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Introduction: Sympathetic Serial Offenders: Gomorrah and Beyond
Abstract
The introduction considers the influx of sympathetic perpetrators—criminals, mobsters, corrupt politicians—who have flooded Italian television screens over the last ten years or so. It looks at the representation and appeal of criminals when they are the subject of popular fictionalized accounts, focusing on a selection of recent, well-known Italian television series that create sympathy for perpetrators and that premiered on Rai, Mediaset, Sky Italian, and Netflix. In particular, the introduction outlines serial television’s several viewing pleasures; discusses the “sympathetic perpetrator identikit” that positions viewers to root for and align with antiheroes; considers complex masculinities; and addresses the particularities of the Italian case (i.e., sympathetic perpetrators on Italian television are conventionally attractive, and narratives are based upon historical figures and events, in particular Italy’s mafias: the Camorra, Cosa Nostra, Banda della Magliana, and ’ndrangheta).
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The renowned Italian television series La piovra is known as the first important televisual intervention on the Mafia, but its aesthetic and thematic contributions to contemporary programming are often forgotten in television scholarship. This article positions La piovra in the development of the current trend of ‘quality’ television series by focusing on the show’s exploration of the subgenre of male melodrama. Through an analysis of the two primary characters, the hero Corrado Cattani and the villain Tano Cariddi, we can see how La piovra is not just an exposé of organized crime but is also a complex meditation on the vulnerability of Italian masculinity in a time of gender upheaval in 1980s Italy. It is this particular thematic concern, rather than organized crime, that likens La piovra to the current wave of male-themed quality television series and makes a critical re-evaluation of the series so timely.
“Netflix è la più grande rete di Internet TV del mondo, con oltre 70 milioni di abbonati in più di 190 paesi, che ogni giorno guardano più di 125 milioni di ore di programmi televisivi e film, tra cui serie originali, documentari e lungometraggi”. Netflix – primo operatore globale di Over-The-Top TV, nato in California dall’intuizione e dalla capacità imprenditoriale del geniale Reed Hastings – è arrivato anche in Italia nell’ottobre 2015, attirando l’attenzione degli addetti al settore e dell’industria del broadcasting e l’interesse degli Internet users. In questo volume, il servizio di video-on-demand più noto in tutto l’Occidente sarà visto non tanto come un punto di rottura sul fronte del consumo di contenuti audiovisivi in rete, quanto come una vera e propria svolta paradigmatica nel modo di fare e concepire televisione, non più basato sul palinsesto bensì sull’algoritmo. Grazie a questa radicale innovazione, Netflix ha l’obiettivo e promette ai suoi utenti, agli stakeholders e ai producers di diventare la più grande televisione internazionale, portando da tutto il mondo e in tutto il mondo grandi storie e nuove narrazioni. Da questo punto di vista, Netflix può costituire anche in Italia un’inedita occasione grazie a cui produttori e giovani professionisti del settore possono trovare spazio nel nuovo ecosistema audiovisivo, ridefinendo il rapporto dialettico tra produzione e consumo e le forme di lavoro culturale nell’era dello streaming.
In the essay the authors would like to review the main Italian studies that have focused on the television series, including both studies that have dealt with national production, and those which have looked to foreign markets and its serial products. In the multiplicity of disciplinary approaches, the authors will focus on studies related to the language and narrative of serial products. The essay is divided into three large blocks which cover three specific periods (the eighties, the nineties and the block from two thousand to present). Each of the three sections will try to give an account of the extent of Italian studies on Italian products, on foreign products and on more theoretical studies, which focus on innovative formulas of the story. At the end of the survey, it is possible to observe positive and thorough input regarding the status of studies on the subject. From the eighties to present, in fact, the studies have not only increased in number, but they have spread out over different fields and divided themselves between the analysis of the national scene and the analysis of international scene.
Contemporary Italian TV fiction production is the result of both a long historical tradition and a complex broadcasting scenario. In recent years, three different models clearly emerged, following the divergent goals and needs of public service broadcaster Rai, commercial television Mediaset and pay-TV operator Sky Italia: respectively, with a pedagogical approach resulting in hagiographic miniseries, socially committed fiction and relevant comedies; with procedural and legal dramas following the US commercial models and romance-filled prime time soaps; and with a cable-oriented tension towards anti-heroes, high-budget productions and “quality television”. The paper reconstructs the main traits of each model, focusing on their main titles and most emblematic genres, as well as on the national production companies that helped the broadcasters in defining and establishing peculiar “fiction styles” and editorial policies.
