Italian American Short Films and Music Videos: A Semiotic Reading

I talian/Amer ican Shor t Films and Music V ideos A Semiotic Reading An Imprint of Purdue University Press Anthony J...

Author: Anthony Julian Tamburri

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I talian/Amer ican Shor t Films and Music V ideos

A Semiotic Reading

An Imprint of

Purdue University Press

Anthony Julian Tamburri

Digital-I Books

Italian/American Short Films and Music Videos

Italian/American Short Films and Music Videos A Semiotic Reading


Digital-I Books An imprint of Purdue University Press West Lafayette, Indiana

Copyright ©2002 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tamburri, Anthony Julian. Italian/American short films and music videos : a semiotic reading / Anthony Julian Tamburri. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-55753-232-X (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 1-55753-248-6 (digital : MS Reader) -- ISBN 1-55753-249-4 (digital : PDF) 1. Italian Americans in motion pictures. 2. Italian Americans in the motion picture industry. 3. Short films--United States--History and criticism. 4. Music videos--United States--History and criticism. I. Title. PN1995.9.I73 T36 2002 791.43'6520351073--dc21 2002006873

for Fred Gardaphè, friend and partner in cultural criminology

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Preliminaries for a Reading An Introduction

1

Fictive Narratives Subliminal Ethnicity What is [not] Italian/American about Lena’s Spaghetti?

13

Black & White, Scungill’ & Cannoli Ethnicity and Sexuality in Nunzio’s Second Cousin

29

Music Videos Rock Videos as Social Narratives Madonna’s Like a Prayer and Justify My Love Bending Rules

55

Documentaries Will Parrinello’s Little Italy People Telling Their Own Stories

79

Ethnicity, Sexuality, Gender Mariarosy Calleri’s Uncovering

93

After-thoughts Some Concluding Remarks

105

Select Bibliography

109

Acknowledgments

A book of any sort usually owes a few debts for a variety of reasons. This is the situation with Italian/American Short Films and Videos: A Semiotic Reading. Abbreviated versions of three chapters originally appeared in the volume Adjusting Sites: New Essays in Italian American Studies and the two serials Bridge and Semiotic Spectrum. In addition, numerous people read either previous versions of the entire manuscript or portions thereof. Three people, especially, saw the manuscript on different occasions and offered invaluable advice: John Kirby, Fred Gardaphè, and Victoria DeMara went well beyond the call of duty of both friendship and collegiality in offering up their comments, suggestions, and constructive criticism. Others who have opined on different parts of this study are William Boelhower, Flavia Brizio, Paolo Giordano, Christine Holmlund, Ben Lawton, Tracy Sharpley-Whiting, and Maurizio Viano. To all of these friends and colleagues I owe a tremendous debt. Last but by no means least, my greatest debt is to Maria, life partner and friend, who not only affords me the time to engage in such activities, but she also keeps me honest during the process.

ix

Preliminaries for a Reading An Introduction

“If every picture I made was about Italian Americans, they’d say, ‘That’s all he can do.’ I’m trying to stretch.”—Martin Scorsese, in Premiere (1991)

Why This Study? The idea of this project was born, in part, from the desire to help create a forum for the Italian/American short visual narrative, be that narrative what we would readily consider an account of fiction; a music video, which may also be a fiction; or a documentary, this too a potential fiction, be it only by virtue of the means with which we examine either genre (fiction or documentary), if not also by some narratological aspect 1 of the nature of a text based on fact, documentary, or autobiography. Such notions we find in recent work on autobiography, as Philippe Lejeune tells us in his classic study; or, more recently, Graziella Parati re2 minds us in her study of woman’s autobiography. Hence, I decided to divide this study into three sections dedicated, respectively, to the abovementioned categories.

The Short Film The short film—and at this point I refer to that type of film under sixty 3 minutes in length, be it a narrative fiction or documentary—is a cultural product that, until three decades or so ago, enjoyed a fairly good fortune 1

2


with respect to being shown in many movie houses. When one went to the movies, until the late sixties especially, there was often a short film of some sort, be it of animated or of real people, that preceded the main attraction, which thus provided numerous possible fora for such short narratives. This, I would suggest, is not the case today, for it is rare to go to a mainstream movie house and enjoy a prefatory short before the feature presentation. Today, very much in tune with the times, we are assailed by anywhere from five-to-fifteen minutes of trailers with a commercial mixed in every once in a while. Indeed, in some theaters the various trailers may take up to twenty minutes. This, of course, always makes one wonder when exactly the film is to begin and how the actual beginning time of the film jibes with what one sees in the papers or is told over the phone. On a related matter, one might also wonder if trailers themselves might not some day become their own form of art, as some critics have dared, though be it sarcastically, compared the trailer to its feature-length product. In this regard, I would remind the reader of an article in Newsweek, where we read that one-third of the “500-person audience opted not to” stay for the film, viewing only the two-minute trailer of the then 4 forthcoming Stars Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace. Indeed, Edmund Levy anticipated such a phenomenon when, four years before, he noted that “despite the fact that many excellent shorts are available today, they have been muscled out of the theater by promotional trailers” (3). Yet, in spite of the lack of venues for the short film, it still seems to be very much in vogue. Moreover, unless the short film is commissioned for something special such as an anthology of sorts that will run as a feature presentation (e.g., Boccaccio ’70 [1970], New York Stories [1986], Boy’s Life II [1998]), it is often the young filmmaker at the helm of the project; this is particularly true for the so-called young filmmaker

Italian/American Short Films and Videos

3

who cuts her/his teeth on this timely production for an array of reasons, at the head of which we must list most obviously the economic factor. Indeed, numerous are the directors of these short films, finished products of which are often shown in small movie houses, off-beat theaters, and university theaters- if not also at the more competitive film festivals, be those festivals regional, national, or international. This last forum of the film festival was in fact my introduction to the first two films in this study, Lena’s Spaghetti and Nunzio’s Second Cousin. I met both directors at the screening of their films at the 1994 Telluride Film Festival, where they were each extremely gracious in get5 ting to me, soon after, copies of their films. An analogous sort of meeting took place with regard to Uncovering; I first meet Mariarosy Calleri at a conference sponsored by the John D. Calandra Italian-American Institute on the lost world of Italian/American radicals, which took place in May 1997 at the CUNY Graduate Center. Will Parrinello’s documentary, Little Italy, instead, came my way through more anticipated channels. Having made the rounds soon after its release on some PBS stations in the Northeast, it soon came to my attention that not only did this film exist, but that it was enjoying a good deal of success among those who saw it, both reviewers and the public at large. The two Madonna videos, Like A Prayer and Justify My Love, took a much more commercial route; the first I saw on MTV, the second I saw on the now (in)famous December 1990, Nightline preview, accompanied by Forest Sawyer’s interview with Madonna. Indeed, the brevity and conciseness of the short film constitute some of its very appealing characteristics. Like the short-story writer, I would suggest, the ability of the short-film filmmaker to be both concise and inclusive is what draws the viewer/reader to the text, and ultimately satisfies his/her curiosity. This, of course, would include the filmmaker’s capacity of some semblance of character-development, which would

4


prove essential in keeping the viewer/reader’s attention. Shorts tend to be highly visual; they tend to include more action with the storytelling relying “more on images than on dialogue” (Levy 11–12). Thus, the shortfilm filmmaker needs to develop a narrative strategy that is both economic in length and comprehensive in description, much in the same way the short-story writer has succeeded in writing in such a mode. This notwithstanding, the short may often have a twist at the end, offering up a 6 proverbial surprise ending. Such narrative success is evidenced by the six films included herein. Each in its own way, especially the first four films, offers a storyline, albeit brief, that, while asking questions of its viewer, does not leave him/her hanging vis-à-vis information that might otherwise be considered fundamental to said story-line. Indeed, like many shorts, especially those made by younger filmmakers, these films deal with subject matter such as sexual preferences, new family styles and strategies, youthful unrest, violence toward others, the search for direction, feelings of isolation, companionship, religion, new mores versus old, and the possible loss of social guidelines, as well as other themes. So much has been written on film in general. One need only peruse the innumerable bibliographic listings in any study to see how exhaustive the critical and theoretical production has been to date. However, with specific regard to the short film, the terrain is, for lack of a better word, quite barren indeed. Whereas in literary studies short fiction 7 has enjoyed a good deal of critical and theoretical success, the short films seem to be a target of study only within the more specific and specialized studies of the so-called avant-garde cinema or the documentary. Yet, even here, careful attention to the brevity of discourse takes secondstage, and notions of something we might consider to be specifically a narrative strategy of the short film is left for us to ponder.


5

Thus, while I shall, to some extent, refrain herein from theorizing specifically about the short film, my hopes are that the actual fact of discussing these six Italian/American shorts will at least figure as some sort of first step, so we may, in our studies of visual Italian America, include as a necessary topic of investigation those shorts that have so often gone unexamined for an array of reasons the least of which is aesthetic quality. Thus, along with the likes of Dina Ciraulo, whom I mentioned earlier, certain other names come to the fore. Louis Antonelli’s extensive awardwinning experience with the short film is unknown to the majority of Italian Americans, be they members of the public at large or actual scholars of the artistic world of Italian America; his films have won countless prizes, both in the United States and abroad. A second case involves the work of Helen DeMichel, now having ventured into the feature-length world of cinema with Tarantella (1995). De Michel is another filmmaker who has proven to be most articulate with the short format. In addition, short documentaries, both here in the United States and in Canada, about the numerous Little Italies, if not the villages in Italy of the parents and grandparents of the filmmaker, abound. Santo Barbiere, Anthony Fragola, and Patrizia Fogliato are just three of the many names that come to mind in this category.

Some Background Italian/American art forms—more precisely, literature and film—have often been defined as those constructed mainly by second-generation writers about the experiences of the first and second generations. I refer the reader to my essay, “In (Re)cognition of the Italian/American Writer: Definitions and Categories,” where, through a Peircean semiotic lens, I propose a re-definition of the Italian/American writer from the perspec8 tive of both chronology and cognition. Those with whom I discourse in 9 this essay are Robert Casillo, Frank Lentricchia, and Dana Gioia. They

6


each offered neat and clean definitions for works of two art forms—and in a certain sense we can extend their meanings to other art media—that deal explicitly with an Italian/American ethnic quality and/or subject 10 matter. Such definitions, nevertheless, essentially halt—though willynilly by those who offer them—the progress and limit the impact of those writers who come from later generations, all of which may result in a monolithic notion of what was/is and was/is not Italian/American literature. As I have already questioned elsewhere, what do we do about those works of art—written and/or visual—that do not explicitly treat Italian/American subject matter, and yet seem to exude a certain ethnic Italian/American quality, even if we cannot readily define it? That is, can we speak to the Italian/American qualities of a Frank Capra film? According to Casillo’s definition, we would initially have to say no. However, it is Casillo himself who tells us that Capra, indeed, “found his ethnicity troublesome throughout his long career” (374) and obviously dropped it. My question then becomes: Can we not see this absence, especially in light of documented secondary matter, as an Italian/American sign in potentia? I would like to say yes. And, in this regard, I would suggest an alternative perspective on reading and/or categorizing any 11 Italian/American art form. That is, I believe we should take our cue from Scorsese himself and therefore “stretch” our own reading strategy of Italian/American art forms, whether they be—due to content and/or form—explicitly Italian/American, in order to accommodate other possible, successful reading strategies. Because of the work of those who have offered alternative perspectives through some of the more recent analytical and interpretive tools of hermeneutics, deconstruction, semiotics, and the like, we can readily broaden our view of what constitutes the Italian/American ex12 perience in the arts. I would thus propose that we reconsider Ital-


7

ian/American literature, for instance, to be a series of ongoing written enterprises that establish a repertoire of signs, at times, sui generis, and therefore create verbal variations (visual, in the case of film, painting, sculpture, drama, etc.) that represent different versions—dependent, of course, on one’s generation, gender, socio-economic condition—of what 13 can be perceived as the Italian/American interpretant. That is, the Italian/American experience may, to be sure, manifest itself in any art form in a number of ways and to varying degrees, for which one may readily speak of the variegated representations of the Italian/American ethos in literature, for example, in the same fashion in which Daniel Aaron once spoke of the “hyphenate writer” and Aijaz Ahmad, more recently, discussed new ways of considering “third-world” literature. In his response to an essay by Fredric Jameson on national allegory and third-world literature, in fact, Ahmad took issue with what he considered Jameson’s limited and reductive assumption that third-world literature revolves primarily around the notion of a national allegory. This notion that literature may revolve primarily around one or two notions in order for it to be considered such—or perhaps because it is considered such and not something else—may be seen as an analogue to the case of some ethnic literatures in the United States. Namely, that an ethnic literary piece has to contain certain thematic motifs or adopt specific formalistic structures in order for it to be considered part of that certain ethnic rubric. Otherwise, the work and its author are considered not to belong necessarily to that very same group of hyphenated writers. This somewhat reductive notion of categorizing art forms limits our ways of examining them, I would 14 suggest.

Notes 1.

For my use of the slash (/) instead of the hyphen (-), see my To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate? The Italian/American Writer: An

8

2.

3.

Anthony Julian Tamburri Other American. For a concerted reaction to my To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate, see Franco Ricci, “Disenfranchisement, or ‘Your Life or Your Life’,” in The Flight of Ulysses: Studies in Honor of Emmanuel Hatzantonis, ed. Augustus A. Mastri, AdI. Studi & Testi 1 348–59. Instead, for discussions on other alternatives to the usual hyphenated term, “Italian-American,” see the following two cogent essays: Ben Lawton, “What Is ‘ItalianAmerican’ Cinema?” Voices in Italian Americana 6.1 (1995) 27–51; and Luigi Fontanella, “Poeti Emigrati ed Emigranti Poeti negli Stati Uniti,” Italica 75.2 (1998) 210–225. Lejeune reminds us of what he had stated earlier about the actual task of reading (i.e., analyzing) fictional and autobiographical texts: “We must admit that, if we remain on the level of analysis within the text, there is no difference. All the methods that autobiography uses to convince us of the authenticity of its narrative can be imitated by the novel, and often have been imitated” (13; emphasis textual); see On Autobiography, foreword by Paul John Eakin, translated by Katherine Leary. For Parati, in turn, autobiography becomes something more than the “metaphor of truth” (1) . . . it is, she tells us, a “fiction, [. . .] a narrative in which the author carefully selects and constructs the characters, events, and aspects of the self she or he wants to make public in order to convey a specific message about her or his past and present identity” (4). See her Public History Private Stories: Italian Women’s Autobiography. Edmond Levy says that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences tells us that shorts should be “less than thirty minutes” (See his Making a Winning Short: How to Write, Direct, Edit, and Produce a Short Film 11). Given the tendency of commercial thea-


9

ters to show films of at least ninety minutes, I believe we can surely consider those under one hour as a “short.” 4. See Kendall Hamilton, “The Second Coming,” Newsweek 132.22 (November 30, 1998): 84. 5. At the 1995 Telluride Festival, I then met Dina Ciraulo, another Italian American whose film, Touch, was also screened in the session of student films. She, too, proved equally gracious in providing me a copy. 6. Again, I refer the reader to Levy’s Making a Winning Short, especially chapter 2, “Defining the Short” (12–18). 7. I would state, en passant, that here, too, one might have a legitimate complaint vis-à-vis how much has been written on the long narrative film. 8. Differentia, review of italian thought 6/7 (Spring/Autumn 1994): 9– 32; now modified in A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In (Re)cognition of the Italian/American Writer. 9. Robert Casillo, “Moments in Italian-American Cinema: From Little Caesar to Coppola and Scorsese,” From the Margins: Writings in Italian Americana, ed. Anthony Julian Tamburri, Paolo A. Giordano, and Fred L. Gardaphé 374–396; Frank Lentricchia, review of Delano in America & Other Early Poems, by John J. Soldo, Italian Americana 1.1 (1974): 124–5; and Dana Gioia, “What Is ItalianAmerican Poetry?” in Poetry Pilot (December 1991): 3–10. Now, with a brief postscript, in Voices in Italian Americana 4.2 (1993): 61–64, followed by a “Response” by Maria Mazziotti Gillan (65– 6). 10. One problem with definitions of this sort is that they exclude any discourse on the analogous notion of, for example, the “hyphenate” filmmaker. I refer to Daniel Aaron’s “The Hyphenate Writer and American Letters,” Smith Alumnae Quarterly (July 1964): 213–7;

10

11.

