The End of an Era?
The end of an era: have we seen the death of the iconic Italian “Mob Movie”?
Rumour has it that there are stirs from Martin Scorsese’s office. It’s got me thinking. Since Scarface (1932), the gangster has been a staple of the film industry, emerging, controversially, as the most pervasive symbol of Italian-American masculinity. Over the last decade, though, genre giants such as Coppola and Scorsese have moved on, and genre successes, such as American Gangster, have had little concern with the Italian-American Mafia. Perhaps no-one dares compete with David Chase’s The Sopranos. Who’d blame them? Surely even Scorsese couldn’t pull off a challenge? Or, perhaps The Sopranos has been the final chapter in a genre that’s simply run its course.
The term “Mafia genre” is innacurate: the genre has constantly evolved and was essentially redefined by The Godfather (1972). Where the gangster films of the second and third quarters of the century had largely had objective, moral frameworks, The Godfather marked the beginning of a contemporary cultural phenomenon: the film depicting the Mafioso in crisis. Tony Soprano’s psychological struggles can be seen as the pinnacle of modernism’s emphasis on intense psychological portraits, underpinned by a specifically American identity crisis: the Mafioso’s inability to separate Italianness from “business”.
In the 70s, Italian-American directors, influenced by Italian neo-realism, began documenting the Mafia’s American struggle for survival in psychological terms. In a society where cultural history had become fundamental to identity, this was a complex negotiation. As John Highams explains, “at the onset of mass immigration to America, Americans were engaged in a self-conscious project of inventing the category of ethnicity”. With no centralized state to unite against, autonomous communities were common, and as America’s peoplehood was still under construction, definitions of cultural and ethnic differences began to form the fabric of society: each group could contribute to the peoplehood. Defining oneself by culture, therefore, became important, and since the men in these films are unable to separate Italianness and ‘business’, the legal crack-down of the 60s and 70s is perceived as a direct attack on Italian tradition.
Since Michael Corleone’s fateful inheritance of his family ‘business’, attempts by on-screen Mafiosos to reconcile familial loyalty and American life has been the cause of the kind of psychological torment conducive to great films. The relevance of the dilemma, though, has faded rapidly – and so has the filmic preoccupation. The moral, ideological clashes between the Sopranos and their children exemplify why the genre has been so short-lived: not only will the FBI close in, but Tony, like Michael Corleone before him, finds no ally in his American children. They simply don’t share his loyalty dilemma. In turn, the film industry has moved on to other relevant concerns – look at the boom in films exploring the clash between Western and Muslim values, for example, and it seems ever more likely that the Mafioso in crisis movement has had its day.
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