of which is an explicit connection, i.e. a deity endowed with immortality and superhuman mystical energy is incorporated into a Sequential Art narrative. A prime example is Marvel Comics’ Thor, first published in 1962, who is in essence the Norse god of Thunder inserted directly into the Marvel universe. Another example is that of the Olympians based on the Dii Consentes of classical mythology, present for instance since 1965  in the Marvel Universe, in which they were envisioned as part of interconnected pantheons. Within the context of DC narratives, the Olympian Gods are also present, among whom was a red-haired, belligerent version of the Italic Diana8 who in a “War of the Gods” betrayed her fellow Roman deities in exchange for greater power but ultimately died in battle with Wonder Woman.9 Wonder Woman herself is also explicitly influenced by classical mythology and indeed even bears the name Diana. Throughout the decades, she has undergone a process of ever-increasing divinity: while the Bronze Age version of the heroine had been fashioned out of clay into an Amazon, in the Silver Age Wonder Woman received at birth the divinely bestowed attributes of beauty, strength, and intelligence. The most contemporary iteration of the character presents her as the daughter of Zeus and Hippolyta, thus transforming her into a demigod herself on par with Hercules. Another character explicitly influenced by classical mythology in the DC pantheon is Captain Marvel whose powers derive mostly from Greek and Roman mythology. When the child Billy Batson utters the acronym “shazam” he transforms into a superhero with the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles, and the speed of Mercury (the initial “S” derives from the wisdom of Solomon, the only not-mythological character included in the acronym). There are also DC characters in whom implicit connections to classical mythology may be discerned: between Jupiter and Superman, all-powerful rulers of the sky, both of whom wear disguises so as to blend among mortals; Batman with the Roman divinity Pluto, of whom the character incarnates the aspect of a dark prince, preferring underground quarters in association with incredible wealth. Furthermore, Batman also metaphorically rules the underworld of the DC Universe and often decides the

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ultimate fate of its ‘damned’ souls, arguably being one himself; Neptune and Aquaman, both rulers of the seven seas, the latter bequeathed the mythical trident of the former; and finally, Mercury and the Flash, both known for their speed and mischievousness, with the deity heavily influencing costume of the original version of the character (Molofsky).

Diana According to Cicero (Cicero 1933, 191), the deity was called Diana because she made day of the night-time, just as in her manifestation among the Greeks she was named Lucifera (the light-bringer). Both Del Ponte and de Vaan derive the etymology of the name Diana from the Latin dius which Del Ponte interprets as “of the light” (Del Ponte, 178), from dies, (“[the light of] day”), while de Vaan (de Vaan, 168) has it derive from Latin dı ̄us (‘godly’). The primordial Italic form of the goddess was also known as Diana Nemorensis (Diana of Nemi), due to her sanctuary being found on the northern shore of Lake Nemi in central Italy. This ancient sacred grove evolved into a substantive Roman religious complex, a popular place of worship from the end of the sixth century BCE until the late imperial age (Coarelli, 100–103, and Gordon, 178). Indeed, Diana’s groves and sanctuaries were always found in the countryside, outside urban boundaries (Green, 87), where her guardianship also extended over roadways, particularly Y-junctions or three-way crossroads. Since the point where a path split represented a moment of decision in unknown circumstances (Wissowa, 174), her supplicants often invoked Diana for guidance (both physical and metaphorical). The temple of Diana on the Aventine was the first major sanctuary dedicated to the deity in the environs of Rome and was already in existence at the time of the Tarquins (Livy, 48). The sanctuary lay outside the pomerium, i.e. the original territory of the city, since Diana was not exclusively worshiped by the Romans, but was a goddess common to all Latins, whom Rome hoped to unify and also to control. In light of the former goal, the deity’s worship was imported to Rome as a show of political solidarity (Poulsen, 12). However, Diana remained a foreigner in Republican Rome and was not translated to the city by the rite of evocation (Alföldi, 85) which, as Beard explains, was a ritual that incorporated “foreign” deities into the urban fabric of the city “aimed at diverting the favor of a tutelary deity from the opposing city to the Roman side” (Beard, 41). Notwithstanding the political role of the temple vis-à-vis the Latins, these

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latter were also among the first slaves of the Romans and, consequently, Diana also became a patroness of lower-class citizens of the Urbs (Wissowa, 198). However, this association with plebeians did not preclude Diana from being included by Quintus Ennius among the twelve major gods of the Roman pantheon in his second-century BCE Annales (Fisher, 10). One of the earliest epithets of Diana was Trivia, addressed with that title both by Virgil—“the triple shaped Diana, three faced virgin”10 (Virgil, 400)—and by Catullus—“You are called magical Triple-Way”11 (Wilkinson, 178)—while, in his Odes, Horace named her diva triformis—a “goddess of the triple form” (Horace, 184). The first manifestation of this triad was Diana the Huntress, while the second was Luna, the goddess of the moon.12 Quoting Quintus Lucilius Balbus (Cicero 2008, 70–72), Cicero reaffirmed this superimposition of the two deities in popular belief and Catullus explicitly named her “Luna”13 (Wilkinson, 178) in his Hymn to Diana. Another popular belief held that the lunar cycles regulated the menstrual cycle, hence the invocation of the deity to assist at the birth of children and to promote fertility in women (Cicero 1933, 191). Thirdly, Diana’s purview over the moon and crossroads carried a somewhat dark and dangerous connotation, as metaphorically the via smarrita might potentially lead to the underworld. Indeed, from her very beginnings, Italic Diana was worshiped as a chthonic goddess and the moon’s monthly disappearance into the cosmic dark and its return was an indication in popular belief of a descent of the moon goddess herself into the netherworld (Green, 132). In the opinion of Maurus Servius Honoratus, the same goddess was called Luna (moon) in heaven, Diana (hunt) on earth, and Proserpina (afterlife) in the underworld (Ronan, 51).14 The three-­way crossroad mentioned above also connected Diana to the goddess of magic, Hecate, a name that came to be attached to Diana in this facet. Virgil explicitly makes this connection when he addresses Hecate as “tergemina Hecate, tria virginis, ora Dianae”—“triple Hecate, Diana the three-faced virgin” (Virgil, 145). This association with the spirits of the dead and magic would later lead to an association with witchcraft in the Christian era. Diana is indeed mentioned by name in the New Testament, specifically in the King James Bible, Acts of the Apostles 19, in which Paul’s preaching and influence in Ephesus interfere with the local trade of silver shrines for Diana, eliciting the wrath and rioting of Ephesian craftsmen.15 The worship of Diana in fact continued into the Christian period as a cultural holdover from previous pagan beliefs and remained relatively common among remote communities throughout Europe, as a practiced

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tradition, well into the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Diana was linked with many folk beliefs throughout the Middle Ages and Carlo Ginzburg specifically examines her in relation to the Canon Episcopi (Ginzburg, 40–41), a ninth-century document that describes female nocturnal processions led by the goddess. These “defenders of harvests and the fertility of fields” (ibid., xx), in the words of Ginzburg, believed that their spirits engaged in extracorporeal battles with malevolent witches who menaced local communities.

The Huntress The character of the Huntress I will examine is the second16 woman in recent decades to bear this nom de guerre, although in the official continuity she is technically the first, since the other character belonged to an alternate reality that was erased. The different versions of the Huntress characters stem from the Multiverse the publisher DC Comics had created prior to the 1980s, a narrative ploy consistently criticized for constituting an overly narrative framework for readers. In 1985, writer Marv Wolfman penned a 12-issue limited series entitled Crisis on Infinite Earths with the goal of eliminating these realities and creating a single, unified DC Universe (DCU). The consequent rebooting of the DC created a division within the fictional universe’s timeline into ‘pre-Crisis’ and ‘post-­ Crisis’ eras. The first pre-Crisis Bronze Age Huntress was Helena Wayne, daughter of Batman (Bruce Wayne) and Catwoman (Selina Kyle) of Earth-Two, an alternate universe created in 1961 by Gardner Fox and Julius Schwartz, which functioned as the setting for stories with Golden Age characters. Helena Wayne begins to fight crime under the name of ‘Huntress’ after her mother is blackmailed into committing acts of crime and subsequently dies as a result. In her crusade, Helena employs her superb athleticism, the result of training under the guidance of her parents, assembles a costume for herself, and uses an array of weapons, including her eventual trademark, the crossbow. Her primary motivation is atonement for her mother’s criminal past which, as Knight remarks, has created in her considerable emotional distress (Knight, 38). Paul Levitz introduced Helena Wayne into the DC narrative universe in 1977 and her solo stories appeared mostly as backup features in issues of Wonder Woman. Following the miniseries Crisis on Infinite Earths, this version of the Huntress was retroactively erased from the DC continuity,

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as was the existence of her parents. However, with the New 52 crossover series (2011), DC reintroduced into its continuity a Multiverse consisting of 52 realities, one of which is ‘Earth-2’, visually similar to the Pre-Crisis Earth-Two that included the Helena Wayne incarnation of the Huntress. In the view of Eury and Misiroglu, DC decided to launch a new version of the Huntress with her own series in 1989  in order to capitalize on the popularity of Helena Wayne who, due to her parentage, was too popular to jettison entirely from the DC universe (Eury and Misiroglu, 186–187). Consequently, DC Comics introduced a new Huntress, with the same first name, physical appearance, and a similar costume, but with an entirely different backstory and personality. This version of the Huntress, the object of my analysis, is Helena Bertinelli, who first appeared in The Huntress #1 (April 1989) written by Joseph Cavalieri. After receiving a BFA in Media Arts from the New York School of Visual Arts, where he subsequently taught cartooning classes, Cavalieri worked for three years as a freelancer and joined DC Comics in 1982, penning several series including Green Arrow (1982), The Flash (1984), and the 50th anniversary publication Fifty Who Made DC Great (1985). In recognition for his work, Cavalieri was promoted to Senior Editor of DC in 2005. While Cavalieri’s Huntress lacked the significance of Helena Wayne, because she did not have the latter’s lineage and motivation, the DC writer incorporated her into a darker mythology connected to the world of the mafia (Callahan, 74). Helena Janice Bertinelli17 (later Helena Rosa Bertinelli18) was born into one of Gotham City’s most prominent Italian American mafia families. At the conception of the character, she was the daughter of Guido and Carmela Bertinelli,19 later to be changed to Franco and Maria Bertinelli, although her biological father was in fact Santo Cassamento,20 the don of a rival mafia family.21 In a further configuration, Helena Bertinelli became the granddaughter of Frank Bertinelli, capo di tutti capi, and a mafia princess,22 heir to “the entire Sicilian mob” described as “the most wanted woman in the world”.23 In all her incarnations, this dark-skinned Italian American character was a withdrawn girl as a consequence of various traumatic events of her youth: she was kidnapped and raped as a child at the age of six,24 and witnessed the mob-ordered murder of her parents at the age of eight25 (or at the age of nineteen26). She was trained in various martial arts to become an effective killer by her bodyguard Sal27 or by a Sicilian assassin named Silvio.28 She learned the language of her father’s country as a child and spent time with her relatives in Sicily29 where at 21 she received

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the inheritance of her family.30 She returned to Gotham and adopted a costume recalling an almost demonic figure as the Huntress to seek revenge as she crusaded to put an end to the Mafia,31 renouncing the Bertinelli legacy of crime and using her skills to take down her father’s criminal empire.32 In the process, she established herself as a compulsively enraged individual, due to her inability to save her family, and prone to excessive violence, blurring the lines between justice and revenge.

Epithet The most obvious commonality between Diana and Helena is the epithet both possess: Huntress, Helena explicitly and Diana implicitly as the goddess of the hunt. Their prey may differ but the capture and slaying of that prey (either literally or metaphorically) is a feature shared by both. Closely connected to the epithet is the similarity in their weapons of choice: the bow for Diana and its variation, and the crossbow, for Helena. However, in the case of the Huntress, her weapon was not the large and cumbersome medieval version. Rather, hers was a customized crossbow made of vanadium with a collapsing mechanism, which allowed for a holster, thus providing the Huntress greater freedom of movement. Cavalieri need not have invented a character whose primary skill was with an archaic range weapon, as a huntress with a firearm would have been far from unprecedented. Moreover, the skill in marksmanship that the goddess of the hunt implicitly possessed or bestowed upon her supplicants is a primary characteristic of Helena, a skilled marksman not only with the crossbow but also with a variety of range weaponry, such as throwing knives.

Isolation and Darkness Both Diana and Helena display the trait of physical isolation in association with darkness and the underworld. In the case of Diana, Catullus describes her in his Hymn to Diana as a lover of solitude and the darkness of isolated locations: “So you could be mistress of the mountains, And of the growing woods, And of the secluded woodland glades” (Wilkinson, 178).33 This facet of the deity emerges from her preference for difficultly accessible sanctuaries which, as mentioned, were always found in dense and consequently dark groves and woodlands, far from urban centers. The trait of isolation in the Italic Diana is also discernible in the very positioning of her first major temple in Rome, beyond the confines of the city’s pomerium,

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her worship at the time isolated from the rest of the Roman pantheon. Moreover, as regards Diana’s association with darkness, her iteration as Luna, although explicitly denoting light, implicitly connected this light to a surrounding of darkness. Lastly, according to ancient beliefs regarding the deity, the transition from full to new moon entailed a gradual descent into the mythical underworld. Similarly, the Huntress has been consistently depicted with a proclivity for isolation and darkness. For instance, she is hesitant to be part of any group, although she does relent in two cases, the first of which is her membership under the auspices of Batman in the Justice League, in the hope that the influence of the other members would have helped Helena mature and overcome her violent tendencies. However, her affiliation with the League only lasts the span of seven years,34 as Batman himself expelled her for her excessive violence. Finally, since her creation, the Huntress has always displayed a preference to operate under the cover of darkness, in which she battles against the forces of a criminal underworld. More importantly, the Huntress is far from being an icon of moral rectitude, but is instead a woman of ambiguous morality (Bonadè, 60). Although she may represent a “retreat from psychological darkness into the light” (DiPaolo, 129), Helena nonetheless remains in the darkness, as it remains in her.

Motherhood and Children As mentioned, Diana was not only regarded as a goddess of the wilderness but was also worshipped as a goddess of domesticity, a patroness of families, of women with offspring and expectant mothers (Horace, 184).35 Indeed, she was one of the deities most often invoked in household rituals and in family worship. Horace viewed Diana as a household goddess (Cairns, 461) and in general Roman culture associated her not only with Vesta, goddess of the hearth, but also among the Penates, household deities of ancient Roman religion, guardians of the household supplies, associated with the wellbeing of the domus (Chance, 73).36 Logically, as the house-goddess, Diana would have ensured the continuation and prosperity of the household and its components. Furthermore, in connection to domesticity and expectant mothers, Diana was viewed as a source of safety for the young and presided over the training of young people, which was one of her domains (Green, 138). According to Sextus Pompeius Festus, Diana’s role as the goddess of roads, particularly of three-way crossroads, entailed that she provided her supplicants with guidance in order to resolve

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their moments of indecision. This role was particularly important for the young and was reflected in her youthful appearance in her statuary, a confirmation of her role as provider of guidance, a correct direction as it were, for the young who were about to embark on their own existential journeys (Festus, 92). In his Hymn to Diana, Catullus explicitly makes this connection, as he states that unwed youths are under the tutelage of Diana (Wilkinson, 178).37 As for Helena, DC writers, beginning with Cavalieri himself, have repeatedly sought to counterbalance the pervasive violence of the character with an association to children and education, by means of Helena’s role as an adoptive mother and teacher. Her connection to motherhood emerges at the end of her first ongoing series when Helena adopts a child named James Cooper. Cavalieri introduced James in Huntress 9 as a child genius residing with his mother and his younger brother in one of the more impoverished areas of Gotham. A local gang kidnaps James to force him to build a nuclear bomb with which they can blackmail the city. After the gang kills his mother and brother, James goes into the child services system and is about to be adopted38 when he runs away and uses his skills in bomb-making against the gang members who murdered his family. When the Huntress series ended with issue 19, Cavalieri scripted Helena’s decision to retire from crime-fighting and move to the suburbs with James, for whom she had essentially become a mother. Helena’s role as a mother for James transcends the limitations of the legal system and indeed her adoption of James was not legal; they simply moved away from Gotham City to somewhere where they were unknown and could live together as a family. Her story concludes in a Justice League International Special 2 (1991), in which the Huntress briefly comes out of retirement only to return to a normal life in order to raise James in peace.39 Lastly, in the majority of Helena’s iterations, her childhood dream is to become a teacher, the accomplishment of which provides her with a strong sense of fulfillment as it reflects a similarly strong drive in her toward the protection of the most vulnerable.40 Consequently, in the nearly four decades since her inception, she has invariably been depicted with children as an elementary school teacher,41 or high school teacher,42 and even as a teacher and matron of a boarding school for girls.43

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Costume Following a process of Hellenization during the fourth century BCE, the Italic Diana came to be conflated with her Greek counterpart Artemis and acquired Artemis’ physical description and attributes. In essence, therefore, the Italic Diana wore a costume of Artemis, as Romans very often depicted her in art in Greek attire, with an athletic figure and wearing simple clothes, as if to underline her vitality. An example is the statute Diana of Versailles, currently housed in the Louvre Museum, a second-­ century CE Roman copy of a lost Greek bronze original attributed to Leochares, c. 325 BCE (Leventi, 69–170). The statue exudes a strong sense of dynamism, with the deity wearing a short-belted tunic and a sickle moon headpiece, as in her stance she draws an arrow with her right hand, with the remains of her bow in her left. This traditional depiction of the goddess continued throughout the centuries, e.g. in late nineteenth-­ century painting Diane, la chasseresse (Diana the Huntress) by Guillaume Seignac in which she wears a belted tunic, a headdress with a horizontal sickle moon pointing upward, bow in hand, a quiver on her shoulders, and her gaze on prospective prey in the wilderness. Although, the Huntress costume has varied throughout the years, a constant presence has been her mask, which may convey demonic feature of horns, but is also interpretable as a horizontal sickle moon with horns up, a variation of Diana’s depiction in Seignac’s painting. Helena’s costume has progressively become more integral in recent issues but initially she was more scantily clad, a reflection of the tendencies of the late 1980s in Sequential Art regarding female characters. However, her original costume as Cavalieri created for her was closer to Diana’s tunic as portrayed in antiquity and in subsequent depictions: in both cases, the garb allowed for a greater freedom of movement. Moreover, her costume has always included many items that recall the moon. For instance, her cape appears fastened by sickle moon clasps, while her initial belt buckle was reminiscent of a full moon with the insignia of her mask superimposed upon it, later changing to a gem-like buckle without the chevron. Significantly, in his description of Diana, the Roman poet Nemesianus (third century CE) specifically mentioned a belt with a jeweled buckle that held the deity’s tunic (Nemesianus, 495). Helena even shares with Diana a commonality of color which plays an important role in the iconicity of the superhero costume, as underscored by McCloud, according to whom costume colors symbolized the characters themselves in the mind of the reader since those

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colors remained exactly the same, panel after panel (McCloud, 188). Again, in the description of Nemesianus, the poet depicts Diana wearing half-boots that are purple, a color that, notwithstanding the many changes through the years, has unvaryingly dominated Helena’s costume.44

Triads Both the Italic Diana and Helena Bertinelli are associated with a variety of triads. As mentioned above, Diana was invoked as a triple goddess alongside Luna and Hecate. Regarding Helena, a significant and long-lasting triad has been with the second group to which the Huntress consented to join: the Birds of Prey, a team of female superheroes initially depicted in a series entitled Birds of Prey: Black Canary/Oracle. Chuck Dixon wrote the first issues of the series in 1996, premised as a partnership between Black Canary and Barbara Gordon, one-time Batgirl paralyzed after being shot by the Joker in Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke (1988), and who had subsequently adopted the codename Oracle. At first, other female superheroes formed a rotating roster of the Birds of Prey. However, when Gail Simone began to script the series starting with issue #56 (2003),45 she firmly established the triad with the inclusion of the Huntress into the group. Following the 2016 relaunch DC Rebirth, writers Julie and Shawna Benson offered a further confirmation of the triad—a healed Batgirl, Black Canary, and Huntress—with a new series entitled Batgirl and the Birds of Prey.

Furies and Camilla Finally, Helena’s motivation for her crusade is fundamentally revenge against the forces that caused the death of her family, a crusade in which she makes uses of the many skills she has accumulated in the course of her training. The themes of vengeance and physical prowess connect Helena to various personages of classical mythology. For instance, in the alternate timeline of the 2011 “Flashpoint” storyline, the Huntress is a member of the Furies, a team of female warriors allied with Queen Diana of Themyscira in the Amazons’ war with the Atlanteans. In ancient mythology, the Furies were female chthonic deities of vengeance whose task was to hear mortal grievances against offenses and to punish such crimes by persecuting the culprits relentlessly (Graves, 122–123). This role is made manifest in their names, as listed by Virgil in the Aeneid: Alekto (“endless anger”), Megaera

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(“jealous rage”), and Tisiphone (“vengeful destruction”). Significantly, the theme of darkness described above in association with Helena is present here also, since Virgil states that the Furies were daughters of Nox, the goddess of night. Furthermore, in their works, Aeschylus and Euripides had already associated the Furies with night and darkness, both their physical appearance and the time of day of their manifestations (Christopoulos, 134). The connection between the Furies and Diana is found in the figure of Greek tragedy Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, who avenges his father’s murder and slays his mother who was complicit in it. Later pursued by the Furies for the matricide, Orestes consults the Oracle of Delphi to inquire how to end his suffering. In response, he is instructed to bring to Argos the statue of Diana from her temple Taurica (Hyginus 1960). However, several sources of antiquity connect Orestes to Nemi. For instance, Valerius Flaccus implies that the cult of Diana was transferred from the Tauric Chersonese to Nemi (Valerius Flaccus, 94–95),46 while Maurus Servius Honoratus asserts that Orestes instituted the worship of Diana at Nemi, and Ovid names the deity that resides in the dense forests of the sanctuary “Orestean Diana” (Ovid 1931, 399). Orestes ultimately found respite in Nemi where rites connected with physical (and mental) health were protected by Aesculapius (Pasqualini, 1109), thereby becoming one of the protagonists of the existential cycle of life, death, and rebirth, metamorphoses set in the metaphorical theater of the Nemi woodland sanctuary (ibid., 1101).47 The most significant connection between vengeance and physical prowess emerges in the Virgilian character of Camilla, a young warrior who in the Aeneid functions for all intents and purposes as an avatar of Diana. Indeed, Virgil describes Camilla as a virgin consecrated from infancy to the Italic deity, raised in the forest to be a huntress, and taught how to use a bow as well as a javelin as soon as she takes her first steps.48 A woman of great beauty and great physical prowess, Camilla endures most difficult battles and does not hesitate to throw herself into every melee and she faces every danger. She instills fear into her adversaries whom she easily defeats, with her unparalleled boldness and countless acts of valor. Furthermore, Virgil presents Camilla as the leader of a group of female warriors: the Italiades or daughters of Italy—Tulla, Larina, and Tarpeia. They are Amazon-like women similar to Camilla, described by Virgil as her chosen comrades: “[B]randishing high her brazen axe—daughters of Italy, all, she chose to be her glory, godlike Camilla’s aides in peace and

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war” (Virgil, 346). Camilla’s death at the hands of Arruns (ibid., 352), who stalks and kills her on the battlefield when she was distracted, unleashes the furious vengeance of Diana against him (ibid., 353). As is evident, Virgilian description of Camilla corresponds seamlessly to Helena Bertinelli who may also be considered a modern incarnation of Aeneid’s heroine, both from a physical point of view and as a member of group of female warriors. As with all the components of the Batman narrative family, the Huntress possesses no inherent ‘super-powers’ and instead relies on her considerable abilities, such as mastery of several martial arts. In combat, she fights without apparent effort, thereby denoting extraordinary stamina and is also noted for her high threshold for pain.