According to its creator, Vince Gilligan, Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008–13) describes the moral corruption of a normal man, the conversion of Mr. Chips to Scarface. In ‘Full Measures’ (3.13), the moral and emotional complexity of the story is encapsulated in a seemingly incidental scene. We see Walter White in his living room, giving little Holly a bottle of milk. A close- up shows how the baby grabs at his glasses, and in this moment of paternal tenderness, the writers cunningly re-humanize a character who just executed two thugs and minutes later ordered the death of his lab partner, as if to remind us that, at heart, ‘he’s really just a family man’ forced by circumstances to take matters into his own hands. This important step in the metamorphosis of Walter is again mitigated by several factors: children, the family and everyday domestic life. Self-defence is, of course, the justification for these deaths, but the devotion of a father towards his little baby also enter into the moral and emotional equation that characterises Breaking Bad. This article will be structured according to four sections: first, we will examine the rise of antiheroes over the past decade, exploring the ideological, industrial and narrative reasons that explain their success. Secondly, we will address how spectators engage morally and emotionally with the moving image, paying special attention to the specific nature of TV narrative. Thirdly, we will analyse the four main dramatic strategies that strengthen our identification with these morally conflicted characters: moral comparatism , the soothing power of family, acts of contrition and victimization. Lastly, we will propose a discussion over the ‘levels of engagement’ described by Smith and expanded by Vaage for television, in order to explore what the limits of sympathetic allegiance are, and how both the spectator and the narrative need to recover it cyclically.
A study of how Italian films re-envisage male identity in response to sexual liberation. How did Italian cinema of the 1970s re-envision masculinity in response to sexual liberation? What role did broader socio-political concerns of the time play in this re-definition? To what extent did this re-envisioning of masculinity intersect with concurrent debates about the function of cinema as a political medium and a mass cultural phenomenon? Masculinity and Italian Cinema takes the 1970s as an especially instructive period for rethinking the traditional trope of an inadequate male in crisis within Italian cinema. It explores how masculinity functioned in several films of the 1970s as a charged allegory for the many socio-political lacerations of the Italian nation and as a site of conflict and radical interrogation of ideas about gender and sexuality. Sergio Rigoletto re-examines a number of key films, including Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist, Federico Fellini's City of Women, Ettore Scola's A Special Day, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema and Lina Wertmüller's The Seduction of Mimì, in the light of gender and queer theory and considers the challenges that these films pose to received ideas about gender and sexuality of the time, and to some of the aesthetic and narrative conventions which have traditionally regulated the representation of men in film.
Our responses to fictions, their events, and their characters, can seem deeply problematic. A typical statement of the problem raises the question: how is it even logically possible to respond to fictions in the way we seem to? How, more specifically, is it possible to care about people we don ‘t believe in? But to be given an answer to this problem-to be told the conditions that make it possible to do something-is not yet to be told how we actually do it, for actuality is a much narrower condition than possibility. Indeed, mere assurance of possibility can itself be no solution to a problem about what we humans, with our contingent mental makeup, do or don ‘t do; many things that are logically possible cannot be done by us. So if our concern is how we respond to fiction as we appear to do, we had better be given a plausible story about the mental mechanisms involved.
In earlier work on what I am here calling “the paradox of caring” I had much to say on the logical issues, and relatively little on the psychological detail necessary to fill out the solution I proposed.1 I think that solution was basically right, and that might be excuse enough for going back to it. But I don ‘t want merely to repeat myself. I shall say something about why the solution I offer is not merely logically satisfactory but psychologically plausible as well.
The author of this book reads the depiction of masculinity in the soap opera, homosexuality in the situation comedy, fatherhood in prime-time animation, emerging manhood in the supernatural teen text, alternative gender roles in science fiction, male authority in police procedurals, masculine anxieties in the hospital drama, violence and aggression in sports coverage, ordinariness and emotional connectedness in the reality game show and domesticity in lifestyle television. The book illuminates the construction, circulation and interrogation of masculinities in contemporary British and American programming and relates such images to the ‘common sense’ model of the hegemonic male that dominates the cultural landscape.
Italian cinema has traditionally used the trope of an inadequate man in crisis to reflect on the country’s many social and political upheavals. Masculinity and Italian Cinema takes the 1970s as an especially instructive period for rethinking the concept of male crisis in Italian cinema. The 1970s were a decade of innovation and challenging work for Italian cinema, one that was marked by radicalism and heated debates about the function of cinema as a political medium and as a mass cultural phenomenon. This book shows that these were years in which a wide-ranging redefinition of masculinity took place. The book discusses how masculinity functioned in several films of the 1970s as a charged allegory for the many socio-political lacerations of the Italian nation, and as a site of conflict and radical interrogation of ideas about gender and sexuality.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the landscape of television began an unprecedented transformation. While the networks continued to chase the lowest common denominator, a wave of new shows on cable channels dramatically stretched television's narrative inventiveness, emotional resonance, and artistic ambition. Combining deep reportage with cultural analysis and historical context, Brett Martin recounts the rise and inner workings of a genre that represents not only a new golden age for TV, but also a cultural watershed. Difficult Men features extensive interviews with all the major players, including David Chase, David Simon, David Milch, and Alan Ball; in addition to other writers, executives, directors and actors. Martin delivers never-before-heard story after story, revealing how cable television became a truly significant and influential part of our culture.