12.

13.

14.

Anthony Julian Tamburri later revised in Rivista di Studi Anglo-Americani 3.4–5 (1984–85): 11–28. What is important to keep in mind is that one can perceive different degrees of ethnicity in literature, film, or any other art form, as Aaron already did with his “hyphenate writer.” For an inventory of what has been done to date, see Fred L. Gardaphé’s Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative; and my A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In (Re)cognition of the Italian/American Writer. I have opted for the Peircean categories of sign (or representamen) and interpretant, as opposed to the Saussurean couplet of signifier/signified, for distinguishing between the image and the concept. Peirce’s definition of the sign is: “A sign or representamen, is something which stands for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. The sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen” (2.228; emphasis textual). See his Principles of Philosophy in Collected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. For more on the difference between Peircean and Saussurean notions of the sign, see Floyd Merrell’s recent study, Sign, Textuality, World 3–73, especially. For more, see Aijaz Ahmad’s response: “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory’,” Social Text 17 (1987): 4; now in In Theory.

Fictive Narratives

Subliminal Ethnicity What is [not] Italian/American about Lena’s Spaghetti?

Preliminary Thoughts The title of this chapter obviously begs a couple of questions, one of which I have already dealt with elsewhere—a redefinition of Italian/ American art forms from a post-1950s perspective: post-1950s not just for the advent of new ideas, rather a time when the notion of exploring 1 new ideas achieved some sort of validity. Other questions that may possibly arise are: 1) Why is “not” under erasure? and 2) What can I possibly mean by “subliminal”? Both are related; and suffice it to say that I use the adjective “subliminal” precisely because of its ambiguity—an ambiguity that carries the various definitions of: a) barely perceptible, b) inadequate to produce a sensation or a perception, or c) existing or functioning outside the area of conscious awareness. All three definitions echo, in some form or another, Victor Turner’s well-known and wellcited definition of liminal entities as being “necessarily ambiguous […]”; they are, Turner continues, “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, 2 and ceremonial.” In what follows, then, we shall see how the two main characters 3 of Lena’s Spaghetti, Hanna (“Lena”) and Herb, constitute liminal beings who, for the major part of this short film, live on the threshold between two different emotional spaces. In a similar sense, it will also become apparent that Greco’s Italian Americanness occupies an analogous interstitial space in his narrative framework. 13

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Reading Filming Writing Joseph Greco’s Lena’s Spaghetti is obviously not an explicitly Italian/American movie. In fact, one may want to argue that there simply isn’t anything much Italian/American about this movie at all, except perhaps for the two words “Lena” and “spaghetti.” But I would contend that in this film there is something beneath the surface—subliminal, according to definitions a) and/or c) listed above—that, to a certain degree, reflects the director’s Italian Americanness, his enthusiasm for his heritage as a third- or fourth-generation Italian American. It is something that, in the words of a Roland Barthes, instead of being, let us say, the cardinal functions/nuclei or catalysers, would be, instead, something in 4 the line of the indices or informants: that is, secondary signs—bits and pieces of information—that lie below the surface, which the regular viewer might easily overlook. And, here, when I say regular viewer, I have in mind the opposite of what we might call a “model viewer,” to echo Eco, or an “ideal viewer,” as someone like Chatman, Iser, or even 5 Prince would have it. Hence, the subliminal in this film manifests itself in at least one of two ways. Namely, the fact that it operates within the realm of secondary signs—functioning outside the area of conscious awareness—renders it inscrutable, if not barely perceptible, to the regular viewer. For the sake of those who have not seen the film, I offer the following, albeit brief, plot summary. Lena’s Spaghetti is the story of thirteen-year-old Hanna’s move from one city to another and her initial feelings of loneliness. One day, after her father brings home a copy of her old town’s newspaper, Hanna decides to answer a personal ad. The result is an ever-increasing epistolary relationship between “Lena” (Hanna’s pseudonym as make-believe actress) and Herb, a lonely thirty-three-yearold letter carrier. As the correspondence progresses, the relationship


15

steadily intensifies, especially for Herb; and he subsequently decides to ask “Lena” to meet, declaring in the same letter his love for her. It is at this point that Hanna, frightened by Herb’s admission of love and the prospect of an encounter, concocts yet another story, this time about her obligations to a theater group that is about to embark on a long road-trip and will be on the road for at least a year or two. Dejected, Herb finally takes notice of his female colleague, Adele, who, at her job as letter carrier, delivered to Herb “Lena”’s correspondence while, all the time, harboring her own feelings for him. They talk, and Herb, finally taking notice of Adele as the thirty-three-year-old, Diane Keaton–type female that she is, invites her to a home-cooked Italian dinner. In a parallel scene, Hanna strikes up a conversation with a very young girl on her school bus. As the bus stops and they get off, the two girls head home together in the same direction—similar to Herb and Adele, the beginning, we may assume, of a long friendship. Lena’s Spaghetti, one might say, is basically about love, or more precisely, about the blossoming of love—or, further still, the field, to use a metaphor, on which the seeds of love are sown and from which one may reap a harvest. In a similar vein, we might also see this reaping as a metaphor for artistic creation, precisely because there are, even though this is a film and there are no films represented in it, references nevertheless to artistic creation, albeit indirect. There is a reference to writing, first of all, in “Lena”’s diary, as well as the actual correspondence that takes place between “Lena” and the lonely letter carrier, Herb, who initially places a personal ad to which she responds. Second, there are also numerous references to painting. In fact, we see that the postcards traveling back and forth between “Lena” and Herb are reproductions of, if they do not at the very least echo, Renaissance art—we have the painting of the two putti, as well as the Mona Lisa that lies on top of a stack of mail

16

Anthony Julian Tamburri 6

“Lena” received from Herb. There is, in addition, the equally significant element of Herb’s own hobby, which is painting. In dealing with the notion of self-reflexivity and the structure of a particular work, be it written or visual, framing and/or bracketing becomes an important narrative component. In the beginning of Lena’s Spaghetti we find that Herb—a lonely mailman, yearning for a significant other, in search of love—is literally framed by two lovers who now wait for him to dole out their mail. Herb, that is, stands uncomfortably between these two people, as they so naturally express their love for each other in his company. Such framing/bracketing also occurs on other occasions throughout the film. The female letter carrier is framed early on within the truck door of her postal vehicle; later, when Herb catches her reading his mail from Lena, she is again framed by her truck’s door; thirdly, she is equally framed once more at the end of the film, when Herb finally invites her to dinner. In a similar manner, “Lena” is also framed on a few occasions—we see her in the mirror in the bathroom, where she appears to be the young girl she truly is; other times she is framed by the mirror in her room, where she is shown writing to Herb or reading his letters. The last time we see her in this framed situation, she realizes she must not write any longer to Herb. One of the more explicit examples of self-consciousness, or selfreflexivity, may be viewed through the lens of the notion of representation, that is representation of reality. What we, as viewers, see at the end of the film is, in fact, a sign of reality in that which takes place when “Lena” decides she can no longer write to Herb because things have become, we might say, too hot for her. Although in her case the more correct term should be frightening, since he now admits his love for her and his desire that they finally meet. In a previous shot, we saw “Lena” sitting on her bed, contemplating Herb’s letters. In this case, we see a similar shot in which she is now writing/narrating that she will not be able to


17

meet Herb. What is significant here, as well as before, is that we are not looking at a sign of reality; that is, we are not looking at the interpretant 7 of an object, as Peirce would call it. We do not directly see “Lena,” we see, instead, her reflection in the mirror. Thus, what we find ourselves looking at is a sign of a sign of reality; namely, the image/concept is no longer separated from us, as would be the case, by one degree of separation—i.e., through one sign and/or image. Rather, this reality is distanced from us through a second degree of separation—that is, we now have a reflection (“Lena”’s mirrored image) of a sign (= interpretant), “Lena,” which represents instead what we would readily call an object, a notion, a signified, a concept. It is also at this point where we witness a radical shift in Greco’s visual narration. The switching of scenes, which up to this point has been an almost seamless process, is no longer a smooth transition from the previous scene to the next. At this point, we have a momentary blank—a black screen—a literal gap in the narration that is, in its own right, a metaphorical gap similar to that which Wolfgang Iser discusses as part of 8 his general notion of the phenomenology of reading. In this vein, such a gap constitutes for the viewer, especially the “model/ implicit” viewer, a moment of repose for him/her to reconcile the information that s/he has gathered thus far, throughout the visual narration, in order for him/her to reconstruct a logical narrative sequence. Parallel to the radical shift in narration is a radical shift in the narrative. The relationship, or the desired relationship, between “Lena” and Herb changes dramatically. That is, his desire for the “unique female,” what we first saw in Herb’s personal ad, at this point is actually concretized, whereas before in the writing, in the correspondence, she remained exactly that—an idea, words, signs, an idea on paper, never an actual human being. A series of graphs illustrates the shift that occurs

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and the various perspectives from which one may consider it:

1

2

3

Adults Children

Those Looking

Substitution

Herb ↔“Lena”

Herb ↔ “Lena”

Herb ↔“Lena”

Be it from the perspective of adults vs. children (#1), the category of those in search of emotional support—read, lover or friend—(#2), or the simple fact that there a substitution occurs (#3), in all three situations the imaginary/fictitious relationship of Herb “Lena” can no longer exist and is, per force, dramatically transformed. The only way that any type of relationship can be upheld is for both principles (Herb and “Lena”) to be substituted for the second set of principles (F.L.C. & Girl on Bus) waiting in the wings, so to speak, as the arrows now illustrate: 1 2 3 Adults Children Herb ↔ “Lena”

F.L.C. Girl on Bus

Those Looking Herb ↔ “Lena”

Substitution Herb ↔“Lena”

F.L.C Girl on Bus

F.L.C Girl on Bus

Be it, then, Herb substituted by the girl on the bus or “Lena” substituted by the female letter carrier, in both changes—and according to any of the three perspectives listed above—we witness a semiotic chiasmus of sorts in that the one sign, Herb (= adult/lover), is substituted by/for another, Girl on Bus (= child/friend); or, similarly, the other sign of the original couple, “Lena” (= child/friend), is substituted by/for its antonym, F.L.C.


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(= adult/lover). In either situation, the change brings about positive results. Thus, on the one hand, Herb’s desired person is now reified in the figure of the female letter carrier [= his “unique female”] while, on the other, “Lena”’s [or, now, Hanna’s] desired person, a friend inasmuch as a friend is also emotional support, is reified in the young girl on the bus, as they now walk off at the end as, we may assume, soon-to-be friends. These dynamics thus come to a head as both desires are satisfied—the search for the “unique female” on Herb’s part, and the search and/or desire for a friend on “Lena”’s. One significant aspect here with regards to writing, or the desire for writing, is that the activity becomes the conduit, the channel, or, to remain faithful to my initial metaphor of sown fields, writing—or better, the paper on which one writes [canvas, with regard to Herb’s painting]— 9 is the field on which such seeds of desires and ideas are sown. At the beginning, Herb’s personal ad underscores the importance of writing as some type of source of satisfaction and/or happiness: “Like to write?” opens his personal ad. In a similar manner, “Lena” in turn expresses an analogous emotion when she states in her diary that “Lena [is] the only friend [she has].” And through writing, Herb and “Lena” create an imaginary relationship that brings them, though ever so temporary, a semblance of happiness. But writing is also just that, writing. It constitutes an imaginary world of ideas, notions, and desires that are not and/or can not be concretized. They remain, therefore, safely in the realm of the imaginary. This harsh truth comes to light at the end of the film when “Lena” sends Herb her farewell letter. At this point, the two media—writing and painting— seem to be brought to the fore. In front of his painting of a woman eating spaghetti, Herb reads “Lena”’s letter, which she signs, “Your pen pal,” thus keeping herself within the realm of the written, far from the real world and far from Herb. “Lena”’s sign-off, that is, recalls the writing

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process, as invention, as creation of a reality, if not as the art of writing—But not Reality! In like fashion, Herb, in turn, replicates, albeit unknowingly, “Lena,” as he also has set up an imaginary world that exists only in the realm of paper and canvas, not in the concrete world. Thus, here, too, we may speak in terms of the liminal, as both characters in their own imaginary worlds exist temporarily on the threshold of desire; for they remain in a state “betwixt and between” the everyday reality of the real world and the desired condition of their imaginary world. Yet writing as conduit, we may assume from the film’s ending, has a positive value within the greater scheme of this love story. This, I would submit, is signaled throughout the film in a number of ways. First and foremost, writing, or the delivery of the written word, is what Herb does. In this real world of the written, love may still blossom, though not between “Lena” and Herb. Instead, a relationship blossoms between Herb and his female counterpart, the letter carrier, and writing (the written) has its integral role. Though they do not write to one another, as Herb receives his letter/cards from “Lena,” the female letter carrier reads them and, through her reading, in a very peculiar and vicarious manner, we might say, also engages in an epistolary dialogue with Herb. After all, she is the one who actually delivers to Herb his mail and, in so doing, occasionally teases Herb about his special correspondence! In fact, in delivering to Herb one of “Lena”’s last postcards, there is a moment when both Herb and the female letter carrier literally make a connection. As she hands Herb “Lena”’s postcard, still holding on to an end of it, she notices some paint on Herb’s nose. Herb, in the meantime, took hold of the other corner of the postcard, and, as they each remain grasping on to an end of “Lena”’s postcard, the female letter carrier wipes the paint off of Herb’s nose. What is significant here, of course, is that the two, for the moment, are literally connected by “Lena”’s mail (i.e., postcard) to Herb, which, in turn, up to this point was the topic of conversation between


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Herb and the female letter carrier. Mail, in fact, is one of the very first, as also one of the very last, verbal signs we see—for the film opens with Herb in the mailroom of an apartment building; and, in a similar manner, the mailbox near “Lena”’s bus stop and the white basket in the female letter carrier’s truck are two of the last verbal signs we see. Thus, while mail is one of the reasons Herb initially moves in search of his “unique female,” who just happens, temporarily, to be “Lena” (= a person with no face, hence a sign only), mail is the very reason why he and the female letter carrier eventually get together, when Herb offers to cook her an 10 Italian dinner.