Rex Nemorensis At Lake Nemi, the most common association of Italic Diana in antiquity was with the rex Nemorensis (“king of Nemi”), a priest of the goddess at her lakeside sanctuary. According to the legend, only a runaway slave, if he could break off one of the boughs of a tree that stood in the center of the grove, was granted the privilege to engage the incumbent rex Nemorensis in a trial by combat. If the slave prevailed, he became the next king for as long as he could successfully defend his position, with strength and guile, against all challengers.49 The challenger was presented with the choice between existence outside the boundaries of the law or obedience to the exacting precepts of the rex Nemorensis tradition. In the words of Frazer: “[in] this sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of day, and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl […] and he kept peering warily about him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy” (Frazer, 2, emphasis mine). While, on the institution of the rex Nemorensis, a quatrain by Macaulay reads: “Those trees in whose dim shadow/The ghastly priest doth reign/The priest who slew the slayer,/And shall himself be slain” (Macaulay, 866, emphasis mine). The rex Nemorensis tradition was another, and in all probability the prime, example of existential cycle set in the Nemi woodland sanctuary as mentioned above in relation to Orestes. However, the authorities of the imperial age could barely justify—due to its antiquity and religious sanctity—the violent barbarity of the rex Nemorensis tradition (Fontenrose, 38) and occasionally even interfered in the succession. For instance, Suetonius recounts that the emperor Caligula hired a stronger adversary

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to attack the rex Nemorensis of the time who, in the emperor’s opinion, had held the priesthood for too many years (Suetonius, 471). A careful analysis of the rex Nemorensis, inherently connected to Italic Diana, reveals many similarities with the role of Batman, correspondingly linked to the Huntress. Anyone familiar with the Dark Knight can recognize how perfectly applicable the quotes of Frazer and Macaulay are to the DC character. He is what LoCicero defines as antihero or a ‘quintessential outsider,’ the expression of an alternative version of the heroic archetype (LoCicero, 219 and 224). Batman has always been the antithesis of the unambiguous and stolid Superman and has repeatedly been depicted as a terrifyingly nocturnal creature, donning a frightening costume in order to strike fear into the hearts of criminals. Within the DC narrative universe, Batman has often operated on the fringe of conventional society, at best only grudgingly accepted by the institutions while simultaneously maneuvering on the fringe of associations of his peers, e.g. the Justice League. The figure of Batman emerges from the darker recesses of Bruce Wayne’s psyche and displays sociopathic tendencies, at times characterized by extreme violence. Although the Dark Knight deems the violent methods of the Huntress (who does not hesitate to cripple or at times even to kill her opponents) as being too ruthless, he readily acknowledges that, at the beginning of his crusade, he also behaved in a similar fashion.50 His never-­ ending war on crime is not based on altruism, thereby negating for him Coogan’s first criterion of a superhero, but instead is born of personal vendetta. As Horn writes, Batman’s primary motivation is vengeance deriving from his origin, which has remained constant throughout the years: as a child Bruce Wayne witnesses the murder of his parents on a deserted city street (Horn, 101). He responds to this trauma by using his inherited wealth to hone his physical skills through incessant training in order to exact revenge.51 In both instances, these figures move in a sinister atmosphere of darkness (a grove for the rex Nemorensis and a cave for Dark Knight whose preferred tempus operandi is precisely after sunset) from which both engage in incessant battles. Both the rex Nemorensis and Batman possess considerable physical prowess which derives entirely from human rather than divine sources. While their physical strength and mental acuity may allow them to emerge victorious in their battles, these features alone are not sufficient to ensure their survival, but are supplemented by a fierce determination to return always to fight another day. Moreover, this shared determination to overcome all obstacles is born of a desperation resulting

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from circumstances imposed by others: the challenger of the rex Nemorensis seeks to overturn to his status as an enslaved individual; the rex Nemorensis must react to the trial of the challenger; and Batman’s irrepressible compulsion to fight crime was inflicted upon him in childhood as a direct result of the murder of his parents. In order to justify their existences, both repeatedly commit brutal acts of violence in the defense of their respective roles as rex Nemorensis and rex Gothamis. Yet they also share an all-too-human vulnerability and both are repeatedly defeated, only to be reborn subsequently. The rebirth with the rex Nemorensis may have been as the incumbent victorious or as the challenger who has defeated his predecessor. In either case, the mantle of the rex Nemorensis was borne by the victor who continued the tradition. In the case of Batman, he has repeatedly been defeated by various characters throughout the decades, most famously by Bane who broke the back of the Dark Knight in the Knightfall story arc (1993–1994). Notwithstanding this defeat, Wayne willed himself to heal and returned to his role as the Dark Knight after extensive physical therapy. Narratively, the character also undergoes a rebirth every time a new writer takes the helm of a series and inevitably seeks to create a personal variation of the Dark Knight. The rex Nemorensis, who sought the approval of the goddess of the hunt, as sanctioned through victorious combat, specularly matches the reiterated desire of the Huntress to seek the Dark Knight’s approval. Batman may not serve the Huntress as the rex Nemorensis does with Diana but neither does she serve him. Indeed, she is the only vigilante of Gotham City who operates without the approval of Batman and over whom the Dark Knight holds no sway or control. Regardless, the Huntress serves with Batman in the furtherance of his mission. Similarly, the service of the rex Nemorensis to Diana is to ensure the future of the sanctuary, thereby ensuring the continued worship of the goddess. In conclusion, the many commonalities that link the Italic deity Diana to Helena Bertinelli/Huntress offer a clear demonstration of the former’s influence on the latter, beginning with the status of venatrices who hunt with very similar weapons of choice and with very similar garb in color, form, and iconography. The expert marksmanship of each is accompanied by a formidable physical dynamism. Helena reflects the ambiguity, the irascibility, and the violence with which Diana was very often represented in antiquity and both display the trait of seclusion, imbued with an internal darkness, from a wider society. Yet, in both instances, this isolation is compensated, both directly and indirectly, with membership in groups,

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albeit limited in number and gender. Moreover, both emerge as protectors of the more vulnerable and providers of guidance, especially for children. Finally, both are intimately connected to male figures of extreme violence with whom they establish a bond of service. Luca Somigli defines the development of Sequential Art narratives over time as being characterized by “sameness with difference” (Somigli, 289), i.e. a reorganization of narrative elements into new configurations. This facet of superhero narratives is evident in Helena Bertinelli, a character who, notwithstanding various iterations in different miniseries and reboots, has consistently returned to the origin that Cavalieri established for her. The Huntress may inevitably be connected to the most clichéd Italian American stereotype—the mafia—but Cavalieri was nonetheless able to overturn the maxim common in the two major publishers of American sequential art: that character names must be short (better if monosyllabic) and Anglo-Saxon (Lo Cicero, 221).52 This unspoken rule was predominant in DC and Marvel for decades, from the very beginning of the superhero genre. Yet, through the creation of the Huntress, Cavalieri refuted the notion that superheroes should be purged of ethnicity, a notion that was instead common among the children of immigrants who had created the most iconic superheroes of the medium: whereas all the characters—Superman, Batman, Captain America, and Spiderman—conformed seamlessly into the dominant culture, all of their respective creators—Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Bob Kane, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, and Stan Lee—were Jewish Americans who strove to eliminate any trace of ‘foreign’ ethnicity from their creations. Cavalieri’s overturning of this longstanding paradigm was able to occur also due to the attributes of the Italic Diana that are discernible in his character.

Notes 1. To limit myself to the DC narrative universe, arguably, the most famous non-Mafiosi Italian American characters of the DC universe belong to the Zatara family, headed by Giovanni ‘John’ Zatara. Fred Guardineer created the character of Giovanni Zatara who first appeared in Action Comics #1 in June 1938, an issue that also saw the debut of Superman. Giovanni Zatara was a great magician of the Golden Age as well as the father of another DC character, Zatanna Zatara (created by Gardner Fox and Murphy Anderson in 1964), whom he trained in the arts of magic, allowing her to become a successful stage illusionist in her own right. Currently,

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Zatanna is one of DC’s premier magic wielders. Far less well-known is the third member of the Zatara family, Zachary (created by Geoff Johns and Tony S. Daniel in 2006), teenage mystic, and cousin of Zatanna, who also performs on stage as a magician. 2. Again, to limit myself to the DC narrative universe, these Mafiosi families are: Beretti, Galante, Inzerillo, Panessa, Sabatino, Tomasso. Of particular importance is the Falcone crime Family, run by Carmine ‘The Roman’ Falcone, who controlled the criminal underworld of Gotham City prior to the rise of the ‘masks’ or superheroes. 3. Although he is not Italian American but Italian, the character of the Legionary warrants mention because his portrayal is indicative of how Italians in general are perceived in the popular imagination. Edmond Hamilton and Sheldon Moldoff created the character in 1955, with the uninspired name of Alphonso (NB the ‘ph’) Giovanni. Legionary first appeared in Detective Comics 215 as an Italian who had been inspired by the figure of Batman and had assumed the mantle of a vigilante. Since he was an enthusiast of ancient Roman history, he based his alter ego on the armies of Rome, naming himself the Legionary. He donned Roman armor and wielded a Roman spear, becoming widely known as the heroic protector of the Eternal City. He even acquired a Joker-like nemesis bearing the similarly uninspired name of Carlo ‘Little Boots’ Calzone, aka Charlie Caligula, mastermind of Rome’s underworld. However, the Legionary underwent a moral and physical deterioration: he succumbed to the lure of fame, gradually abandoned his vigilantism, and became obese. Eventually, he was corrupted by Rome’s organized crime until a non-Italian criminal organization contracted the Wingman, the ‘Batman of Sweden’, to kill the Legionary by stabbing him twenty-three times, reminiscent of the death of Julius Caesar (Batman, 667, August 2007). His daughter Pippi Giovanni became his successor. 4. Both DC and Marvel commonly divide their publication histories into a Golden Age (1935–1956), a Silver Age (1956–1970), and a Bronze Age (1970–1985). 5. Moore publically disavowed the film. 6. Watchmen 4 December 1986. 7. There are obviously exceptions, e.g. John Constantine, significantly a creation of Alan Moore. 8. Created by George Pérez in War of the Gods (Vol 1, No. 2, October 1991). 9. Wonder Woman Vol. 2, No. 192, July 2003. 10. “tria virginis ora Dianae.” 11. “tu potens Trivia et notho es.” 12. This association would perhaps be the most enduring in time, as may be noticed in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, in which Falstaff styles himself

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and his cohort as “Diana’s foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon”. 13. “dicta lumine Luna.” 14. Proserpina, daughter of Ceres, is renowned for the myth of her abduction by the god of the underworld, her mother’s frantic search for her, and her eventual but temporary restitution to the world above. According to the myth, she must periodically return to the god of the underworld, with whom she rules the realm of the dead. 15. Acts of the Apostles 19:27. The craftsmen lament the fact that “the temple of the great goddess Diana should be despised, and her magnificence should be destroyed”. 16. There was pre-Crisis Huntress who preceded the modern iterations of the character: Paula Brooks, a somewhat minor World War II era villain created by Mort Meskin in 1947. In the 1980s, DC writer Roy Thomas retroactively renamed her the Tigress (also due to her tiger costume) and included her in his series Young All-Stars, based on a team of World War II era superheroes. 17. 1989 Huntress Series. 18. 2000 Batman/Huntress: Cry for Blood limited series. 19. 1989 Huntress Series. 20. It is not entirely clear whether the creators of this character (Greg Rutka and Rick Burchett) were aware of the meaning of his name—roughly ‘holy annulment’—perhaps in connection to the act of infidelity at the origin of Helena’s birth. 21. 2000 Batman/Huntress: Cry for Blood limited series. 22. 2006 Batgirl and the Birds of Prey. 23. 2014 Grayson series. 24. 1989 Huntress Series; 2000 Batman/Huntress: Cry for Blood limited series. 25. 2000 Batman/Huntress: Cry for Blood limited series; 2008 Huntress: Year One miniseries. 26. 1989 Huntress Series. 27. 1989 Huntress Series. 28. 2012 Huntress Year One. 29. 2000 Batman/Huntress: Cry for Blood limited series; 2008 Huntress: Year One miniseries. 30. 2008 Huntress: Year One miniseries. 31. 1989 Huntress Series. 32. 2012 Huntress Year One. 33. “Monitium domina ut fores, silvarumque virentium, saltuumque reconditorum.” 34. Helena joins JLA Secret Files #2 (1998) expelled World War III miniseries (2007).

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35. “O Maiden goddess, guardian of hill and grove, thou//that, thrice invoked, givest ear to young mothers//when in travail and rescuest them from death.” 36. Cicero provides an etymological interpretation of the Penates: “a name derived either from penus, which means a store of human food of any kind, or from the fact that they reside penitus, in the recesses of the house, owing to which they are also called penetrales by the poets” (Cicero 1933, 189). 37. “Dianae sumus in fide puellae et pueri integri: Dianam pueri integri puellaeque canamus” (Wilkinson, 178). 38. Huntress, 17. 39. Helena definitively returns to her role as the Huntress in Detective Comics 652 (1992), written by Chuck Dixon in which she moves back to Gotham City as a schoolteacher. 40. 2006 Batgirl and the Birds of Prey. 41. 2006 Batgirl and the Birds of Prey. 42. 1989 Huntress Series; 2000 Batman/Huntress: Cry for Blood limited series; 2008 Huntress: Year One miniseries. 43. 2014 Grayson series. 44. One feature of Helena’s costume which does not derive from Diana is her initial gold cross pendant (and occasionally gold cross earrings) which was eventually replaced with the motif white cross incorporated into her costume, a reflection of the character being a practicing Catholic. 45. She continued until issue 108 (2007). 46. “ille procul trunca fugit anxius alno/Taurorumque locos delubraque saeva Dianae/advenit. hic illum tristi, dea, praeficis arae/ense dato: mora nec terris tibi longa cruentis;/iam nemus Egeriae, iam te ciet altus ab Alba/ Iuppiter et soli non mitis Aricia regi” (Valerius Flaccus, 94–95). 47. A relief of the Augustan era found in Nemi, but outside the sanctuary, depicts Orestes killing Aegisthus (Pasqualini, 1104). 48. The Huntress often also uses a staff. 49. “The strong of hand and fleet of foot do there reign kings, and each is slain thereafter even as himself has slain” (Ovid 1916, 141). “[…] the prize for the victor in single combat was the priesthood of the goddess. The contest was open to no freeman, but only to slaves who had run away from their masters” (Pausanias, 393). 50. 2003 Batman: Hush Volume One. 51. A narrative origin that is entirely similar to that of the Huntress. 52. E.g. Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne.

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Works Cited Alföldi, Andreas. Early Rome and the Latins. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964. Beard, Mary, et  al. Religions of Rome: A Sourcebook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Beaty, Bart. “Translator’s note.” In Thierry Groensteen, The System of Comics. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen, 131. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Bonadè, Sophie. Des superhéroïnes à Gotham City: une étude de la (re)définition des rôles genrés dans l’univers de Batman. Paris : Université Paris-Saclay, 2019. Cairns, Francis. Roman Lyric: Collected Papers on Catullus and Horace. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012. Callahan, Timothy. “The Huntress: The Daughter of the Bat and the Cat”. Back Issue! No. 38 (2010), 71–78. Carrier, David. “Comics and the Art of Moving Pictures. Piero della Francesca, Hergé, and George Herriman.” Word & Image Vol. 13, No. 4 (1997), 317–332. Chance, Jane. Medieval Mythography: From Roman North Africa to the School of Chartres, A.D. 433–1177. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. Christopoulos, Menelaos. Light and Darkness in Ancient Greek Myth and Religion. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. On the Nature of the Gods (De natura deorum). Translated by P.G Walsh. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. ———. On the Nature of the Gods (De natura deorum). Translated by Harris Rackham. Cambridge: Loeb-Harvard UP, 1933. Coarelli, Filippo. I santuari del Lazio in età repubblicana. Milan: La Nuova Italia scientifica, 1987. Coogan, Peter. Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre. Austin: MonkeyBrain Books, 2006. de Vaan, Michiel. Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other Italic Languages. Leiden: Brill. 2008. Del Ponte, Renato. Dei e miti italici. Genoa: ECIG, 1985. DiPaolo, Marc. War, Politics and Superheroes: Ethics and Propaganda in Comics and Film. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2011. Eco, Umberto. “The Myth of Superman.” Diacritics, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1972), 14–22. Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. Tamarac: Poorhouse Press, 1985. Eury, Michael, Gina Misiroglu. “The Huntress.” The Superhero Book: The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Comic-Book Icons and Hollywood Heroes, edited by Gina Misiroglu, 186–187. Canton Charter Township: MI, Visible Ink Press, 2012. Festus, Sextus Pompeius and Marcus Verrius Flaccus. Festii, de verborum significatu quae supersunt cum Pauli epitome. Translated by W. M. Lindsay and Emil Thewrewk, Leipzig: Teubner, 1997.

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Fisher, Jay. The Annals of Quintus Ennius and the Italic Tradition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Fontenrose, Joseph. The Ritual Theory of Myth. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion. London: Macmillan and Co., 1890. Ginzburg, Carlo. The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Translated by John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Gordon, A.E. “On the Origin of Diana.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, No. 63 (1932), 177–192. Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths. Mount Kisco: Moyer Bell Ltd, 1988. Green, C. M. C. Roman Religion and the Cult of Diana at Aricia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Horace. Odes and Epodes. Edited and translated by Niall Rudd. Cambridge: Loeb-­ Harvard UP, 2004. Horn, Maurice. The World Encyclopedia of Comics. New York: Chelsea House, 1976. Hyginus. The Myths of Hyginus. Translated and edited by Mary Grant. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1960. Knight, Gladys L. Female Action Heroes: A Guide to Women in Comics, Video Games, Film, and Television. Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2010. Kunzle, David. The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825. Santa Barbara: University of California Press, 1973. Leventi, I. “Leochares.” In The Dictionary of Art, edited by Jane Turner, Vol. 19, 169–170. New York: Grove, 1996. Livy. History of Rome, Volume I: Books 1–2. Translated by B. O. Foster. Cambridge: Loeb-Harvard UP, 1919. LoCicero, Don. Superheroes and Gods: a Comparative Study from Babylonia to Batman. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2008. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New  York: Harper Perennial, 1994. Macaulay, Thomas Babington. The Life and Works of Lord Macaulay Complete. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1897. Molofsky, David. “The Justice League as the Greek Gods.” www.ap2hyc.com, August 7, 2013 (accessed April 10, 2023). Nemesianus. “Cynegetica.” In Minor Latin Poets, Volume II: Florus. Hadrian. Nemesianus. Reposianus. Tiberianus. Dicta Catonis. Phoenix. Avianus. Rutilius

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Namatianus. Others, 451–518. Translated by J. Wight Duff, Arnold M. Duff. Cambridge: Loeb-Harvard UP, 1934. Nodelman, Perry. Words About Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988. Ovid. Fasti. Translated by James G. Frazer. Revised by G. P. Goold. Cambridge: Loeb-Harvard UP, 1931. ———. Metamorphoses, Volume I: Books 1–8. Translated by Frank Justus Miller. Revised by G. P. Goold. Cambridge: Loeb-Harvard UP, 1916. Pasqualini, Anna. “Oreste nel Lazio: percorso della leggenda e funzioni del mito.” In Ou pàn ephémeron. Scritti in memoria di Roberto Pretagostini Offerti da Colleghi, Dottori e Dottorandi di ricerca della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, edited by C.  Braidotti and E.  Dettori, E.  Lanzillotta, 1091–1113. Rome: Quasar, 2009. Pausanias. Description of Greece, Volume I: Books 1–2 (Attica and Corinth). Translated by W. H. S. Jones. Cambridge: Loeb-Harvard UP, 1918. Poulsen, Birte. “Sanctuaries of the Goddess of the Hunt.” In From Artemis to Diana: The Goddess of Man and Beast, edited by Tobias Fischer-Hansen and Birte Poulsen, 401–425. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2009. Ronan, Stephen. The Goddess Hekate. Hastings: Chthonios. 1992. Somigli, Luca. “The Superhero with a Thousand Faces: Visual Narratives on Film and Paper.” In Play It Again Sam: Retakes on Remakes, edited by Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal, 279–294. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Suetonius. Lives of the Caesars, Volume I: Julius. Augustus. Tiberius. Gaius. Caligula. Translated by J. C. Rolfe. Introduction by K. R. Bradley. Cambridge: Loeb-Harvard UP, 1914. Valerius Flaccus. Argonautica. Translated by J.  H. Mozley. Cambridge: Loeb-­ Harvard UP, 1934. Vergilius Maro, Publius (Virgil). The Aeneid. Translated by Robert Fagles, New York: Viking, 2006. Wilkinson, L. P. Ovid Recalled. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Wissowa, Georg. Religion und Kultus der Römer. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1912. Witek, Joseph. Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989.

CHAPTER 15

CNN’s Searching for Italy: Stanley Tucci as Foodways Icon Alan J. Gravano

Stanley Tucci, an acclaimed Italian-American actor remembered for roles such as Secondo in Big Night (1996) and Nigel Kipling in The Devil Wears Prada (2006), takes his notoriety to a new level, challenging Italian-­ American stereotypes in CNN’s Searching for Italy (2021–2022). If Tucci is to be believed, he made Big Night in part to counter the gangster stereotype and to prove himself worthy of playing different, non-gangster/ criminal roles. In an interview with Tim Grierson, Tucci complained, “I was always playing a heavy, usually a mafioso … The thing is that most of these roles aren’t well-written. They’re caricatures. Besides, the Mafia is the only view we get of Italian Americans. There are 15 million of us and we’re not all thugs” (Grierson). Tired of these Hollywood roles, such as Frank Zioli (Kiss of Death, 1995), Eddie Biasi (It Could Happen to You, 1994), Lucky Luciano (Billy Bathgate, 1991), and Soldier (Prizzi’s Honor, 1985), Tucci developed the script for Big Night with Joseph Tropiano. In Searching for Italy, his efforts to defy Italian stereotypes persist. Here,

A. J. Gravano (*) Rocky Mountain University of Health Professions, Provo, UT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Fioretti, F. Orsitto (eds.), Italian Americans in Film and Other Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47211-4_15

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Tucci offers a representation that embraces the diversity of the country, which pushes back against the monolithic image that many in the US hold of this land, its people, its food, and its culture. Some Italian Americans and the media perpetuate certain stereotypes, such as spaghetti and meatballs (a scene made famous in Big Night). The Italy, for which Tucci searches, counters a unified image of Italy by celebrating the country’s varied peoples, politics, regions, cuisines, and histories. Tucci sought to push back against the gangster stereotype. Now, the effort continues not by playing a fictional character but by playing himself in several venues not available to him when he and Campbell Scott directed Big Night. Searching for Italy allows the viewer a glimpse of Tucci as a second-generation Italian American who visits Italy in search of his Italian roots and places them in the context of the twenty regions to better understand the meaning of his heritage. He goes beyond the widely known destinations of Rome, Florence, and Venice, highlighting less touristy parts of each region. Tucci’s CNN show Searching for Italy is a culinary travelogue exploring Italy’s diverse and rich food culture, running for two seasons (2021–2022). The show features the celebrated actor and food enthusiast traveling across the country to discover each region’s culturally unique flavors, ingredients, and takes on recipes, and brings viewers on a culinary journey. In season one, Tucci travels to Naples, Rome, Bologna, Milan, Tuscany, and Sicily; in season two, he visits Venice, Piedmont, Umbria, and London. The last season, or the continuation of season two, includes Calabria, Sardinia, Puglia, and Liguria. Thus, six of the fourteen episodes name the city rather than the region, although London is in the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, CNN canceled the show before Tucci had the opportunity to film all twenty regions. Those not dedicated with their own episode include Abruzzo, Basilicata, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Marche, Molise, Trentino Alto Adige, and Val d’Aosta. Each episode features Tucci tasting his way through a specific city and/or region. In many cases, the chefs invite him to the kitchen to see the preparation of the food he is about to consume. The best episodes also contain a segment examining social issues such as migration. The first season of Searching for Italy premiered in February 2021 and focused on the regions of Campania, Emilia-Romagna, Lazio, Lombardy, Sicily, and Tuscany. However, four of the six use the names of the cities and not the regions. Tucci traveled to these regions and delved into the local food scenes, meeting with chefs, farmers, and locals to learn about

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each area’s unique ingredients and traditional dishes. In Season 1, Episode 1, “Naples and the Amalfi Coast” (February 14, 2021), Tucci explores Campania, beginning his journey in Naples and continuing along the Amalfi Coast. The episode starts with Tucci strolling through Naples’ vibrant and chaotic streets, showcasing Fernanda’s friggitoria, famous for her pizza fritta di Fernanda. Later, Tucci meets Enzo Coccia, who introduces him to the city’s famous pizza and the importance of using local ingredients, such as mozzarella di bufala and San Marzano tomatoes. The chief of police shares an espresso with him and explains ‘suspended coffee’ (caffè sospeso). He visits Scampia, where Romani nomads live without electricity and no running water; however, they have started Chikù, a Romani-­ Italian restaurant run by women. Moving to the Amalfi Coast, Tucci travels through winding roads and cliffside towns, showcasing the region’s breathtaking scenery. He stops at a farm to learn about mozzarella cheese production and explores the picturesque town of Ravello, known for its historic villas and beautiful gardens. Tucci delves into the history and significance of the region’s cuisine, including the influence of ancient cultures such as the Greeks and Romans. He concludes his journey with a traditional seafood dinner, highlighting the importance of fresh, local ingredients in Italian cooking. In Season 1, Episode 2, “Rome” (February 21, 2021), Tucci explores the Eternal City beyond the expected gustatory traditions usually found in travel shows. He begins the episode by visiting a market where he samples some of the local produce and learns about the origins of Rome’s cuisine. At the Bar San Calisto in the Trastevere, he stops for an espresso, and the owner brings him a brioche with panna (whipped cream). Then, he explores a side of Rome not found in the tour guides. He learns about the Centocelle neighborhood (literally, 100 jails) and tastes Conciato di San Vittore (a Pecorino cheese) produced inside a woman’s prison located in the suburb. The cheese represents the promise of paid labor and possibly redemption for the women there. He witnesses the charred interior of the antifascist bookshop, La Pecora Elettrica, firebombed twice by local gangs. First on April 25, 2019, and then again on November 6, the night before their reopening. Alessandra Artusi, the co-owner, explains to Tucci that the police have not yet arrested anyone in connection with the crime (Di Noia 2019). Later, Katie Parla walks with Tucci in the Testaccio neighborhood, home to former slaughterhouses. Tucci explains the significance of the cucina povera and the “fifth quarter” (quinto quarto), or the offal of the slaughtered animals relied upon for protein by the poor people of

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Rome. Parla and Tucci experience for themselves the unexpected depths of flavors found in animal parts so easily dismissed as unfit for the upper classes at Sarah Cicolini’s Santo Palato. A former vegetarian, Cicolini offers dishes that highlight the use of the entire animal, as they dine on trippa alla romana, the innards of a pig as a pasta ragù. Later in the episode, Tucci explores the Jewish Quarter of Rome, known as the Jewish Ghetto, where he learns about the history of the Jewish community in the city from Italia Tagliacozzo and tries some traditional Jewish dishes (cucina ebraica), including fried artichokes (carciofi alla giudia). The artichoke, another undesirable vegetable that provided little sustenance or flavor, became one of Rome’s most popular foods. The episode concludes with Tucci tasting Michelin-starred chef Kotara Noda’s cacio e pepe at Bistrot64 in the Flaminio neighborhood. Noda has restaurants in Tokyo and Rome and artfully presents twists of pasta and guanciale. Through this tour of the corners of Rome, Tucci highlights the variety of the people and its culinary viewpoints to viewers whom most had never explored beyond the standard tourist attractions, making this episode an unexpected lesson in Roman history. Tucci continues the history lesson in Season 1, Episode 3, “Bologna” (February 28, 2021), as he explores Bologna, Modena, and Parma in northern Italy, known for its rich culinary traditions, including fresh pasta, cured meats, and cheese. He begins his journey by visiting Caseificio Rosola, a Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese factory outside Modena. He meets Matia Sartori in the Quadrilatero market in Bologna’s city center, founder of the Sardines Movement, who discusses the start of the movement because of far-right candidate Matteo Salvini and his 2019 campaign. The show turns to Roberto Morgantini, who started the People’s Kitchen in 2014 and, during the COVID-19 pandemic, provided 500 meals per day to refugees and the unemployed. Next, he visits Forlimpopoli, the hometown of Pellegrino Artusi, a wealthy scientist/gastronomist in the 1800s who wrote Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well (La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene). There, Tucci learns to make the Artusi Bolognese sauce, noted for its use of veal instead of beef and no tomatoes, garlic, or several other ingredients one might expect in a Bolognese sauce. This ragù bianco is served over fresh pappardelle, and Tucci marvels at the comparison to the traditional red meat sauce. Finally, in Rimini, he meets Federico Fellini’s niece, Francesca Fellini. She walks him around famous locations with murals dedicated to Fellini and his many films. They make it to osteria Io e Simone, where he watches Alessandra make various pasta

