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Why No Outrage over "The Sopranos"?
Published in the Los Angeles Times, July 26, 1999.
Imagine, if you will, an updated television version of the old radio
show "The Goldbergs," in which the normal middle-class Jewish patriarch
pulls off some financial scams on the sly. How about a show called
"The Tongs," where the normal middle-class Asian American dad operates
a heroin ring out of the back of his popular Chinese restaurant?
Would such shows be considered preposterous and racist? Absolutely,
and with good reason. They promote gross, one-dimensional stereotypes
of individual American groups. Yet a current television show, HBO's
"The Sopranos," not only revels in negative, cartoonish
images of a specific community-Italian Americans-but was congratulated
for doing so last week by a flurry of Emmy nominations from the television
industry. How can this be?
As everyone knows by now, "The Sopranos" has become a cult favorite
among critics and audiences. Ostensibly it deals with a normal middle-class
Italian American father (James Gandolfini) going through a midlife
crisis. And what does this all-American Everyman do in his spare
time? He shoots people in the head. Just like you and me.
Look beyond the show's surface details, however, and what you'll see is culturally
respectable prejudice being passed off as satire.
Although America still has a long way to go in eradicating racism,
we have made strides as a society by eliminating blatantly racist
images of individual American groups. Stepin Fetchit, the "red savage"
Indian, Shylock the Jew, the Frito Bandito, the Inscrutable Oriental-these
and other hurtful images are persona non grata in American
popular culture.
And yet images of Italians as gun-toting psychopaths inexplicably continue
to flourish-and more inexplicably yet, earn reams of critical praise,
even awards.
Popular American mythology holds that Italians never reached these
shores until the 1890s. In fact, Italians have maintained a presence
in North America from the very beginning.
Many major explorers of the continent were Italian, either on land (Chino,
Malaspiga. Vigo) or by sea (Columbus, Cabot, Vespucci and Verrazano).
Thomas Jefferson's best friend and neighbor, the Italian Filippo
Mazzei, is credited with inspiring the phrase "all men are created
equal." The U.S. Marine Band was formed in 1805 under the baton
of maestro Gaetano Carusi. And vibrant Italian communities were
already well established in California and Louisiana long before
the Civil War.
Mass Italian migration did hit a peak between 1890 and 1910, though, arousing
the fears and suspicions of many, including the so-called yellow
journalists. These precursors of modern-day tabloid reporters had
a field day portraying the new immigrants as crude, bloodthirsty
killers-or, more benignly, as dimwitted dunces who would forever
be out of place.
Predictably, these same attitudes were picked up by the new media
of movies and television. The popular press focused exclusively on
people such as Al Capone and Lucky Luciano, transforming these common
thugs into larger-than-life mythological figures-in short, the "official"
representatives of Italian American culture.
The turning point came in 1969 with the phenomenal success of the
late Mario Puzo's fictional pulp novel "The Godfather." Before that,
Italian gangster images, like images of other groups, were considered
antiquated and offensive, something you wouldn't bring up in polite
company. Yet Puzo's book, along with Francis Ford Coppola's lush,
romantic treatment of it three years later, literally enshrined Italian
stereotypes, made them respectable. It has been a non-stop orgy of
defamation ever since.
Italian thug stereotypes are such an entrenched staple of popular entertainment
now-quaint and cozy as it were-that no one even questions their accuracy
regarding Italian American history. It's all "for fun." It has led,
sadly, to an erosion of Italian American self-respect, an apathetic,
shoulder-shrugging attitude of "It's only a movie." And yet, as quickly
as we dismiss "just another movie," more and more of them keep piling
up, creating a cultural Berlin Wall of stereotyping.
The end result, as we can see, is the no-holds-barred success of "The Sopranos," a show that not only exploits popular prejudice about Italian Americans but allows audiences to giggle at such images guilt-free, as naturally as breathing. Italian Americans everywhere really need to wake up and smell the cappuccino.
Bill Dal Cerro
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