In his seminal book "Television's Second Golden Age", Robert Thompson described quality TV as 'best defined by what it is not': 'it is not "regular" TV'. Audacious maybe, but his statement renewed debate on the meaning of this highly contentious term. Dealing primarily with the post-1996 era shaped by digital technologies and defined by consumer choice and brand marketing, this book brings together leading scholars, established journalists and experienced broadcasters working in the field of contemporary television to debate what we currently mean by quality TV. They go deep into contemporary American television fictions, from "The Sopranos" and "The West Wing", to "CSI" and "Lost" – innovative, sometimes controversial, always compelling dramas, which one scholar has described as 'now better than the movies!' But how do we understand the emergence of these kinds of fiction? Are they genuinely new? What does quality TV have to tell us about the state of today's television market? And is this a new Golden Age of quality TV? Original, often polemic, each chapter proposes new ways of thinking about and defining quality TV.
There is a foreword from Robert Thompson, and heated dialogue between British and US television critics. Also included – and a great coup – are interviews with W. Snuffy Walden (scored "The West Wing" among others) and with David Chase ("The Sopranos" creator). "Quality TV" provides throughout groundbreaking and innovative theoretical and critical approaches to studying television and for understanding the current – and future – TV landscape.
Today, it is tempting to see the rise of HD television as ushering in a new era of spectacular television. Yet since its earliest days, the medium has been epitomised by spectacle and offered its viewers diverse forms of visual pleasure. Looking at the early promotion of television and the launch of colour broadcasting, Spectacular Television traces a history of television as spectacular attraction, from its launch to the contemporary age of surround sound, digital effects and HD screens. In focusing on the spectacle of nature, landscape, and even our own bodies on television via explorations of popular television dramas, documentary series and factual entertainment, and ambitious natural history television, Helen Wheatley answers the questions: what is televisual pleasure, and how has television defined its own brand of spectacular aesthetics?
«Perché sedurla se puoi sedarla?», oppure «perché sedurla se puoi saldarla?»: solo due esempi del li-vello di violenza e brutalità quotidianamente vei-colate dai social in pagine che mescolano misoginia, omo/transfobia, razzismo, incitamenti alla pedofilia. Al centro di questa indagine, la violenza contro le donne, ma anche la violenza che dalle donne è agita, due fenomeni speculari benché di natura e portata assai diverse, che sono analizza-ti nella loro copertura mediale. Dalle serie Tv a circolazione globale alle cronache nazionali, dalla musica alla pubblicità, muovendosi tra «factual» e «fictional», ciascuna delle due forme di violenza è esplorata attraverso molteplici raffronti tra il piano della realtà e il piano della rappresentazione, illustrando modelli, attori, dinamiche, radici, così come retoriche, estetiche, politiche.
In his collection of short stories Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace creates a resonant implication between the two adjectives in his title — if we’re going to spend time in the company of hideous men, it best be brief.1 Most fictional television abides by this implication, where distasteful and unpleasant characters are treated briefly, whether as unsympathetic figures on an anthology programme like The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959–1964) or single-episode villains emerging in the course of a procedural’s police investigation or medical case. But as I argue elsewhere, serial television is distinguished by the long timeframes it creates, and thus any interaction with hideous men found in an ongoing series’ regular cast will last quite awhile.2 One common trait shared by many contemporary serialised primetime programmes is the prominence of unsympathetic, morally questionable or villainous men at their narrative centre, a trend typically identified by the character type of the anti-hero. The rise of serial television’s anti-heroes raises a key question: why would we want to subject ourselves to lengthy interactions with such hideous men?3
Unfinished Business is the first book to examine Italian mafia cinema of the past decade. It provides insightful analyses of popular films that sensationalize violence, scapegoat women, or repress the homosexuality of male protagonists. Dana Renga examines these works through the lens of gender and trauma theory to show how the films engage with the process of mourning and healing mafia-related trauma in Italy. Unfinished Business argues that trauma that has yet to be worked through on the national level is displaced onto the characters in the films under consideration. In a mafia context, female characters are sacrificed and non-normative sexual identities are suppressed in order to solidify traditional modes of viewer identification and to assure narrative closure, all so that the image of the nation is left unblemished.