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shapes such as cappelletti and strozzapreti and later tries cappelletti in broth and strozzapreti with meat. In Season 1, Episode 4, “Milan” (March 7, 2021), Tucci explores Milan’s culinary and architectural heritage with a visit to the iconic Duomo Cathedral, the largest church in Italy, and talks about it with New York Times columnist Beppe Severgnini. We learn that the stained glass windows are colored with saffron, a key ingredient in risotto Milanese, known for its yellow hue. He goes to the Navigli district to sample several cocktails with social media sensation Tess Masazza, who is half-French. They have an aperitif at Mag Café before going to Tencitt, a sort of speakeasy that requires a password to enter. There, they meet Morris Maramaldi, the most sought-after mixologist in Italy, according to Tucci. He orders a martini, which Maramaldi prepares with saffron and a coal-based elixir. As for the city’s cuisine, Tucci discovers the history of cotoletta alla milanese and risotto alla milanese, a dish made with saffron and butter, at Ratanà. Later, he learns about bitto cheese from Paolo Ciapparelli. At Lake Como, he fishes with William Cavadini, president of the Lake Como fisherman’s association, who shares his love for Matteo Salvini and the Lega Nord. The episode closes at Osteria del treno, a meeting hall for unionized workers of the nearby railroad. Tucci and his wife, Felicity Blunt, eat veal shank and potatoes and listen to live traditional music. Tucci begins his journey in Florence in Season 1, Episode 5, “Tuscany” (March 14, 2021), the birthplace of the Renaissance and one of the most well-known regions for food and wine. Here, he again strikes a balance between the iconic foods and customs of the rich and poor Tuscans. No trip to Florence would be complete without a visit to the infamous Uffizi Gallery to admire some of the world’s greatest works of art, including paintings by Michelangelo and Botticelli. But afterward, he tries the local cuisine, such as bistecca alla fiorentina, the traditional Florentine steak made from the chianina breed of cattle, cut as thick as the length of a matchstick. He samples the fresh cuts of raw and grilled meat, noting the distinct flavors. Next, Tucci travels to the Chianti region, famous for its wine production, to visit a local vineyard and learn about the production of chianti wine. Later in the episode, he shows us the little-known “wine windows” built into the homes of Florentines to sell their homemade wines to passers-by. He and his friend Elisabetta Digiugno find one still operating and drink several glasses of white wine and cheese as an aperitivo before heading off to dinner. Later in the episode, he returns to Florence, and this time, the focus is on the bread made without salt. Salt was a

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luxury, and this particular bread also embraces the traditions of cucina povera. We briefly see Siena, known for its medieval architecture and annual Palio horse race. Here, Tucci explores the city’s narrow streets and tries local dishes like pici pasta with wild boar ragù. The wild boar or cinghiale is plentiful in the hills and often seen as a pest to local farmers who have continued to hunt the boar for its meat. Finally, Stanley visits the coastal town of Livorno, where he tries the local seafood dishes, including cacciucco, a fish stew. He also learns about the town’s history as a port for ships traveling to and from the Mediterranean. Sicily has been conquered many times over by the Moors, Normans, Spanish, Greeks, and now Tucci. In Season 1, Episode 6, “Sicily” (March 21, 2021), Tucci arrives by train, ferried over the straits of Messina in a unique Italian fashion to explore the unique culture and cuisine of the Italian island of Sicily thoughtfully. He begins in Palermo, the island’s capital, where he samples traditional street food such as panelle and arancini. Tucci then visits a farm in the countryside, learning about the region’s agriculture and trying local specialties such as caponata and pasta alla Norma, two dishes that celebrate the eggplant and the many historical influences of Sicilian roots. He also meets with the fishermen of Lampedusa (173 miles south in the Agrigento province), and Beppe Billeci invites him to his house, where his wife prepares a delicious seafood feast with sarde beccafico, another cucina povera using fish to stuff poultry. Billeci shares the story of the October 3, 2013, migrant shipwreck, where 280 of the 300 migrants died. The Island of Lampedusa welcomes thousands of people crossing over from North Africa as the doorway to Europe. They discuss the recent increase in migrants and Lampedusa’s struggles to offer humanitarian aid. Next, he turns the focus back to wine, where he meets Arianna Occhipinti in Vittoria and learns about the region’s wine made with red varietal distinctly Sicilian grapes, Frappato and Nero d’Avola (Levine 2022). In Catania, he introduces Emanuela and Mimmo Pistone, who foster migrants, and the viewers meet Joy from Nigeria and Mustafa from Egypt, who share a meal made with traditional spices from northern Africa. The whole Sicilian episode juxtaposes history and current events threaded together through food. Based on the first season’s success, CNN greenlighted a second season of Tucci’s Searching for Italy. In Season 2, Episode 1, “Venice” (May 1, 2022), Tucci begins by taking a boat ride through the canals, admiring the stunning architecture, and learning about the city’s history. Tucci then visits a local market where he samples fresh seafood and produces,

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including the famous Venetian artichoke. Next, Tucci joins Giovanni “Gianni” Scappin, food advisor on Big Night, and purchases cuttlefish at the Rialto market and then makes risotto al nero di seppia together (Davis 2022). He meets with a local expert on Venetian cuisine and learns about the city’s unique culinary traditions, including spices from the East and the influence of neighboring regions such as Friuli and Emilia-Romagna. He also samples some classic Venetian snack foods, including baccalà mantecato (creamed salt cod) and sarde in saor (sweet and sour sardines). Finally, in Friuli Venezia Giulia near the Austrian border, he meets PolishJewish-­Italian chef Antonia Klugmann, whose menu is as diverse as her Triestine roots. Returning to the Veneto, he discovered the region’s famous wines, including Prosecco and Amarone, and tried local specialties such as risotto al nero di seppia and baccalà alla vicentina using sepia bought from the famous Rialto fish market. But fish and risotto are not the only foods on the menu. He goes duck-hunting in the marshes outside Venice and learns how to prepare a rich duck ragù. He ends the episode with two more tastings. In Trentino-Alto Adige, Tucci tasted the region’s hearty mountain cuisine, including speck and canederli. In the Aosta Valley, he explored the region’s alpine food traditions, including fontina cheese and beef stew. In Season 2, Episode 2, “Piedmont” (May 8, 2022), Tucci explores the region of Piedmont in northern Italy. Piedmont is known for its wine, truffles, coffee, and chocolate and encompasses a rich culinary history. Tucci begins his expedition in Turin and samples a bicerin, a traditional espresso, chocolate, and cream drink local only to Turin. Next, Tucci travels to Pollenzo and the University of Gastronomic Sciences and learns about the Slow Food movement from the founder Carlo Petrini. Returning to Turin, he tastes the food of Elisabetta Chiantello, chef at Piola da Celso, who also subscribes to the Slow Food movement, where she makes bagna cauda, a dish of warm anchovy and garlic dip served with vegetables. Tucci also learns about Piedmont’s successful white truffle industry, a major part of the region’s economy. He joins Igor Bianchi, who later cooks for Tucci eggs with shaved white truffles after a truffle hunt with Bianchi’s dogs. Next, he introduces the viewers to Giulia Negri, “one of Piedmont’s youngest vintners and the first person in her family to make Barolo” (Sawyer 2022). He visits a winery and meets with a local winemaker who explains the different grape varieties and the importance of the terroir in the winemaking process. Finally, he dines with the owner of Ristorante

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Alpage, Cecilia Lazzarotto, and has the local bleu d’Aoste and fonduta, the Italian version of fondue with fontina cheese. In Season 2, Episode 3, “Umbria” (May 15, 2022), Tucci travels to the Umbria region of central Italy, famous for their pork products. Tucci starts his journey in the town of Assisi, famous for being the birthplace of St. Francis and the Basilica di San Francesco, adorned with the frescoes of Cimabue and Giotto. He visits the basilica and learns about the life and teachings of St. Francis. Tucci joins Claudia Ferracchiato, leader of the women-led “pink-tinted” hunt (la caccia si tinge di rosa), on a boar hunt. Later, Ferracchiato’s mother, Giuseppina, prepares a wild boar ragù, a typical cuisine of the region. Valentina Santanicchio, the chef of Capitano del Popolo, joins Tucci in visiting the Orvieto Underground, an area dotted with Etruscan caves carved into the rocks for pigeons, then cooks him a pigeon dish. Departing from the expected, in Season 2, Episode 4, “London” (May 22, 2022), Tucci leaves Italy and travels to London to explore the city’s significant Italian cuisine and culture. Tucci begins by visiting the Borough Market, where he samples Italian foods such as fresh pasta, cheese, and salumi. Next, Tucci meets with renowned chef Angela Hartnett, who takes him to her Italian-inspired restaurant, Murano. Hartnett shares her experiences growing up in an Italian family in the UK and the impression that has had on her cooking. Tucci also visits the Italian embassy in London, where he meets with the Italian Ambassador, Raffaele Trombetta. The ambassador discusses the strong cultural ties between Italy and the UK and the importance of Italian cuisine in bringing people together. Later, Tucci explores the Italian influence on the art and architecture of London. He visits the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he marvels at the Italian Renaissance art collection, and the St. Pancras International Station, where he sees the aesthetics of Italian architect and designer Luigi Gallo. Finally, Tucci enjoys a traditional Italian meal at La Mia Mamma, where mothers from different regions of Italy cook their favorite family recipes for the hungry local clientele who yearn for a taste of their childhoods. Tucci travels to the southern region of Calabria, known for its stunning coastline and rustic cuisine, in Season 2, Episode 5, “Calabria” (October 9, 2022) to explore the region of his ancestors.1 He begins his tour in his grandfather’s hometown, Marzi, to seek out the family home and discovers the surname Tucci is commonplace. After enjoying a lunch of bread stuffed with broccoli rabe and sausage, the original to-go meal of Calabria,

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they head out to the seaside town of Tropea, perched on a cliff overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. He then learns about the Tropean red onion, a distinctly sweet variety local to Tropea. He then enjoys a simple traditional dish of “red onion” spaghetti. Continuing his tour, Tucci explores the rugged terrain of the Aspromonte National Park, where he meets a shepherd and learns about the region’s tradition of goat cheese-making. He also visits a vineyard where he tastes local wines, including the strong and fruity Cirò Rosso. In Reggio Calabria, Tucci samples more local dishes, including swordfish cooked in a tomato and onion sauce and a spicy seafood pasta dish called spaghetti alla pescatora. The culinary crescendo that transcends generations and borders, Tucci’s journey through Italy concludes in Cittanova, Tucci’s maternal grandparents’ home. Stanley, his mother, father, and the extended Tropiano family gather for a feast of stockfish in tomato sauce, roasted goat with potatoes, and savory zeppole. Here, familial ties, cultural heritage, and the shared joy of a traditional feast illuminate the essence of Calabria, leaving us savoring not just the delectable dishes but the enduring warmth of familial connections. Cagliari is the setting for the opening of Season 2, Episode 6, “Sardinia” (October 16, 2022), where Tucci begins his journey in the capital city of Cagliari, where he visits the colorful San Benedetto market and samples various local delicacies such as bottarga, a cured fish roe, and pane carasau, a crispy flatbread. He then travels to Cabras to learn about the island’s traditional fishing techniques and taste the famous fregola, a pasta made with semolina flour. Next, Tucci visits the historic city of Oristano and discovers its ancient architecture and cultural heritage. He also tries the local specialty dish, sa fregula cu a cocciula, a hearty soup made with fregola pasta and clams. In the village of Mamoiada, Tucci learns about the island’s unique carnival tradition, the Mamuthones, where men dressed in sheepskins and cowbells perform a dance to ward off evil spirits. He also visits a local winery and tries the Vermentino wine, known for its delicate flavor. Finally, Tucci travels to the mountainous region of Barbagia and explores its rugged terrain, rich history, and authentic cuisine. He visits a shepherd’s hut and samples pecorino cheese, made from the milk of Sardinian sheep, and also tries pane guttiau, a type of bread cooked on an open flame. In Season 2, Episode 7, “Puglia” (October 23, 2022), Tucci begins his journey in the city of Bari, where he tries a variety of local specialties, including focaccia, panzerotti, and orecchiette pasta. He also visits the Basilica of San Nicola, a major Catholic pilgrimage site. Next, Tucci travels

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to Martina Franca, where he learns about the local winemaking traditions and tastes some of the region’s famous Primitivo wine. He also tries some of the town’s famous street food, such as bombette, a grilled meat skewer. Tucci then heads to the coastal town of Polignano a Mare, where he takes a dip in the Adriatic Sea and samples some fresh seafood dishes. He also visits the Grotta Palazzese, a stunning restaurant built into a natural cave overlooking the sea. Finally, Tucci continues to the town of Alberobello, a UNESCO World Heritage Site known for its unique trulli houses, cone-­ shaped buildings made of stone. He learns about the history and architecture of the trulli and tries some local sweets made with almond paste. In Season 2, Episode 8, “Liguria” (October 30, 2022), Tucci explores the Liguria region of Italy, a coastal region known for its stunning beaches, beautiful landscapes, and delectable food. Tucci begins his journey in Genoa, the capital city of Liguria, where he learns about the region’s history and its importance as a trade and commerce gateway during the Renaissance period. He also explores the Old Town, where he tries local specialties such as focaccia, farinata, and pesto made with large leaves of fragrant basil. Next, Tucci visits the village of Portofino, a picturesque fishing village that has become a popular destination for tourists. He explores the village’s colorful buildings and stunning harbor and tries fresh seafood at a local restaurant. Tucci then travels to Camogli, where he learns about the region’s traditional fishing techniques and tries local dishes such as anchovies and stuffed mussels. He also visits a family-owned olive oil mill to learn about making olive oil. Finally, Tucci visits the Cinque Terre, an isolated group of five picturesque villages famous for their colorful houses and stunning sea views. He explores the villages and tries local specialties such as trofie pasta with pesto and the local dessert wine, Sciacchetrà. Throughout the series, Tucci provides commentary on the cultural significance of each dish and how it reflects the history and traditions of the region. He contemplates the historical and current political issues facing Italians today and presents them to the viewer in a thought-provoking manner. He brings a personal touch to each episode, sharing memories of his own experiences in Italy and reflecting on how the country’s food culture has influenced his life. With stunning scenery and enchanting food, “Searching for Italy” offers a vibrant and engaging exploration of Italy’s culinary traditions, making it a must-watch for food lovers and travel enthusiasts alike.

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Note 1. Monique Jessen and Julie Mazziotta write that Tucci “grew up in Westchester County, NY, the oldest of three children in a family with roots in Calabria, Italy” (Jessen and Mazziotta, 41). They report that he “was diagnosed with cancer at the base of his tongue in 2017 and underwent intensive 35-day radiation treatment and seven sessions of chemotherapy that ravaged his senses and left him unable to eat and dependent on a feeding tube …. He lost more than 30 lbs.” (ibid., 40).

Works Cited Artusi, Pellegrino. Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Davis, Janelle. “Yes, You Can Make This Pitch-Black Venetian Classic from ‘Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy.’” CNN, Cable News Network, 2 May 2022. https:// www.cnn.com/travel/article/stanley-­tucci-­recipe-­black-­ink-­risotto-­cuttlefish-­ wellness-­origseriesfilms/index.html (accessed April 10, 2023). Di Noia, Silvia. “Rome’s Centocelle Neighborhood Is on Fire.” Italics Magazine, 28 Nov. 2019. https://italicsmag.com/2019/11/28/romes-­centocelle-­ neighborhood-­is-­on-­fire/ (accessed April 10, 2023). Grierson, Tim. “Before Stanley Tucci Was the Internet’s Boyfriend, There Was ‘Big Night.’” MEL Magazine, January 30, 2021. melmagazine.com/en-us/ story/before-stanley-tucci-was-the-internets-boyfriend-there-was-big-night (accessed September 10, 2023). Jessen, Monique, and Julie Mazziotta. “Stanley Tucci’s New Taste for Life.” People, Vol. 97, No. 12 (2022), 38–43. Levine, Irene S. “Searching for Italy: Stanley Tucci Visits Sicily.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 9 Nov. 2022. https://www.forbes.com/sites/irenelevine/ 2 0 2 1 / 0 3 / 1 7 / s e a r c h i n g -­f o r -­i t a l y -­s t a n l e y -­t u c c i -­v i s i t s -­ sicily/?sh=4166a4104871 (accessed April 10, 2023). Sawyer, Madeline. “Review: ‘Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy’ Provides a View of Italy’s Culinary Diversity.” The Dartmouth, 8 July 2022. https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2022/07/stanley-­tucci-­searching-­for-­italy-­provides-­a-­ view-­of-­italys-­culinary-­diversity (accessed April 10, 2023).

Films and TV Shows Cited Big Night (Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci, 1996). Billy Bathgate (Robert Benton, 1991). The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel, 2006).

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It Could Happen to You (Andrew Bergman, 1994). Kiss of Death (Barbet Schroeder, 1995). Prizzi’s Honor (John Huston, 1985). Searching for Italy (TV Show, 2021–2022).

CHAPTER 16

Chef/Cook, Influencer, Mixologist, Travel Host: Stanley Tucci as Everyman Alan J. Gravano

Since 1999, Stanley Tucci has shared his passion for Italian cuisine and cocktails with several cookbooks: Cucina & Famiglia: Two Italian Families Share Their Stories, Recipes, and Traditions (1999); The Tucci Cookbook (2012); The Tucci Table: Cooking with Family and Friends (2014); and Taste: My Life Through Food (2021). The first cookbook happened due to requests for recipes from Big Night (1996), especially timpàno, the show-stopping entrée of the memorable feast created by Secondo (Tucci) and his brother, Primo (Tony Shalhoub), which has “inside, all of the most important things in the world.” Timpàno is essentially a large drum of molded pasta filled with hand-made ziti, salami, eggs, cheese, and tomato sauce, inverted before serving. Coinciding with the success of CNN’s Searching for Italy (2021–2022), Tucci posted a video on social media with him making a Shaken Negroni. That began his social media rise, with his followers watching him bartend and cook from

A. J. Gravano (*) Rocky Mountain University of Health Professions, Provo, UT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Fioretti, F. Orsitto (eds.), Italian Americans in Film and Other Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47211-4_16

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his home in London with his wife, Felicity Blunt, capturing it all. Capitalizing on the need for connection during the COVID pandemic, people turned to social media to fill the void. This moment changed everything; Tucci merited sponsorships with Tanqueray and San Pellegrino, and his flair for making stylish cocktails propelled Tucci’s name even further than his acting career did alone. Tucci, a food lover and award-winning actor known for his roles in films like The Hunger Games Tetralogy (2012–2015), Julie & Julia (2009), The Devil Wears Prada (2006), and the already mentioned Big Night, has recently been making waves on social media with his cocktail-­ making skills and promotion of San Pellegrino. With his charming demeanor and impressive culinary skills, Tucci has quickly become a social media sensation, garnering millions of views and followers across various platforms. First, Tucci’s social media fame rocketed skyward in April 2020, when at the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown, Tucci posted on Instagram a three-minute video of his version of the Negroni, a classic Italian cocktail made with Gin, Vermouth, and Campari. His video went viral, and so did his social media presence. To date, Tucci has captured over 2.1  million followers on Instagram, 628 thousand followers on Facebook, and 1.1 million TikTok followers. In “Stanley Tucci Explaining His Negroni Recipe Has Entranced the Internet,” Melissa Locker argues that Tucci “does his twist on a classic Negroni. As smooth jazz plays in the background, Tucci showed off his step-by-step negroni guide with the world, captioning the video with the words, ‘Drink up!’” (Locker 2020). The idea of shaking the Negroni never occurred to me and thus started my journey of following Stanley Tucci, the cook, mixologist, and travel host. Unlike the rest of the world during the pandemic, Tucci showed no signs of stopping. He starred in the British film Supernova in 2020 and voiced the character Bitsy Brandenham in Apple’s animated series Central Park (2020–present). He continues to share his cocktail recipes and techniques on social media, offering his followers a behind-the-scenes look at how he has invented innovative twists on classic cocktails drinks since the first video aired in 2020. People took notice. In 2021, Tucci hosted CNN’s Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, which allowed the rest of the locked-down world to travel vicariously with Tucci throughout Italy, sampling all of the delectable food and noted regional wines, such as Langhe for Barolo and Nero d’Avola and Frappato in Vittoria, Sicily. Tucci’s family has roots in Calabria, and he speaks Italian, all of which seemed to add to the attraction. It is no wonder when, later that same year, he partnered

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with Tanqueray No. TEN (“Stanley Tucci Joins Tanqueray”) as a brand ambassador to promote his signature Martini using 1.5 oz of Tanqueray 10, 0.25 oz of dry vermouth, and a grapefruit twist garnish. Soon after, it seems nearly every online media magazine or blogger was in line for an interview or writing about it (House 2021). On June 18, 2021, he posted his first live Instagram video making a Tanqueray No. TEN Grapefruit Martini  (House 2021). From classic cocktails like Martinis and Negronis to more unique concoctions like his “Quarantucci,” AKA “40 Tucci,” crafted with Vodka, orange juice, and thyme, Tucci’s creations are both inventive and accessible. He even offers tips on producing the perfect ice cubes and properly shaking a cocktail. In collaboration with the Gin brand, Tucci has shared numerous cocktail recipes that feature Tanqueray as the star. He has even created his signature drink, “The Stanley Tucci,” which combines his sponsors’ products: Tanqueray Gin, with San Pellegrino Limonata and fresh lemon juice for a zesty and refreshing taste. Fast forward to 2023, Tucci appears as a guest on Chef Ina Garten’s new show and confesses that she has never had a Martini. Tucci replies: “Jeez, you gotta get out more.” He combines 4 oz of Tanqueray with 0.75 oz of white Vermouth over ice and stirs. He pours it over chilled glasses, brushes the edges with a lemon rind, and adds an olive, yielding a “super dry” Martini. We watch as Garten takes her first sip, and Stanley stands proudly, awaiting the verdict: “Delicious” (Leasca 2023). In addition to sharing his cocktail recipes, Tucci has also been promoting San Pellegrino, a premium Italian sparkling water brand. On February 2, 2022, San Pellegrino’s parent company, Nestlé, announced a new campaign with a limited-edition “Stan Pellegrino” bottle set (“Two Italian Stars Align”), including a cutting board and stemless water glasses, which each bottle “engraved with Tucci’s signature” (Yagoda 2022). In a series of videos varying from three to eight minutes, he demonstrates how to pair San Pellegrino with different types of cuisine, from pizza to sushi. Tucci’s love for the brand is apparent as he discusses the importance of quality ingredients and San Pellegrino’s role in elevating the meal. In November of 2022, Tucci and San Pellegrino unveiled “San Pellegrino’s Taste of Tucci,” a meal kit accompanied by a bottle of San Pellegrino water. The first featured gnocchetti con salsiccia e broccolini, created by World Chef recipe kit experts, quickly sold out. The arrangement contained gnocchetti sardi (“a small Sardinian dry pasta”), sausage, broccolini,

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fennel, Pecorino Romano, and extra virgin olive oil, with instructions to prepare it at home (Yagoda 2022). But Tucci is not just a cocktail enthusiast, he’s also an accomplished cook. This comes as no surprise after his role in Big Night, where he plays an Italian immigrant in 1950s New Jersey who struggles to open an authentic Italian restaurant called Paradise. The movie culminates in a multicourse feast featuring timpàno, the already mentioned large baked pasta dish filled with “all the best things.” In 1999, Gianni Scappin, Mimi S.  Taft, and Joan T.  Tucci published Cucina & Famiglia: Two Italian Families Share Their Stories, Recipes, and Traditions with the foreword by Stanley Tucci. Joan Tucci includes a detailed account of how timpàno made its way to the U.S. by “Apollonia Pisani, Stan’s maternal grandmother”: She grew up in Serra San Bruno, a small hill town in Calabria. If you saw Big Night, you have an idea of the wonderful visual impression timpàno can make. It is also intensely flavorful and well worth the process of preparing the components to fill the drum of pasta dough. (Tucci et al. 1999, 170)

Stanley Tucci concludes emphatically: “Though many Big Night timpàno recipes have been printed in various magazines and newspapers since the film’s release, they are imposters. This is the true recipe for our timpàno” (ibid., 172 – emphasis his). Since then, he has published two cookbooks and a memoir, which includes recipes following a short vignette. The Tucci Cookbook (2012) features timpàno and other recipes, such as Venetian Salted Cod Pâté and Livia’s Tiramisu. In The Tucci Table: Cooking with Family and Friends (2014), Tucci acknowledges in the introduction: A number of years ago, I helped put together a book for my culinary-loving parents and my friend Chef Gianni Scappin. Originally titled Cucina e Famiglia and later revised and reissued as The Tucci Cookbook, it was written to celebrate and safeguard the culinary history of our families  – and this book [The Tucci Table] does very much the same thing. … But if they are never written down, tomorrow those recipes and the memories they fill us with will be gone forever. (Tucci and Blunt 2014, ix)

Finally, Tucci published Taste: My Life Through Food (2021), in which he reflects on the importance of the Italian American kitchen as a child and films such as Julie & Julia and Big Night. In Chapter 7, “Christmas Day,” Tucci recalls:

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There is a dish, a very special dish, that is served in our home on Christmas Day. It is called timpàno. This is a baked drum of pastry-like dough filled with pasta, ragù, salami, various cheeses, hard-boiled eggs, and meatballs. It’s a big, heavy dish, and needless to say very filling. The recipe and tradition of serving it on special occasions, particularly Christmas, were brought to America by my father’s family. (Tucci 2021, 109)

On his social media platforms, Tucci has given his followers a behind-the-­ scenes look at his culinary routine, sharing tips and techniques for creating fresh, authentic meals at home. In one video, he prepares gnocchi from scratch, using potatoes, eggs, nutmeg, flour, Parmesan cheese, and olive oil. He talks viewers through each step of the process, from making the dough to rolling out the pasta into logs, cutting it, and cooking it to perfection. These Instagram posts allow Tucci’s wry personality to flourish and include moments of back-and-forth between him and his wife, Felicity Blunt. Tucci’s acting roles, cocktail-making, Tanqueray No. TEN and San Pellegrino’s promotion and passion for food have made him a beloved figure on social media, with fans eagerly anticipating his next culinary creation or cocktail recipe. By partnering with San Pellegrino and Tanqueray Gin, he has been able to promote products that he genuinely loves and uses in his kitchen and bar. His authenticity shows as he describes his creations and connections to his Italian American heritage. And for those of us at home, especially with the cancellation of CNN’s Searching for Italy, we can only hope that Tucci continues to share his cooking and mixology skills with us for years to come.