Italian Spice Turning now to a discussion of what is or is not explicitly Italian/American about Lena’s Spaghetti, as I have already stated earlier, one may surely argue that, on the surface, there is no Italian/American quality to this film—except, of course, for something as blatant and, dare I say, banal as Hanna’s made-up name, “Lena,” and her trumped-up rec11 ipe for “spaghetti.” Yet, were we to engage in a discussion of implicit and explicit semiosis, we might easily find that a dose of Italian Americanness and/or Italianness exists in the film’s visual narrative in the fore12 shadows, in the background, that is, namely, beneath the surface. In this regard, then, any sense of Italianness and/or Italian Americanness becomes, like that of Herb’s mother’s English speech, an accent; it adds flavor to the narrative but it does not necessarily move it toward one or another specific direction. To echo once again Roland Barthes, the Italian Americanness of Lena’s Spaghetti figures not so much as integral parts of the narrative logic, rather as those indices and informants that we saw before—bits and pieces of information that, while they are not necessarily the main component of the film’s narrative, they underscore those aspects of the story-line such as character, feeling, atmosphere, and phi-

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losophy, as well as aid in the authentication of the so-called facts of the 13 story-line. Other examples of Italian/American signs appear in other parts of the film. Along with the above-mentioned accent of Herb’s mother and her salutation of “ciao,” we also have two specific names mentioned on two different occasions—Uberto and Evalina—that conjure up images of, if not specifically Italian Americans, at least Latins, be they Italian or Hispanics. Again, we must keep in mind the notion of intentio lectoris— that is, the reader’s interpretive arsenal in ascribing significance to these two signs (Uberto and Evalina). These names, I would add, seem to appear at a moment of need and comfort, when Herb seems to be at his two lowest moments in the film. The first instance is just before “Lena” writes to him for the first time, as he, at home seemingly alone and dejected, receives a phone call from his Italian mother in which she offers to fix him up with Evalina’s daughter. The second time these Mediterranean names appear is toward the end of the film, when Herb is once again feeling dejected after “Lena”’s farewell letter. Here, too, Herb’s mother’s accented voice reappears to offer, unknowingly once again, comfort and solace in her willingness to fix him up, for a second time, with Evalina’s daughter. On both occasions this seemingly Italian/Mediterranean mother, as we might readily consider her, comes to the rescue. A sense of Italian Americanness continues to be articulated throughout the film via these and other secondary signs. In the postcards that travel back and forth between “Lena” and Herb, for instance, we find, as we saw above, reproductions of Renaissance art in the recurring paintings of the two putti, the cherubs. Secondly, I remind my reader once more of the Mona Lisa that stands out atop the stack of mail “Lena” received from Herb. Thirdly, food, and more precisely, spaghetti, becomes the common denominator. That is, the appearance and function of


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food in this film serves as a sort of elixir, that linchpin which initially binds “Lena” and Herb, as it also ultimately brings together Herb and the female letter carrier. That is, food is the initial nexus for the epistolary relationship between “Lena” and Herb, when she very soon in their correspondence sends to him her recipe for spaghetti, as well as the ragion d’essere of the first date between Herb and Adele, the female letter car14 rier, as we see at the end of the movie. Of course, what is ultimately significant here is that “spaghetti”—i.e., the recipe for spaghetti—brings together the lonely people in this film. Food initially binds them. More specifically, Italian food brings together these three people, fictionalized and real, and ultimately, to various degrees, satisfies their wishes and desires, especially those of Herb and the female letter carrier. So this is a story that is highly “American,” a simple love story in that we witness only the beginning of their romance, which obviously takes place, in the foreground, between two seemingly non-ethnic Americans. Yet, on the other hand, somewhere in the background of this story, we may readily perceive echoes of an Italianness and/or Italian Americanness that continues to rise throughout Greco’s visual narration. In returning now for a moment to the aforementioned mirror image of “Lena” where she is distanced from us through a second degree of separation, one may, indeed, speak in terms of self-protection and selfelucidation with regard to this character’s reflection in the mirror. Mary Jo Bona offers an acute reading of Carmolina, a character in Tina De Rosa’s Paper Fish, when she states that Carmolina, in mimicking Leonardo, “writes in reverse both as a protection and elucidation of the self” (98), especially since, as Bona points out, “double consciousness charac15 ters may be attracted to mirrors, reflecting windows, [etc.]” (105). A curious difference between the book and the film, however, lies in who is using the mirror. As Bona points out, it is clearly the character, not the

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narrator, who uses the mirror. In the film, conversely, “Lena” does not consciously sit in front of the mirror in order to see herself. Rather, it is the directorial personality (or, narrating agency), what or whom in the literary text we might consider the author (or, narrator), depending on the circumstances, who places “Lena” in front of the mirror. Thus, we might look more toward Greco the director, and not “Lena” the character, and consider the mirror his self-protection and/or self-elucidation of his own double-consciousness—read here, ethnicity—that is then mirrored—Pun intended!—in the image of “Lena.” It is thus here that I would point to an instance where we might return to the liminality of Greco’s seemingly nonexistent ethnicity in this film. In a sense, Hanna’s concocted character, “Lena,” to whom she does not ascribe any ethnic quality, becomes nevertheless a reminiscence of Italian Americanness insofar as the proper name “Lena,” combined with her favorite food “spaghetti,” reeks of italianità as strongly as a freshly prepared bowl of broccoli di rapa reeks of garlic—the one can not do without the other; it cannot not conjure up concepts of Italian America. Yet, this Italian America remains, within Greco’s narrative—like the classic liminal state that lies outside the normal classificatory systems— only in that interstitial space of, to paraphrase again Victor Turner, “betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by [in our specific 16 case, narrative] custom, convention, and ceremonial.” Indeed, as I mentioned at the outset, both “Lena” and Herb also inhabit a state of liminality, or marginality, for most of this film’s narra17 tive. Having just moved, “Lena” is temporarily without friends and thus in search of some sort of emotional support one would readily find in friendship. Similarly, Herb, thirty-three, is a seemingly hopeless lovelorn bachelor in search of his idea of the “unique female.” Both figure as individuals who have slipped through what we might now consider the emotional “network of classifications that normally locate states and po-


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sitions in cultural space” (Turner 95). And since there is no two without three, as the Italian saying goes, it would not seem illogical or far-fetched to append Greco himself to our trinity of liminal beings. For, while he has scattered numerous secondary signs of Italian Americanness throughout his narrative, he does not assign any specific “position” to this ethnicity. In the more prevalent form of Barthesian indices and informants, Greco’s italianità, thus infused in his film, remains neatly situated in a state of signifying limbo, waiting to be activated by an array of potential viewers and their respective semiotic acts. To conclude, finally, with the statement that this is, among other things, an Italian/American film, I would submit thusly only inasmuch as America is that very kaleidoscope, a country of unique individuals that form a unique population, made up of people from all different origins, who at one point or another try to become part of a mainstream, that is assimilate, and yet often tend, conversely, to hold on to various bits and pieces of their heritage. In this sense, then, Lena’s Spaghetti is precisely that. It is an American film, by no means explicitly Italian/American, that is at the very best implicitly Italian/American, insofar as this American film has been, here and there, peppered with the director’s Italian heri18 tage.

Notes 1.

I make this distinction because while there were new faces on the scene, older faces, often forgotten by the establishment, were revived, reread, and reappropriated for constructing a different critical discourse. My own rereading of Italian/American literature appropriates the newer voices that are Umberto Eco, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wolfgang Iser, and the like; yet it also goes back to C. S. Peirce, whose seminal notions of sign, firstness, secondness, and thirdness lie at the base of my 1994 essay.

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2.

Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure 95– 100. Lena’s Spaghetti, directed by Joseph Greco, screenplay by Rachel A. Witenstein. Senior Thesis of The Florida State University School of Motion Picture, Television and Recording Arts. The Florida State University, 1994. The film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, September 1994. Functions, for Barthes, are units of content that drive the narrative. The essence of the function, according to Barthes, “is the seed that it sows in the narrative, planting an element that will come to fruition later—either on the same level or elsewhere, on another level” (89). Catalysers, instead, fill up space between the cardinal functions. In turn, indices index character, feeling, atmosphere, and philosophy. In addition, informants serve to authenticate; they are pure data of immediate and, I would add, local signification. For more on Barthes notion of narrative, see his seminal structuralist essay “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives” (1966) in Image Music Text 79–124. I am clearly making an analogy to the special construct of the “ideal” or “model reader” of the world of literary hermeneutics. For various notions on this concept of the “model” and/or “ideal viewer,” see Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader; Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse; Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader; and Gerald Prince, “On Textual Readers and Evaluators,” VS (Versus) 52/53 (1989): 113–20. For more on general notions of literary hermeneutics, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method. An Italian icon par excellence, the Mona Lisa appears in the background of numerous “American” films. One need only think back to True Love by Nancy Savoca.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Italian/American Short Films and Videos 7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

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For more on Peirce’s tripartite notion of the sign, see, for a quick overview, Charles Sanders Peirce, “What Is a Sign?” (1894) in Philosophical Writings of Peirce 98–104. See, especially, his chapter “How Acts of Constitution Are Stimulated” in The Act of Reading 180–231. As a point of information, and in keeping in line with my metaphor, I would refer the reader, at this point, to the oldest Italian text on record, the Indovinello Veronese: “Se pareba boves, alba pratalia araba, et albo versorio teneba, et negro semen seminaba.” Indeed, because she belongs to the real world is one of the reasons why the female letter carrier can and does eventually touch Herb. Trumped-up since she cribs the recipe from a cookbook. What is significant here for my reading strategy—as I assume the opening pages of this essay have already signaled—is that I adhere to Umberto Eco’s notion of intentio lectoris with ample conciliation to intentio operis, since any reader’s intertextual arsenal employed must always, to a certain degree, be context sensitive; in some way or another, that is, the reader’s decodification must jibe in some way with the text. For more on Eco’s notion, see his “Intentio Lectoris: The State of the Art,” Differentia, review of italian thought 2 (Spring 1988): 147–68. As Barthes reminds us, I would point out that catalysers, indices, and informants have the common denominator of being, with respect to nuclei, expansions. Nuclei, instead, form finite sets, are governed by logic, and are at once necessary and sufficient. Over the centuries, food has often appeared as a type of elixir or connector of people, be they characters in novels, short stories, plays, or, later on, in the cinema, a topic that deserves its own time and place. In the meantime, I would point out two recent studies on

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15.

16. 17.

18.

Anthony Julian Tamburri food: Gian-Paolo Biasin, Flavors of Modernity: Food and the Novel; and Massimo Montanari, The Culture of Food. Mary Jo Bona, “Broken Images, Broken Lives: Carmolina’s Journey in Tina De Rosa’s Paper Fish,” Melus 14.3–4 (Fall–Winter 1987): 87–106. Turner, The Ritual Process 95–100. For more on liminality vis-à-vis marginality, and a general brief introduction to the liminal, see Gustavo Pérez Firmat, “Preliminaries,” in Literature and Liminality: Festive Readings in the Hispanic Tradition xiii–xv. One question that may rise here, and elsewhere, is how much of Greco’s implicit ethnicity is purposely hidden. With regard to such a desire on the artist’s part to mask her/his Italian Americanness, see Fred Gardaphé’s “Visibility and Invisibility: The Postmodern Prerogative in Italian/American Narrative,” Almanacco 2.1 (Spring 1992): 24–33. My viewing copy of Lena’s Spaghetti came courtesy of the director, Joseph Greco, whom I warmly thank. I also would like to thank Professor Mark Pietralunga, who accepted an earlier version of this essay for presentation at The Florida State University Conference on Comparative Literature and Film, 1995.

Black & White, Scungill’ & Cannoli Ethnicity and Sexuality in Nunzio’s Second Cousin

Tom DeCerchio’s short film, Nunzio’s Second Cousin, debuted at the 1994 Telluride film festival and is now included in the anthology Boys Life II, in national distribution throughout the United States. One of six shorts chosen for the “Resume Films” session, Nunzio’s Second Cousin was an instant hit with the audience for its up-front-and-in-your-face manner of dealing with sensitive and controversial issues. In his film, DeCerchio confronts the questions of race and homosexuality, two seemingly taboo issues in the general community of Italian America, thus forming a triangle of issues of race, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. The basic semiotic premise to this chapter, as elsewhere herein, is that the study of signs proves to be more than adequate in the analysis of aesthetics and cultural artifacts. Semiotics proves to be the interpretive tool that can examine the signifying process of such artifacts and uncover the epistemological procedure that ascribes meaning and value to signs, which, I believe, we already saw in chapter one. As will become apparent in this chapter, Nunzio’s Second Cousin exudes a sui generis ideology independent of the usual white hetero-patriarchal control. As such, this counter-hetero, nonwhite ideology defies the typical white hetero-[fe] male-sexual gaze in not affording him his usual position of control. In this case, semiotics becomes the mode of analysis to identify the procedure of how signs may bear meanings in a specific sign system, as is the one we find in Nunzio’s Second Cousin.

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A Meeting of Cultures From the opening scene, sexuality constitutes both a prominent and problematic theme in the film. The initial confrontation between the racially mixed gay male couple and the gay-bashing group of suburban boys sets the stage for the conflictual theme of homosexuality. Anthony, the police 1 officer, and his black date exit a bar and are on their way to what we might assume to be a delightful dinner when they are spotted by some 2 prospective gay-bashers from Cicero, Illinois, who soon attack them. What they do not know is that Anthony does not represent the stereotype of the gay man: instead of the effeminate, seemingly shy and weak male, Anthony proves to be a type of “macho gay” who, though off-duty, is 3 nevertheless packing his pistol. Considering the sui generis system of upsetting the semiotic apple cart of traditional signification, one should not ignore the morphemic similarity between the name of the bar here— Cheeks, an obvious gay bar—and the more popular, mass-media bar of the early 1980s—Cheers, where heterosexuality reigned, and homosexuality was taboo. Further, as shall become apparent later, in spite of DeCerchio’s explicit use of ethnicity and sexuality throughout this film, secondary levels of signification, seemingly subliminal, may readily rise to the surface of the conversant viewer’s interpretation, a semiosic process we already saw in chapter 1. The concept of polyvalence, if not the phenomenon of a type of unlimited semiosis—where meaning is consistently created from the preceding sign through one mental process to another, such as by analogy or extension—is in effect from the very beginning. One of the bashers, for instance, states: “two fucking fruits just showed up on radar.” The play on words of “radar” and the recently coined term gaydar is too blatant to ignore and may thus serve as a hint, especially in retrospect, of what is to come from the point of view of signification. Yet this too proves, in a hermeneutical sense, semantically slippery. For it is true, as I have stated, that


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the morphemic similarity of radar and gaydar come to the fore. But the young men’s gaydar, so to speak, is not consonant with whom they find, as 4 Anthony is most straight-appearing, and quite macho to boot. In a similar retrospective mode, Jimmy Cerentano exhorts his 5 friends with a most telling battle-cry: “Let’s beat them back into yesterday.” The chronological marker of “yesterday,” as compared not only to today but especially tomorrow, first calls to mind the dichotomous binomial of old world versus new world; yet it now also references the dyad “old attitudes toward gays” versus “new [i.e. post-Stonewall] attitudes toward gays.” The usual form of the expression is “beat [someone] back into last week,” but by the substitution of the word yesterday, the utter6 ance lends itself more easily to identification with the (cultural) past. This notion of “old” vs. “new” is later underscored in other ways, one example being a subsequent episode of Mr. P and his racist comment couched in the proverbial opener, “you know what they say . . . ,” as if the “they say” assigns valence to the statement. Jimmy’s clothing, in turn, aids in ascribing a more broad interpretation to his statement. His athletic jacket with the big C (Cicero) on his chest broadcasts both his masculinity—it is an athletic jacket—and his racism—the C stands for Cicero. The idea of signs signifying and their array of possible meanings is also exhibited in Anthony’s statement to the would-be bashers and, as just mentioned above with regard to gaydar, what we may call their superficial reading of the sign . Anthony underscores their misreading when he states, with gun in hand: “After tonight you’re going to remember that the next time you decide to go out and fag bash, that sometimes fags bash back.” The repetition of the two terms “fag” and “bash,” used here together in two totally different and dichotomous contexts, tells us, here specifically, 1) that not all gay men act in a manner similar to the stereotype of the effeminate male exaggerating

