Mafia on the US screen: setting the stereotype straight

Groundlessly, mafia is a term that has plagued Italian-Americans since the very first moment they arrived in the US. The equation “Italy = mafia” on the screen generally dates back to The Black Hand: True Story of a Recent Occurrence in the Italian Quarter of New York (McCutcheon 1906). Nevertheless, the typecast Italian-American did not reach the masses before the advent of sound film, when the colloquial dialogue and sound effects clearly helped to delineate the genre. The movie that really started the whole phenomenon was Little Caesar, (Le Roy 1930), though it was Francis Coppola’s brilliant film adaptation of Mario Puzo’s bestseller, The Godfather in 1972 which gave the Italian-American mobster a world-wide cinematic boost. Since then, the mafia, and later on the camorra – its Neapolitan counterpart – with their symbols, their unique customs and rituals, have provided material for countless movies (and television programmes) and have been represented through various paradigms. Actually, narrative conventions have unquestionably shifted over the years since The Godfather, and the past few decades have seen the advent of what Mitchell (1994: 12) terms “the pictorial turn”, i.e. a philosophical attention to imagination, imagery, and non-linguistic symbol systems; nonetheless, even with the advent of new multimedia technologies, the core characteristics remain the same as screen law: the Italian-American mobster mystique and ‘mystification’ is still being reproduced and used for profit in the twentyfirst century. This article intends to investigate stereotyped re-presentations of Italian-American mob characters in US ‘mediascapes’ (Appadurai 1990), from cult movies such as The Godfather, proceeding to a subsequent process of stereotyping of mob characters which still takes place in US commercial, and how this process has concurred to reinforce socially-shared ‘psychollages’ (Mancuso 2001, 2004), and gives an ethnic connotation to organized crime