Works Cited House, Alana. “Stanley Tucci Joins Tanqueray as Its Global Brand Ambassador.” Drinks Digest, No. 16, June 2021. https://drinksdigest.com/2021/06/16/ stanley-­tucci-­brand-­ambassador-­tanqueray/ (accessed April 10, 2023). Leasca, Stacey. “Stanley Tucci Just Made Ina Garten her First Martini Ever.” Food and Wine. March 3, 2023. https://www.foodandwine.com/stanley-­tucci-­ina-­ garten-­martini-­7187458 (accessed April 10, 2023). Locker, Melissa. “Stanley Tucci Explaining His Negroni Recipe Has Entranced the Internet.” Time.Com, Apr. 2020. https://time.com/5824753/stanley-­tucci-­ negroni/ (accessed April 10, 2023). Tucci, Stanley. Taste: My Life through Food. New York: Gallery Books, 2021. Tucci, Stanley, and Felicity Blunt. The Tucci Table. New York: Gallery Books, 2014.

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Tucci, Stanley, Joan Tropiano Tucci, Gianni Scappin, and Mimi S. Taft. Cucina & Famiglia: Two Italian Families Share Their Stories, Recipes, and Traditions. New York: William Morrow Cookbooks, 1999. Yagoda, Maria. “Stanley Tucci Just Dropped a Limited-Edition Collab with S.  Pellegrino.” Food & Wine, Food & Wine, 2 Feb. 2022. https://www. foodandwine.com/news/stanley-­tucci-­san-­pellegrino (accessed April 10, 2023).

Films and TV Series Cited Big Night (Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci, 1996) Central Park (TV Series, 2020–present) The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel, 2006) The Hunger Games (Gary Ross, 2012) The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (Francis Lawrence, 2013) The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (Francis Lawrence, 2014) The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (Francis Lawrence, 2015) Julie & Julia (Nora Ephron, 2009) Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy (TV Series, 2021–2022) Supernova (Harry Macqueen, 2020)

CHAPTER 17

An Unlimited Memeiosis of The Godfather: Diachronic and Synchronic Observations of a Pervasive and Ubiquitous Meme Anthony Dion Mitzel

After 50-plus years, what can anyone say about The Godfather that has not been said already? Even the evocation of the phrase ‘The Godfather’ brings visual preconceptions into the mind along with phrases and music to the ears. The metaphorical imaginarium of the film carries a certain cultural weight that still stimulates and cultivates manifestations of the texts years since it was released. In a certain sense, the text in whatever form still captivates readers and audiences. For some, it is because they like and appreciate the films, while others take part in the ritual of the event. When these days someone either reads the text in book form or watches the film, they are at once transported to an idealized American past and pastoral Sicily, each place providing meaning for observers as to what an Italian and American is, at least in the world(s) that Mario Puzo and Francis Ford

A. D. Mitzel (*) Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Fioretti, F. Orsitto (eds.), Italian Americans in Film and Other Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47211-4_17

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Coppola created and refined. By virtue of their persistence 50-plus years on, these texts still have value, and as we push further into the twenty-first century, they still exert a cultural force. It is my position that The Godfather, as a meme, has permeated both the media and memeiosphere, i.e., the sum totality of the ecology of memes. It is the memes and meme cycles that are creating and shaping public and private discourse, while at the same time generating material artifacts that then have gone on to shape discourse for themselves with regard to the source texts in novel combinations and in various mediatic forms. Yet, as time passes and the multimodality of The Godfather persists, expands, and embeds into these novel mediatic forms, including ones of a digital nature, it cannot be denied that the book-text(s) and film-text(s) are part and parcel of literary and cinematographic history. It is due to their popularity in the culture that these texts were the origination point of The Godfather meme and, due to this popularity, the subsequent meme cycles that were generated from it continue to be observed today. If we are to consider the unforeseen consequences of actions and expand the meaning and interpretation of what The Godfather as a text is, then The Godfather meme in a multimodal frame provides an unlimited number of permutations to observe and analyze. A well-known anecdote recalls that when Puzo wrote The Godfather (1969) he did not have the lofty goal of making fine, literary art. Deeply in debt at the time, he needed to generate income to pay off an assortment of debts, chief of which were debts incurred due to gambling (Evans 1994; Gross 2019). Little did he know that this act of creation would go on to generate infinite permutations of multimodal memetic signs embedded with his idea(s). Critical mass began with the novel being a best seller, which was further amplified and expanded through Coppola’s film (1972). Due to the visual nature of film and audience reach, it went on to embed new and old aphorisms, sayings, ideas, and familial notions, including what it meant to be the ‘other’ and an outsider in the US and Italy, and crucially the application of power in contemporary society, only to name a few attributes. Yet, as the 50th anniversary of the release of the film unfolds, we can still observe a plethora of multimodal signs (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2001) that have been generated first from text, then amplified through the medium of filmmaking, and now into television. Furthermore, ideas related to The Godfather can be found to persist in the use of image macros, i.e., the semi-­ephemeral digital artifacts commonly referred to as internet memes. Phrases and the folk wisdom from the text can also be found in diverse mediatic

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expressions such as film, television, video games, and popular culture, often used as metaphors to evoke humor and emotions. Due to the multimodality of The Godfather, it continues to shape discourse today. For this chapter, I will discuss The Godfather as a pervasive and ubiquitous text in popular culture through the lens of meme theory (Dawkins 1976) and unlimited memeiosis (Mitzel 2021, 2022), demonstrating the impact the classic text still has on contemporary discourse and the fecundity of The Godfather as a meme, broadly speaking. The intent of this study is to introduce and demonstrate a novel semio-memetic model for the interpretation of Italian signs in the periphery, using The Godfather as a prime example. My position is that 50 years on, one can still observe and interpret signs generated from The Godfather source text precisely because as a meme it continues to shape and embed itself materially, discursively, and ephemerally in films, television, and increasingly digital formats, including streaming, and continues to contribute to US and, by extension, global popular culture. Firstly, we will discuss how The Godfather is a meme through the concepts of meme theory and multimodality. Secondly, evidence will be provided to support this position with a small and targeted sample taken from film and television. One would be remiss to think of memes as only historical artifacts, relegated to the past and locked in time. Just as the image of Don Vito Corleone was first locked into celluloid and now electronic bytes called (internet) memes, any iconicity related to The Godfather source texts can be observed in several multimodal texts, aesthetically and textually. With that said, if we were to dismiss the more multivalent idea of the meme and only focus on the image macros, i.e., digital artifacts with text parsed into an image shared from person to person over social media applications, in emails/correspondence, and/or in print media, then we would miss an opportunity to explain how The Godfather became and continues to be a cultural phenomenon. For the uninitiated, The Godfather is a best-selling novel by Mario Puzo as well as a 1972 American crime drama film directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who also wrote the screenplay with Mario Puzo. It tells the story of the Italian (Sicilian) American Corleone family, a powerful Mafia dynasty, headed by patriarch Don Vito Corleone played by Marlon Brando. The film is set in a post-World War II New York City and focuses on the struggles of the Corleone family to maintain their influence and power in the criminal underworld as well as their control of judges and political figures. When Don Vito Corleone is targeted for assassination, his

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youngest son, Marine Corps veteran and Ivy League-educated Michael (played by Al Pacino), steps in to enact retribution and assumes the role of head of the family’s business interest. In his descent into existential turmoil and to the dismay of his father, Michael eventually becomes that which his father tried to avoid: a ruthless and feared mafia Don himself. Along with its vivid portrayal of organized crime, both The Godfather novel and film also explore themes of family, loyalty, honor, betrayal, and power, as well as the immigrant experience and the experience of returning to Italy from an Italian American perspective; this last being something that was novel for American audiences. The Godfather is widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time, earning critical acclaim and winning multiple Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Marlon Brando, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Puzo and Coppola. Both the novel and film were financial successes, so much so that the film is credited with saving a beleaguered Paramount Pictures and ushering in a revival of the company’s portfolio of film productions. Moving on to the area of the memetic, its iconic imagery and memorable quotes, such as “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse”, have become part of popular culture. To expand the metaphorical frame of inquiry to encompass the totality of The Godfather as an iconic sign and a cultural symbol emblematic of the film, we must first take into consideration the concept of the meme and how we shall consider The Godfather a meme in and of itself. Due to its popularity, this meme has become a kernel of informational content that has many nodes orbiting around it. There are infinite permutations of nodes but only one kernel. According to Richard Dawkins, a meme was originally posited as a “noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” (Dawkins, 192). He further goes on to state that a meme is “a unit of human cultural transmission analogous to the gene, arguing that replication also happens in culture, albeit in a different sense” (ibid.). Memes are ideas or cultural artifacts that are transmitted from person to person in the real world, while internet memes have since been popularized in digital culture and are shared through the internet and move through the internet’s metaphorical central nervous system at record speed (Chiaro 2018). They can take the form of images, videos, or text and often involve humor or satire (Attardo 2020). Image macros can be created and shared by anyone with access to the internet, and they often spread rapidly and widely across social media platforms. Moreover,

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internet memes can be used to express emotions and opinions or to comment and ‘align’ (Zappavigna 2012) with the discourse on current events or popular culture. Although Zappavigna’s research looks at hashtags on Twitter, the idea is applicable to social discourse, whether it be online or in the real world. Due to the openness of the World Wide Web, meme culture has become supranational as well as translingual. Memes have become an important and increasingly essential, ever-evolving part of modern real-world and online communication as well as intercultural mediation, especially regarding social and political discourses. Regarding memes in the expanded sense, Blommaert and Varis have gone on to refine the concept of the meme and consider them multimodal signs in which images and texts are combined (Blommaert and Varis 8). Furthermore, applied to ‘The Godfather meme’, the multimodality of the meme has embedded in multiple modes or forms of communication or representation to convey information from and associated with the source text through a combination of visual and auditory channels. It is through these channels that memes are allowed to continue to spread and evolve. Moreover, due to its visibility, recognizability, and multimodality (Kress 2009), together with the fact that it is easy to create, a meme can shape and spread a socially constructed public discourse (Shifman 2014a, 4). Shifman focuses on the virality of internet memes and how they can be considered a “genre” (ibid.). Attardo’s linguistic approach analyzes memes and the meme cycles they produce by applying his work on the intertextuality of joke cycles (Attardo 2001, 2020), while Tsakona adds an important quality to the interpretation of memes by stating that one “presupposes the recognition and understanding of implicit or explicit intertextual references” (Tsakona, 3). To put it all together, a meme is ‘an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture’, while internet ‘memes’ are cultural symbols and social ideas that spread virally. Even though it falls outside of the scope of this chapter, it should be stated that internet memes are often humorous, and they synthesize complex ideas into easily digestible signs due to slight modification (remixing) and replication (fecundity). For a meme to achieve memetic status, it must pass through various stages in its potentially infinite lifespan. The meme cycle, like the joke cycle (Attardo 2020), refers to the life cycle of a meme. It is generally accepted that meme cycles evolve through multiple stages which we will define as the following:

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Inception A meme is an act of creation by an individual or a group of individuals and is typically based on a current event, popular culture, or social phenomenon. We can consider Mario Puzo the originator of ‘The Godfather meme’, while Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola are responsible for generating the most influential form of the meme, the 1972 film. As opposed to the source text, the film is the main generator of most permutations.

Diffusion The meme spreads rapidly through social media and the internet, typically through sharing, reposting, and retweeting. Due to the influence The Godfather has exerted on popular culture, it is easy to find memes embedded with its content floating around the memeiosphere, a term extended from Yuri Lotman’s “semiosphere” (Lottman, 124). Moreover, due to the relative ease of decentralized, horizontal meme-making applications, anyone can parse text onto an image gleaned from the internet, share it, and then engage in said memeiosphere. It is an ephemeral space of discourse that is highly reactive to time and space.

Modification As the meme spreads, it may undergo variations and adaptations, as different people add their own unique spin on it or else it becomes utilized in a new production, e.g., the re-release of The Godfather on its 50th anniversary. Another example is the recent Coppola re-edit, which we can consider a memetic remix, of The Godfather Part III (1990) titled The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone (2020). This new version of the film coincided with the 30th anniversary of the original version. New stories about certain political figures, for example, that deal with power dynamics can be fertile ground for images and aphorisms adapted from The Godfather, but, like the 24  h news cycle, these have relatively short lifespans.

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Declination Ultimately, as a meme declines and wanes in popularity, it becomes less influential and fades from public consciousness. This is because it has been replaced by a new meme because people have lost interest in it, or because there is nothing in popular culture that references it anymore.

Dormancy After a meme declines and stops spreading, it remains in the memeiosphere awaiting an opportunity to be reused and remixed into another novel combination. Like a virus, memes as viruses of the internet’s central nervous system are never excised from the memeiosphere. Events such as holidays, election cycles, or current events are prime movers that bring memes back to life and out of dormancy. The duration of meme cycles is highly variable, from a few hours to several months, depending on the popularity of the meme and the speed at which it spreads through the general public and, by extension, social media and the internet. After a meme’s life cycle has declined, if the meme does not reach another post-genesis critical mass of virality, it will then stagnate becoming dormant, waiting to be discovered at another temporospatial moment. On the other hand, if a meme does achieve another post-genesis replication, this time with slight modification, and the meme continues to replicate while undergoing changes (remixing) to its internal grammar, then it has achieved a relative state of persistence or ‘memeiosis’ (Attardo 2020; Shifman 2014). By extending and applying Umberto Eco’s reconceptualization of Charles Sanders Pierce’s semiosis, i.e., the process of creating and interpreting meaning through signs and symbols (Eco, 68–69) to the meme form, memeiosis helps us understand how memes evolve and how we use them to communicate. It allows us to interpret the meanings of the signs and symbols we encounter in said memes wherever we experience them. If and, most relevant to our purposes here, when the meme—and by extension meme cycle—becomes a fundamental part of a discourse and is extensively embedded in both cultural artifacts and common linguistic usage—such as catchphrases and aphorisms—it has then achieved a relative state of infinity or what I refer to as “unlimited memeiosis” (Mitzel 2021, 2022). Unlimited memeiosis (UM) is achieved when the specific semi-ephemeral iteration of a particular meme is highly manipulatable or ‘frenetic’, while the interpretable meaning of the

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meme—its internal grammar (template)—remains relatively constant or ‘static’. To use the age-old metaphor, UM is when ‘the genie is out of the bottle’ and cannot be put back in, as the meme has taken on a life of its own. What is most important to re-bridge the gap between memes as a theory and internet memes as cultural artifacts is that unlimited memeiosis applies to all forms potential memes take regardless of where and how we encounter them: past, present, and future. The modifier ‘unlimited’ implies that we, as users, have both control and zero control of the memes. With regard to memes in the mediasphere, a meme cycle can be considered a genre (Shifman 2014a, b) and “part of a limited number of story forms that have been refined into formulas because of their unique social and/or aesthetic qualities” (Schatz, 16), although Schatz does not use the term ‘meme’. This refinement is also a way for a meme cycle to continue its fitness, that is, how well a meme spreads. After a meme establishes itself, it can draw on new sources of multimodal content via the process of memeiosis. Because image macros, albeit relevant to our discussion, fall outside the purposes of this chapter, we will be focusing on the expanded concept of meme as text—and not the specific image macros—associated with The Godfather as an iconic sign. This section has attempted to provide a summary of current meme theory suggesting that The Godfather is one such text that has achieved memetic status and now has a cultural gravity/gravitas all of its own. It now creates meaning that is independent of its source text. As with semiosis applied to signs, memeiosis applied to memes defines itself through itself. One no longer needs to have read the source text or even see the films to recognize the text. Unlimited memeiosis, on the other hand, adds a crucial component as it considers all manifestations of a meme regardless of where it is found and what form it takes. From books, film, television, print and online magazines, podcasts, video games (Cavallaro 2022), t-shirts (Mitzel 2014, 2016), songs, influences on fashion and masculinity (Bauman 2022; Gardaphé 2006, 180–192), jokes, and digital image macros themselves (Chiaro 2018), The Godfather as a meme is pervasive and ubiquitous and continues to sustain itself through multimodality. In the next section we shall look at the diachronic and synchronic evolution and persistence of ‘The Godfather meme’, possible origins, and its continuing influence on popular culture. In what we shall call the diachronic perspective, we can consider the reality that Italians and Italian Americans have been in the US for well over 100 years, and their culture via The Godfather and the influence it has had

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on mainstream American culture can be seen in such diverse areas as literature, film, journalism, politics, and digital media. The mediasphere works in tandem with the memeiosphere exchanging content that then goes on to shape not only memes and ideas but also public discourse, whether it be verbal or aesthetic in nature. Therefore, ‘The Godfather meme’ persists because it continues to be relevant as a way for people to communicate human ideas, hopes and desires, justice, and inequity: all the things that are contained in the idea of the ‘Other’ embodied by the countercultural gangster genre. These notions of culture and society are not exclusive to this genre, which has created a visceral form of popular fiction. Due to this intensity, the ideals of the gangster have been codified into the DNA of the artistic manifestations associated with said genre. Moreover, the genre of Italian American-themed film and television products contains multiple discernible themes, which we can also consider memes, due to the overall aesthetic these th(m)emes provide the genre. Italian American audiovisual products, and by extension the gangster genre, often contain the following ‘social facts’ (Durkheim 1982) in some way and in different quantities: Family affairs: marriage History: traditions, music, stories/tales Places: the neighborhood The table as ritual: food Language Masculinity Vice: crime and criminal culture Violence and aggression Ceremonies Religion The topoi of the gangster and the origin of this archetype are characterized as emergent more than a specific creation and are a “strange mixture of fact and fiction” (Gardaphé, 3). This emergence was first consumed via print media and newsreels (ibid.) which were then brought to a larger public through the mass media where it became a cultural icon (ibid.). Fred Gardaphé’s seminal book From Wiseguys to Wise Men: The Gangster and Italian American Masculinities (2006) explains the origin and progression of the gangster in US society as well as the sociopolitical selection pressures that went into codifying the iconic sign:

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The gangster emerged in response to the evolution of corporate capitalism in the early twentieth century. Although criminal gangs had long occupied American cities, The Prohibition Act of 1920 and the desperate poverty brought on by the Great Depression in the 1930s provided opportunities for individual crime leaders to emerge and thrive. (ibid.)

Though not specifically referring to the gangster as a meme or the emergence of the gangster meme cycle, Gardaphè all but defines the memetic mechanism for one of the most pervasive archetypes in Hollywood and US popular imagination. As Hollywood amplified and exploited the cultural bogeyman of the day, establishing and cultivating the cinematic terrain, such films as Little Caesar (1931) and Scarface (1932) set the cultural icon—and, by extension, the US collective conscience—in stone. Moreover, we can hypothesize that Hollywood moguls, specifically Jack Warner, drew on their personal experience and observations of actual gangsters when choosing to produce these films, since many moguls came from humble beginnings, originating on the East Coast as well as west of Appalachia in places formerly referred to as the country’s ‘Steel Belt’. While Warner was born in Canada, his formative years were spent in the US, specifically in Youngstown, Ohio, where some of the first Warner Brothers theaters began. In fact, to lend circumstantial evidence and credence to the above-stated hypothesis, Warner in his autobiography states as much while recounting his experiences in Northeast Ohio as shaping the young Warner’s idea of mafiosi and crime: J.  Edgar Hoover told me that Youngstown in those days was one of the toughest cities in America, and a gathering place for Sicilian thugs active in the Mafia. There was a murder or two almost every Saturday night in our neighborhood, and knives and brass knuckles were standard equipment for the young hotheads on the prowl. (Warner and Jennings 29)

As the cultural and technological terrain was ready for the emergence of the gangster as meme, so too were people in positions of power to make it happen with greenlighting studio projects along with the necessary paratextual promotional outlays, which can often make or break a picture. Therefore, both industry and the public were primed for this novel, pervasive meme cycle. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s and into the 1950s, the gangster was a basic stock character in Hollywood productions, usually played by actors of Jewish descent, waning in the 1960s only to

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re-­emerge in 1972 with The Godfather. From that point on, we start to see more actors of Italian origin playing the characters. From there, the rest is cinematic and, now, memetic history. As we move on, more recently, in a bridge between the cinematic and television universes as well as the diachronic and synchronic section of this chapter, Paramount Pictures, which still holds the copyright for the 1972 film, has recently released a limited series called The Offer (2022). This series recounts the ‘fictionalized’ backstory of the making of The Godfather film. Here we have further evidence that ‘The Godfather meme’ has once again undergone another genesis, this time in the world of television, specifically online streaming. We can posit that a whole new generation of viewers will enter the text through this new multimodal channel and then, perhaps, go on to discover the source text(s). While we do not have enough time here, this is a potential area of further inquiry. In the synchronic, while The Sopranos (1999–2007) offered perhaps the greatest usage of The Godfather references, we shall focus on two more contemporary TV shows that do not use Italian Americana (IA) as an overarching aesthetic. While the two examples that follow are non-IA-­ based products, they are important because, while we shall take for granted that audiovisual products couched in IA themes would be appealing to IAs, shows such as Billions and The White Lotus cannot be considered IA-based shows. Therefore, they serve as just a pair of examples of how The Godfather has influenced media without a specific IA theme. Moreover, one would be remiss to not mention the parodies of Italian Americans, including the gangster, in one of television history’s longest-running sitcoms: The Simpsons (1989–present). Over 34 seasons, just about every important Italian mediatic cultural expression has been assimilated into the Simpson’s pantheon of pop culture, especially The Godfather. As a sort of cultural clearing house, non-Italian Americans and Italian Americans alike can see characters representing the Springfield Mafia headed by mobster ‘Fat Tony’ D’Amico. In another act of artistic and memetic cross-­ pollination, Fat Tony is voiced by Joe Mantegna, who himself played Joey Zasa in The Godfather Part III. While these shows are indeed relevant to a larger study, they are a bit dated for our purposes here since we are primarily interested in more recent manifestations. Billions (2016–present) is a premium cable drama series that follows the high-stakes world of New York City finance, law, and politics. The show revolves around two main characters: Bobby ‘Axe’ Axelrod (Damien Lewis), a billionaire hedge fund manager who has come from modest

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beginnings, and Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti), a powerful US attorney from an influential New York family. The two characters are vying for control in a ‘tale of two cities’, where Axelrod is the founder of Axe Capital, a hedge fund that has made him one of the wealthiest men in the world, and Chuck Rhoades, on the other hand, is an aggressive prosecutor who is determined to bring down corrupt and powerful figures in the financial world. The two are constantly at odds, with Rhoades determined to take down Axelrod. Part of the show’s appeal is found in how each protagonist seeks to outmaneuver the other over the course of the series. Like The Godfather, the show is defined by its insider versus outsider positionality of its protagonists and antagonists, who try to excel and survive in the same geographical environment the Corleone family and associates once inhabited, although in a different century and with a different set of selection pressures. While The Godfather is couched in immigration and ‘making it’ in the New World, the world Billions inhabits is where people have already made it and trying to maintain it. The show is also a meditation on how things work in the late-stage capitalistic system of the US, a system in decline as opposed to its former position as a system in ascent. The show also explores the power dynamics—both public and private—and complex relationships between the characters as they navigate the zero-sum world of high finance and legal battles that inevitably come with the terrain. In this timely and provocative series, we find another example of ‘The Godfather meme’, but the use of memetic content is mostly verbal- and not aesthetic-based. We can imagine that this is also part of the show’s appeal as it stands to reason that the show’s writers would use the language of the gangster canon and apply it to the power dynamics in the show. Though the show uses multiple references, we shall look at a sample that spans three seasons in order of appearance that demonstrates a consistent and sustained usage of The Godfather meme. In the first example, we find Bobby Axelrod referencing Michael Corleone’s first meeting with Apollonia, his future bride. In the show’s second season episode titled “With or Without You” we find a reference to show Axelrod expressing nostalgia: Axe: Hey, it’s me. I went to Terry’s bar. The memories came flooding back. Us there at the beginning, right after I got struck by the thunderbolt like Michael with Apollonia. (23:33—S2.E10)

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Our second example takes place in the following episode “Golden Frog Time”, where we find a reference to one of the film’s most tragic yet important scenes, the assassination of Sonny Corleone. In this scene, we find an exchange with Axelrod’s adjutant over the developing trouble of a potential IPO (Initial Public Offer): Bobby: Wow. You have something you really don’t want to tell me about. What happened? They shoot Sonny on the Causeway? Otherwise, spit it the fuck out. (3:20—S2.E11)

