Towards a More Balanced View of Italian American Life

Amidst the uproar generated by the latest controversy over Italian American stereotypes in the media, one of the most disturbing aspects of this issue is being overlooked. Sadly, the many authentic voices depicting Italian American life are going unheard. The Italian American stories that do get the most attention are fakes, and this cultural fraud is being prolonged because it makes a lot of money for a lot of powerful people in both Hollywood and New York.

That many of the stories about Italian Americans are often told in the mass media by non-Italians should be cause for deep concern in the Italian American community, and I think this is perhaps the element that is implicitly most distressing to many of us. Consider the broad appeal of popular entertainment such as "Moonstruck," "Saturday Night Fever," "Grease," and, of course, "The Sopranos" -- even if these stories were written by Italian Americans, and many of them were not, they certainly cannot be considered balanced portrayals of Italian American life.

In contemporary American society, every subculture remains burdened by past stereotypes to some degree. For Italian Americans, that burden has taken the form of the persistence of a dark view of who we are in spite of the richness of our cultural heritage. Given all the evidence to the contrary, given the fact that most people report that their personal encounters with Italian Americans are uniformly positive, and given the examples of public figures from Joe DiMaggio to Mario Cuomo, it is taking much too long a time for us to shed our negative image.

As Richard Gambino has written in "The Crisis of Italian American Identity," when mainstream society holds dominant myths about a subculture, that group's self-understanding is distorted to the extent of the strength of those artificial cultural myths. The Mafia myth seems ineradicable, and it is so powerful that it distorts Italian Americans' view of themselves. This is reflected by the degree of popularity of Francis Coppola's Godfather films as well as the books by Mario Puzo among many Italian Americans, as well as the larger society as a whole.

More to the point, I can understand why working class Italian American families, whose main concern is survival, may place their cultural heritage on the back burner, but I'm deeply dismayed by the number of Italian American artists who are willing to do the same thing. Whenever Italian American directors make movies, from Capra to Minnelli, to Coppolla and Scorsese, they use mainstream archetypes (Mr. Smith) or fall back on the cultural stereotypes (Vito Corleone). Driven most likely by the profit motive and caught up in Hollywood's homogenization machine, these talented storytellers have forfeited an opportunity to make their own wonderful and uniquely Italian American movies with the freedom of Fellini, DeSica, and Antonioni.

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