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his non-masculine ways; and, rhetorically, 2) that, be it here or elsewhere, what we are told may need to be examined for significance other than the first that comes to mind. This sense of polyvalence, finally, is also underscored by Anthony’s black date’s reaction to his (Anthony’s) statement to one of the boys who tries to “bond” with him: “You want to bond with me? Get on all fours and I’ll stick my dick in your ass,” says Anthony, to which his lover responds: “Anthony, I hope you’re speaking metaphorically.” This episode proves to be a particularly rich moment in the film for a number of additional reasons. First, for Mediterranean culture, generally, at least since ancient Greece and Rome, penetration (whether vaginal or anal) has been the ultimate sign of masculine dominance and 7 privilege. The insertive man in male/male sex was not, then, seen as effeminate, while the receptive man was quintessentially so. Thus, by threatening to penetrate the basher, Anthony is actually threatening (in Mediterranean terms) to unman him by performing a sign of masculinity that is, historically, even more masculine than fag-bashing. Semiotically speaking, to underscore my initial premise, this falls well in line with what we may assume to be DeCerchio’s possible intention of upsetting the semiotic apple cart, as traditional sexual roles are rhetorically threatened and thus, on a more broad scale, called into question—this calling into question being relevant for all sex roles presented herein, I would hasten to add at this point. Second, the black man’s comment is supremely campy and ironic—indicating not only a total lack of trepidation at this imminent threat of violence and hatred, but also a mild, lip-curling disdain at the notion of his Anthony having, as he might describe it, to fuck someone as unsavory as this would-be basher. Known (originally among urban American Blacks) as “shading” or “throwing shade,” this mode of deprecation is typically gendered culturally as feminine and stands in carefree mocking opposition to the masculine mode of depreca-


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tion performed by the bashers. In addition, it also subtly belies the cliché that every gay man desperately hungers for sex with any straight man. All this, I would further contend, now sets the stage for the next thirteen minutes of the film, for which the spectator has been put on alert that s/he 8 may not be the idle consumer of texts, as Barthes tells us, but must engage, as Barthes also tells us, in an active process of signification. As it becomes apparent that Anthony, this white, gay police officer, is from the same Chicago suburbs as the would-be bashers, and he knows the family of one of the boys, he tells Jimmy to meet him the following evening at 7:00 P.M. at a specific address in Cicero. While the young man is suspicious, and perhaps even afraid, he does go; and the meeting turns out to be a dinner invitation to the police officer’s unsuspecting mother’s house in what we can readily consider the “old neighborhood” in Cicero, Illinois.

At the Table As the dinner scene occupies the rest of the film’s duration, it becomes the stage for the would-be basher’s epistemological initiation into the world of homosexuality, if not polysexuality. No longer surrounded by his friends, the young would-be basher must now endure the police officer’s lectures, for lack of a better word, on sexuality. More specifically, he must now confront, conceptually for the first time, the issue of homosexuality, and Anthony—now Tony as he is back in the “old 9 neighborhood” —becomes his teacher. On a more general scale, we witness the confrontation of two different sets of sign systems. The traditional, Italian/American sign system of white heterosexuality clashes head-on with an Italian/American sign system that has been altered according to the gay police officer’s individual life situation. Such polyvalence—or better, rhetorical malleabil-

34


ity of signs—is evidenced in a number of ways. Through a few seemingly insignificant transitional scenes, or just simple comments, the clash between a traditional Italian/American sign system and one having undergone a more radical modification also comes to the fore. While Cicero is already marked, to some degree, by an Italian Americanness, in that it is well known as an Italian enclave, DeCerchio also invests ethnic signs early on in the film when Anthony has the boys recite an apology to “all the fags in the world,” that “gay people are good people”; for he also has them repeat that “Michelangelo was gay and he’s a freaking genius.” At this point, Anthony’s statement reflects, in disaccord with that of the would-be bashers, a new Italian/American sign system that adds homosexuality as an accepted characteristic. On the other hand, once Anthony goes back to the old neighborhood, he confronts the cancer of racism that seems to permeate some white, working-class ethnic enclaves. We see this in his conversation with Mr. P: Mr. P: “It’s always nice to have a cop around. You know what they say: ‘A cop a day keeps the niggers away!’” Anthony: “Yeah. Well, I wish they wouldn’t say that.” The clash between the old world and the new world is exhibited in two ways. First, Anthony responds in disagreement: “Well, I wish they wouldn’t say that.” Then, in another sign of disagreement—this time not verbal—Mr. P exhibits puzzlement to Anthony’s reaction to his— unbeknownst to himself—racist comment. All this is then further underscored by the irony in the fact that Anthony’s date of the night before was a black man. In what I have already stated above, another scene calls to the fore an example of semiotic freedom. It is here, when Anthony ➠ Tony tells his mother of their dinner guest, that Jimmy becomes Nunzio’s second cousin: Anthony’s mother, Mrs. Randazzo, readily assumes that


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Jimmy is Nunzio’s relative because of the similarity in last names, an example of what we might otherwise call a superficial reading, or better yet, with tongue a bit in cheek, a fleeting act of semiosis that does not get really to the meaning of things. On the other hand, we might slightly rethink Anthony’s mother’s semiotic act: For, be it superficial on her part (or tongue-in-cheek on DeCerchio’s part), Mrs. Randazzo’s assumption is also a sign of the innate goodness and generosity of Anthony’s mother—not only in polar opposition to the reception Anthony received from the bashers, but also a sign of first-generation and immigrant Americans’ unswerving hospitality, a presumption of goodness based on shared bloodlines and ethnicity—He’s Nunzio’s cousin, he must be all right! Hence her unhesitating willingness to take a total stranger into her house and prepare a special meal for him. In this sense, Mrs. Randazzo is very much the generous Italian/American mother who, in doting on her children, is more than willing to take into her home her son’s friends. On the other hand, Mrs. Randazzo is not the iconic, stereotypical Italian/American woman we might expect. Neither in dress nor in physicality does she resemble the stereotype: no hair pulled back set in a bun on the top of her head; not necessarily short, stocky, and possibly overweight, as we might find in the more stereotypical representations of the Italian/American mother, especially the widow, as we may assume of Mrs. Randazzo’s marital status. Thus, here too, I would contend, DeCerchio engages in another form of upsetting the semiotic apple cart, as we find a constant clashing of expected and unexpected imagery vis-à-vis the Italian/American mother figure. Such undermining of expected sign-functions is both ironic and important because the film constantly problematizes the space Jimmy occupies: Is he Italian (read, Italian American) or American? Gay or straight? Friend or foe? To the extent that he shares Mrs. Randazzo’s culture, he will be familiar with those norms of hospitality. To the extent

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that he intended evil against her beloved son, he certainly did not deserve them, nor would she ever have extended them had she known of his illwill. Further still, Mrs. Randazzo’s assumptive act of semiosis becomes even more telling once Jimmy finally gets to the house. Anthony’s mother greets Jimmy at the door and tells him she knew his second cousin, who was a good guy until he became a Fascist. It is this ironic reference to Jimmy’s presumed cousin’s (Nunzio) Fascism that provokes further signification. True or false, the relationship established by Mrs. Randazzo between Jimmy and the Fascist Nunzio extends such despotism to Jimmy who, here now, is not so much an Italian Fascist as the despotic homophobe/racist engaging in violent gay-bashing. As we switch to the dinner scene of the movie, the heart of the film’s sixteen minutes, the clash of two different sign systems takes a turn. The polyvalence of Anthony’s speech, both his deliberate and seemingly non-deliberate double meanings, are, in a comic manner, underscored to some extent by his mother’s apparent ignorance of her son’s true sexuality. That is, Mrs. Randazzo’s unawareness of her son’s actual sexual orientation not only creates ambiguity—if not the license 10 thereof—but it also adds a bit of comic relief during these scenes. In addition, we see that Anthony’s role reflects the semiotic slipperiness of polyvalence; here, at different times during the dinner, Tony takes on the role of bully, informer, and/or teacher. After Mrs. Randazzo establishes the relationship between Jimmy and Nunzio, Anthony comes to greet Jimmy at the door and proceeds to tell him what is in store for him after dinner. In a scene couching the threat of violence in comedy, the taller and stockier Anthony puts his arm around Jimmy and, while first tapping on his chest and then waving back and forth in his face a long, thick salami, states: “I bet you thought I invited you here to fuck you in the ass.” Pausing, he then continues, “No. I’m gonna wait until after dinner.” Then, after pushing Jimmy into the


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house, he closes the door behind them. Here, of course, we see DeCerchio’s blatant use of phallic imagery in the form of the salami, further exaggerated in, let us say, its physical abundance. It is, first of all, a sign of threatening force that, at the same time, refers to the legendary attribute of genital abundance often imputed to Italian men. Yet, it goes one step further in its semiotic function; for one other potentially significant marker is the salami’s color—dark brown; let us not forget Anthony’s date of the evening before, the black man in leather pants and chest11 wear. For here, semiotically speaking, we are again in the realm of secondary signs, something that, in the words of a Roland Barthes, instead of being, let us say, the cardinal functions/nuclei or catalysers, would be, instead, something in the line of the indices or informants: those secondary and tertiary signs that seem to have no constitutive function in the production of meaning yet, when all is said and done, figure 12 significantly. Thus, as viewers, we are subliminally reminded of the race issue, introduced at the beginning by Anthony’s “date,” which has now seemed to fall by the wayside. Both Mr. P’s rewritten racist proverb of a “nigger a day,” and the dark salami keep race, albeit in the background, as part of the general semiotic of the filmic text. To digress a bit, any discussion on race and Italian Americans is a complex one, to say the least. One need only think back to the two infamous, tragic episodes of Howard Beach (1987) and Bensonhurst (1989), where Italian Americans were, to the chagrin of many, on the wrong side of the racial divide as they victimized blacks in two Ital13 ian/American neighborhoods. On another front, also questionable is one of the more popular books among Italian Americans on Italian Americans by an Italian American. Richard Gambino’s Blood of My Blood proves to be a semi-scientific, semi-personalized account of the 14 Italian Americans’ early years in the United States. Unfortunately, one of the book’s later chapters engages in perpetuating a stereotype of

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blacks; in setting up a dichotomy between blacks and Italian Americans vis-à-vis music, we read that, according to Gambino, while Italians are more melodious because of their Italian legacy of opera, blacks are more rhythmic because of their African musical heritage. Gambino would have us believe that such “observations about music and body and language are trivial.” On the contrary, such observations indeed underscore a long15 lived stereotype we should eschew. A third case of Italian/American bigotry involves Senator Alfonse D’Amato, who made the headlines for his outrageous imitation of Lance Ito, presiding judge in the O. J. Simpson trial, on nationally syndicated radio. While on occasion, the things Mr. D’Amato does only bring ridicule upon himself, such as the time he sang his rendition of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” on the House floor, on other occasions, he is an embarrassment to the community at large. The Judge Ito incident is one of those times. On April 5, 1995, while being interviewed by Don Imus, in a mock Japanese accent D’Amato launched into his imitation of “little” Judge Ito, when he and Imus were discussing the reopening of the Senate Banking Committee hearings on the Clintons’ involvement with Whitewater. Imus, an often controversial host himself, suggested that D’Amato and his committee wouldn’t attract as large an audience as long as the O. J. Simpson trial continued on TV. “Judge Ito will never let it end,” D’Amato said in a fake accent. “Judge Ito loves the limelight. He is making a disgrace of the judicial system. Little Judge Ito will keep us 16 from getting television for the next year.” The remarks in themselves are ridiculous and would have gone unnoticed but for the fact that this man dared to make fun of a people by stereotyping and deriding the way they supposedly pronounce the English language. The fake Japanese accent used by D’Amato makes those remarks offensive to all people who are concerned about bigotry and racism in the United States. All Italian immigrants, especially those who learned to speak English in grade


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school, and their progeny should take special offense at Mr. D’Amato’s racist behavior. As children, many immigrants were the recipients of such racism because they did not speak English well, or because they had, as many Italian Americans did, the “oily brown lunch bag,” or for 17 whatever other reason that differentiated them from their classmates. Equally disappointing is the fact that there has been no overt denunciation of Mr. D’Amato’s actions by Italian/American foundations and organizations, especially from those groups that, whenever possible, com18 plain about the image of Italian Americans portrayed by the media. In contrast to those who have willy-nilly contributed to the schism between blacks and Italian Americans, one can find others who have championed not only similarities but indeed called for an interethnic understanding—if not cooperation. Some of Mary Bucci Bush’s short stories place Italian Americans alongside blacks in an analogous struggle 19 for dignity and equality in their everyday life. Rose Romano has discussed the notion of Italian Americans, especially those of southern Ital20 ian origin, as people of color. Similarly, as was pointed out earlier (note 14), Jerome Krase and Robert Viscusi have spoken specifically to the Bensonhurst tragedy in their respective calls for inter-racial/ethnic solidarities. Finally, in a more general context, Rudolph Vecoli has dis21 cussed the notion of Italian Americans as not always “just white folks.” Perhaps three of the more poignant calls for similarities between, and solidarity among, Italian Americans and blacks can be found in Felix Stefanile, Daniela Gioseffi, and Patrick Gallo. Stefanile’s poem, 22 “Hubie,” which carries as epigraph the 1943 news item “Army experiments with mixed units: Negroes being admitted to white companies.” “Hubie” is a wistfully lyrical account of friendship between a black and Italian American during World War II. Stefanile, in juxtaposing the local racism of the “Anselmo Club” to the more systemic racism of the Army,

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pin-points the two distinct wars Hubie and his white friends must wage, as their friendship, we are told, endured: A blackman and a white man, that’s for sure, this other war and the cagey cowardice of habit, turning honest blood to ice. I think that we were brothers once, “The Twins,” the fellows called us, masking their wide grins. What’s left is poetry, the penance for my sins. In a similar manner, Gioseffi recounts on one occasion her experience as one of the Freedom Riders, in an essay in which she also discusses analogous tragedies that both Italian Americans and blacks have 23 endured. Further, her creative writing and editorial work have consistently exhibited much disdain and disgust toward prejudiced and racist 24 thought-patterns. In what may seem to be a rare move among social scientists of Italian America, Patrick Gallo, in turn, closed his 1974 study with a type of call to arms for which Italian Americans and blacks should form the ethnic coalition that would figure as the nucleus of an interethnic response to the WASP dominant power structure. “What is needed,” Gallo wrote at the end of his study, “is an alliance of whites and Blacks, whitecollar and blue-collar workers, based on mutual need and interdependence, and hence, an alliance of political participation.” Namely, the notion of us and them, not us against them. “But,” Gallo continued, “before this can realistically come to pass, a number of ethnic groups have to develop in-group organization, identity, and unity.” Here, Viscusi’s notion of the “group narrative” comes to mind, which he so eloquently rehearsed in his “Breaking the Silence.” Finally, Gallo stated, “[t]he Italian-Americans may prove to be a vital ingredient in not only forging that alliance but in serving as the cement that will hold our urban centers to-

