Abstract
Nerenberg has set out to write a book for two relatively distinct academic audiences: those from the field of cultural studies that are interested in crime but who are not Italianists, and Italianists who may not be so interested in crime but who are prepared to be persuaded that such a book offers insights into broader Italian culture. Satisfying both audiences is a challenging endeavour as common Italian stereotypes circulate widely amongst those who do not have a more nuanced engagement with the culture.
Nerenberg achieves her goal with style and guile. She banishes a good deal of theory and detail about Italian culture to the endnotes. She provides a thick description of three cases of homicide or homicides over the period from the mid-1970s to the early 2000s. She analyses a variety of texts (film, novels, newspapers and so on). She starts off by discussing Roberto Benigni’s take on this (and Benigni is someone that will be relatively well-known to non-Italianists). Perhaps most importantly, she tells a forensically good story accompanied by maps and images.
That is not to say the study lacks analytical depth. Nerenberg organizes her narrative around four key concepts: moral panic; media spectacle; cronaca or true crime; and the body. In the cases Nerenberg discusses, the moral panics concern ‘deviant’ sexual and religious practices and fear of outsiders that legitimize outpourings of xenophobia directed against a variety of foreign bodies. The concept of media spectacle is mobilized to explain how the different media feed off each other to produce a ‘judicial media circus’ even in an age before viral videos and social media. Cronaca refers to cuttings of crime stories from newspapers but is used in a much broader sense to include the gamut of popular cultural representations of crime from TV shows to detective novels that make up the backdrop to the three case studies. Nerenberg’s sense of the body, particularly the abject body of the corpse, is drawn from psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically informed film theory and criticism.
The murder of a British student, Meredith Kercher, in Perugia in 2007 hangs over the book and Nerenberg writes in the book’s epilogue about the transnational character of the murder with arrests and trials of people from three continents, including the American Amanda Knox. One suspects that Nerenberg will develop this account subsequently, building on the thesis of the present study. If so, one would hope that Nerenberg captures a little more of the fascination and attraction that many Italians (and indeed others) seem to have for crimes of a sexual nature. It may be that the concept of moral panic, with its emphasis on revulsion for those who may be threatening the established order, does not do justice to the sense of ambivalence and ambiguity that surrounds such crimes.