The antihero prevails in recent American drama television series. Characters such as mobster kingpin Tony Soprano (The Sopranos), meth cook and gangster-in-the-making Walter White (Breaking Bad) and serial killer Dexter Morgan (Dexter) are not morally good, so how do these television series make us engage in these morally bad main characters? And what does this tell us about our moral psychological make-up, and more specifically, about the moral psychology of fiction? Vaage argues that the fictional status of these series deactivates rational, deliberate moral evaluation, making the spectator rely on moral emotions and intuitions that are relatively easy to manipulate with narrative strategies. Nevertheless, she also argues that these series regularly encourage reactivation of deliberate, moral evaluation. In so doing, these fictional series can teach us something about ourselves as moral beings—what our moral intuitions and emotions are, and how these might differ from deliberate, moral evaluation.
Book synopsis: Male Trouble explores how Western masculinity has increasingly appeared as a troubled gender category in recent times. Cross-disciplinary in scope, the book focuses on a variety of performative case studies in drama, theatre, live art, guerilla performance, public spectacle, and film. Moreover, the study analyses work that dialogues with discourses of masculinity in crisis principally drawn from American, British, and Irish contexts to challenge the sacrificial terms by which male trouble is typically articulated, while ultimately arguing for an ethic of fragilization in order to move beyond this deadlock in subjectivity and relationality.
Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status explores how and why television is gaining a new level of cultural respectability in the 21st century. Once looked down upon as a "plug-in drug" offering little redeeming social or artistic value, television is now said to be in a creative renaissance, with critics hailing the rise of Quality series such as Mad Men and 30 Rock. Likewise, DVDs and DVRs, web video, HDTV, and mobile devices have shifted the longstanding conception of television as a household appliance toward a new understanding of TV as a sophisticated, high-tech gadget.
Hollywood moviemaking is one of the constants of American life, but how much has it changed since the glory days of the big studios? David Bordwell argues that the principles of visual storytelling created in the studio era are alive and well, even in today's bloated blockbusters. American filmmakers have created a durable tradition-one that we should not be ashamed to call artistic, and one that survives in both mainstream entertainment and niche-marketed indie cinema. Bordwell traces the continuity of this tradition in a wide array of films made since 1960, from romantic comedies like Jerry Maguire and Love Actually to more imposing efforts like A Beautiful Mind. He also draws upon testimony from writers, directors, and editors who are acutely conscious of employing proven principles of plot and visual style. Within the limits of the "classical" approach, innovation can flourish. Bordwell examines how imaginative filmmakers have pushed the premises of the system in films such as JFK, Memento, and Magnolia. He discusses generational, technological, and economic factors leading to stability and change in Hollywood cinema and includes close analyses of selected shots and sequences. As it ranges across four decades, examining classics like American Graffiti and The Godfather as well as recent success like The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, this book provides a vivid and engaging interpretation of how Hollywood moviemakers have created a vigorous, resourceful tradition of cinematic storytelling that continues to engage audiences around the world.
An introduction to the key debates concerning the representation of masculinities in contemporary television programming.
Tony Soprano is a vicious thug. And yet, he commands the loyalty, affection and sympathy of most viewers of The Sopranos. The case of Soprano gives rise to two philosophical questions. The first concerns the problem of personality. How can we feel sympathy for, or be attracted to, characters who would repel and appall us, were we to encounter them in reality? The second concern can be traced back to David Hume's remarks on 'vicious manners' and 'rough heroes' in 'Of the Standard of Taste.' What are the moral implications of the fact that we find Soprano an appealing and sympathetic character? In approaching these questions, I first consider the different ways in which fictions may engage us morally. In tackling the problem of personality, I survey a range of possible answers, and contend that our stance towards Soprano is a complex amalgam of attraction - elicited by both Soprano's moral and immoral actions - and repulsion. The very complexity of this stance implies that the second, moral question is a live one which will require further careful consideration.
The present paper explores the moral psychology of fiction conceptually through the paired concepts ‘fictional relief’ and
‘reality check’. I suggest that the spectator of fictional films and television series sees himself as relieved from some
of the moral obligations the spectator of nonfiction films sees himself as subject to, such as considering the consequences
of a character's actions and attitudes. A fictional attitude is disturbed when elements of nonfiction are inserted into the
fiction, such as the documentary photographs in Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003), or when the fiction otherwise reminds the spectator of the moral and political consequences of his
engagement. I call this reality check, and explore how Dr Melfi often reminds the spectator of The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007) of the consequences of having a sympathetic attitude towards the main character and gangster Tony Soprano.
The related notion fictional relief captures the relief from considering such consequences, and finally I discuss how Omar
Little exemplifies fictional reliefs at work in a socially realistic setting in The Wire (HBO, 2002–08).