Italian/American Short Films and Videos 25

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gether.” Gallo, we see, anticipates what Stuart Hall was to state years later with regard to cultural studies, reminding us that we must learn not to speak in terms of racism or prejudice in the singular, “but of racisms 26 [as also prejudices] in the plural.” DeCerchio, from what we have seen thus far, has learned this lesson well. For let us not forget the close-up, at the beginning of the film, of Anthony and his date kissing, as their faces—one black the other white—occupy a large part of the center of 27 the screen. In continuing our discussion of Nunzio’s Second Cousin, we see that the closing door now brings us into the house, that closed sphere of the domus, where, in one sense, all that goes on is to be kept secret according to the old concept of omertà, an imported sense of silence and honor that existed among immigrants and subsequent generations of Italian Americans. It is only here that the secrets can be told. But even here, as we shall see, they must be told in a euphemistic manner. I have deliberately avoided, here, the term metaphor for reasons of practicality. For be it metaphor, analogy, simile, or any other mechanic of significant allu28 sion, even the slightest hint of the bare fact of the matter can not be articulated, according to the cultural laws of omertà. Hence, DeCerchio’s cinematographic semiotic consists of a plethora of signs and signfunctions that continue to call into question the problematic themes introduced at the beginning of the film: sexuality, race, and ethnicity. At the dinner table we see that Jimmy’s experience as an athlete mirrors Anthony’s. When Jimmy responds that he is on the wrestling team, Mrs. Randazzo responds excitedly: “No kidding! So was Tony! Yeah, he was captain of the team.” While her voice grows soft, she continues: “Oh I was so proud, I remember, the way he used to jump on those little boys. It was beautiful.” As the mother leaves the room to get more “scungill,” Anthony turns to Jimmy and, in moderated tone, states: “You know, Jimmy, I think when all those guys were rubbing against

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me and I was rubbing against them, on the wrestling team, I think that’s what made me become a homo. In fact, I’m sure of it.” Of course, what Anthony’s statement underscores is the myth that homosexuality is something you might catch, as Anthony, in an obviously facetious manner, says he did when he was on the wrestling team. But more important here is also the tone of Anthony’s voice. Now, for this one exchange, Anthony is not at all menacing as before but seemingly serious, and controlled in tone and manner. In a sense he has dropped the mask of bully (super macho) and, for the moment, put on that of the informer/teacher. But there is even more to this statement, especially in the two phrases “rubbing against me and I was rubbing against them” and “that is what made me become a homo.” For let us not forget that the action of “rubbing” is not so much an act of origination as stimulation; that is, while for Jimmy, in believing in the mythology, homosexuality is a contagious disease, for Anthony the rubbing against other male bodies was an act of stimulation of what was already there. Thus, “he grew into,” he “became,” to paraphrase his own words, the homosexual he is. The puzzling and frightening prospect for Jimmy, at this point, is that he not only is too close to this specific situation, but his own experience as young man is beginning to mirror Tony’s: they are both Italian Americans from Cicero who went to the same high school and were on the wrestling team. This said, I would now contend that, in retrospect, after Anthony’s statement to Jimmy, facetious or not, Mrs. Randazzo’s pride and sense of beauty we witnessed earlier—“Oh I was so proud, I remember, the way he used to jump on those little boys. It was beautiful.”—serve, though unknowingly to her, as an aesthetic comment of approval of Anthony’s homosexuality. While the dinner scene progresses couched often in a comedic vein, two important aspects of DeCerchio’s semiotic come to the fore. First, we witness a semiotic of opposites, as Anthony’s description of


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his date is all but a lie, except for the fact that he had a date; for Anthony tells his mother that he had a date with a blonde—presumably a woman for Mrs. Randazzo—and he laughingly says he will bring her around to meet his mother. We should not lose the irony on the imagined woman’s blonde hair. First, blonde, too close to the color white to ignore, acts as a direct counterpoint to the skin color of Anthony’s date the evening before. Second, any blonde-haired figure also stands in contradistinction to Anthony’s Italianness, usually associated with darkhaired, dark-eyed individuals. Third, the blonde woman also figures as the idealized female figure who may, as such, also readily cancel out the ethnic element in general. Finally, blonde is the whitest of whites, and in the context of race, especially, it also conjures up the notion of the Aryan über-race—ultimately white, ultimately masculine. The second aspect of DeCerchio’s semiotic comes into play here during dinner as the parallel between Jimmy and Anthony grows yet stronger, up to now all the time couched in terms of athleticism, which in itself is a sign of masculinity that superficially counters the 29 stereotype of the homosexual. For instead of telling her something about Anthony (and here Anthony threatens Jimmy to tell her about his own homosexuality), Jimmy blurts out a statement about himself: “I’m the captain of the wrestling team too.” Such a telling similarity, I would caution, should not be considered merely the obvious sign of Jimmy as young Anthony, who will also “grow into” his gay adulthood, as we might readily decipher. I would suggest, instead, that we also read this sign, in the spirit of a Peircean semiotics of unlimited semiosis, as a sign of congregation of different sorts, gay and straight, as opposed to the easier reading of the gathering of simulars, as I just mentioned—not to overdo the cliché, gay or straight, we’re all the same. The “cannoli” scene that follows serves as further proof of the polyvalence that not only pervades this film, but infiltrates our daily

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lives in general. Further still, this polyvalence, precisely because of the film’s theme of homosexuality, as well as the specifics of Anthony’s gay relationship with the black man, now transforms itself into a type of 30 metaphor, a sign, for the acceptance of a polysexual society. The short exchange between mother and son becomes comical. “I got the kind that you like with the little nuts,” Mrs. Randazzo says. “With the chocolate nuts?” responds Anthony—a question that not only refers to the general image of the phallus, but the addition of “chocolate nuts” brings us back to the beginning of the film and, in a not too subtle way, ties in once again the issue of race, as we saw earlier in the salami scene. Indeed, the comedic aspect of this exchange continues even as the question Anthony asks is, not so metaphorically speaking, a serious one. As his mother leaves the room, Anthony, with a type of Cheshire-cat grin, turns to Jimmy and asks: “You want a cannoli?” To which Jimmy, now most mindful of this newly invested sign of the cannolo, responds quickly and shakingly, “No.” In the final scenes of the film, Anthony qua police officer, in his confrontation with Jimmy qua would-be basher, directly points out the differences and/or contradictions in each person’s cultural and signifying reservoir of experiences. He actually indicates different interpretations one may give to certain actions and behavior, one example being the practice of high-school wrestling and what it may mean for young men and their “true” feelings of sexuality. This is Anthony/Tony’s final lesson for Jimmy. “I got news for you Jimmy boy,” he states. “Bashing fags is not going to stop you from becoming one. You got to trust me. I tried it!” As Anthony forces a kiss on Jimmy, and eventually pushes him to the ground, a few conflicting cultural signs come into play. They are: 1) the aluminum-foil phallus at the center of the kiss scene. The phallus, one would quickly assume, should only signify one thing in this situation, as any two men kiss; 2) the Madonna statue next to which


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Jimmy falls can only represent, in our quick assumption, a counterbalance to the homosexual kiss; and 3) the pasta/scungill’ now strewn all over Jimmy, as he is left to fend for himself in assigning some sort of valence to this experience, might readily signify the ethnoideological mess in which he now finds himself. For, as Anthony says his disgusted good-byes—“See ya!”—we see Jimmy, covered with pasta—the ultimate Italian sign of food!—staring up toward Anthony with a perplexed look, as Anthony now enters the house and, definitively we might say, closes the door behind him; whereas Jimmy, the high-school macho wrestler, must now wrestle with this plethora of seemingly contradicting cultural signs into which he has been strewn. Before going on, we might spend a few moments discussing the violence Anthony exhibits at the dinner table when he threatens Jimmy to reveal to his mother his homosexuality. It is, to be sure, an uncomfortable moment, especially when considered in the greater scheme of actions throughout this short movie. To a certain degree, DeCerchio’s representation of Anthony as violent is in line with representations of gays in film, especially that which we might consider Hollywood cinema, since gay relationships were often presented as inherently violent, as 31 Vito Russo established in The Celluloid Closet. That is, Russo continued, “the sex and violence that Hollywood attributed to the gay lifestyle were indistinguishable from the violence against gays in real life” (164). But Anthony exhibits an exaggerated violence, I would contend, something similar in appearance and semiotic function to Richard Dyer’s notion of what he considers the gay category “macho”: that “exaggerated masculinity [whose] very exaggeratedness marks it off from the conven32 tional masculine look on which it is based.” What we have, namely, is “an excess of masculinity” in that macho, continues Dyer, “is far more clearly the conscious employment of signs of masculinity” (42; emphasis textual), which, similar to “other predominant forms of gay male ghetto

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culture, camp and drag[, . . .] self-consciously play[s] the signs of gender, and . . . in the play and exaggeration . . . an alternative sexuality is implied—a sexuality, that is, that recognizes itself as in a problematic relationship to the conventional conflation of sexuality and gender” (42). This, to be sure, is the situation with Anthony. He surely represents an alternative to conventional notions of gender and sexuality. For, while his alternative status may be ideologically consonant with Russo and Dyer, it is, I would submit, nevertheless different both from what they tell us as well as what we might readily consider conventional sexuality and gender. While it is true that Anthony is a gay male who exhibits violence in this film, he does so not as part of the gay couple Russo speaks to in his study. Instead, Anthony demonstrates his violence as reaction to the violence threatened on him and his “date” by the group of gay bashers with bats in hand. He thus turns the table on them and actually threatens to bash, in his own words, the “fag bashers.” His alternative sexuality, then, is not only problematic to the relationship to the conventional conflation of sexuality and gender, as Dyer would have it, but it is problematic to the conventional conflation of homosexuality. Anthony, that is, as sign, similar to other familiar signs we have seen thus far—i.e., his black date and his mother—are part and parcel of DeCerchio’s sui generis ideology, which continuously upsets what I have alluded to earlier as the semiotic apple cart.

Some Concluding Thoughts As a police officer in good standing—for we may readily read his earlier statement about what he would do were he not a police officer— Anthony’s role in his encounter with Jimmy is transformed into the more specific dual role of the anti-gay-bashing police officer and, in this role, also the teacher of the possibly redeemable homophobe. From the beginning of this short film, in both the city scene and in the suburb, race and


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ethnicity play equally important and integral parts. As seen above, in Nunzio’s Second Cousin all three themes recur and serve as integral components of DeCerchio’s visione del mondo and, at the same time, ruffle, to a great degree, the dominant culture’s feathers. Anthony’s final lesson to Jimmy underscores, on the one hand, the difference between them as he tries to kiss Jimmy who fights to move away; yet, on the other hand, Jimmy’s wrestling experience mirror’s Anthony’s, as the latter states: “Bashing fags is not going to stop you from becoming one. You got to trust me. I tried it!” It is in fact the cultural conundrum of homosexuality’s origin—the question of nature vs. nurture—that is underscored here and ultimately closes this brief film, leaving to Jimmy—as well as to the spectator—his own semiotic freedom—and we might add responsibility—for constructing meaning. What ultimately becomes apparent in this small and delightful 33 film is, as Mary Jo Bona stated in her introduction to FUORI, that cultural and sexual identities resist a unitary definition, allowing for multitextured identities that embrace nuance and interpret change as necessary 34 to ongoing development. What this film also suggests is the necessity of a continual renegotiation with one’s ethnic and sexual identities, and to some extent, an appreciation of the possibilities of richness that may result from a confluence of their Italian/American and lesbian/gay cultures. For this, we can say, is the lesson for all Jimmys to learn—since he is “a nice boy,” as Mrs. Randazzo states, saying good-bye to him, but just “a little misguided,” as Anthony had stated earlier in the evening, before Jimmy arrived. In conclusion then, Tom DeCerchio chose a narrative of both past and present that underscores his character’s identity as initially homosexual, while at the same time uncovering his ethnic identity as Italian American. He chooses first to introduce the more taboo identity of sexuality, identified also with racial difference, only then to transform it, by

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downplaying race and substituting it with the specific ethnic quality of Italian America. In so doing, he demonstrates his keen awareness of both the intersection and eventual clash—especially in those Little Italys that are Cicero, Illinois—between not only ethnicity and class, and ethnicity and community, but—even more significantly charged—between ethnicity and sexual identity. Nunzio’s Second Cousin thus brings to the fore notions of sexual orientation, race, and ethnicity, offering a visione del mondo that transgresses, and, I might add, rejects, all that is traditional, conformist, and racially masculinist.

Notes This is an expanded version of what I presented at the conference Adjusting Sites, 4–6 October 1997, Padova, Italy, now published in Adjusting Sites: New Essays in Italian American Studies, ed. William Boelhower and Rocco Pallone. 1. 2.

3. 4.

“Date” is the word Anthony uses when he refers to him in his conversation with the boys from Cicero. For those who know the reputation of Cicero, Illinois, vis-à-vis racial awareness, one can only ascribe a keen sense of irony, as well as a strong dose of parody, to DeCerchio’s use of this Chicago suburb as the main characters’ home town. As such, it thus figures as the geographical analogue to Queens’s Howard Beach and New York’s Bensonhurst. Let us not lose the metaphoric irony in the image of the pistol, an obvious phallic symbol ubiquitous throughout society. On the other hand, one might see Jimmy’s gaydar in good form. For, as we shall see later, there is some ambiguity vis-à-vis Jimmy’s sexuality, as parallels between his and Anthony’s upbringing come to the fore during dinner at Anthony’s mother’s house.


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Here, I am relying on my notion of the retro-lector, a special construct that affords us the possibility to engage in a reverse form of intertextuality so that those signs that come later serve as semiotic intertexts for those previous signs which may, or may not, have proven to be of a difficult signifying nature. See my “Aldo Palazzeschi’s “riflessi: Toward a Notion of a ‘Retro-Lector’,” The American Journal of Semiotics 7.1/2 (1990): 105–24. 6. I would also point out that DeCerchio has opted for this expression marking the past as opposed to the future-looking synonymous phrase: “to knock [someone] into next week.” 7. See e.g. Kenneth Dover, Greek Homosexuality; Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure; John J. Winkler, The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece; and David M. Halperin One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love. 8. For more on this notion, see Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller. 9. What becomes ethnically curious here is that Anthony is Anthony outside his ethnic enclave; however, once he enters the Italian/American neighborhood of Cicero, he is now Tony. 10. Moreover, like the carefree attitude of Anthony’s black date, it underscores the post-Stonewall conviction that being “gay” can be other than tragic and melancholy. 11. The legendary large penis is also an attribute imputed to black men, for which another form of identity may seem to rise to the surface. Let us not forget that Italians, southern Italians in particular, were often considered people of color; this was especially true of the opinion of early sociologists who looked upon most immigrant groups as non-white. I would also add that this attribution of non-

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12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

Anthony Julian Tamburri whiteness is now a voluntary characteristic a number of Italian Americans of southern Italian descent have adopted. I refer the reader to chapter 1, note 4, for a reminder of Barthes’s notions of functions, neclei, catalysers, and the like. Robert Viscusi (“Breaking the Silence: Strategic Imperatives for Italian American Culture”) and Jerome Krase (“Bensonhurst, Brooklyn: Italian-American Victimizers and Victims” Voices in Italian Americana 5.2 [1994]: 43–53) are two members of Italian America who have spoken to these issues. First published by Doubleday, Blood of My Blood was recently republished in its original form in Canada (Guernica, 1996) without any preface or postface that should have contextualized the study, as more than two decades had passed since its 1975 publication. See his Blood of My Blood, especially 331–33. Quoted from the Chicago Tribune(April 6, 1995). Ironically, if one hears Judge Ito speak, one immediately notices that he does so in a much more articulate manner than does Mr. D’Amato. Judge Ito’s diction, syntax, and grammar are, in the estimation of some, far and away superior. These comments on Alfonse D’Amato are a modified, abbreviated rendition of what appeared in the column “Graffiti,” Voices in Italian Americana 6.1 (1995): 205–6. To our chagrin, D’Amato has company in his peculiar world of ethnic insensitivity. In January 1998, we read about John Lombardi’s ignorance of not knowing his biscotti from his cookies when, in wanting to compliment, as he stated afterwards, his new boss, he referred to him as an “oreo,” since the new chancellor, black, according to Lombardi, knows how to deal with the white powerbrokers of the academic world.