Moving on to the third season, another example presents itself in the episode “Flaw in the Death Star”. In direct reference to the scene in which the Corleone family consiglieri, and adopted son, Tom Hagan meets with hard-nosed Hollywood film producer Jack Waltz, a nomen à clef of Jack Warner, to persuade him to give a film role to Don Corleone’s godson Johnny Fontaine, we find an Axelrod core employee Taylor utter some lines quasi verbatim from the film: Taylor: Thank you for a very pleasant day. Have your car take me to the airport. Mr. Axelrod insists on hearing bad news at once. Oscar: Funny. (14:00—S3.E5)

Rounding out the season there, we find the season finale “Elmsley Count”. This example is in reference to the scene in which the audience discovers that Luca Brasi has been killed by the Corleone clan receiving a ‘Sicilian message’, the message being some dead fish wrapped in Brasi’s body armor. At a pivotal point in the episode, a few Axe Capital employees discuss making some serious work decisions with potentially negative consequences. Bobby: Now, who’s actually gone? And who’s on the fence? Wags: So far, it appears that other than Mafee, only Ben Kim sleeps with the fishes. (19:52—S3.E12)

In the season four series premiere “Chucky Rhoades’s Greatest Game”, we see a reticent Axe Capital employee ‘Mafee’ utter in embarrassment a line where Don Corleone admonishes his son Sonny for speaking out of turn during a pivotal business meeting with the dangerous gangster Sollozzo:

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Sara Hammon: Mafee! Mafee: I know. Never let anyone outside the family know what you are thinking. Sara Hammon: It’s not enough to quote it. You need to live it. (17:16—E4.S1)

This final example in the episode “Fight Night” offers another allusion to one of the film’s most transgressive moments and references the killing of Jack Woltz’s price thoroughbred racehorse Khartoum, whose severed head is then placed into a slumbering Woltz’s bed. Upon waking, a damp and confused Woltz discovers his prized possession’s head in the bed with him. Bob Sweeney: I see how this is going to go. I’m gonna say no and let me guess uh, teachers’ strike? No. Nurses? Or you’re gonna release my tax returns? Or I’m gonna find Khartoum’s head in my fucking bed? Bobby: No horses need be harmed in the making of this picture. (36:37—S4.E8)

Each of these uses of dialogue from The Godfather, whether directly or indirectly, references the film, and constitutes memetic activity. Film references and recombination of dialogues with specific scenes are used as a nostalgic device, direct or indirect action, allusion, or to express uncertainty, shame, etc. ‘The Godfather meme’ makes its presence and cultural gravity known to the fictional cast and viewers alike. What is also interesting is how in the fictional Billions universe the characters have a tacit awareness of another fictional text, The Godfather. It can be said that the characters on the show are an extension of the showrunner and screenwriters, who are keenly aware of The Godfather influence due to their use of references, thereby demonstrating an awareness not only of the film but of pop culture in general. We shall now look at another audiovisual product that has used The Godfather in another interesting way. The White Lotus (TWL; 2021–present) is another premium cable offering and dramedy with a star-studded cast visiting high-end resorts to indulge in luxury experiences in relatively exotic locations (season one is set in Maui, Hawaii, while season two is in Taormina, Sicily). The series is a scathing social satire on contemporary US culture and society that depicts the actions of various resort guests, employees, and residents whose various dysfunctions and proclivities have an adverse effect on their

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capacity to enjoy their time at the imaginary White Lotus chain of hotels. As the week progresses, tensions mount and subplots are revealed, leading to unexpected and sometimes shocking outcomes for everyone involved. TWL offers a satirical and sometimes uncomfortable look at the privileged and less so and the problems they face while escaping to paradise. Shifting away from the more overt references and aphorisms in Billions, in the second season of the TWL series we see an example of the discursive and more visual influence The Godfather has on the show. Located in Taormina, the new season’s hotel is now the base for the Italian American Grasso family as well as other guests. As episodes progress, they are there to relax and, as viewers learn, connect to the family’s Sicilian roots, making this an example of the ever-increasing trend of ‘roots tourism’ into Italy by Americans of Italian descent seeking to reconnect with their origins. In this example, the memetic influence is more aesthetic and visual and provides a discursive base. Specifically, in episode S2.E2 “Italian Dream” we see Bert Di Grasso watch The Godfather in his hotel room at the end of the episode which is a subtle lead into the action which will take place in the next episode. In fact, the next day (S2.E3 “Bull Elephants”) we see the Di Grasso family and friend take a day trip to the actual filming location from The Godfather and The Godfather Part III. The family patriarch Bert (played by F. Murray Abraham) is wearing a wide-­ brim fedora hat, while his son Dominic (played by Michael Imperioli of Sopranos fame) and grandson Albie (played by Adam DiMarco) enjoy what is meant to be a nice time at one of the important shooting locations. We see the camera pan and drift through the scene, paying close attention to get each shot so that it reminds the viewers of the film original. During lunch on the grounds, the party sits in what appears to essentially be a Disney-esque rendition of the film set, which comes across as plastic and gauche, and as the audience, one cannot quite figure out if this is meant to be serious or comical. Next to them, we can see a mannequin of Apollonia in the car that was destroyed by a bomb placed there to kill her new husband, Michael Corleone, one of the film’s most gut-wrenching scenes being reduced to prop function. One cannot tell if White Lotus writer and director Mike White is serious or playing with the audience. Perhaps both. What we do know is that the location and film itself spark debate on the nature of masculinity and violence with all the men present. While the older Di Grasso comments that it is one of the greatest films ever made, the younger Di Grasso wholeheartedly disagrees claiming that the film is

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nothing more than a male power fantasy using the language of a first-year undergraduate student. While we see both parties’ lackluster attempts to persuade each other, one cannot help but wonder what the point is of the scene. Each is so thoroughly set in their generational ways that only negative feelings are generated from the discussion. While the older men say it is the “best American movie ever made”, Albie dismisses both his father and grandfather, going on to state that both are “nostalgic for the solid days of the patriarchy”. He further goes on to state that the film is a “fantasy about a time when they could go out and solve all their problems with violence”. While there is some truth to both statements, what is missed is that the film has a meaning, but so does the memetic discourse around the film. Here we can see how The Godfather is still finding its way into television production as a plot device. More importantly though, as a text, The Godfather is still a location of contested meaning and a place where new interpretations can enter the discourse surrounding the film, as is the case of TWL. Even if this is just a fictional argument, it nonetheless provides another example of the relevance the film still holds in popular culture and the writing associated with contemporary television products. While The Godfather had its moment in the episode, mainly as homage it did not continue as a theme throughout the series or was even back-referenced toward the end of the season. Nonetheless, it still found its way into another contemporary television program. This chapter’s intent was to offer and demonstrate a novel semio-­ memetic model for the interpretation of Italian signs in the periphery using The Godfather as a prime example. In it, we have seen how ‘The Godfather meme’ has moved beyond the constraints of the materiality of the original cultural artifact where it originated, i.e., the Puzo text. It has now surpassed the original idea and intent of the novel, evolved into a film trilogy, and reached its apotheosis via popular culture, where there is now a plethora of multimodal variations indexed to it. While it is true that The Godfather was and is an Italian American-based text, it has now achieved global multimodality, going beyond its original ethnic connection to Italian and Italian American themes. One could be so bold as to say that this text has achieved an influence usually reserved for religious and other canonical texts. Fifty years on, we can still see signs generated from ‘The Godfather meme’ as they continue to embed themselves materially, discursively, and ephemerally in the expanded texts of books, films, and television and

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continue to shape the US and, by extension, global popular culture. These prime movers of twenty-first-century reality appear to not be ebbing but in fact continue to flow from the unintended consequences of Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel, once again demonstrating that, to use a variation of the iconic phrase, The Godfather is still a text that one cannot refuse and oftentimes continues to use. Though it was outside the scope of this chapter, further research should consider looking at how image macros associated with The Godfather as iconic sign are used in different modalities, specifically by younger generations of Italian Americans who are expressing their Italianità or ‘Italianness’ and their relationships to Italy as people in diaspora via social media applications. Moreover, reactions to the various uses of The Godfather on television and audience reactions to it on social media may also prove to be an interesting area of inquiry.

Works Cited Attardo, Salvatore. “Memes, Memeiosis, and Memetic Drift: Cheryl’s Chichier She Shed.” Media Linguistics, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2020), 146–168. https://medialing.ru/memes-­m emeiosis-­a nd-­m emetic-­d rift-­c heryls-­c hichier-­s he-­s hed/ (accessed April 10, 2023). Attardo, Salvatore. Linguistic Theories in Humor. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 2001. Bauman, Rebecca. “The Gangster Wears No Pants: Undressing the Mafia after The Godfather.” Paper Presented at the Italian American Studies Association Conference. Pittsburgh, USA. October 2022. Blommaert, Jan and Piia Varis. “The Importance of Unimportant Language” Multilingual Margins, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2015), 4–9. Cavallaro, Jonathan J. “Playing Games with Luca Brasi: The Representations of Italian American Ethnicity in The Godfather Video Games.” Paper Presented at the Italian American Studies Association Conference. Pittsburgh, USA. October 2022. Chiaro, Delia. The Language of Jokes in the Digital Age: #like #Share #Lol. New York: Routledge, 2018. Dawkins, Richard. 1989. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. Durkheim, Émile. Translated by Steven Lukes and Wilfred Douglas Halls. The Rules of Sociological Method. New York: Free Press, 1982. Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Indian University Press, 1976. Evans, Robert. The Kid Stays In The Picture. New York: Hyperion Books, 1994. Gardaphé, Fred L. From Wiseguys to Wise Men: The Gangster and Italian American Masculinities. New York: Routledge, 2006.

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Gross, Terry. “Remembering Robert Evans, Producer of The Godfather And Chinatown”. Fresh Air. National Public Radio, USA.  Audio and Transcript. November 1, 2019. https://www.npr.org/2019/11/01/775364522/ remembering-­r obert-­e vans-­p roducer-­o f-­t he-­g odfather-­a nd-­c hinatown (accessed April 10, 2023). Kress, Gunther. Multimodality. New York: Routledge, 2009. Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. Oxford University Press, 2001. Mitzel, Anthony D. “An Unlimited Memeiosis of The Godfather: Diachronic and Synchronic Observations of a Memecycle.” Paper Presented at the Italian American Studies Association Conference. Pittsburgh, PA. October 2022. Mitzel, Anthony D. Authenticity and Ephemerality: The Memes of Transcultural Production in Italian Diasporic Culture. 2021. University College London. PhD dissertation. UCL Discovery. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/ eprint/10133405/ (accessed April 10, 2023). Mitzel, Anthony D. “Ethnogenesis, American Italianità, and Identity Construction: Diasporan Italian Culture in Youngstown, Ohio, USA.” Paper Presented at the Cultures on the Move: Italy and the USA Language, Literature, Cinema Conference. Oxford, UK. September 2016. Mitzel, Anthony D. “An Ethnogenesis of Youngs’talians: DIY narratives from the Rust Belt”. Paper Presented at the Italian American Studies Association Conference. Toronto, Canada. October 2014. Puzo, Mario. The Godfather. New York: Putnam. 1969. Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Formulas Filmmaking and the Studio System. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981. Shifman, Limor. Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2014a. Shifman, Limor. “The Cultural Logic of Photo-Based Meme Genres.” Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 13, No. 3 (2014b), 340–358. https://doi. org/10.1177/1470412914546577 (accessed April 10, 2023). Smith, Ben. The Billions Companion. https://thebillionscompanion.net/all/tag/ The+Godfather (accessed May 10, 2023). Tsakona, Villy. “Tracing the Trajectories of Contemporary Online Joking.” Media Linguistics, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2020), 169–183. https://medialing.ru/tracing-­the-­ trajectories-­of-­contemporary-­online-­joking/ (accessed April 10, 2023). Warner Jack L. and Dean Jennings. 1965. My First Hundred Years in Hollywood: An Autobiography. New York: Random House. Zappavigna, Michele (edited by). Discourse of Twitter and Social Media: How We Use Language to Create Affiliation on the Web. New York: Continuum, 2012.

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and

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TV Series Cited

Billions (TV Series, 2016–present). The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972). The Godfather II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974). The Godfather III (Francis Ford Coppola, 1990). The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone (Francis Ford Coppola, 2020). Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931). The Offer (TV Series, 2022). Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932). The Simpsons (TV Series, 1989–present). The Sopranos (TV Series, 1999–2007). The White Lotus (TV Series, 2021–present).

PART III

Interviews

CHAPTER 18

Interview with Helen De Michiel Daniele Fioretti

How did you start your career as a filmmaker? I began as a young videomaker in the late 1970s. At that time, the introduction of new technologies and new video equipment made it possible for people outside of the film and broadcast industry to gain access to film and video tools. At the same time, funding opportunities through the National Endowment for the Arts and from other founding

Helen De Michiel, born in California to Italian parents, is a movie director, documentarist, producer, and media arts advocate. She works on social justice, environmental themes, and women’s rights. She directed the movie Tarantella (1995) and documentaries like Turn Here Sweet Corn (1990), The Gender Chip Project (2006), and the series Lunch, Love, Community (2014) about the evolution of school lunch reform in Berkeley. She is the founder of Thirty Leaves Production.

D. Fioretti (*) Italian, 208 Irvin Hall, Miami University, Oxford, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Fioretti, F. Orsitto (eds.), Italian Americans in Film and Other Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47211-4_18

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organizations encouraged local—and regional—video production. In the mid-­1970s I was living in New York, and I started taking classes in videomaking there; I would not have had this opportunity without media art centers like “Young Filmmakers” on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. This opportunity opened up a new world of videomaking that had not been available to me before. I decided to apply for graduate school at the University of California in San Diego (UCSD) for an MFA in multidisciplinary visual arts. At UCSD, the visual arts were in a rich and constant exchange and dialogue. It was an exciting time to be working in this new and developing field. Did the situation for filmmakers change in the 1980s? In the 1980s we started seeing the emergence of a sphere of independent narrative filmmaking in the United States that could be made with a mixture of funding from national foundations, government, and other regional arts grants. Around the country, filmmaking communities grew in strength where previously there had not been access to filmmaking. Artists were empowered to create networks that included filmmaking cooperatives and other kinds of local media organizations. Who were the people that had little or no access to filmmaking before that time? Mostly women and people of color, or people coming from marginalized communities. We were learning to use new technologies outside of institutional structures, in many different kinds of grassroots movements. For many women interested in filmmaking, the goal was not so much to break into the industry, because we knew it was almost impossible, but rather to explore and create new kinds of storytelling forms. An entire politicized movement of feminist filmmakers arose with awareness around theoretical issues: the male gaze, gender, race and class relationships among women, and representation—on screen—from Hollywood to commercial broadcasting. It has always been a struggle to be taken seriously and to find resources that would allow us to work. When I look back, it seems remarkable to me that we were able to complete and release a narrative film like Tarantella in the 1990s. Apart from fiction films like Tarantella, in which you address Italian American culture, your filmmaking career includes several documentaries. Your first cinematic production, Turn Here Sweet Corn, was a documentary about farming and urbanization in Minnesota. How did you get interested in this story?

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Fiction is not my only interest. I like to experiment with different styles and various visual languages: experimental films, performance videos as well as new forms of non-fiction or documentary. Turn Here Sweet Corn was an exploration of people in relationship to the land. At the time my family and I were living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and I developed a great sensitivity and deep feelings for the upper Midwestern landscape. I happened to meet the Diffley family when stopping at their roadside vegetable stand. I learned that their land was threatened by encroaching suburban development. I was also interested in where our food comes from and the connections between land and table. Working on this project led me to do more research on land and agriculture and how these themes are related to food and family. Other interests that I weave into my film projects are how people build community, how people develop identities, and how people interact and communicate around shared values. These themes all penetrate The Listening Project, The Gender Chip Project, and Lunch Love Community. Can you tell us about this last project? Lunch Love Community was a radical departure from my previous projects. The internet went through an incredible growth in the late 2000s; it was another turn of the wheel in terms of technology. In Berkeley, where I live, a new generation of lunch chefs were rethinking and changing the way children ate. According to a recent statistic, one in three young people in the United States will live shorter lives than their parents because of the consumption of soda and processed food. This is another story intimately connected to the land and the food chain: where the food comes from, how it grows, how it is distributed to children in schools, and what are the food politics of this movement. I am currently working on a new documentary, Between the Sun and the Sidewalk, that follows a fiercely dedicated Latino political organizer, Christian Garcia, who leads a diverse team of young adults organizing for a soda tax in the central valley of Stockton, California. They are tested by unforeseen political obstacles and struggle to beat back the powerful beverage industry. I work with several questions at all times: what do we do with new technologies? How do we bring people together? What kind of dialogues can a film create so audiences can empathize with and connect with experiences they may never have had my films are polyphonic in practice. I work with multiple voices, protagonists, and points of view that interact one with the other, both in harmony and in conflict.

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Your heritage is Italian; did you grow up in a predominantly Italian American neighborhood? I grew up in San Mateo, California, a suburb south of San Francisco. My parents met in San Francisco, in the North Beach area of the city, which at that time was home to many Italian immigrants. In North Beach, the Italian population included mostly people from Northern Italy, which was a different immigration pattern from Italian immigration patterns on the East Coast. My parents came from Friuli. I grew up as an only child in an affluent California neighborhood. My father was a tile and mason craftsman, like many who came from that region, and my mother was a seamstress and a dressmaker. They lived modestly, saved, and created the conditions for me to be able to go into higher education. Do you feel that Italian culture had a significant influence in your education and in your growth as an artist? Yes. Nevertheless, the San Francisco Bay Area is a diverse community. For example, my Catholic school included families that were Japanese, Chinese, Black, Filipino, Latino, and White. Mine was not an overt Italian American childhood. However, my family itself was very Italian. Both my parents and their friends spoke the Friulian dialect at home. When I was in high school, my mother and I traveled to our family village in the Friuli. This trip to Italy was a transformative experience for me and influenced my relationship with my ancestry more than any kind of local Italian American culture in the Bay area. I discovered an Italy that was so utterly different from what I imagined. I had always heard a lot of stories of what it was like to be young in Italy during the World War II.  It was terrifying what these families had to endure: fascism, extreme poverty, being cut off from the outside world, being occupied by German troops living in their houses… I had my own idea of what Italy was like, but when I visited for the first time, a whole new world opened up. It was Europe in the 1970s, and it was cool. That is when I decided that I was going to look more towards the Italian cultural atmosphere and social environment of the 1970s instead of the traditional Italian American one. Eventually, I was able to connect the two experiences together, exploring a dialogue between what we went through as descendants of immigrants and our ancestral lineages. In the movie Tarantella, Diana is an Italian American woman who struggles to come to terms with her Italian origin. Perhaps the entire film can be interpreted as a reflection on how to deal with the past and what to keep of one’s tradition?

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Starting from the 1980s and onward, identity has been a really interesting subject to probe for artists. I enjoyed researching on Italian American history and identity. You know about all the stereotypes; the films made by male Italian American directors were centered on the East Coast and on Mafia mythmaking. In this sense I would say that Tarantella is definitely a feminist movie, a film that depicts Italian American women in relationship with other women of different generations. Italian American women have been erased as subjects with our own voices, and we are usually peripheral to the predominant male figures. I think that the female Italian American experience has included trauma and silent suffering. There are suppressed secrets in families. The more I think about the story of Tarantella, the more I am convinced that this film is about the costs of carrying secrets. Speaking about different formal ways of narration, in Tarantella you make use of puppets to tell the story written in the family book by Diana’s mother. Is this also a reference to traditional Italian culture? Yes. Puppet theater is a traditional form of storytelling in Southern Italy. I was inspired by the large figures of the Black Madonna in Calabria. I was fascinated by the beautiful, strange religious street parades in August that seem to echo from bygone times. So, I thought: “wouldn’t it be interesting in this film to go in a non-realistic direction and tell part of the story in this very strange and detached and distant way?” The puppets were created by my collaborator Sandy Spieler, who was the artistic director of the In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre in Minneapolis. Another intriguing aspect of Tarantella is the reference to Italian food culture. Early in the movie Diana seems completely disconnected from Italian foodways, and in fact she says to Pina: “I didn’t even remember that gnocchi taste so good,” but at the end she offers to cook for Pina. Did you put this emphasis on food because you wanted to highlight the topic of food in Italian American culture? Definitely. In many of my films I introduce food as a way to reach out across generations, as an entry point for aesthetics, spirituality, and deeper challenging conversations. Food is also a way to understand what we find meaningful, moving from the past to the present, through the way that we eat, and the way that we cook, and the way we nourish one another. In Italian American culture the dinner table is a stage where people communicate, connect, socialize, and share. So yes, it became very important to include food culture and sensuality in the film and also to show that food, as well as culture, is not static—it is always changing and is such a powerful source of sensory, direct memory threading through the generations.

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Why is the movie entitled Tarantella? Is this a reference to the traditional dance that in some places in Southern Italy, especially in Apulia, is used as a magic, healing ritual? Yes, this is true. At the core of the film is the theme of the uncertain and pain-filled journey. And the Tarantella dance is a healing ritual deeply rooted in Italian traditions. At the beginning of the movie Diana lives on the surface. She is a young professional focused on her job. She leads a conventional life with her boyfriend. And suddenly her world falls apart when her mother dies. She is plunged into the depths of confusion and grief. One of my intentions was to explore how Italian American women from earlier generations, who did not have the ability to express their problems and their sorrows, often lived with shame. They would mask their vulnerabilities and submerge their secret history. These women who did not have the language and emotional tools to deal with issues in their families while hoping that any traumatic experiences would simply, eventually, disappear. Diana goes through a very difficult time in her life at a young age and with the support and friendship of her mother’s friend she is transformed through her grief. We all have these little personal narratives we live with, but what happens when an event or situation demolishes them? It is an opportunity to change and gain new insights into one’s life and unexamined choices. Speaking about female identities, for centuries women were taught that they did not matter, that their only purpose in life was to cook, clean, and take care of the children. Often, conservative households held these beliefs. What happens when women question their family belief systems and turn away? There is this ancestral drama that flows through and across different generations. Various ethnic communities continue to struggle with patriarchal views, and how to manage the difference between maintaining strong links to a heritage and functioning in a highly dynamic twenty-first-century world. For example, you can see it in Elena Ferrante’s novels, especially the relationship between the two main characters of L’amica geniale (My Brilliant Friend): one of the friends pleases the expectations of her family and stays, while the other one leaves, and this situation creates a conflict between them. In my class on Italian American culture I discuss movies like Tarantella and True Love by Nancy Savoca. During our conversations students notice how different is the point of view of a female director, who looks at femininity from outside the boundaries of the “male gaze” and the objectification of the

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female body. In many Italian American stories directed by men the female characters are just completely irrelevant if not in relationship to the male characters; they have no depth. They are absent, silent, and hidden except as support to the main masculine drama. In films like these, the male characters generally behave with impunity. It is taken to be normal and desirable. The lives and actions of the men are front and forward. Everybody else supports this “front-row privilege” to be able to act in the world without consequences. A new generation of filmmakers have been creating work where this bias is reframed, interrogated, and reconfigured into new forms of storytelling. It is in the news how Mira Sorvino, Salma Hayek, Annabella Sciorra, and other actresses said about being sexually harassed, coerced, raped, or blacklisted when they refused to comply… They had to make decisions about their careers in the moment. We live in different times now. With social media there are new pathways to discussing and understanding activities that have been kept secret for so long, out of fear and shame. Now women can connect, mobilize, and work together to stop unacceptable workplace behaviors. Are you hopeful that after the MeToo movement and the renewed attention that mainstream cinema is showing towards women and ethnic minorities that the situation will change permanently? Change comes about slowly and, then, quickly. The worlds of film and media are in rapid flux, and we do not know what the future holds after this pandemic. Independent film is undergoing massive change, and it is up in the about who can earn a living and who cannot in this new environment of streaming platforms. Nevertheless, stories are being told in completely new ways. Audiences can be found in ways that were not available before the internet. And the theatrical film experience is now only one option among many. I am convinced that enormous change is happening now. Filmmakers are collaborating, partnering, reigniting unions to protect their livelihoods and intellectual property. This is an exciting and turbulent time for filmmakers and those who love cinema as a central cultural touchstone that is always in motion.

CHAPTER 19

Interview with Tony Vitale Daniele Fioretti

How important Italian American culture was in your upbringing and how important it is in your work as a filmmaker? Extremely important. As you can tell, Italian American family, and my desire to put out what I felt was an inaccurate portrayal, from my perspective, was really at the core of why I made Kiss Me, Guido and the offense that I took about how Italian Americans are perceived in New York City, the difference in New York City between the Outer Boroughs, the Bronx from where I am from, and Manhattan, which is more often defined as

Tony Vitale is an American director, screenwriter, and producer of Italian descent. His long and successful career started with a collaboration in Robert De Niro’s A Bronx Tale (1993). He directed four feature films: Kiss Me, Guido (1997), Very Mean Men (2000), One Last Ride (2004), and Life’s a Beach (2010). He also produced TV shows for CBS, NBC, and Fox and was the executive producer and director of a financial news network.

