Posted: Nov 13, 07
3:22pm
No one could be a bigger Sopranos fan than I. Godfather II is my favorite movie. I thought Goodfellas was pretty diverting. Now comes the disturbing thought that the entertainment that I've enjoyed over the years has served as a recruiting tool for the Italian underworld. Robert Saviano is the author of "Gomorrah," an inside look at the Camorra, the Mafia-equivalent in Naples. He recently told a reporter that the image of organized crime has become so glamorous in Italy that, "People of my age who decide to enter the clan do it less at first for money or power than for fashion, for women, to be a real man."
If it's true that fledgling Italian mobsters are attracted by the romantic mythology of the Mafia, it's not hard to figure out where that impression originates. It seems that while American writers have been milking the Mafia for material, so has the Italian underworld taken its cues from American popular culture. Mob guys have long been movie favorites; as imagined by Hollywood screenwriters, they make colorful, larger-than-life protagonists. Our movies have made the Mafia cool.
My Italian friend Filippo, member of a group that stages regular anti-mob protests, confirms this observation. He mentions a minor but telling detail. Traditionally Mafiosi always held their guns upright while firing; the younger ones have now taken to copying the Hollywood-invented sideways hold, popularized in a dozen gangster films. This stylistic divide was even parodied in an episode of the Sopranos, when a young gangster wannabe is told off by a veteran for imitating onscreen gunplay techniques.
Many years ago I read a memoir by historian Gerda Lerner in which she paid tribute to her husband Carl, a Hollywood film editor. Carl, who edited "The Conversation," had been asked to take on Godfather I. He turned down the job because, he said, he didn't want to be party to glorifying organized crime. At the time, I considered this scrupulous to a fault. After all, it's only a movie.
Now I'm wondering if it's time to change my mind.