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19. See her collection of stories, A Place of Light, and her single story “Drowning.” 20. See her “Coming Our Olive in the Lesbian Community,” in Social Pluralism and Literary History: The Literature of the Italian Emigration, ed. and intro. Francesco Loriggio 161–75. 21. See his essay, “Are Italian Americans Just White Folks,” Through the Looking Glass: Italian and Italian/American Images in the Media, ed. Mary Jo Bona and Anthony Julian Tamburri 3–17. 22. See his The Country of Absence 54–9. 23. See her “Breaking the Silence for Italian-American Women: Maligned and Stereotyped,” Voices in Italian Americana 4.1 (1993): 1–14. 24. Gioseffi’s concern for prejudice can be found in her poetry collection Word Wounds and Water Flowers, in her anthology On Prejudice: A Global Perspective, and in her most recent collection of fiction, In Bed with the Exotic Enemy, especially “The Bleeding Mimosa,” “Beyond the Spit of Hate,” and “Equal Opportunity Employer.” 25. Patrick J. Gallo, Ethnic Alienation: The Italian-Americans 209. 26. See his “Race, Culture, and Communications: Looking Backward and Forward at Cultural Studies,” Rethinking Marxism 5.1 (1992): 10–18. 27. As we shall see, such a scene is reminiscent of the kiss that takes place between the Madonna character and the black Christ in Madonna’s music video Like a Prayer (1989). 28. For an excellent excursus on the origins of metaphor and its semiotic relationship to the contemporary world, see John T. Kirby, “Aristotle on Metaphor,” American Journal of Philology 118 (1997): 517–54.

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29. I underscore superficially precisely because homosexuality is not as rare among athletes as some would have us believe. 30. The “cannolo,” for those who do not know, is a dessert of sweet dough baked in tubular form with a ricotta-based filling. 31. Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies 164. 32. Richard Dyer, The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations 40. 33. See her introduction, “Gorgeous Identities: Gay and Lesbian Italian/American Writers,” FUORI: Essays by Italian/American Lesbians and Gays, ed. A. J. Tamburri, VIA Folios 6: 1–12. 34. See also Bona’s epigraph from Stuart Hall: “[Cultural identity] is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture. . . . Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialized past, [cultural identities] are subject to the continual play of history, culture and power. Far from being grounded in a mere “recovery” of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which, when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past” (“Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation,” Framework 36 [1989]: 69).

Music Videos

Rock Videos as Social Narratives Madonna’s Like a Prayer and Justify My Love Bending Rules

“When Madonna grabs her crotch the social order is effectively transgressed.” —Chip Wells, Florida State University “Poor is the man whose pleasures depend on the permission of another.” —Justify My Love

Preliminary Thoughts Of the numerous things Madonna calls to the fore—or, for that matter, any of her performances—is how little society tends to tolerate ambition (and success) in women. Lest we forget that still today women feel the strains, the pushes and pulls, of what it means to be a successful, inde1 pendent woman in a world still grounded in patriarchy. Madonna’s vid2 eos seem to have always caused a stir for one reason or another. Too sexual; too provocative; too much skin; undergarments as outerwear; little boys in peep shows; women in submissive positions; etc. The litany is ever-long, and it seems no one will give her a break—not that she really needs one! As will become apparent in the following pages, a Madonna video—Like a Prayer and Justify My Love especially—often exudes a female sui generis ideology, independent of the usual patriarchal control. In so being, this female ideology defies the typical male gaze in not af55

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fording the male his usual position of control. In a Madonna video, in fact, if the male does gaze, his control of the gaze is often re-appropriated 3 by Madonna, the protagonist. Sexuality constitutes both a prominent and problematic theme of Madonna’s music/performance– but it is not always all-encompassing. Religion and race play equally important and integral parts in her videos. In the first video discussed herein, all three themes reoccur. In fact, together these three themes—sexuality, religion, and race—serve as integral components of Madonna’s visione del mondo and figure, at the same time, as reasons for which some of her videos ruffle, to say the least, the 4 dominant culture’s feathers. Thus, it is that sexuality and religion—and at this point we should also add gender—combine with race to form a radically different visione del mondo, which now surpasses in its provocative nature most of the so-called mainstream videos that have thus 5 far appeared. The second video, in turn, abandons the religious theme, bringing to the fore notions of sexuality, race, and sexual orientation. Together, both videos offer a visione del mondo that transgresses, and I might add, rejects, as we already saw with DeCerchio, all that is traditional, conformist, and racially masculinist. The manner in which texts are interpreted today—the theoretical underpinnings of a reader and/or viewer’s act of disambiguation, that is—is much more broad and, for the most part, tolerant of what may once have seemed to be incorrect or inadequate interpretations. Today the reader/viewer has as many rights as the author in the semiotic process. In some cases, in fact, the reader/viewer may even have more rights than the writer/artist. Lest we forget what Italo Calvino had to say about literature and the interpretation thereof; and here, I would contend, one may easily substitute any art form for Calvino’s literature, and viewer for his reader. For Calvino, the reader relies on a form of semiosis which places him/her in an interpretive position of superiority vis-à-vis the au-


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thor. In “Cybernetics and Ghosts” Calvino considers “the decisive moment of literary life [to be] reading (15),” by which “literature will continue to be a ‘place’ of privilege within the human consciousness, a way of exercising the potentialities within the system of signs belonging to all societies at all times. The work will continue to be born, to be judged, to be distorted or constantly renewed on contact with the eye of the reader” (16). In like manner, he states in “Whom Do We Write For” that the writer should not merely satisfy the reader; rather, he should be ready “to assume a reader who does not yet exist, or a change in the reader” (82), a reader who would be “more cultured than the writer himself” (85; Calvino’s emphasis). That is, Calvino foresaw a reader with “epistemological, semantic, practical, and methodological requirements he [would] want to compare [as] examples of symbolic procedures and the construction of logical patterns” (84–85). Such a position is, to be sure, equally valid for the viewer of visual texts. Like a reader, the viewer also depends on his/her own repertoire of knowledge in order to interpret more 7 fully a visual narrative. In making such an analogy between reader and viewer, I do not ignore the validity of the writer/artist. For while it is true that the act of semiosis relies on the individual’s time and place and is therefore always new and different with respect to its own historical specificities vis-à-vis the dominant culture—i.e., the canon—it is also true that the writer/artist may willy-nilly create for the reader greater difficulties in interpretation. Namely, if we accept the premise that language—verbal and/or visual— is an ideological medium that can become restrictive and oppressive when its sign system is arbitrarily invested with meanings by those who are empowered to do so—i.e., the dominant culture/the canon-makers— so too can it become empowering for the purpose of privileging one coding correlation over another (in this case the canon), by rejecting the canonical sign system and, ultimately, denying validity to this sign system

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vis-à-vis the interpretive act of a non canonical text. Then, certain ideological constructs are de-privileged and subsequently awarded an unfixed status; they no longer take on a patina of natural facts. Rather, they figure as the arbitrary categories they truly are. All this results in a pluralistic notion of artistic invention and interpretation which, by its very nature, cannot exclude the individual—artist and viewer—who has [re]created and developed a different repertoire of signs. What becomes significant about Like a Prayer and Justify my Love is that while the first video did not enjoy the privilege of being viewed in a tolerant manner, the second was, in fact, banned before it 9 could even be shown on MTV. I would contend, moreover, that initially, and to some extent still today, each video has been viewed and/or judged according to a more traditional sign system that does not allow for alternative interpretations that may offer a more constructive reading of the videos, and thereby resituate it in a different interpretive locus. For this reason, Madonna ruffles the feathers not only of the canon-makers, but those of any other traditional viewer. Indeed, to the extent that her videos can exist, in their opinion, only on the margin—i.e., not shown on MTV, or, later, shown only in the wee hours of the morning—and not in the mainstream, even though she is, for all practical purposes, a mainstream video artist par excellence given the fact that she is one of the top money makers ever in the entertainment industry. As performer/artist, Madonna, in fact, redefines traditional signs, codes, and referents by, at the very least, situating them in new combinations and thus reinvesting 10 them with new interpretants. The proverbial fan was sullied, perhaps for the first time on a grand scale, with the video, and its, by now, (in)famously canceled TV commercial, Like a Prayer. The power of its opposition was such that less than a year later—that is, barely two years after a wildly popular acceptance in 1988—Madonna found herself vilified in the many headlines


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of the major Italian dailies as heretic par excellence. Indeed, within a period of less than two weeks, the time-span between what were to be her Turin and Rome concerts, the latter was canceled due to lack of sales combined with a wave of last-minute refunds. The second occurrence of a bad odor surrounded Justify My Love. Having bent MTV’s “rules” of nudity once before, baring her breasts in her previous video, Vogue, Madonna believed she “was going to get away with it” again, as she stated on Nightline, since MTV had included her uncut Vogue in its various programs. But, the “censorship and conservatism that is sort of sweeping over the nation,” as she defined the 1990 US cultural mindset, set into motion a series of events from which, ultimately, she was to gain. The suppression of MTV’s planned December 1, 1990 viewing of the video 1) provoked her appearance on ABC’s Nightline—that, despite the 1:00 A.M. airtime and the threat of war in the Persian Gulf, generated the largest 1990 audience; and, 2) thrust her again into the category of firsts, since her only alternative for getting her video viewed was to package and market it as a single.

Like a Prayer Like a Prayer focuses primarily on race and religion, both of which play an integral part in Madonna’s narrative. One of the first things to remem11 ber is that much of the video is presented in the form of a dream. Moreover, while the bulk of the video’s narrative constitutes a dream sequence, the narrative is often interspersed with events from Madonna’s 12 reality. Thus, events from a dream state are combined with those from reality, and together they form a fragmented and disorienting narration. As a consequence, the viewer remains initially confused by the unexpected combination of events and ultimately puzzled by the incongruence of coding correlations that do not appear to lead to a neat process of signification. The viewer, as a result, must rely (= re-lie?) on his/her in-

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tertextual reservoir. If this reservoir is steeped in tradition, if it is not open, if not at least tolerant, to new coding correlations, the viewer—i.e., the pre-postmodernist viewer—cannot decode the resituated sign functions and, therefore, s/he remains at a loss for any sort of successful interpretation. Like a Prayer opens with a type of prologue. There are four quick shots that announce the major theme of the racial dilemma depicted in the video. There is a burning cross, à la KKK, a quick shot of one of the white muggers, another quick shot of a black man being escorted by a white policeman, and Madonna, who takes refuge in a church where she immediately finds a statue of a black Christ behind bars. In a discussion following an oral presentation of this video, my labeling this character a “black Christ” was called into question, as one member of the audience wanted to see him as a reference to a “black saint” in general or, perhaps, more specifically, to San Martin de Porres, a black saint of South America who aided African slaves brought to Perù in the seven13 teenth century. My predilection to see a Christ figure in this character derives from his clothing. In traditional Roman Catholic settings, the Christ statues were robed in the same manner as this figure, identical 14 robes and colors. Moreover, if we were to see this video as one of Madonna’s many attempts at overturning tradition, I would submit that this reference to a christological imagery suits much better her desire to present a topsy-turvy world of Catholicism than would reference to a saint many of whom may not know. Thus, for me, the dress with which he is presented is much too blatant to ignore. In an analogous story of unfounded accusations, then, we witness the tragedy of a black man unjustly accused of mugging/killing a white woman who, in actuality, is attacked by three white men. When Madonna enters the church, she finds a black Christ behind a barred chapel: he is literally locked in behind a barricade. Before anything else takes place, Madonna lies down on a pew


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and enters into what we may readily consider a dream state, as the lyrics readily imply: I hear your voice, it’s like an angel sighing I have no choice, I hear your voice Feels like flying I close my eyes, Oh God I think I’m falling Out of the sky, I close my eyes Heaven help me. Almost as if she were on the very edge of the beginning of this dream world, she first encounters a black women who literally thrusts her into the dream state in which Madonna will immediately liberate the black Christ. Once Madonna opens the barred barricade, the black Christ statue comes to life, whispers something in her ear, kisses her good-bye on the forehead, and exits the church. An intriguing point here is Madonna’s manipulation of the messianic theme. First, as mentioned above, Madonna’s Christ is black, an aspect incongruent to the Catholic church. Second, Madonna herself becomes Christ-like in that she receives the stigmata from the knife that falls from the Christ statue. This is underscored, in a sense, by the lyrics when she sings “You’re here with me” as she picks up the knife only to drop it quickly after receiving stigmata. Third, in yet another sense, Madonna also appears Christ-like in that she has delivered, so to speak, the imprisoned black Christ. The video’s narrative is perhaps best characterized by the following lyrics: Like a dream, no end and no beginning You’re here with me, it’s like a dream Let the choir sing.