D. Fioretti (*) Italian, 208 Irvin Hall, Miami University, Oxford, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Fioretti, F. Orsitto (eds.), Italian Americans in Film and Other Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47211-4_19

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New York City. Being part of the derogatory “Bridge and Tunnel Crowd”, and that getting lumped in with being an Italian American, was really, really important. Spike Lee did Do the Right Thing and, sadly, his portrayal was very accurate—very accurate to the downside to the Italian American portrayals. I’m not going to say it was inaccurate, but it was accurate on the ugliness of Italian Americans. As portrayed by Jonathan Turturro, there was Danny Aiello in the film, and Richard Edson playing Jonathan Turturro’s younger brother. What was interesting to me was to try to take that character and expand upon it. We have got a full set of Danny Aiello, we have got a full set of Jonathan Turturro, but the comradery, and the openness, and the “trying to find his way” was really interesting to me. So, I wanted to take that character and blow it up and really do a deeper dive into that. The other thing that I tried to do with Kiss Me, Guido, and I thought it was kind of a cleverer way to get exposure to Italian American cinema, was the Sundance Film Festival, which is really the apex of independent cinema, was really doing a fantastic job with exploring the variety of gay characters as there were portrayed in cinema, and there was one film in particular, The Boys in the Band, a classic film in the Sixties, or late Seventies, and I said to myself: what I can do is to emulate Boys in the Band but do it for Italian Americans. One of the great things about that film is that they took the word “gay”, what it meant to be a gay character, and they split it five or six different ways. So, all of a sudden, the identity of being gay was anyone of these characters, from the extremely flamboyant to the straight-acting, to the over-machismo, to the shy, so now you have a really fantastic portrayal of six characters with all of their warts or fallacies or less-than-perfect portrayal. I said: I can do the same thing. I can mirror a gay character in Kiss Me, Guido to my perception of the Italian American character and show how there is a lot of similarities. Not just between the gay community and the Italian American community, which people thought were completely polarized, what I can also show is that, when it comes to be an Italian American growing up in New York City, I can show you five different ways Italian Americans can be portrayed. All of them could be considered stereotypical, but—at least for me—it was all done with love: from the oversexed, very high libido, to the corky Mafia character, Tony the Fish, to the dad, to our hero who, again, is very much like the same thing of Spike Lee’s Vito. It was very important to me to show the wide variety of what it meant to be an Italian American.

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So, in a sense, it shows the complexity of the Italian American identity. Of course, when you are making a comedy, a little bit of caricature, a little bit of stereotyping is necessary to make people laugh. I’ll take it to a higher intellectual level. It’s necessary not to make people laugh, but for people to digest the intricacies. If you, oftentimes I felt, if you try to preach from a pulpit, to get a message across, it doesn’t resonate, it doesn’t become digestible; but if you do it with a little bit of comedy, it makes it more digestible, and when it hits the funny bone, it sticks. Of course, at the end of Kiss Me, Guido there is also a reference to Casablanca: “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”, which is a great intertextual reference. Thank you for recognizing that. A film lover can see that these are not just throw-away lines. Someone who appreciates cinema can find those references. It may seem like popcorn and bubble gum on the surface, but a lot of time and care were put in things like that, like Some Like It Hot, like Boys in the Band. I tried to make a groundbreaking piece of Italian American cinema in portrayals going forward as opposed to an easy stereotypical going backwards. I think Kiss Me, Guido is groundbreaking, and when I tried to get a copy I could not believe it was so difficult. As far as I know it is not even available on streaming platforms. Here’s the politics around it. Paramount bought the movie, and there were some fears around it, in the title. I purposefully chose a politically incorrect title to get the attention. Generic people thought that the name “Guido” was like calling someone Marvin, but it held so much more of a powerful meaning. What I discovered is that there is a German film called Der Bewegte Mann. In this film, in a similar gay-straight relationship, the derogatory term was a “Bruno”. Brunos were those out-of-city characters that would come into the city, and in this particular movie—it was the highest grossing film in Germany at the time—he meets up with someone in the inner city from Berlin, and so there was a little bit of inspiration behind that, to use the word Guido in the title, because I knew how loaded the question was. When Paramount started understanding that, they thought: “This could be politically incorrect for us.” They were going to start their own independent film vision, Paramount Classics, with this as a title, hoping that Howard Deutschman was going to come on. Well, Howard Deutschman rejected the idea of moving up to Hollywood and starting the Paramount Classics label, so Paramount never went to go and expand the movie. The maximum number of theaters that it got to was

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thirty-seven, unlike The Brothers McMullen that Fox Searchlight just launched with their independent division. McMullen wasn’t as derogatory as Guido, but they were scared to expand upon. So, what did the Paramount do? They bought the movie, they had it in their library; when Lionsgate was asking for movies, independent films to purchase from Paramount, this movie got put into Lionsgate’s video department. Paramount sold it to Lionsgate, and Lionsgate never went forward with releasing it wide on their platforms. That’s the bad news. Here is the good news: Paramount never bought the film, they licensed the film for twenty-­ seven years, and now [2021] we are in year twenty-four. So, in three years I get the full copyright back, and when it does come back, I will be able to make copies and put it out there. I can license it out to Netflix, to Amazon, and I’m going to have digital rights to be able to do that. Ideally there will be some recognition for it, including the Broadway musical Kiss Me, Guido. What is your relationship with your Italian ancestry? I’m half Sicilian and half napuletano. People don’t realize that, in Italy, northern Italians look down upon southern Italians, they don’t even call the Sicilians “Italians”. They’re another class, another breed, you know. They want to disassociate. For many people, on the outside world, an Italian is an Italian, whether you are from Florence or whether you are from Palermo. I embraced the Sicilian culture as well, in the movie, because that’s how I grew up, that’s what I knew. There is dialect, a very slight Sicilian dialect in the household. Irma St. Paule, who plays the grandmother, and Anthony DeSando were southern Italians. The mother was actually Hispanic, so she didn’t capture the dialect as well, but Anthony DeSando, who is a Sicilian, did. Little do people know, Robert De Niro and Chazz Palminteri are also Sicilian. They come from the same province, Agrigento, that I grew up in. Not so unusual for Chazz, because we grew up in the same neighborhood, which was a very strong Sicilian neighborhood in the Bronx, so it was natural that he was from Agrigento as I was. Since you are from the Bronx, what do you think about the representation of the Bronx in movies? I’ll offer up three movies. In Raging Bull, Scorsese did his portrayal of the Bronx in the [19]50s. De Niro directed A Bronx Tale, which takes place between 1960 and 1968. I made Kiss Me, Guido, and even though I shot the movie in 1996 the story, the sentiment, was more about the late [19]80s, [19]90s. I couldn’t do a period piece, because there wasn’t enough distance between the late [19]80s and 1996. So, I wrote the story

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in 1994, influenced by the late [19]80s, early [19]90s, shot in 1996, came out in 1997. All three are very accurate portrayals of the Bronx, as is Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing that came out in 1989. I shot half the film in the Bronx. The opening scene in the movie tries to portray how similar Greenwich Village is to the Bronx. There’s the famous kiss that happens between the two gay men, and then Pino and his friends out of the pizza shop. All done visually, all done very quickly, but I took a lot of pride in bringing that together, very fast, just through visual context, accurate portrayals of both the Bronx and the Greenwich Village. Pino and Frankie are two different interpretations of the Guido stereotype. Pino is the irredeemable guy, Frankie who still can change. I will say this: in my books, literally my Sparrow notebooks, I did this: I don’t know if you can read, but I made two columns, and I said: What I need to do, if I’m going to make it real accurate is, for every gay character, to have these equal characteristics to the straight character. Pino, who has the over-active libido, and who is always careful about his hair, and is always looking to make a score with a woman, is the exact same character of Terry, who has very particular hair, over-active libido, always looking to score. One small difference: one likes men, one likes women, but exact same character. I did that, and it comes from Boys in the Band; I looked at how the characters are portrayed in Boys in the Band, and I said: Okay, now I have my identity, for my characters in Kiss Me, Guido, and I just need to take what is Italian American, like a circle, and expand on it, over-­ exaggerate the sexuality of Pino. It’s not like Frankie and Joey don’t like women, but Pino wears it on his sleeve. It’s not like Joey is so dumb; he is naïve, but I have to find the balance of naiveté in Frankie and Pino. Who’s most naïve? He is way to the extreme in naiveté. Toughness, you know; there’s Vinnie the Fish who plays the Mafia character. And of course, in everything that’s Italian American you are supposed to have a Mafia character in there. Side note: they wanted me to make all the characters in the story Mafia, and I said: “No way, you’re missing the whole point of the movie” so I rejected that. But then we find out that Vinnie the Fish, as typical as we thought he was Mafia, he falls in love with # [pound sign], the very quirky, artistic gay character. So, even as simple as these two characters are, at the fifth rung of this [chart], at the very bottom, how do I identify that they have a very similar characteristic, but there is something underneath that makes them very special? I was thinking about what you said about Mafia characters. In the year 2000 you directed a movie that is kind of a Mafia comedy, right?

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Yes, Very Mean Men. How do you feel about Italian Americans represented as Mafia? Do you react against it, or do you embrace, maybe in parodic terms, this representation? Great question. I’m going to start off by saying: I never saw The Sopranos. I take that back; I saw the pilot episode, because there was a big premiere in New York, and Anthony DeSando, who plays Pino in Kiss Me, Guido, took me as his guest. I would say, half the cast of The Sopranos, including Edie Falco, Tony Sirico, Van Zandt, they all auditioned for me for Kiss Me, Guido. I knew everybody there. I never watched anything else. Going back to the relationship between Pino and Frankie: Pino is the stereotypical male who thinks it’s his duty to try to seduce every woman he meets; Frankie, on the contrary, still has a chance to go through a process of re-­ evaluation of his beliefs. Is Pino’s function to underline the difference with Frankie, so to show that Frankie is more open to change? A hundred percent. So, there is a reason why Frankie and Warren bond, and the big thread that bonds these two together is that they’re both heartbroken. They’re both jilted lovers. Frankie’s girlfriend fools around with somebody else, Warren’s boyfriend fools around with somebody else. So, they are both pained, as characters. Frankie’s and Warren’s approaches are different, but here’s the beauty of what I’ve done for the Italian American character: it is the Italian American character that’s teaching the gay character, so the stereotype is that Italian Americans have no culture, they’re not wise, they’re stupid, they’re missing something. Frankie teaches Warren that when it comes to heartbreak, at some point, if you don’t laugh about it, you’re going to go crazy. Warren responds and says: “Wow! That’s amazing that you can do that.” Boom. All of a sudden, the tables have flipped in this My Fair Lady kind of setup that I have. It is the student, the uncultured, teaching the cultured how to progress with life, and that sensitivity, Frankie is not denying that he is heartbroken, but he has found a way to resolve it, and that is through comedy. Interesting. I was thinking about Warren who, for me, is the most relatable character in the movie. But I also think that he has some preconceived notions on Guidos as well. In a certain sense he changes as well, learning that there is something good in Frankie, no matter what. Well, he sees that, if you judge a book by its cover, that’s the wrong thing. It’s trying to teach the gay community not to judge a book by its cover. I want to share two insight that I think you’ll appreciate. Number one, when I was writing the piece, it was suggested by the gay production

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designer of A Bronx Tale to join the Village playwrights, in Greenwich Village, because he thought it would help me get insights about the gay community. And I said: Okay, I will. I went to join this group of twelve playwrights in Greenwich Village; everybody went around the room to discuss their story and everything else. By the time it came to me, all the playwrights were bashing straight men as uncultured, and it was pervasive. So, when it came to me, I didn’t say if I was straight or gay; I just kept my mouth shut. I said: I want to tell a story about a gay character and a straight character living together. And, of course, they were all: “We’ve seen it already, we’ve done. You need to do something more exciting”, all that stuff. Nine out of ten of the would be, the gay character will help the straight character to realize that he’s gay and go over to the other side. You know? This was not about friendship; this was gay fantasy. That was one really eye-opening experience about how much I could teach the gay community about straight people, and how ignorant they were, and judging a book by its cover, judging me as straight, and just rattling off all these derogatory things about straight people without realizing that I am sitting in the room, as a straight man. That’s one. Number two: when the movie came out Frank Bruno of The New York Times wanted to interview all the Sundance Film Festival filmmakers, because he felt like gay cinema has reached its peak there. He asked me a question about—and he saved it as the last question in the questioning: “So, what about you, Tony?” I said: “What about what?” “You know, where do you see your place in the gay world?” I knew that he was either trying to get me admit that I was gay or not, because I’ve been down that road enough times, of people wandering if I was gay or straight. I bring it back to the artist, the production designer, his name is Wynn Thomas, who said to me: “It doesn’t matter whether you’re gay or straight; it’s all about your art.” And so, when they interviewed me for The New  York Times that’s what I said to them: “It really doesn’t matter who I sleep with; I really love you to just judge me on my art, which is this silly little comedy.” Because I said that, he put me on the cover of the Arts and Leisure New York Times. So, I forgot your question. Yes, I was asking about the relationship between the two, the fact that Warren changes and that Frankie changes as well, I see it as a way to show that, with better understanding between different communities, you can destroy stereotypical views on both sides. That’s why I thought that it was unfair to put this movie in a niche, because this movie was, on the contrary, intended to create a discussion.

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That’s exactly right. Now I know why I told you about the playwright story. It raised the bar for me to do better. Not to be so far out in the forefront; I didn’t all of a sudden get on my soapbox and say to them: Hey, wait a second: I’m straight here. Don’t talk like that. What it forced me to do was to be a better artist. It forced me to influence Italian American cinema. Who is going to independent films? When the movie came out, nine out of ten of the people who went were probably gay, because they were supporting gay cinema. It wasn’t until the word got out: “This isn’t just gay cinema, this is just a funny, interesting story told on film”, but they set the bar for me. That group set the bar for me to be better, to teach them. If I could convince those twelve in that room that there’s more to be an Italian American in New York City than what they were perceiving, if I can do it in a clever way, if I can shine a mirror on to how foolish they sounded and raise their level, then I would feel good about the movie I was about to make. One of the scenes that I find among the funniest is the “nightmare” scene, when Frankie has that hallucinated dream inspired by The Sound of Music. I would like you to talk a little bit about it, because it looks like Frankie is nervous: for example, he dreams about being naked in a bathtub outdoor, surrounded by people—I think his father is among them—dressed in a way that blurs their gender identity. Could you talk a little bit about that? I think that scene is perfect, but sometimes it confuses students when I show the movie in my class. The evolution of that scene, I really have to attribute it to my entire crew, because everybody came up with another idea to enhance it, and I could just say: Okay, let’s try that. Oh, that’s a great thought, because we would do a dream sequence, it could be anything. The costume designer said: “We have to make these costumes non-identity gendered. It’s perfect for the movie,” and I said: Go for it. The nakedness in the bathtub, having Frankie with his shirt off, so muscular, it would be mass appeal to both straight women and gay men. It’s perfect there. The three-point trajectory, maybe to help your students, is… and I have to work backwards on this, because whenever I write I always write backwards… I never knew if I was going to get the music, or the television rights of The Sound of Music, because Fox owned them. That was the one thing that was holding me pursuing, continuing the scene or not. The very last thing that I shot was the sequence of Frankie on the couch watching The Sound of Music, because I didn’t know if I was going to get the rights. If you remember, he falls asleep on the couch while he is watching The Sound of Music,

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accidentally. Initially, when he talks with Warren, he confuses Julia Roberts and Julie Andrews. The movie is the last image he sees, so of course it’s going to sit in his head. The fear of the young man is that the gay man wants to seduce him, so he is coming in with that fear. If you remember the scene right before, he goes to the bathroom, keeping his eye on the doorknob, because of the fear of breaking in. This is the immature fear. On the flipside, there’s a lot of gay men who think that if a man is getting closer, they can turn him. They’re really gay inside, they just don’t know it. So, playing with all that stuff, when it comes down to The Sound of Music, I needed a transition, because this is the transition to the second half of the movie. I needed to show the reality of the fear of a straight man being seduced by a gay man. I needed to show how Frankie was processing that. And once I can alleviate this fear, I can then move on, on seeing him [Warren] as a man, as a person, and not as a seducer, and of course trying to do that in the funniest way possible. Everyone is coming together: the mother is coming together with the father, and the order in which they all stood was also very important, because I have Joey Chips right next Terry, and that was very strategic. The daisy chain of miscommunication. You know that game when you say something, and when you get to the end it all sounds very different. There are so many elements into that particular scene, which is all about miscommunication, or misunderstanding. Don’t let your fears and your panics overtake you. Process it, recognize it, but overcome it. That’s what that was. I like the scene when Frankie gets involved into a fight with two bullies. Frankie reacts aggressively at being called with gay slurs because maybe this is the first time he realizes what it’s like to be offended in that way. He doesn’t say he’s straight, he says, why is this your business? What right do you have to judge me? That’s exactly right. I can talk a little bit about that scene, because I have a great story that happened just a couple of weeks ago as a follow up. You’re one hundred percent right that this is the confrontational homophobia, and now we realize that Frankie has evolved. He does realize how negative and inappropriate it is to act that way. In a matter of few days this movie takes place in a couple of days, he has evolved. Because he is strong, he’s now going to protect his new friend. He’s going to start straightening out the world, because there is this idea that gay men cannot defend themselves. If you remember the scene, it’s Warren who protects him, with the roundhouse kick. Frankie is amazed that Warren can do this, but Warren knew martial arts because he played Wong Gambino in Mafia

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Kickboxing III. It is the evolution of Frankie; it also allows me to show that gay men aren’t little finocchios, they can have brawn, when need be. It’s one of those evolutionary scenes. Now, that thread all comes through because of Mafia Kickboxing III. You remember that when Frankie gets into the place [Warren’s apartment] he’s all: “Mafia Kickboxing III: I love that movie!” And his father too! The irony that Warren played it is just a gig. That has a chance to come out, later on. So again, I write backwards. I knew that this was going to lead up to that. But here’s the great part of that: there is a writer in New York who loved Mafia Kickboxing III, and he said: “I’ve got to make that movie. I’ve got to make Mafia Kickboxing III. Would you mind if I do that? I love Kiss Me, Guido.” I said: No, go for it, Mark, it’s like a running joke. I said: I’d be honored. The guy spent twenty years trying to make Mafia Kickboxing III, and he just made it. It’s a different title, it has got released two weeks ago. He emailed me and said: “Tony, I just want to thank you for inspiring me.” The story is about this Chinese guy who wants to be part of the Mafia, because he loves the girl, then there is a gay element to it… I haven’t seen it, I have to watch it, but the film has just got released. The name is Mark Wiley, and the movie is supposedly doing pretty well. Vision Films bought it, and he was inspired by Mafia Kickboxing III. The title of the movie is Made in Chinatown. He said: “I did two interviews in the movie and I’m always mentioning Kiss Me, Guido as inspiration.” I would like to discuss the family part of the movie. There are a couple of anthologies of writings from Italian American gay and lesbians, and one crucial part of these stories is about coming out and how to break the news to a very traditional family. In Kiss Me, Guido the family come to watch the play; some of them start thinking that Frankie is gay. Do you think that the strength of the Italian American family can be an obstacle for gay people to come out? Maybe before, I don’t think any longer. There are two other films that dealt with the family mob issue: one is Mambo Italiano, and another one is a movie about the making of Kiss Me, Guido, but I don’t remember the title of that movie. It is from a gay perspective. Where are we today in Italian families? It has evolved. If, within the family, the gayness of a loved one could have been shunned in the Nineties, in my perception, it has evolved tremendously. I like to think that I have a little something to do with that. If I can shine the mirror up on… If I can have a young Italian American boy, and he says: “Hey mom, dad, let’s watch this movie.” He doesn’t have to admit he’s gay, just watch this movie. And if he can see his

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parents laugh: “What did you think? Have you laughed at this movie?” That’s just the same mirror that shines on the gay community that think that straight people can’t rise to it. If that movie could be shown to Italian American parents, it eases the conversation, it eases the ability for that young gay man to come out, and he doesn’t need to be Italian, it could be anyone, because the film played very well worldwide. Anyone from the small-minded parents, who have got to understand that it is a big life out there… It’s a lot easier if it’s done with comedy. Would you make a sequel of Kiss Me, Guido? It’s funny. I used to say: “Yes, I’m going to make a sequel and it’s going to be called Kiss My Ass” and it would be more like, like we’ve just talked about, saying to the gay community, and to the Italian American community: “See? I can be straight and do the movie.” Or I can say to the Italian American community: “Look how foolish you looked twenty years ago”, but no, it wouldn’t play ball just because of the effect of the evolution of what’s happened in the gay community over time. It would not just play well. However, what I’m really excited about doing is to make it a Broadway musical, and there is opportunity. Jerry Mitchell, who is a Tony Award–winning choreographer-director, found this movie, right when it came out, back in 1997, and he wanted to make it into a musical. That was twenty years ago. All the problems with Paramount and the rights, the legal issues, couldn’t get it done. When I do get the rights back, in a couple of years, I’m going to go full ahead to get the musical version and set it in the late Eighties, early Nineties; and I do think that the perspective, then, will re-engage what went on, in a moment in time, back then. I think that there is opportunity there. You are very eclectic, between films, TV series, documentaries… I saw, for example, that you made documentaries with a focus on economy, like Cancel Crash and Soldi. You also have a background in economics. I know that you are working on a project right now. Do you want to talk about it? Sure. When I was growing up—so now we’re going way back—I’m a kid from the Bronx, and my father had passed away when I was thirteen years old, and economically, there was a “white flight” that was happening in New York at the time, we were kind of left behind; we were the last white Italian American family on that particular block. So, when college came around, I wanted to go to NYU to be a filmmaker, but my mom warned that the price was more than I could afford, and my mom thought it was good to get a good sense of business, so you can survive, and then if you want to go ahead with filmmaking you can do so later on in life.

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I went to a Jesuit college, took all my business courses, and then in my senior year, because I had enough business courses to graduate, I was able to take some electives, and the electives that I took were film courses, and that was a big mistake, because the love of wanting to make movies all came back to me and I didn’t know what to do. I was all: Am I going to work in Wall Street, or I am going to go trying to be a filmmaker? What I did was what every young man does: I signed up to go work for Club Med, and the day before I graduated from college I rejected an internship at Wall Street. I was too scared to become a filmmaker, so I decided to travel around the world, which I did for two years: Italy, France, Greece, just travel, for Club Med. I then met someone who worked on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, they offered me a job when I was ready to come back home. I took it, and then I started going to NYU Film School at night, always living this dualistic life. Finally, I got a really big bonus from my Wall Street job, and I said I am going to commit to filmmaking and think about Wall Street. But I worked at the Stock Market during the crash of 1987, and it just amazed me how everything that a specialist—which is a trader in the New York Stock Exchange—does is the same thing that a bookie, a Mafia bookie up in the Bronx does, on a street corner. Except two big differences: one, the trader on Wall Street was doing it legally, because he has a license from the federal government to do it, and he doesn’t have an Italian last name. In the Bronx there was a vowel at the end of your last name, and everything he was doing was illegal in the eyes of the court. When I say illegal, I mean you take a number in, and you sell the number out, and you make the difference. The same thing that a bookie does is what a trader does. So, my first screenplay that I ever wrote was about this dichotomy, being an Italian bookie and being a business specialist, and I revolved it around the canvas of the stock market exchange crash of 1987. So, that has been a part of my life forever, in knowing the world of the financial markets, and wanting to put that out there into the world. And then Goodfellas comes out, and I thought I was going to make a follow-up of Goodfellas, I wanted to work with De Niro, trying to work as a PA for Scorsese, so I had both going on. I wrote a screenplay, I picked up an agent, there was an agent at William Morris that pocketed me because he thought the screenplay was really brilliant, but I couldn’t get it set up. Then I wrote another screenplay about my time at Club Med, being an Italian Guido that works at Club Med; I didn’t get that sold at the time, but eventually I made it into a movie [Life’s a Beach]. The third one was Kiss Me, Guido. I went out to Hollywood, I made four

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movies, I had an opportunity to do now my Cancel Crash movie, which was about 1987, was about traders, but less about being Italian American. But I had an opportunity, twenty-five years later, to make that movie, so that was great. The movie was played on PBS; and then I had an opportunity to work with Louis Borsellino, who was an Italian American trader, whose father was in the mob, and I said: “Wow, that’s a great opportunity now to tell his story, but at least trying to tell what it’s like to be an Italian American trying to navigate the financial market.” The last one, the person who financed these two documentaries, asked me to help him to start up a network, an online television network, based on financial media and comedy, with a little bit about comedy, a little bit about financial media. I helped him build up the programming and the network and all that. He then wanted me to make a documentary about how all that started, and that’s the project that I just finished. So, I did four documentaries for him, this one same producer, and I helped him build the network, a company that he just sold for a billion dollars. I got my payout, for help to build the network because I got shares in the company, getting the chance to do some other films that I wanted to do and make a pretty good money as well. I do have a pretty extensive experience in financial media. Are you planning to make other fiction movies? I will tell you, the one movie that I thought to be my follow-up to Kiss Me, Guido. Now that I was able to successfully shine the mirror on the gay community and the Italian American community, I wanted to do the same thing about the Black community and the Italian American community, as my response to Do the Right Thing. The script is called Color Blind. Having gotten into the Sundance Film Festival, I thought that I wanted to do a film as creative, and as artistic, and as politically incorrect, but do it with the same nuances of Kiss Me, Guido. One huge difference: people didn’t know if I was straight or gay by my name, Tony Vitale, but now they know that I am not an African American. The ease that I had to moving Kiss Me, Guido along through the politics, I was afforded by the unknown element if I was straight or gay; I cannot pretend to be African American, and that makes it very difficult. However, every couple of years someone say it’s a great script, because it’s a combination of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon and Do the Right Thing. It takes place at a bus accident in the Bronx; an African American tour bus guy and a white Italian American bus driver named Sacco, after Sacco and Vanzetti, and how do politics play in the Bronx between races, between being an Italian American, and being an African American. So, my pizza shop in Do the Right Thing is a tour bus in Color

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Blind, and it unfolds very much in the same political incorrectness of Do the Right Thing. Trying to add nuances as it’s told through the eyes of a young African American woman, just like Warren. Who is really the centerpiece in Kiss Me, Guido, Warren or Frankie? It depends, it depends on the audience member. If you’re gay, you see the movie through Warren’s eyes. If you’re Italian American, you see the movie through Frankie’s eyes. But who’s the main character, who’s really the protagonist? I do the same thing in Color Blind: I split myself into being a Black, young African American woman and an older Italian American bus driver, but I yet have to make the film. But I try; I never stop trying. That’s going to be interesting. Speaking about Italian Americans and African Americans, what do you think about Green Book? I loved it! And I have a great story about it. You’re going to love this. I also teach at Columbia College, I teach directing and writing at Columbia College, and I was shocked that when it won [the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2019] nobody liked it in my class. The writer of that movie is a guy named Nicholas Vallelonga. Nick was one of the very first people I met when I went to Hollywood, in the late Nineties, and he was making these cheap, low-end Mafia pictures. When I met him, he was blown away by Kiss Me, Guido: “I love it. Kiss Me, Guido is just a perfect balance. I’ve got a great story myself that I’m dying to tell but I can’t tell yet.” I said: “Why not?” “Because I made a deal with my father and the other person that is part of the story.” I said: “Man, you’re going to do it one day.” He had to wait for Dr. Shirley to die to tell the story of his gayness, because he didn’t want to upset the family. He promised Dr. Shirley he was not going to tell the story until he passed away. He had that story for thirty-­ plus years. Never gave up on it. Finally, the right story, at the right time, by the right people, it got made into one Best Picture. I went back and tried to tell my class: “I don’t know what story you have right now, but if it’s coming from your soul, from your heart, never give up, like my friend Nick. The most important thing is not that he won the award; the most important thing is that there was a story that he believed in, that hopefully would resonate with some people. I can almost bet that everyone who is sitting in this room will trade places with your fellow classmate to be able to tell a story that you think is important, that it took you thirty years to make, and it’s coming from the purest of heart. And if you had a little bit of luck, and you can get recognized by few other people, you would embrace it.” All of a sudden, a new whole perspective about Green Book. I thought the movie was well crafted, a little bit sappy with the Hollywood

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end, but to me it wasn’t a story about how the white person champions the Black gay male: it was a personal story that was made with craft and love. That’s why I love it. Do you want to add something to this interview? Is there something that I didn’t ask that you would like to say? Yes. I want to add something about the whole Mafia thing. You can try to embrace it, and tell your perspective on it, like David Chase did with The Sopranos, or you could be at the other end and just say—that’s how a lot of my friends are—“I’m tired of Italian Americans as being portrayed as nothing but the Mafia, and why are we always have to be the bad guys?” I simply say to that group: “Do something about it. I’m not denying you; I agree. Do something about it.” And for someone like David Chase: “Fine that you did it. As an artist, raise the bar.” How can you raise the bar? It’s pretty hard to say “raise the bar” for David Chase, because of the success of The Sopranos, how it resonated with so many people, but as an artist, what can you do in your position now, to raise the bar? That continually drives me to get my Color Blind movie made, to show that people of the same social-economic background have more in common that people of the same skin tone. It just so happens I’m telling you from an Italian American perspective, as an Italian American, and raising the bar to what’s happening in the society. That’s great. Now I’m looking forward to seeing how this project develops. Hopefully, hopefully yes, you will interview me in ten years from now, and you will say: “I can’t believe you were able to make that movie and get an Academy Award and changed the perception of Italian Americans all over the world.”

