Abstract
The Devil may have the best tunes; why does he also seem to have the most compelling movies? Roberto Dainotto, professor of Romance Studies and Literature at Duke, sets out, not least because of his own late-coming “impassioned affair” with Mafia shows and movies, to explore “the tension between the real Mafia—with its brutal, often abusive connotations—and the imaginary Mafia surrounding it—a mythical potpourri of codes of honor, family values, and chivalric machoism” (p. 10). In other words, this is less a story of a criminal phenomenon as of a cultural one, about the reasons why law-abiding people choose to build, hold, and cherish fantasies about predatory thugs they would cross the street to avoid in real life, and how this masochistic romance can, fortunately, fade.
He starts elegantly with the roots of the opera Cavalleria rusticana, at once the sound track for the culminating montage of The Godfather, Part III and an orientalized exploitation of 19th-century mainland Italian perceptions of an exotic, medieval, and violent Sicily: “The very work that invented the Mafia: not the real Mafia, to be sure, but an imaginary one” (p. 17). Yet far from being either some primordial secret society of Sicilian freedom fighters, less yet a “rustic cavalry” of traditionalists cleaving to some code of honor, organized crime in Sicily was instead rooted in late 19th-century socioeconomic circumstances, a peasantry resentfully controlled by a state and magnates both physically and cultural distant from them and brutally pragmatic alliances of convenience between local strongmen and those running the Sicilian economy. On the other hand, the image of the Mafia was instead born from both the cultural gulf between Sicily and mainland Italy and its ability to provide stirring accounts of violence and virility at a safe distance.
Of course, that distance would in due course narrow, as the Mafia, as well as other organized crime phenomena, spread in Italy—and, most importantly for a study of its mythologization—also migrated all the way to the United States, the workshop where a whole world’s myths were machined. In this way, Dainotto deftly braids an account of the actual emergence and expansion of the Mafia with its varied representations.
It is perhaps unsurprising that the Mafioso would emerge as a familiar icon of American fiction and above all film and television, combining the gangster motif of the Prohibition era with, again, the presumed exotic, alien, and somehow premodern. What Dainotto demonstrates, though, is that from the 1950s and 1960s, there was a growing divergence between U.S. and Italian representations. Filmmaker Francesco Rosi—a Neapolitan—really began to attack previous romantic orthodoxies about the gangsters, especially in his Salvatore Giuliano (1962), who seeks to look beyond the eponymous (and dead) criminal and instead indicate the business–criminal–political interests behind and around him. The growing disenchantment with the Mafia, regarded rightly as a symptom of institutionalized corruption within the Italian state, culminated in the television series La Piovra (“The Octopus”) that began in 1984 and lasted to 2001, a running tale whose compelling but downbeat leitmotif was precisely the travails and obstacles placed before those judges and police officers who genuinely sought to fight the Mafia. As organized crime became increasingly involved in such businesses as drug trafficking, as well as prone to violent struggles both internal and directed against the state, Italians were losing their patience with the old tropes.
In the United States, by contrast, perhaps because the Mafia was a waning force, posing nothing like the same threat to state and society alike, the myth remained potent and popular. On the other hand, as Dainotto notes, the tone has undoubtedly changed, as the self-indulgent, self-conscious, and self-referential mobsters of The Sopranos demonstrate that “the American Mafia movie has become an allegory for an entire nation, but this time for a nation that is in crisis.” (p. 172)
This is an intelligent and wide-reaching book. Given that it is straddling the realms of history, sociology, pop culture, and criminology, it is perhaps inevitable that one could question some of the detail, but in fairness, Dainotto is also willing to acknowledge the limits of his certitude, such as whether or not there was some grand bargain with the Mafia behind “Operation Husky,” the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943. (Let me also nitpick: This book also has a frustratingly skimpy index, something that’s a particular problem with such an eclectic work.)
As a study of the way art does not imitate so much as caricature and sometimes shape it, though, this is as readable as it is perceptive. The book concludes looking at a new medium, the Mafia II computer game, as the latest iteration: “The Mafia becomes once again a metaphor for all-too-real social processes and dynamics” (p. 203). Organized crime fills vacuums, voids in governance, and failures of the economic and social system; likewise, as Dainotto so neatly demonstrates, representations of organized crime fill voids in our sense of ourselves in our political and economic contexts, allowing us to explore their boundaries and rail against their failings in allegorical, formularized ways. We’re all Tony Soprano now.