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They tell the viewer, among other things, that the narration oscillates between what seems to be the real and the non-real—i.e., the abovementioned dream state—albeit a mimetic one. The dramatic event of the video that takes place at this point is the mugging/killing of the white woman by three white men. The quick menacing glance toward Madonna by one of the attackers is quickly juxtaposed to the appearance of the black man who immediately comes to the aid of the wounded woman. But, to his misfortune, a police car pulls up and the officers immediately assume he is responsible for the crime. As the black man is taken away by the police—a scene already anticipated in the prologue— the white attacker smugly glances at Madonna as if to signal his satisfaction at getting away with the crime. It is at this point that the racial element is underscored visually and, to a strong degree, verbally. What follows is a scene in which Madonna is in a large field of burning crosses à la KKK—another scene anticipated in the prologue—singing the following lyrics: Life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone I hear you call my name And it feels like home Just like a prayer, your voice can take me there Just like a muse to me You are a mystery Just like a dream, you are not what you seem Just like a prayer No choice Your voice can take me there At first glance the lyrics appear to contain a straight-forward quasireligious, moral, and ethical meaning. They can easily have a religious


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connotation in that the mystery constitutes the proverbial mysteries of the Catholic church and all it represents. That everyone must stand alone because, again according to a moral and ethical point of view, everyone is responsible for his/her actions and must respond accordingly. Indeed, as the video progresses, it shifts to an interior shot of the church with a large choir singing, repeating lyrics similar to the above-cited, a scene easily considered a reinforcement of this religious message. Yet, from another perspective, the ultimate meaning of these lyrics can be readily construed as one of general racial dis/harmony among humankind. To be sure, Madonna’s church in this video is not the traditional Catholic church one may readily associate with an Italian Ameri15 can. Here, hers is a reconstituted sui generis church filled with blacks only, inclusive of the Christ figure: she is the only white person. As the only white person in the video, Madonna’s presence affords the possibility of alternative meaning production. The “mystery” of the first stanza, that may, at first glance, constitute the mysteries of the church, may now constitute the mysteries of the human race and question its tolerance of 16 violent racism. Indeed, one may also include the church when speaking of the human race, since, as stated above, Madonna has reconstituted the notion of church in this video. With Madonna as the addresser and the black Christ/black man as the addressee, the lyrics of the second stanza also undergo a reevaluative semiotic process that is eventually underscored once reconsidered in juxtaposition to the visual image. The key words here are prayer, muse, mystery, dream, and seem. At first glance, all five words contribute to the construction of a series of ambiguities, if not non sequiturs. However, when read within the context of what is presented thus far in the video—the black man being unjustly accused of a crime—the phrases in this stanza take on a complex series of meanings that, against the backdrop (here, a literal one) of racial dis/harmony (= the burning crosses),

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seem to follow a certain logic. Prayer connotes hope and inspiration (= “your voice can take me there”), while muse underscores the second term, especially. And while mystery, on the other hand, may signal the unknown, any sense of fear from the mystery (i.e., not knowing) of the black man is mollified by the analogy to dream, a positive reference point, which is underscored by the lyrics “you are not what you seem.” As already stated, the entire scene consists of Madonna singing these lyrics against the background of burning crosses à la KKK, which, 17 on the one hand, reminds the viewer of the racial/racist element. However, of the twenty-four different camera angles of Madonna in this scene, only two (the first and the seventeenth) are long shots in which the burning crosses occupy most of the screen: in all the other shots, Madonna is the prevalent figure. This series of shots is then followed by an interior scene of the church in which the black choir, singing repeatedly the second of the above-cited stanzas, welcomes Madonna with open arms. As the choir scene progresses, it is interrupted on a few occasions. The first is a side-view close-up of the black Christ bending over someone. Before seeing who this is, the scene switches back to the choir. After a quick refrain, we now see Madonna, in a dream-like state, rolling over on the pew where she first lay down. What follows from here on is a succession of inter-changing scenes which underscores the presence of the blacks and ultimately situates them in an equal if not more significant position of empowerment in Madonna’s sui generis church. The black woman who occupies center stage in the choir scene is a type of priestess in front of whom Madonna eventually kneels—a recollection of the typical ancient baptism scene, this time, however, without the baptismal urn. As the scene progresses, the video switches to a close-up of the black Christ and Madonna about to kiss. But a sudden switch back to the previous scene momentarily interrupts, as if to remind the viewer of the church setting. Once the kiss


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takes place, the screen is filled with a close-up of the two faces, one black the other white, and what follows is a series of six quick scenes underscoring a collision of diametrically opposed racial ideologies. As the camera scans upward above the black Christ’s head, the following images quickly succeed one another: 1) one large burning cross; 2) Madonna dancing; 3) a field of burning crosses; 4) a quick, frontal closeup of Madonna with both hands to her mouth—too quick at regular speed to be sure if she is happy or anguished; 5) a quick, frontal close-up of the wooden Christ statue’s face crying—this time tears of blood; and 6) the black man being taken away by the police. At this point, as the choir scene continues with everyone still singing the same stanza and dancing, Madonna is now surrounded by a group of small children, an obvious signal to the future, while two following scenes signal the end of Madonna’s dream. First, the statue, now wooden again, assumes its original position; second, the barred chapel in which we first saw it, now closes. Madonna, in the meantime, awakes and sees the choir now exiting the church in twos. A quick camera shot to the statue behind bars—this time not Madonna’s glance—reminds the viewer of the black Christ. Once Madonna does glance toward the black Christ—and at this point the viewer sees only Madonna looking in the direction of the statue—what she sees is the falsely accused black man behind bars. The barred chapel in which the Christ statue stood is suddenly transformed into a jail, which now holds the black man who tried to rescue the white woman from the white muggers. As witness, Madonna frees the black man and the curtain falls, signaling the end of the story—but not the end of the video. The final shot before the curtain call is, one might say, a mini-epilogue—a close-up, chest-high, of Madonna against, this time, a blurred background of burning crosses. What Madonna eventually does in this video is layer her narrative text to the extent that it consists not only of the reality of a narrative

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text and, therefore, includes the fictive reality one readily assumes the narrative text represents, but she adds to this the dream sequence. To further complicate matters, her dream sequence is consistently interrupted by scenes from the fictive reality, and the boundaries between the one and the other are ultimately blurred. This blurring of textual boundaries is consonant with her overriding theme of the necessity to blur social boundaries—i.e., racial, here specifically—that Madonna seems to so readily transcend in most of her videos. The black Christ Madonna frees is, in her fictive reality, the falsely accused black man—a parallel too striking to ignore which, here, is underscored by the fact that one actor plays both roles. Madonna’s twentieth-century, secular Christ, this black man, an obvious outsider in this video who is falsely accused of committing a crime perpetrated on a white woman by three white men, reifies the false accusations launched against the biblical Christ, also an outsider in his own time, whose otherness, in this video, is now represented by, among other things, his skin color. Yet Madonna does not stop at skin color vis-à-vis the black Christ figure in her blurring of social boundaries. Sex—more precisely, interracial sex—constitutes a significant and integral component of 18 Madonna’s visione del mondo as articulated throughout this video. The unjustly accused black man reminds us of the canonical (i.e., white patriarchy) threat, “Black man mugs/kills [read, rapes?] white woman,” which leads to the repression and/or suppression of interracial couples, especially black men with white women. Here, Madonna irreverently overturns this notion in a number of ways. First, the kiss between the two is reminiscent of the Sleeping Beauty/Prince Charming fable—in this case, however, a black prince brings her back from her sleep state. Second, Madonna implies a willing orgasm with a black, as may be evidenced by the lyrics, “Just like a prayer, I’ll take you there,” sung here by the choir—especially the black priestess—as the black Christ bends


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over to kiss Madonna. Furthermore, as the scene switches to Madonna dancing in the church, she sings “Just like a prayer, your voice can take me there.” In sum, Madonna breaks down the traditional virgin/whore dichotomy in this church scene and further layers her text by including a black man/Christ.

Justify My Love Like Madonna’s previous video, Like a Prayer, Justify My Love consists of a story-line, if we may indeed consider it as such, presented to a great extent in a dream state. Moreover, while the bulk of the video’s narrative constitutes a dream sequence, the narrative is often interspersed with events from Madonna’s [fictive] reality. Thus, events from a dream state are, again, combined with those from [the fictive] reality, and together they form a potentially fragmented and disorienting narration. Indeed, as in Like a Prayer, the viewer here remains initially confused by an unexpected combination of events and thus befuddled by the incongruence of coding correlations which seem to subvert a neat process of signification. The viewer ultimately finds him/herself in the same initial, interpretive dilemma of the viewer of Like a Prayer, depending on his/her predisposition to a post-structural interpretive arsenal. From the very beginning, as Madonna enters the hotel corridor, to the very end, when she leaves her lover—she half-dazed as she exits the room, he half-dazed sprawled on the sofa—the characters often emulate states of suspended animation or are presented in, if not as, surrealistic situations. Thus we have, for instance, the various people, in couples or groups of three, lounging around in a state of semi-sleep; then there is the bare-breasted woman who fiercely grabs the crotch of the man in 20 chains—Madonna’s lover—on the sofa; and, finally, there is the recurring octopus-like androgen dressed in black tights who, in addition to

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his/her surrealistic characteristic, often signals a change in scenery throughout the video. As the video begins, Madonna, in a loosely fitting black coat over lace lingerie, enters a questionably looking hotel corridor only to immediately meet up with her lover, whom she joins from the end of the hall. A bit tattered looking, but anxious to see her, he moves forward as she squats against the wall and eventually opens her coat, exposing stockings, garters, and bra straps, and continues to erotically, to put it nicely, massage herself. She then pulls herself up against him, openmouthed and ready to kiss, saying: You put this in me so now what, so now what Wanting, needing, waiting, For you to justify my love. What then follows in this video is an array of images, on the one hand familiar and comfortable, on the other unfamiliar and disturbing, which contribute to an overall series of images in conflict with one another, thus creating gaps in what would normally be a neat process of communication and interpretation. The dream-like atmosphere may fulfill a number of functions in this video. First, from a socio-ideological point of view, it allows Madonna, as artist/auteur, to offer up the images she indeed includes. By couching them in this dream state, they lose some of their potentially scandalizing impact and become, to a certain degree, innocuous, since they are presented not as a reality desired to be concretized, but rather as simple fantasies one enjoys as such. Second, accompanied by a slowmotion effect, the dream state allows the spectator to better view the dynamics on the screen. In this case, as the action slows down, the spectator notices that it is indeed Madonna, and not her lover, who is in charge of


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their actions and deeds. Third, in a manner similar to the second function, this slow-motion effect may indeed also be seen as a narratological compromise, since the sign system in this video is incongruent to what the spectator would normally expect, the slow-motion effect thus takes on a constitutive function with regard to the spectator’s overall interpretive role in the semiotic process. In this case, the spectator may be in a better position to decipher those codes and referents Madonna had enciphered in such unorthodox imagery. To be sure we may indeed ask, What are we to do with all these images that clash and collide as the video progresses? Crucifixes are conspicuously present as Madonna and her lover engage in their pleasures; a Christ figure briefly appears as the dynamics seem to shift from the man being in control—her lover is literally on top of her—to the woman in control—Madonna now literally on top of him. Indeed, this shot of the woman in control—i.e., on top—seems to last a bit longer. Also, there is a shift from heterosex to female homosex as a female figure dressed as a male inconspicuously substitutes herself for Madonna’s lover, who, suddenly, is virtually framed by their limbs as he looks on, half-dazed, from the sofa. Indeed, if these shots of Madonna on the bottom seem to last longer than when she is on top, let us not forget that the scenes of her on the bottom also consist of a series of changes in which her lover is substituted by the female dressed as male. The transgression of boundaries and behavioral code switching are implicit in the array of different people who inhabit the video. In various forms of masquerade—androgynous and euphoric/erotic (?)— some of the men and women in the video are black, others are white, and others still are Latin as the spectrum of human colors is, here within, represented in its various hues. The same can be said for sexuality. Here, too, there is the representation of all possibilities as female homosex is explicit in the above-mentioned substitution of the female figure for

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Madonna’s lover, and male homosex is implicit in a number of the ambiguously dressed figures, both of which seem to be punctuated by the seemingly non-sexed-dressed androgen occupying not necessarily a mere space in between, but, rather, a point of potentiality from which any of the above socio-cultural possibilities can spring forward. Yet, even within a more conventional discourse of male/female roles, codes are switched. One need only recall the Cavaniesque, barebreasted woman in black suspenders and military cap who, with a most confident air, saunters into the room, turns to Madonna’s lover—who is now in a body harness—boldly grips his chin to kiss him squarely on the mouth, and continues to reach down and grab his crotch. In the meantime, we hear the following lyrics: Tell me your dreams Am I in them? Tell me your fears Are you scared? Tell me your stories I am not afraid of who you are? Indeed, Madonna, the artist/co-writer/co-director, is extremely aware of what she is doing. On two occasions she, as protagonist in the video, looks directly into the camera, once smiling as the two androgynous figures paint moustaches on each other, the second time laughing as she runs down the hall at the end of the video. Deliberately ambiguous and “button-pushing,” as she herself characterized this video during her Nightline interview, Madonna indeed displays herself as social construct only to subvert the seemingly conventional image and the viewer’s initial impression once she has drawn her viewer into her “narrative.” To be sure, we may say that if traditional feminism says “No more masks!,” Madonna seems to be saying, “We are nothing but masks!,” which, to


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some extent, may help to explain her ever-changing array of personae throughout her music and video career.

Postmodernism Performed Madonna’s desire to blur both the formalistic and contextual boundaries of her narrative text and infuse it with re-invested signs of re-situated interpretants, something she had already done successfully in Like a 21 Prayer, and succeeds in repeating in Justify My Love, surely places 22 here within the realm of the postmodern. She is, similar to the true avant-gardists at the beginning of this century, a desecrator of what they considered a stultifying canon. In today’s terms, she is, to quote from Franco Ricci, the “epitome of the postmodern concept of simultaneity of 23 form, seamlessness of content, synthesis of traditions.” Thus, it is within this framework that one can alternatively—that is, successfully (?)—view her videos. For the modernist viewer, one rooted in the search for existing absolutes, Madonna’s sign system appears contemptuous, if not also contemptible. For the post-modernist viewer, one who is open to, if not in search of, new coding correlations, Madonna’s sign system instead appears rejuvenating: her videos indeed present a sign system consisting of manipulated sign functions which ultimately redefine the sign according to her own ideological specificities. Surely then, one may recall Lyotard’s “incredulity toward metanarra24 tives,” late twentieth century’s increasing suspicion in narrative’s universal validity, for which artistic invention is no longer considered a depiction of life; rather, it is a depiction of life as it is represented by 25 ideology, since ideology presents what is, in actuality, “constructed 26 meaning as something inherent in that which is being represented.”

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Notes I owe a heart-felt debt to Maurizio Viano, who invited me to deliver a lecture at Wellesley College on Madonna and Michael Jackson, many comments of which were dedicated to the two Madonna videos I discuss in this chapter. 1.

2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

In this regard one need only recall the 1992 resignation of Doctor Frances Conley from the Stanford University Medical School faculty for reasons of “gender insensitivity.” Unless otherwise noted, when I say video I also include the lyrics. See, for example, E. Ann Kaplan, “Feminist Criticism and Television,” Channels of Discourse 211–53. Today, to be sure, the notion of “dominant culture” or “canon,” as we knew it until not so long ago, may now be placed into question: Who are the members of the dominant culture? What constitutes the canon today as opposed to ten or twenty years ago? These questions notwithstanding, I shall use these terms as aesthetic points of comparison in so far as for “dominant culture” or “canon” I understand that which is considered correct, right, artistic, etc. by that community of people that has the power to decide (read, impose?) such issues. I use the word “mainstream” here since it was Madonna herself who characterized her “art” as such during her Nightline interview December 3, 1990. See his “Cybernetics and Ghosts” and “Whom Do We Write For” in The Uses of Literature, tr. Patrick Creagh. These essays were originally published in 1967. Caveat lector: What I have in mind here is that any reader/viewer’s response in this semiotic process is, to some degree or another, content- and context-sensitive.


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See, for example, V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik: “A sign does not simply exist as a part of reality—it reflects and refracts another reality. Therefore, it may distort that reality or be true to it, or may perceive it from a special point of view, and so forth. Every sign is subject to the criteria of ideological evaluation (i.e., whether it is true, false, correct, fair, good, etc.). The domain of ideology coincides with the domain of signs. They equate with one another. Wherever a sign is present ideology is present also. “Everything ideological possesses semiotic value” (10). 9. This obviously recalls the uproar over the video Like a Prayer, which, imagistically, is different from the Pepsi commercial, and yet provoked the cancellation of the commercial despite the fee having already been paid to Madonna. 10. In a similar vein, John Fiske sees Madonna’s image not as the “model meaning for young girls [sic] in patriarchy, but a site of semiotic struggle between the forces of patriarchal control and feminine [sic] resistance . . .” (272). See his “British Cultural Studies and Television,” Channels of Discourse 254–89. For more on my use of Peircean categories of sign (or representamen) and interpretant, I remind the reader of the introduction, note 13. 11. What a curious coincidence that both this video and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ contain dream sequences of a sexual nature that caused much uproar and provoked many to deny the artistic and speak to what they saw as the profane, if not heretical, as the Italian public seemed to label it at times. 12. From this point on, I shall use italics—Madonna—when referring to the protagonist Madonna.