CHAPTER 20

Interview with Michela Musolino Daniele Fioretti

When did you start getting interested in Italian popular music and dance? When did you decide it would become your profession? It kind of happened by accident. It was interesting for me in my whole life, but it was also hard to find. When I was an adult—I was already married, I had a business—I took a workshop in New York City on southern Italian folk music. It was with the theater company I Giullari di Piazza.

Michela Musolino is a singer and dancer who performs work songs, love songs, and lullabies from the Sicilian tradition. She collaborates with many musical projects like Metalli Sonanti, Rosa Tatuata, and Rosa’s Drums, with Italian folk singers, American singers, and with avant-garde musicians. She performs in theaters and festivals both in the U.S. and in Italy, keeping alive traditional folk music and dance. She released four albums: Songs of Trinacria, Terra Sangue Mare, Sotto le stelle / Under the Stars, and La notti triunfanti, a Christmas album in which traditional Italian songs are reinterpreted in collaboration with a group of musicians from Memphis, Tennessee.

D. Fioretti (*) Italian, 208 Irvin Hall, Miami University, Oxford, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Fioretti, F. Orsitto (eds.), Italian Americans in Film and Other Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47211-4_20

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The first day I had the workshop, they asked me to audition for the theater company, because I looked southern Italian and I picked up the dances. These dances, although I was learning them, they were very familiar, similar to what my family would do. That set me off on a path where I wanted to learn everything I could: I started to study dance and theater, and Commedia dell’arte, and voice. I soon realized how much I loved this music, specifically Sicilian music, because it is my tradition. There were years when I was in Sicily as a young woman, I traveled with my dad trying to find folk music. It is hard to find it in Sicily, you need to know where to look. Can you tell us more about your family? When did they leave Sicily and come to the U.S.? They left Italy in the early 1900s. My grandparents immigrated probably between 1914 and 1918, because my grandmother and my grandfather got married in 1914. My dad’s father probably came earlier because he was older when he married; he did not get married until 1920, but he came to the U.S. as a teenager. He did not get married until he was in his thirties. Are both your parents of Sicilian origin? Except for my paternal grandfather, Domenico Musolino. If you know about Calabrian culture, that last name is typically calabrese. He was from the province of Reggio Calabria. He and my grandmother—my dad’s mom and dad—they had to elope here in the U.S. because my grandmother’s family did not want her to marry a calabrese. Hanno fatto la fuitina. Music runs in your family. In your bio, you say that both your grandmother and your great-grandmother were musicians as well. Did you find inspiration in these figures for your career? When I started studying folk music and dance, I went to my father, and he said: “You should do that, that is your tradition, that is what women do.” I did not understand what he was saying, because my father was very progressive, he was in favor of educating his daughters, let them choose what they wanted to do, do not make arranged marriages, that kind of stuff. He said, “It is a women’s tradition. Your mother had a drum, she came with a drum, and her mother in Sicily was known for drumming and folk dancing.” It was bound to happen. I assume you found inspiration in these figures. Definitely. That grandmother died when I was two years old, I did not really know her. It is a memory of what people told me about it. I wish

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things could have been different. It blows my mind. Sometimes I am on a plane with drums that friends made for me in Sicily, but I am bringing them back from New  York to Sicily, the place my grandparents had to leave, bringing the music with me that they brought with them coming to the U.S., bringing back music to the Sicilians. This is crazy! How important was, for your career and for you as an individual, the encounter with Italian culture at large? Your artistic experiences range from the study of Commedia dell’Arte (which led you to act in a bilingual version of Carlo Goldoni’s theater play The Coffee Shop) to the encounter with Sicilian folk artists (such as Umberto Leone, Rocco Pollina, La Banda di Paceco). I feel I would have never had a career apart from the Italian traditions. I was taking the workshops with directors coming from Rome, Lidia Biondi and Enzo Aronica. Lidia was a famous actress; she had a part in the miniseries Roma. She wanted to know if I was working, if I was having parts and I said no. I go to auditions and nobody knows what do with me because I am so ethnic. In Italy directors know you, and if they work well with you, they keep calling you, but in New York they have auditions, and they have quota. If a casting director wants me to look Italian and they look at me, they think I do not even look Italian. They have an idea in their head. However, with the Italian traditions I was always doing something, I always had my hands working in something. I do not want to say I turned my back on conventional entertainment, conventional theater, but I will go where people want me, where people understand me, where I can communicate with people. And I have always felt more comfortable working with Italian literature, Italian poetry combined with music. It is only in the last couple of years that I am starting to open up to very specific kinds of American music where I see I can combine. Umberto Leone and Rocco Pollina are my friends from Sicily. I also worked with Pippo Pollina, Moffo Schimenti, Michele Piccioni. These are wonderful musicians in Sicily. Sicily was always very open to me, even in the beginning, unlike the U.S.  Here people do not even know what Sicilian music or southern Italian music is. Instead, I go to Sicily and right away festivals want me to go to sing for them, because they are just open to the music. People come back year after year, they remember me and they ask me: what are you going to do this year, what dress are you going to wear this year, we loved the dress you wore last year… Even pre-COVID, I was touring Italy, I was collaborating with musicians from Cremona, and we toured everywhere, from Rome all over to Trieste, and we were always

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well received, because Italians are open to music, are open to new things. We performed in every kind of spaces. Italy makes everything into a venue, anything can be a venue in Italy, and we always had a very receptive audience. I am curious about your collaboration to the soundtrack of the documentary Un bellissimo ricordo on Felicia Bartolotta Impastato (mother of the anti-Mafia activist Peppino Impastato killed by the Mafia in 1978). Can you tell us something about it? Yes. I received a call from Professor Anthony Fragola, who was the director of the documentary. He said he was doing this project on Felicia Bartolotti Impastato, and I was really excited to participate, no matter if they could pay me or not. I asked if I could get a couple of gigs from this, maybe to a university, and he said yes. He used just one of my songs in the film, but when the film premiered, they set up an entire tour for me in North Carolina. We went to these wonderful workshops and presentations on the film, and we did it again three months later when Giovanni Impastato came to the U.S. and I worked with him. That helped me make roots in North Carolina; I go back almost every year in North Carolina to do a tour. To get to meet Giovanni Impastato was an incredible experience; I am honored to be part of this work. It is not just creative work; it is hopefully work that makes a positive impact on our culture. You published several music albums, from Songs of Trinacria to the most recent La Notti Triunfanti, a Christmas album, in 2022. This last work has been described as a “collision” of Sicilian folk traditions and Memphis music traditions. Can you tell us something more about this project? There are several layers of things happening with this album. You say it is a collision. For those of us who are Italian Americans, even though we are not recent immigrants, we always feel like we live in two worlds. I know some people are quite traumatized by that; I find it more fascinating and humorous, and I try to see the good in it. We are not quite fully Americans, but we are too Americans to be fully Italians. I am in a weird spot because, as an Italian American, there is a whole new generation of Italian Americans that I do not relate to at all. That is not my culture, not the Italian American culture I grew up with, and my culture was even different from my parents’. We are always floating between worlds. What I experienced, especially in the last year, is that there is such a strong connection between Sicily and the U.S., musically, since the early days of our country. Sicilians came here with such a strong musical tradition, so what happened when they came here? They took all these traditions, and they

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incorporated them in the fabric of American music. So this is the natural progress of this. The producer of this album is a Sicilian from Catania; he is a recent immigrant to the U.S. He is the opposite of me, in the sense that he was a Sicilian who grew up enamored of American music, and he came to the U.S. to make American music. When I found out about it, I thought it was kind of weird: I am an American who goes to Sicily to make Sicilian music, and he is a Sicilian coming to the U.S. to make American music. I needed to meet this guy. We started collaborating. We were still in the throes of COVID; he had just lost his mother, my mother passed away, he got stuck in Sicily, I moved and I started a new life. Life was in the air for us. We started working together and we produced this Christmas album. There are a lot of traditional sounds in this, but we said: “Let’s make this journey what it really is, let’s make the music take this journey.” To give you an example, we had a wonderful fiddle player, a violinist; her name is Alice Hasen, a young lady from Memphis. She is an amazing talent. When she went in the studio for recording, she asked: “Should I have been trying to listen Sicilian music and Italian music to get an idea of how am I supposed to sound?” The producer and I said, “No! We want to hear you, we want to hear what you are going to bring. We have got the Sicilian stuff taken care of, don’t worry about it.” That is what we are trying to convey, and we hope that when the people listen to this album, they hear familiar things and new things and they cannot really tell which is which. We want to show that path, that movement of the people from the old world to the new world and what happens in the music. That makes me think of Louis Prima, who mixed Sicilian songs and jazz. Yes. Finally, after years of running away from the song C’è la luna, I finally put it in the repertoire. It is just a fun song, everybody loves it. If you hate that song, you have no soul. I tried to give people a little bit of background about that song, and that song is really emblematic of the path of the immigration of the Sicilians. It started with the folk tradition. Rossini even borrowed from it for his compositions. Then an immigrant here in the U.S. decided he was going to claim it, clean it, make a nice arrangement. Rudy Vallée had a hit with it, and then Louis Prima had a hit with it. When I go to universities and speak with students, I tell them: “You all know this song because it was a giant hit on TikTok just nine months ago,” and their minds just blow. It is amazing to see this song that keeps coming, keeps cycling back. It has never left our consciousness for hundreds of years.

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You talked about “floating” between different cultures. How do you feel about being defined as an Italian American? Do you agree with this definition? I really do not know what to say about that. I hate to use labels, and for years I did not identify myself as an Italian American singer. I just said, “This is what I do.” But guess what? It does not work. You need to give people a description. In these last few years, there has been this big resurgence of interest in being Italian American in young people, which I think it is great, I am happy. However, we are getting pushed out, and I said: wait a minute, I am the same person I was before everybody became an expert, everyone turned into an authority on it, and this is my life. I was born in America, born and raised in the U.S., but when I go to Italy, I feel very much at home, so I feel that Italy is my second home or maybe my first home. Sometimes I feel more comfortable there, but sometimes I feel more comfortable here in the U.S. I feel that everybody who immigrated has the same feelings. There are things I can do here that I could never do in Italy, and vice versa, there are things you can do in Italy that you could never do here. Just to give you an example, when my daughter was little, I used to bring her with me when I sang in Sicily, and I could give her freedoms. When we were in a little town, I could give her a lot of freedom to do stuff that I could never do here. I could give her some money and send her to the store, and go with her friends to do those errands and I never worried that something could happen to her, because everybody along the way knew who she was and they knew who I was. Staying in a friends’ farm up in the mountains, up in the Madonìa, the kids played all day and I never had to worry. I was there but I did not have to watch her the whole time. We do not have that culture here. I cannot let her walk down the street because it was like a highway. There are times I feel completely American, and other times I feel an Italian; not even a modern Italian, an Italian from two hundred years ago. There are times I feel Italian American. It depends on the situation. I hate like hell, when I describe my work, to say that I am an Italian American, but it is my identity. I did come from two cultures, and I am grateful about that. Years ago, I was interviewed by a journalist who was from India, and he asked me how did I feel about Garibaldi; I explained to him that Garibaldi was antagonistic towards the South. A lot of southerners were anti-Garibaldi, even if he is now considered the eroe dei due mondi, he really did not do us anything. I need to be impartial from the story but I am grateful it did not work out, because that is what brought me here. The repercussions of

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what Garibaldi did in the South, that is why my people left sixty years later. I have opportunities here that I probably would not have had in Italy. And I have a perspective that I am grateful for, that I would not have had if I was only connected to one place. How do I identify myself? It changes from day to day, from situation to situation. There are some times my friends say: “You are so Italian, are you sure you were born in the U.S.?” and I say yes. There are other times I think I could never be an Italian. Also, Italian Americans have their culture too, so there are times I would say yes, I wear that badge today. I feel I did not answer your question very well. You answered perfectly, and I think I can relate to that. It is exactly the in-betweenness of Italian American culture that interests me. How important is folk music for the preservation of Italian identity in the U.S.? Definitely! I think it is important for the preservation of every kind of ethnic identity. It is important in Italy as well, but it is extremely important for Italian Americans in the U.S.  When immigrants came, they did not come with anything, except for their traditions. It is a way to give people perspective, to give them a reference point. It is a way to give people an identity. It is good to know and understand your traditions. You may not want to keep them, because they may be detrimental, but at least you have something to run away from. At least you know what you do not want. The danger I see is when people do not have a sense of identity, when they do not understand what the foundation is, that is when you get the stereotypes and the negative aspects. We need to have something behind us that supports us. Do you want something solid, or do you want something fake? Yes, I do think that folk music is important. It is a social glue. If we lose music, we lose a way of thinking, of communicating, of uniting with people. Italian and Italian American cultures are typically depicted as full of colors, sounds, and gestures, but also taste and smell. How important is food as part of your Italian American identity? It is inescapable! In our culture, food is a way of sharing. It is so essential breaking bread with someone, the idea of giving something to a guest, or a friend. It is fundamental to our culture. Italian Americans used to—I do not know if they are still doing it in modern times—invite people to their house and offer them something. If you went to someone’s house, you perhaps could not have something but you needed to accept something, even a glass of water, because it is a social dance, giving and receiving. The astonishing thing is that this tradition comes from a time when

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people had nothing; whatever you had you would still give some kind of offering. I was nineteen, and I was in the mountains of Calabria. We stumbled on my grandfather’s cousin, a very tiny woman who looked like she was a thousand years old; she was so happy to see my dad. We walked into her house and her house was very spartan but, all of a sudden, she pulls out from the cupboard this beautiful crystal set: these amazing glasses with a decanter. She started pouring some liquor, and she pulled out of the cupboard some biscotti. We had to sit down and make company, accompagnare. In English we say you have to make company, and it is this beautiful social dance and it unites us. It is a way to show kindness to another human being. I think it is fundamental to any kind of relation and I think we are lacking that. I grew up in a family where people would just drop in. I still have a few friends who are older than me that would call me when they are in my neighborhood, and we sit down and we have that something, an espresso, a cup of tea. But that is dying, and it hurts. It bothers me when someone come to my house, I offer them something and they refuse. We used to make fun of our mothers and aunts, tell them to stop, but I get it now. It is a social dance, a social contract. I want you to accept this because I need to give you something. It is good to give something and it is good to accept it, it is part of a community, of a society: you learn to give and you learn to accept. It freaks me out when someone comes to my house and says no. What do you mean, no? I turn into my mother and my grandmother. That comes from a time when people had nothing, it goes beyond survival: I think it is for the survival of our souls that we have this dance, this contract. Our culture is known for that. I always say you can understand how people think by their music, but also by their food: you can understand a lot about people by the food they have, the food they share. It is a really big thing now. The supply chain is a mess and everything is blowing up, and people say you should have this, you should stock up, but we have been doing that, we never stopped doing that. We are in modern times and we still have to think the way our grandmothers thought: you may not have it tomorrow, put it in the cabinet. There is a lot of wisdom in these traditions. Also, recipes evolve, they can tell what a culture has been through. Food is an important aspect and so basic, so necessary for our existence. It should not be taken lightly. Where are you going from here—artistically speaking, of course? I have made all kinds of plans, and most of them will happen. I like this journey of figuring out what is happening to my music when I combine it with American music, exploring the influence that Sicilians—and southern

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Italians in general—had on American music: jazz, blues, rock and roll, rockabilly, pop music. Sicilian had a tradition of itinerant musicians, music made in the barber shop, singing while you are working in the field, and music in a funeral; it was all brought here. Eventually, they worked their way into American bands making American music. So, I would like to explore that more. As I am working on it here, I have friends in Sicily, the group I Beddi. I toured with them in October, in New York City. I had an idea for a song and they did that song here. It was not quite what I wanted but we are getting there. I was on stage with them and, all of a sudden, one of the guitarists just did a little riff from a Johnny Cash song, and I said: “That’s it! That’s exactly what I want to have.” So, I proposed a project and we started to work on it together. They have been exploring, in Sicily, combining American root music with Sicilian root music. It is fun, and it is fun for the audience too. It is just an interesting illustration. It reflects our journey as a people. So, this is where I am trying to take my music now. It kind of directs me, I do not get to direct it.

CHAPTER 21

Interview with Anthony Julian Tamburri Ryan Calabretta-Sajder

Anthony Julian Tamburri is currently dean of the John D Calandra Italian American Institute and Distinguished Professor of European Languages and Literatures at Queens College/CUNY. In 2010, he received the honor of Cavaliere dell’Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana (The Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (OMRI) was instituted in 1951 and is the highest-ranking honor and most senior order in Italy. It is awarded for “merit acquired by the nation” in a variety of fields such as literature, the arts, economy, public service, and social, philanthropic, and humanitarian activities, and for long and conspicuous service in civilian and military careers.). Dr. Tamburri’s research interests lie at the intersection of literature, cinema, semiotics, interpretation theory, and cultural studies. Although trained as an Italianist, his current research agenda balances both Italian and Italian American studies. He is the author of 20 books and more than 130 essays published in both English and Italian. Additionally, he has edited more than 30 volumes and special issues of journals. He is the co-founder, with Fred Gardaphé and Paolo Giordano, of Bordighera Press (1990), the first press in the U.S. dedicated to the publication of creative

R. Calabretta-Sajder (*) Department of World, Languages, Literatures, & Cultures, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Fioretti, F. Orsitto (eds.), Italian Americans in Film and Other Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47211-4_21

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The first question is when was ‘Italics’ created and why? How would you summarize its mission? And has its mission evolved over time? The institute that I direct is called the John D.  Calandra Italian American Institute. It was founded in 1979 because of a study by the then-senator John D. Calandra of about 40 years of, to use a more general term, mistreatment of Italian Americans within The City University of New York. It took a few years to get it sufficiently structured, and then at a certain point, it was The City University of New York’s television station that approached the Institute. It’s not your typical university or college TV station. This is a professional station that runs 365, 24/7. For the most part, it’s like a public broadcasting station. They do very little advertising. Some programs have ‘sponsors,’ but they don’t advertise a can of soda or whatever. Thus, the only sponsors you’ll see are at the end of some of the programs. Most programs are 30 minutes. In 1986, the director of CUNY TV asked the director of the Calandra Institute at the time, “Why don’t you guys do a television program?” And so, they hired a couple of people, who had MFAs in TV production, and they started, they called it Italics. Today, I think the title has lost a little bit of its historical reference, the aura of the so-called black 20-year period here in Italy, because italico was an adjective used very much by Mussolini’s regime, and Italians were not Italians but they were il popolo italico, right? Things of that sort. Anyway, they called it Italics, and it’s remained so, even after I started in 2006. After 30-some-odd years, it’s hard to change your name, or change a brand. The mission is to promote Italian things that deal with Italian American, as well as Italian. When I came to the Institute, because my background is Italian, I Italianized the Institute a little bit. We’re doing more with Italy, and we are also doing more on Italics.

works by and from Italian American authors. Beyond his academic reach, Dr. Tamburri is a co-founder of the Italian Diaspora Studies Summer Seminar and has taught at various summer institutes including at the University of Pennsylvania and Middlebury College’s Scuola Estiva Italiana. He was also the first Esposito Visiting Faculty Fellow at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. He also serves as the executive producer of the TV program, Italics. Dr. Tamburri visited the University of Arkansas’s Rome Center at Palazzo Taverna during Summer Session I while I was team-teaching the course “To Rome with Love.” We discussed Italian American cinema as well as the representation of Italian Americans in new media.

