Cultural Impact
After the success of the Godfather the perception of Italians changed. The movie allowed WASPS to stop seeing Italians as blue collar, lower class individuals who barely scraped by with the rest of the minorities to reach the ranks of the upper middle class. But instead as clanish entrepreneurs who were as dangerous as they were intelligent. Most Italians at this time were happy to adorn this new mantle as long as it allowed them to integrate and be more accepted into the WASP middle to upper class communities. This brought forward the end of the Italian Americans being thought as “They” by the mainstream media and instead being embraced as “Us” by the WASP community.
So where did the Godfather leave Italian culture in relation to the gangster genre? For a little while after the movie came out people would only associate Italians and their culture with the Mafia and mobster movies. Yet as more films also wanted an authentic feel of the culture, Italians were brought in as consultants for them. Many Italians used the Godfather’s success to spring-board their culture into as many films with the gangster label so that they could get increased exposure. In the book Mediated Ethnicity: New Italian-American Cinema, author Fred L. Gardaphé states that the gangster genre and it is depictions of Italian Americans fall under three stages.
Gardaphé claims that we are at the point where Italians can make a movie about their culture without having to hide behind the gangster banner. This is to some degree true, as now any films can be made, independently, and showcase any culture anyone would like, but I am not sure that point of view works in the mainstream. The last most successful Italian themed success was the TV show The Sopranos. This new age look at the Italian mafia and how it operates in today’s world while still holding mobster traditions of the old one, was the last major show or film centered around an Italian family that entered the mainstream. Is it a coincidence? Or is it saying that to the mainstream culture Italians have nothing of real value to offer America except for thrilling tales of crime and the mob?The first is the early use of the gangster as minstrelsy, a way of performing Italian culture in an effort to control the perceived threat to mainstream American culture posed by differences introduced by a wave of Italian immigration. This stage began with films based on Al Capone and faded with the Vietnam War, but revives whenever a non-Italian puts on the “Mafioso” mask to perform the gangster. A second stage began when Italian Americans started to use the figure of the gangster as a vehicle for telling their own stories of being Italians in the United States. The third stage started when Italian Americans began to parody, and in doing so renounce, the gangster figure as representative of their culture, as a means of gaining control of the story