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Has the mission evolved at all over time? Besides being more global from the last director? Not really. Well, what we can do today is because the previous administration didn’t have the same type of personnel. … Because I speak Italian, we hired one of our two full-time people who speak Italian, for Italics. And we have three other people who are also fluent in Italian at the Institute. So, if we do something in Italian, we can quite quickly and very accurately set up subtitles. We do the translations and then our tech people just put them in. So, yes, we do that, and I like to do that. Overall, if one is to engage in Italian American studies, knowledge of Italian can only fill in gaps that would otherwise linger and remain unbridgeable. You interviewed Emanuele Crialese. We interviewed Emanuele Crialese, who directed, as you know, the movie Golden Door (Nuovomondo). And he did two other movies that were very successful, very well-received critically. One with Valeria Golino, Respiro, which is a very good movie about this married woman who is trying to deal with the issues of being this constricted, married woman. And Terraferma, which addresses the issues of more contemporary migration to Italy. And I’m happy to say that we’ve interviewed the only, the one of only two, two-time winners of the Strega award, Sandro Veronesi—for those who don’t know, the Strega award is like our Pulitzer Prize. Before moving forward to share with the students, what is your definition of Italian American? So, I leave it up to the individual to identify. Somebody could be somatically and cellularly of Italian origin, but if that person has totally immersed themself into the host culture, then they can be American, they can be Canadian, they can be whatever they want. For me, an Italian American is someone who is aware that there is this heredity, this cultural heritage that we call Italian, someone who has an interest in it to some degree. It doesn’t have to be an academic interest or an intellectual interest, it could be a cultural interest. Someone who goes to book presentations, someone who goes twice, three times a year to a bookstore because they have presentations, whatever. So, for me, that is enough for someone to be an Italian American. That’s a minimum. What I don’t see are limitations. There are also associations outside of academia. There’s the Order of Sons of Italy, which has been around since 1905 in the United States. There’s UNICO which has been around since 1922 in the United States. There’s NIAF, the National Italian American Foundation. NIAF has been around since 1976. It’s one of the youngest but has a significant pontifical

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reach in Washington DC. Others would include, of course, the National Organization of Italian American Women (NOIAW). And then there are some organizations that are seemingly more local, but they have a pretty good regional, if not national, impact. And two of them are the Tiro A Segno club, which is in New York, down in Greenwich, down in the Italian area of New  York, on MacDougal Street. And then there’s also the Columbus Citizen Foundation, a larger club, still local, by invitation only, and it runs the Columbus Day parade in New York, which some of you may have seen on TV. I’m also happy to say that Tiro A Segno has endowed a visiting professorship at NYU, New  York University. Finally, another foundation not that well-known, but impactful on a national level through its fund-raising especially is the Francesco and Mary Giambelli Foundation. If you’re not familiar with the hyphenated history of the United States, it is clear that Italian Americans have made an impact, a big impact, have had and continue to have an impact. It doesn’t matter where your politics are. We go from Nancy Pelosi, two heartbeats away from the president, to Michael Pompeo, to Leon Panetta and so on and so forth. Our two judges weren’t the most liberal, Alito and Scalia but… Think about that, nine Supreme Court justices, and for a period, there were two Italian Americans, both sons of immigrants. Moving from mission of the theme, Italics has covered a vast array of topics, from literature and film to advocacy and history. One area that I think remains clearly connected is a sense of activism. Could you comment on that? Sure. Well, there was a sense of ethnic activism already existed before I got there. I would say it was a little more sociopolitical on the local level. We still engage. We are funded by the state of New York. We have, right now, the smallest number of Italian American representation  in a long time, we have about 40 legislators, between the Senate and the Assembly, in the state of New York. We used to have about 50 or 55 Italian Americans serving in politics on the state level. That number, through redistricting and things of that sort, has decreased, but we’re in contact with them. We don’t have to engage in that type of social activism at the local level. What we’ve been trying to do, what I’ve been trying to do with my colleagues, is engage in intellectual activism, socio-intellectual activism. Considering the history of the United States, considering the history of Italian immigration to the United States, … how is it that we do not have more Italian American studies programs in the United States? I mentioned the Tiro A Segno professorship, but that’s one course every other year at the graduate

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level, in a department of Italian Studies. There was at Lehman College, which is part of The City University of New  York system, there was a major. It was the only undergraduate major in the country in Italian American studies. Unfortunately, like a lot of things in the academy, programs, and institutes, et cetera, are tied to an individual. When the individual leaves, passes away, whatever, the program basically wilts and then dies. That’s what happened at Lehman. We have an Italian American Studies minor at Queens. I think there are a couple of others around, in the country, and that’s it. We need to do more. And we’re trying to convince the leaders out there at these organizations I mentioned and others, that it’s nice to give a lot of money to a hospital. And it’s nice to give a lot of money to a church, but that does nothing for the promotion, promulgation and even the preservation of culture, the promotion and promulgation of the culture as is, and preservation of the history, let’s say! It does nothing. So, you give money to a hospital, because you’re hoping they’re going to put you in line first, again on how much you give and save your body, right? And then you give money to the church because you hope that if you’re a believer, you hope that when you do pass and you meet St. Peter or whoever is up there, at the gate, that he’s going to let you in, right? We make that joke and some of them don’t appreciate it. We’re hoping, we want to see more money given to the universities, to the colleges and universities. And let me go back to NYU again. And a lot of this is serendipity. A lot of this is a stroke of luck, right? Well, NYU just happened, years ago, to meet up with a woman named Mariuccia Zerilli-­ Marimò. She was a baroness, the widow of someone who was an antifascist, a big pharmacist who lost everything during Mussolini’s reign. After Mussolini’s defeat, he then got it all back and, of course, was very wealthy. And they lived here in the U.S. and there in Italy, and then he died. She started to split her time between Monte Carlo and New  York. And she went to NYU and offered to fund an Italian studies institution. It was a lot of money, and there were a couple of stipulations. One stipulation was that there be only a department of Italian. This is what you can do with money. And so, what she did was, she bought a double townhouse, restored it, and then gave more money still. In the end, she gave somewhere to the tune of about $8.5  million to NYU.  And they have La Casa Italiana, which is a wonderful structure, which houses the Department of Italian. It has a nice little theater with 99 seats. Because in New York, in the theater world, if it’s under a hundred seats, then members of the SAG union can engage in a theater without having to demand union scale. Otherwise, the

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SAG actors cannot just go anywhere and act. And so, NYU really stands out among all the universities in the United States with regard to Italian studies. And I’m not an NYU graduate, just for the record. I got my Ph.D. at the University of California Berkeley. So, I would like to think that Berkeley is what it is. It was what it was when I was there. That’s what I like to think. Since this interview will be included in a volume on Italian Americans in films and other media, can you comment on the research focusing on Italian American studies and the media? In which direction do we need to go? Italian American cinema or Italian Americans in American cinema are very prominent. The numbers are also pretty good, when you think of Frank Capra, Vincent Minnelli, Francis Ford Coppola. I’m just talking about the directors, Martin Scorsese, Michael Cimino, Brian De Palma, and so on and so forth, right? And Nancy Savoca, Penny Marshall, and it continues. Even female directors then, right? Yes, Nancy Savoca, Penny Marshall, Ida Lupino, and Helen De Michiels, who did only one feature, but there are several directors who have only done one feature, for various reasons. Because when they were working, they were still working with film. It was very expensive to work with film. No one works with film anymore. And in fact, Nancy Savoca shot her latest film Union Square, I think in 2011. It’s about Italian Americans. One scene, she shot with an iPhone, because where they were shooting, it just wasn’t convenient to come and set everything up, so it was shot with an iPhone. The unfortunate thing is that critics aren’t paying enough attention to Italian American cinema as a whole. They look at certain directors and that’s it. They look at the directors that are very easy to talk about as Italian Americans, or their films to talk about as Italian American products, and the idea that you might look at a film from a different perspective, like forget about what’s going on in the middle of the screen and look what’s going on outside the middle of the screen. Sometimes you see things that are, well, “Oh, wow. Look at that, look at that, look at that.” And it gives you an idea that maybe that person, for whatever reason, didn’t put his Italian-ness up front, but is trying to put it here and there. I’m thinking of a film, a short film, called Lena’s Spaghetti. And so, “Oh, Lena’s Spaghetti, it’s not about some little old lady making spaghetti.” Well, it’s anything, but that, right? And the storyline really has nothing to do with Italian Americans. The director is Italian American.

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It’s only a 23-minute movie. There’s this correspondence that takes place, and the correspondence is on little postcards with the proverbial putti. Oh, yeah. I’ve seen those on tours. And so, it was on this classic Renaissance, canonical Renaissance drawing that was going back and forth. So, there you can see a little bit. Now, here are two other very important Italian American filmmakers and they have and have not dealt with their Italian-ness in their films. And they’ve given life to a genre. The new Hollywood! There are four names that come up, Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma, and Cimino. There is not much to add about the first two or three, but I would say that Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter is important, for a variety of reasons. It’s the first post-­ Vietnam war film, and it deals with post-traumatic stress syndrome in the soldiers that came back. When we weren’t using that word [post-traumatic stress syndrome]. No. No. The word didn’t exist. The concept might’ve existed among psychologists and psychiatrists, but it wasn’t part of the general vocabulary. And so, here’s the other thing about Italian American, non-Italian American, The Deer Hunter is about working-class men and women, who live in Eastern Pennsylvania, and if you pulled out those Eastern European names and stuck in names that ended in a vowel, it could very well be an Italian American movie. Because the family, the idea of family, the idea of community, all those things that you see in Clairton, PA, it’s not just… People say Italian, family, hard work, whatever. Yes, a lot of immigrant groups are family, hard work, and so on and so forth. And so, you see that. So, these four guys really gave life to then another… the new Hollywood. They’re really the heart of the new Hollywood. And what about television? Where does the field of Italian American television stand from a critical perspective? So, let me finish with the film. What happens, however, is, people aren’t studying all these movies in depth. They’re not taking the time and they’re not themselves looking at these movies and looking for those secondary and tertiary signs, like the postcard with the putti on it that we see in Lena’s Spaghetti (1994), those secondary and tertiary imageries that you also would find in Madonna’s music video Papa Don’t Preach (1986). You know Danny Aiello’s in it. She’s this little ‘Italian girl.’ She’s got a T-shirt on. What does the T-shirt say? “Italians do it better.” You’ve seen that T-shirt, I’m sure. Now, the video’s really not ‘Italian American,’ but it’s Madonna, it’s Danny Aiello, and so on and so forth. But it’s the scholars who are lacking in interest that they don’t go further. Television. Penny

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Marshall: Laverne & Shirley with Cindy Williams and Penny Marshall? Penny Marshall has made a number of movies. Her first movie was Big. Then she went on to do, A League of Their Own, which is about the women’s baseball league during World War II. She went on to do other things. There are other examples, too. Nancy Savoca, to date, has made eight films. Three deal with Italian Americans. Nancy Savoca happens to be an Italian American, filtered through Buenos Aires. Her parents first went to Argentina, lived there, and then moved to the US. So, you look at Nancy’s overall work so far and you see two things: gender and ethnicity. And the other thing about Nancy Savoca, and nobody notices, no reference at all to organized crime. When she debuts with True Love, in 1989, with a very young Annabella Sciorra and a very young Ron Eldard, this film is about these 20-something-year-olds getting married. It’s a couple of days preparation for the marriage in an Italian American neighborhood, but not one reference at all to organized crime. Not even in the conversation that goes on between the characters, not even incidentally, right? I would submit to you that that is a purposeful act of omission. And then, of course, it’s all about, it’s from a woman’s perspective. It’s hard to find online, but it’s a good movie. And then she did a movie to go back to her Latin American roots, called Dirt, for Showtime, which is about an undocumented domestic woman from Guatemala and the complicated issue of dealing with being undocumented in the United States and the abuse that you have to deal with your work. So, the movies are there. There’re many more movies than what we see the critics study. And so, the scholarship needs to broaden itself. And now, let’s bring it to the TV, television. TV’s a very happy place for Italian Americans, and the ones who are anti-Godfather and anti-Scorsese and anti-whomever should be very happy about TV, despite The Sopranos and in spite of ‘Pizza Man,’ and in this regard I’m going to mention a TV program, you guys weren’t around then [Ed. Note: Tamburri is addressing 20-year-olds], Hill Street Blues? You know Hill Street Blues? It’s from the ’80s. Late ’80s. Hill Street Blues was Stephen Bochco. It was his big first mega hit. It was a police show, and it was also one of the first TV shows that was almost shot like a movie, with the camera angles and things of that sort, the editing, etc. The captain of the police force was Italian American. He was divorced. His wife was also around occasionally. She was played by Stephen Bochco’s wife. And the captain of the police force was having an affair with the district attorney.

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And she had a nickname. His name was Frank Furillo (played by Daniel Travanti), and she called him ‘Pizza Man.’ And, of course, it was an affectionate term, and people didn’t know what to do with it. The people who are always offended, they didn’t really know. They were trying to figure out what to do with it, because it had to be negative, in their opinion. After all, it’s an Italian on TV, but it wasn’t. It was an affectionate term. Because there would be scenes of them, in a hotel room, they would get a hotel room for the day, and she would call him ‘Pizza Man.’ But when TV begins, Italian Americans are the master of variety shows. From 1948 to 1964, Perry Como is consistently on TV, with a variety show. Jimmy Durante was already a famous comedian at the time, he had a variety show. Frank Sinatra had two variety shows. They lasted two years each. Dean Martin, of course, if you go back to the ’70s, you’ll find had a variety show for about five or six years, and so on and so forth. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a reference to My Three Sons, with Fred McMurray and company. There are two TV shows that predate that by a decade. One is Life with Luigi, and the other is Bonino. These came out of radio. So, we’re talking late ’40s. Whereas in the early ’40s and late ’30s, these were done on the radio. And it continues, the shows go on and people are saying, “Oh, but look, this and that, et cetera.” Well, in the ’70s and ’80s, and ’90s, what do you have? You have a hospital show in which the doctor, the head doctor, is Dr. Alberghetti, played by Barbara Hershey. You have One Day at a Time, about a divorced woman and her two daughters. What’s her character name? Ann Romano. Thus, we have these Italian characters, and they’re not mafiosi. They’re not necessarily negative. And there is a plethora of programs that move forward. And then, of course, they’re the ones that are questionable. I always get slack for this, from the Italian Americans who are unknowing of the history of Italian Americans. Everybody Loves Raymond. Everyone seems to like Everybody Loves Raymond. All these Italian Americans love Everybody Loves Raymond. I ask, “Why?” “Oh, it’s funny. Yeah.” I reply, “Yeah, it is funny, but let’s do a breakdown.” The mother is hysterical, the father’s a boob, the sons, one is a cop, so that’s a little bit of a stereotype, because he’s a civil servant and that was the stereotype, and he’s not that smart either as we intuit from his dialogue. And he is living in his parents’ basement. And then Raymond is also henpecked. … And yeah, the brother lives in the basement. And the only saving grace in this family is Raymond’s wife … who’s Irish. So, I always say, “Why do you like that?” And they’re

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“Well, well I never thought about that.” All to say, we, as Italian Americans, and we, as scholars, just need to be more, to use the term that doesn’t seem to fit, more vigilant of what’s going on within these movies e TV series. What is your favorite and least favorite representation of Italian Americans via TV or media, or one and one? It’s hard to say because just in the last three weeks, I saw The Godfather, Mean Streets, and True Love. Aesthetically, structurally, from that point of view, The Godfather and Mean Streets maybe, but The Godfather, because… It’s the 50th anniversary of The Godfather. Yes, the 50th anniversary. But then I think, I don’t know. There’s a movie that most people haven’t seen, and it’s called Dinner Rush. Unfortunately, when it came out it was supposed to be distributed in September 2001 by Sony, I believe. And, of course, we know what happened in September 2001. And at the same time, Sony was going through change. So, between 9/11 and nobody going to the movies for six months, and the situation with Sony, the movie never made it and it only received word-of-mouth advertising. And it’s a really good movie. So many Italian and Italian American chefs have had cooking programs on TV for decades. What is their role in Italian, and Italian American studies? What is the role of the academy in analyzing these programs from a cultural studies perspective? The first thing that we all need to recognize is that the Italian food we see on American TV programs, the likes of Lidia Bastianich and company, and she’ll admit it, is modified. It’s different from Italian. And there are various reasons why it’s different, but it’s different from what we find here in Italy, for the most part. So, they become important for a variety of reasons, right? Not just for food. They become important for any type of cultural transformation that’s taking place, that we can see perhaps an analog in other activities. They’ve become important for identity in ways that are different. And I was just at a three-day wine festival, “Tutti giù in cantina,” in a town called Velletri, 45 minutes from Rome by car. I met a gentleman named Daniele Cernilli, a journalist. He has a degree in philosophy, theoretical philosophy, but he’s become a journalist and a specialist in wine. He’s nicknamed Doctor Wine today. And he had a very good, even-keeled view of Italy, America, Italian wine, and American wine. I think that’s the same with Italian food, that it’s different, but it’s good. And so, I think what we learned from the food is the cultural

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transformations. And if people study food in a more profound manner than some have, I think we can also see that. And one of the people who began their career with him in the 1980s and who is now in the United States is Fabio Parasecoli. Recently Stanley Tucci started an Instagram page, in which he makes cocktails, many are Italian, as well as launching a CNN program, “Searching for Italy”. What significance does he and  this program, have for Italian American studies? I like Stanley Tucci. I’m not totally convinced about Searching for Italy. It’s a really high-end cuisine that he’s seeking out. Now, it’s also true that the old trattoria doesn’t really exist anymore, right? My favorite one disappeared in Florence about eight or nine years ago, and it was still an old trattoria. So, yeah, I’m happy it’s been done. I really am, because I think it gives a good view of Italy. I think we still need that, unfortunately, because we don’t get the help we need from those who can. And for the record, I’m rubbing my fingers together, the money sign, culturally. I think that food, as I said before, we can study cultural transformations through food. If we look at the history of the food, then I think that this, perhaps, can help us a little bit in that sense. Yeah. You know the good thing about it is he learned Italian; he speaks Italian. Yeah. And, of course, he did Big Night. Last question. YouTube has become amazing as an archive for many reasons, including cinema. In fact, some early Italian American films are now available today there, which otherwise will only be housed in archives and available to only a few. How has this changed or is changing the way we conduct research? You can do research in your pajamas from your home. I mean, really, when you think about it. Look at all the complaints people have about Google, because YouTube is now owned by Google, and they’re very vigilant because we have our Italics archived on Google or on YouTube. We have a big page. And we went through a period where somebody wanted to make life difficult for us and they claimed the copyright of a song. And although within a week, we had the actual songwriter and the owner of the copyright write to us in an email that we indeed had permission, it took us about six to eight weeks to finally get that episode back up with the music in it, and for us to be able to use it.

Index1

A Academic research, 10 Adaptation, 20, 47n12, 51, 52, 101, 139, 157, 162, 239, 286 American Dream, 22, 54, 59, 60, 150n17, 159, 160 American Mutoscope, 2, 16, 34 American television, 7, 206, 222, 227, 228, 343 Anxiety, 5, 103, 144, 184n37 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 142 Assimilation, 16, 22, 45, 67–82, 122, 139, 141, 145, 159, 222, 225 B Bancroft, Anne, 116, 131n5 Barker, Reginald, 3, 37–39, 44, 45n1, 186n15 Bastianich, Lidia, 8, 226–228, 232n9, 232n10, 232n12, 346

Batman, 241, 244, 247, 252–255, 256n3 Bauman, Zygmunt, 5, 144 Beban, George, 37, 38, 44, 45, 48n19, 48n22, 186n15 Bella figura, 4, 88–90, 92, 98, 102 Bersani, Leo, 105 Bertinelli, Helena, 8, 237–258 Besson, Luc, 6, 157–170 Biograph, 2, 3, 15–27 Blunt, Felicity, 9, 267, 276, 278, 279 Bonifacio, Matthew, 5, 137–151 Border, 5, 6, 138–144, 146, 147, 148n5, 150n19, 190, 213, 230, 269, 271 Bronx, 97–99, 118, 127, 129, 160, 169n3, 194, 311, 314, 315, 321–323 Butler, Judith, 86, 87, 89, 92, 101

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Fioretti, F. Orsitto (eds.), Italian Americans in Film and Other Media, Italian and Italian American Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47211-4

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INDEX

C Calandra Institute, 338 Capra, Frank, 70, 192, 199n6, 342 Christ, 57, 61, 63 Closet, 4, 85–111 CNN, 8, 263–273, 275, 276, 279, 347 Cocktail, 267, 275–279, 347 Community, 3, 4, 16, 22, 35, 36, 47n9, 52, 58, 59, 63, 69, 71–75, 86, 88, 93, 99, 100, 103, 105–108, 108n1, 108n2, 109n7, 132n14, 140, 142, 158–161, 169n3, 179, 194, 195, 198n2, 211, 215n5, 229, 243, 244, 266, 304–306, 308, 312, 316, 317, 321, 323, 334, 343 Confinement, 59, 130 Cooking shows, 8, 212, 226 Coppola, Francis Ford, 9, 109n10, 161, 164, 180, 183, 230, 281–284, 286, 342, 343 Cultural constraints, 9 CUNY TV, 10, 131n6, 338 D Dance, 2, 10, 40, 41, 57, 65n13, 77, 78, 81, 120, 176, 271, 307, 308, 327, 328, 333, 334 Dark comedy, 222 DeCerchio, Tom, 88, 91, 110n16 De Laurentiis, Giada, 8, 226–228, 232n9, 232n12, 233n16 De Michiel, Helen, 4, 5, 10, 67–82, 116, 181, 182, 303–309, 342 Diana, 4, 8, 71–80, 237–258, 306–308 Di Donato, Pietro, 3, 51–66, 183 Dillingham Commission, 16 Dmytryk, Edward, 3, 4, 51–66

Documentary, 116, 181, 303–305, 321, 323, 330 Domesticity, 58, 118, 119, 226, 247 Drama, 15–27, 78, 123, 124, 134n23, 183, 196, 210, 216n15, 224, 230, 283, 291, 308, 309 E Easter eggs, 163, 165, 170n9 Ethnic, 5, 7, 9, 15–27, 53, 54, 68, 69, 71, 72, 78, 88, 91, 108, 115, 138–141, 181, 192, 193, 195, 196, 198, 199n10, 207, 213, 215n5, 222, 225–229, 296, 308, 309, 329, 333, 340 Ethnicity, 3–5, 17, 19, 20, 22, 25, 27n26, 53, 67–73, 79–81, 82n6, 98, 107, 115, 116, 122, 131n1, 193, 195, 207, 208, 213, 215n6, 222, 223, 229–231, 255, 344 F Feminism, 77, 91, 93 Flavors, 9, 183, 264, 266, 267, 271 Folk music, 327, 328, 333 Food, 8, 9, 55–58, 60, 61, 65n13, 73–76, 116, 121, 125–128, 130, 132n12, 226, 232n9, 258n36, 264, 266–270, 272, 276, 279, 305, 307, 333, 334, 346, 347 Friendship, 5, 77, 101, 137–151, 178, 308, 313, 317 G Gangster genre, 6, 157, 159–162, 168, 169, 180, 289 Gaudreault, Émile, 101 Gay, 85, 86, 88, 91–95, 98, 100–105, 107, 108, 108n2, 109n6,

 INDEX 

109n7, 110n12, 312, 315–321, 323–325 Gender performativity, 101 Global, 9, 46n5, 230, 231, 283, 296, 297, 339 Great Depression, 59, 65n9, 66n16, 290 Griffith, David Wark, 2, 3, 15–27, 34, 36, 200n17 Guido, 23, 205, 215n9, 224, 232n7, 245, 313–316 H Huntress, 8, 237–258 I Ince, Thomas, 37–39, 45n1 Instagram, 9, 276, 277, 279, 347 Interview, 2, 10, 89, 118, 131n6, 133n22, 133–134n23, 148n1, 161, 162, 166, 169n4, 169n5, 182, 186n16, 263, 277, 303–309, 311–325, 327–335, 337–347 Italian American cinema, 6, 86, 107, 109n6, 109n9, 173, 178, 312, 313, 318, 338, 342 Italian American culture, 10, 70, 80, 81n2, 87, 99, 102, 174, 178, 304, 306–308, 311, 330, 333 Italian American ethnicity, 68, 70, 80 Italian Americans, 1, 31, 52, 68, 85–111, 115, 138, 157–170, 173, 178–184, 189–200, 205–216, 221–233, 237, 263, 278, 284, 304, 311, 330, 338 Italian cuisine, 8, 227, 270, 275 Italian immigrants, 2–4, 22, 23, 26n11, 31–48, 52, 53, 55, 69,

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118, 129, 160, 178, 192, 226, 278, 306 Italian traditions, 106, 176, 308, 329 Italics, 10, 131n6, 133n22, 338–340, 347 K Kefauver, Estes, 7, 194 L Language, 1, 16, 17, 32, 45n3, 51, 53, 68, 69, 76, 81, 81n3, 91, 102, 105, 117, 145, 146, 185n6, 231n4, 245, 289, 292, 296, 304, 308 Lombroso, Cesare, 16 M Madness, 6, 173–178, 180 Mafia, 5, 7, 8, 34, 71, 87, 98, 100, 115, 157, 160, 163, 164, 166, 169, 169n3, 183, 194, 195, 200n20, 210, 212, 222, 230, 237, 245, 246, 255, 263, 283, 284, 290, 307, 312, 315, 316, 320, 322, 324, 325, 330 Marionette, 174–177, 179, 180, 184n4, 184n6, 185n6 McCarthy, Joseph, 4, 52, 194 Meme, 2, 281–297 Memphis, 327, 330, 331 Mexican, 5, 6, 138–146, 149n8, 150n15, 151n23 Multimodality, 9, 282, 283, 285, 288, 296 Musolino, Michela, 10, 81, 327–335

352 

INDEX

N Neighborhood, 24, 25, 34, 43, 46n5, 65n13, 71–73, 75, 77, 78, 82n7, 91, 96, 98, 103, 118, 121–124, 128–130, 131n7, 132n11, 140, 146, 160, 205, 265, 266, 289, 290, 305, 306, 314, 334, 344 Netflix, 8, 209, 230, 233n14, 314 New York, 24, 32–35, 39–41, 46n6, 48n23, 48n24, 52, 55, 56, 58, 59, 64n2, 98, 131n7, 158, 163, 179, 183, 222–224, 230, 231n2, 292, 303, 316, 320, 321, 329, 338, 340, 341 Niceforo, Alfredo, 16 P Painting, 24, 36, 37, 39, 40, 45n2, 77, 82n8, 150n18, 166, 167, 249, 267 Popular culture, 9, 46n3, 69, 193, 199n13, 283–288, 296, 297 Prime Video, 8, 230, 231 Pulcinella, 176, 177 Pupi, 178–183, 184n6, 185n6 Pupo, 174, 178–184 Puppetry, 2, 6, 173–176, 178–180, 182, 184, 184n6, 185n11 Q Queer, 4, 86–88, 100, 103, 107, 108, 109n9, 141 Queer Italian American Cinema, 86, 107, 109n9 R Red Scare, 4, 52 Riis, Jacob, 17, 24, 26n8, 33, 35, 46n9, 47n9

S Savoca, Nancy, 5, 115–134, 216n15, 308, 342, 344 Second generation, 52, 69, 71, 80, 208, 213, 264 Sequential Art, 237–242, 249, 255 Sergi, Giuseppe, 16 Sicily, 26n17, 46n5, 47n13, 77, 184, 195, 245, 264, 268, 276, 281, 294, 328–332, 335 Silent films, 2, 3, 31, 33 Small screen, 7, 110n22, 191, 192, 194, 197, 208, 210, 229 Social justice, 182, 303 Social media, 2, 8, 9, 111n25, 267, 275, 276, 279, 283, 284, 286, 287, 297, 309 Solitude, 8, 246 Stereotypes, 3–5, 7, 23, 31, 32, 34, 35, 41–43, 45, 47n10, 71, 91, 94, 98, 100, 104, 107, 116, 122, 132n10, 133n23, 139, 144, 145, 160, 164, 168, 193–197, 199n12, 200n22, 205–213, 222, 225, 229, 230, 255, 263, 264, 306, 315, 316, 333, 345 Streaming, 8, 190, 198n3, 230, 231, 233n14, 233n16, 283, 291, 309, 313 Subscription Video-On-Demand (SVOD), 8, 230 SVOD, see Subscription Video-On-Demand T Tamburri, Anthony Julian, 10, 31, 88, 92, 109n7, 109n11, 110n21, 131n6, 133n22, 192, 196–198, 199n8, 199n12, 205, 206, 211–213, 223, 228, 229, 337–347

 INDEX 

Tarantella, 4, 10, 41, 57, 67–82, 116, 181, 182, 303, 304, 306–308 Tenement living, 58, 61 Tibaldo-Bongiorno, Marylou, 5, 116 Transmedia, 163 Transmediality, 182, 184 Travel, 37, 39, 42, 158, 177, 264, 265, 267, 269–272, 275–279, 322 Travelogue, 8, 264 Tucci, Stanley, 8, 9, 183, 216n15, 263–273, 275–279, 347 TV series, 7, 131n1, 190, 206, 208, 210, 213, 214, 215n5, 216n15, 224, 233n14, 321, 346 TV shows, 225, 230, 232n8, 291, 311, 344, 345

353

U Uncanny, 74, 174–176 V Valentino, Rudolph, 33, 45, 199n12 Videogames, 2, 161–167, 169, 170n9, 232n8, 283, 288 Vitale, Tony, 10, 97, 98, 110n22, 311–325 W Womanhood, 4, 72–74, 79 Women directors, 1, 5, 115 Women roles, 5, 72, 75, 116