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13. See also Susan McClary, “Living to Tell: Madonna’s Resurrection of the Fleshy,” Genders 7 (Spring 1990): 1–21. 14. Indeed, this Roman Catholic heritage of mine, in Gadamerian terms, constitutes part of my anterior relationship to the subject matter as viewer/reader of this video. See Gadamer and his notion of the hermeneutic circle in Truth and Method 262. 15. Madonna does wear her ethnicity on her sleeve, and therefore one’s initial expectations would conjure up the image of a congregation inclusive of members of her ethnic group, since Italian Americans are predominantly Catholic. 16. Violence and racism are just two of the many social ills Madonna has condemned. AIDS, violence to women, and child abuse, for example, are part of her long list of social cancers. For more specifics, see her December 1990 interview on Nightline. 17. In an essay on Madonna and Mariarosy Calleri, Elisabetta Convento suggests the following: “Those images of the burning crosses that appear . . . in the video can remind us of the KKK of course, but I would also say that in Christian symbolism we can also associate them with heresy and the kind of death the heretics were condemned to [suffer]” (“Madonna’s Like a Prayer and Calleri’s Uncovering: Italian/American Women in Search of an Identity” [2]). 18. Interracial sex is also an important component of the thematics in Justify My Love, where Madonna’s notions of sexuality/sex are further complicated by the articulation of sexual fantasies inclusive of sex partners, men and women, who, on occasion, remind us of the androgyne, as we shall see. 19. The dichotomy of secular and religious love deserves more space than can be dedicated to it in this study. Fiske makes some significant comments in this regard in his essay, “British Cultural Studies and Television” (280).


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20. This bare-breasted woman in this video has an uncanny resemblance to Lucia (Charlotte Rampling) in Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974). 21. For more on Like a Prayer, see my “The Madonna Complex: Justification of a Prayer,” Semiotic Spectrum 17 (April 1992): 1–2; Carla Freccero, “Our Lady of MTV: Madonna’s Like a Prayer,” Boundary 2 19.2 (Summer 1992): 163–83; Ronald B. Scott, “Images of Race and Religion in Madonna’s Video Like a Prayer: Prayer and Praise,” in The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theories, ed. Cathy Schwichtenberg (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993) 57–77; and Linda Hutcheon, On Irony (New York: Routledge, 1997). A more recent piece of a more general nature that contains approximately one page dedicated to the two videos discussed in this chapter is by Fosca D’Acierno, “Madonna: The Postmodern Diva as Maculate Conception,” in The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts 491–8. 22. E. Ann Kaplan, among others, has already placed Madonna in the category of the postmodern even though Madonna’s videos, according to Kaplan’s simplistic formulaic chart, contain “more narrative than is usual for the type” (239). 23. See his brief essay, “Madonna: Towards a Transvaluation of Values,” Metro Magazine (November 1990): 40. 24. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi with a foreword by Fredric Jameson xiv. 25. Lenard J. Davis, Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction 24. 26. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism 49.

Documentaries

Will Parrinello’s Little Italy People Telling Their Own Stories

“Lest we forget!”—Ralph Fasanella 1

The New York Daily News described Little Italy as a film “very tenderly told [that] bursts with heart, humor, warmth, tradition and respect;” and the San Francisco Examiner found it “riveting . . . wonderful and uplifting.” Written, produced, and directed by Will Parrinello with John Antonelli, of the Mill Valley Film Group, Little Italy won the prestigious Gold Hugo award for Documentary: History/Biography at the 1996 Chicago International Film Festival. Other awards earned include a Golden Gate Award at the 1996 San Francisco International Film Festival and the Award of Creative Merit at the 1996 American International Film Festival. Like the “kaleidoscopic country [and] not a melting pot” that is the United States, as August Coppola tells us late in this film, Will Parrinello’s narrative is a type of kaleidoscope. Through a mixture of extended interviews, historical footage and photographs, home movies and pictures, and Italian (popular and operatic) and Italian/American music, Parrinello explores the various phenomena of culture, language, ethnic identity, gender, acculturation, and assimilation, or lack thereof. On the one hand, his interviewees tell their stories directly into the camera; on other occasions they are the voice-over for the various pictures and scenes Parrinello draws and constructs from his visual artifacts of newsreels, photos, home movies, and his own camera work. The people we 79

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meet therefore become both his subjects and co-authors as they oscillate between telling their own story as well as the story of others, especially those who can not speak for themselves—the immigrants who are no longer with us. Such a technique thus further humanizes the stories we are so used to seeing instead in the form of picture-books with captions or the usual documentary with historical footage accompanied by the voice-over of someone we may or may not know—e.g., a well-known cultural figure—and who may or may not have any personal connection with the stories being told. Thus, Parrinello’s narrators are part and parcel of the story as well as the story-telling, all of which bridges, as much as possible, certain semiotic gaps present in both verbal and visual texts. Little Italy is divided into eight sections: 1. “Wrenching in the soul”; 2. “Non parla italiano?”; 3. “Table as temple”; 4. “Power not authority”; 5. “Passion has us”; 6. “What they understood is Italian American”; 7. “I could have been in that village”; 8. “I didn’t know who I was.” Thus, emigration, assimilation, food, women, identity, stereotypes, ethnic (re)discovery, and sense of self constitute the thematic foundation of Little Italy. As these cultural phenomena constitute the outline of Italian America’s poly-generational history, they also serve as a type of road-map that the later Italian American must consult in his/her quest for ethnic self-discovery. Section I is very much based on typical imagery of the Italian immigrant and their Italian/American progeny. Here Parrinello gathers an array of voices that communicate the various feelings and sentiments of these early generations. He also does so by including those voices of the second and third generation who engage in a type of comparative analysis of the differences between the groups. His spokespeople include Ellis Island child-immigrants who are now adults, children and grandchildren of those who have experienced some sort of success, and an Italian professor who obviously sees the United States through a different lens.


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Also important in this section, Parrinello’s viewer becomes privy to the North/South dilemma, so often ignored by both Italians and those who believe they represent Italy and Italian Americans. The North/South issue is, in fact, much too significant to ignore, and Parrinello makes sure, by inserting it here, that his viewer is informed early on, especially since a good number of the people who populate his film are from Southern Italy. As section I lays down a solid foundation for the viewer’s notion of the Italian American’s immigrant heritage, section II deals with the issues of what the Italian American may and/or should do in order to maintain if not recuperate his/her heritage. Here, in fact, we’re introduced to, perhaps, Italian America’s most eloquent spokesperson to date, Robert Viscusi, who, with a little bit of help from his paesano August Coppola, spells out a project of maintenance/recuperation of one’s ItalianAmericanness through a familiarity of Italian and Italian/American cul2 ture and a solid knowledge of the Italian language. As with members of any ethnic group, the Italian American needs to engage in some form of discovery of her/his italianità through such activities as research and bilingualism, to mention only two 3 significant aspects. Visually, such a notion is best represented by the paintings of Ralph Fasanella, which Parrinello highlights from the very beginning of his documentary—paintings that depict the humble beginnings of the Italian immigrant. Indeed, such engagement in a rediscovery and reappropriation of one’s italianità is best underscored by the constant appearance in many of Fasanella’s paintings of the proverbial phrase, “Lest we forget,” always conspicuously set-off by a frame of some sort so that the viewer’s gaze may catch it head-on in his/her line of sight. In fact, it is no small irony, I would submit, that in section II of this film, it is Ralph Fasanella who tells us that we “lose [our] identity when [we] become American,” thus underscoring the need to reengage in order

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to maintain both identifiers of the ethnic couplet, be it noun or adjective, Italian American. Sections III and IV deal with two Italian and Italian/American icons par excellence: food and the mother figure. Many of the interlocutors tell us how the kitchen is at the center of the temple and that food is the object around which the main ritual revolves. Eating dinner, in plain English, as we are told, is an event. True! But it is more than this, as Italian/American culture is more than food. If there is a critical point to bring to the fore, it is perhaps the emphasis here and in one or two other places in the documentary where the director/camera’s eye zeroes in, unfortunately, on those one or two things that underscore some of the less desirable images. For it is not so much the eating, as it is the meeting, that constitutes the event that takes place in the kitchen. Yes, it is the food at the center of the table that gives nourishment, but it is also the conversation during dinner that solidifies the family and nourishes its members of those intangibles that we can not easily shoot with the camera; nor can we readily describe them in our writings or include them in the many inventories of ethnic characteristics. The bonding that takes place in the kitchen is thus one that includes, and yet transcends, physical nourishment. The kitchen in both the Italian (read, in Italy) and Italian/American household was the center of the household universe; for along with its function as a place of nourishment, the kitchen was most often the location of the great hearth whose second function was the heat source, since in those times central heating was still a thing of the future. Thus, the kitchen was, especially in the colder months, a place for the family to gather. As a consequence, even after its use as a heat source was no longer necessary, the kitchen maintained its function in the various paesi whence many an immigrant came, as it continued to be in the Italian American’s household, and also as a meeting place for the family


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to discuss those important issues that needed the requisite attention. Vis4 cusi and Coppola happily raise the kitchen to this level in Little Italy. The mother figure, mamma, is introduced to us with an array of photos accompanied by the background music of the eponymous song, Mamma. Indeed, who better than Jerry Vale to sing, who, along with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Perry Como, was among the top Italian/American crooners par excellence of the late fifties, sixties, and early seventies and made the song famous in the United States. The main point here in Parrinello’s film is that while the woman seems to be in a position of inferiority, it is really she who rules the roost. True matriarchy, we’re lead to believe in Little Italy, makes men think they’re in charge, when instead the woman actually influences all the decision-making to her liking. The emphasis on the woman’s ability to rule the roost, so to speak, is such that one of Parrinello’s co-narrators sees man belittled in USA culture. Such notions of quasi-absolute power endowed upon Italian and Italian/American women seem somewhat out of line with a good deal of the sociological, literary, and filmic representations of the female, be she Italian in Italy or Italian/American in the United States. One need only peruse some of the more popular books and essays on the subject to see that the Italian and Italian/American female did not enjoy a desirable position in the society in which she lived. Be it a perusal through some of the more popular fiction or the more noted sociological and anthropological studies, one would find that the Italian or Italian/American woman lived within a delineated framework, as a certain behavioral pattern was expected of her, and other behavior was eschewed. Carlo Levi’s autobiographical novel, Christ Stopped at Eboli, offers us a picture of village life in general, as well as a complex portrait of the female within those village mores we come to know, especially through the character 5 Giulia. Many of Levi’s observations are reiterated in other non-fictional work, such as Charlotte Chapman’s and Ann Cornileson’s respective es-

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says on Southern Italy. The Italian immigrant-woman in the United States often experienced a parallel life. In literature, Mario Puzo’s A Fortunate Pilgrim and Helen Barolini’s Umbertina both portray the trials 7 and tribulations the immigrant woman often endured. Valentine Rossilli Winsey, in turn, analyzed early on similarities in his keen essay on the 8 pre–World War I immigrant woman. Finally, with regard to film, the waters may seem muddy a bit, but certain films, I would submit, bare out my point of a marginalized position for women in Italian America. Take, for example, Nancy Savoca’s True Love (1989) or Household Saints (1993); one might also consider the female’s position in such classics as 9 The Godfather (1972) and Mean Streets (1973). Entitled “Passion has us,” section V deals with the figure of the effusive Italian and Italian American. Be it the philosophy of carpe diem, or some other trait we might associate with the Mediterranean individual, we see here that passion is something presented as a quasi-somaticethnic characteristic. It is something “I can’t turn off,” says one of Parrinello’s many co-narrators. It is, as Diane Di Prima adds, “full-out attention, full-out love.” It is to a certain degree more than any of the above and perhaps best defined here in the film as “a sense-of-self” in a culture that “denies self,” especially that of the other. To be sure, Italian immigrants and their progeny surely have and continue to represent different variations, at different times, of the self of the other. Thus, I would submit, it is precisely this sense of otherness, to some degree, that the Italian American needs to cultivate. It is indeed the flip-side, I would also argue, of what I have referred to thus far as the rediscovery and/or reinvention of one’s italianità. For it is true, as Larry DiStasi tells us in section VI, that we are in a type of “never-never land, [being] neither the one or the other.” But we need to be sure that we know who we are as we occupy this space: hence the rediscovery and reinvention, which can only come about through a method of education—something I referred to earlier as


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ethnic self-discovery, analogous to Viscusi’s strategic imperatives. This accomplished, it becomes clear that there is absolutely nothing wrong with inhabiting the interstitial space that is Italian America, thus considering it more in a positive sense and not as a place where one is “stuck,” as we are told. For sure, especially in today’s world of postmodernist thought and globalization, the interstice affords the informed other the opportunity to chose, if not alternate his/her experience. This, to some extent, is what we might reconsider Chaz Palmentieri’s notion to be, when in this section he makes reference to getting “the balance.” It is the ability to weigh the pros and cons, the weaknesses and strengths, and reconstruct an image of the Italian American that indeed includes all those positive characteristics of the Italian/American individual, regardless of whether said characteristics are Italian, immigrant, or Italian/American. Such an imagistic reconstruction, however, does not afford the Italian American the privilege to rewrite history in order to eliminate that which is also a negative aspect of our past. Thus, the “pasta and mobster crap” that Marco Greco sees Americans associating as Italian characteristics par excellence may sometimes become a necessary evil. To be sure, this is where one might go off on a tangent and discuss what some consider the validity, both aesthetic and thematic, of certain films such as The Godfather (1972), Mean Streets (1973), and/or GoodFellas (1989). However, given the scope of this study, I would only state here that sometimes certain works may also invoke a more intense reading that allows the viewer to grasp more firmly the inner semiotic underpinnings of a text. With brief regard to the three films mentioned above, let us not forget that in each case the so-called mob figure was presented as both a physically violent and, often, a sentimentally devoid individual—in nuce, a pathetic and despicable human being. In this regard, then, I would only remind the reader of Don Vito’s death in The Godfather. While playing with his grandson, Anthony, he feigns being a monster. Besides the ini-

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tial fear he instills in Anthony, significant in itself, two other important items stand out: 1) This is the last image we have of Don Corleone, as he runs through the tomato plants, first chasing then being chased by his grandson; 2) As he lies dying, unbeknownst to his grandson, Anthony begins to spray him with what we can only assume to be insect repellent, if not, given the dramatic date of the scene, DDT. Such a combination of events is too significant to ignore; it is almost as if the future generation—the sign of which is Anthony—here now rebuffs the old world of 10 organized crime. In addition, we must not forget that the subsequent scenes are those where Michael proves to be the cold-hearted person he truly has become: what follows are the intertwining scenes of the five murders being performed at Michael’s command, as he stands in as godfather to his sister’s child, the one who will soon be a widow, the killing of his brother-in-law also at Michael’s command. This reprehensible individual should surely not be high-lighted in any positive manner in what we might consider the Italian/American cinema; however, the reprehensibility of these Mafia individuals is brought to the fore, as we see above, and censorship, when their presence is necessary in the story-telling, becomes an ironic form of aesthetic bullying. Section VII is perhaps the most ironic part of the documentary. For if we were to point out an infelicity or two, I would include Parrinello’s choice of narrator here in a section dedicated to going back to Italy; it is not a happy one. If there is an American writer of Italian descent who has proven to be less helpful even in situations that were to be otherwise, it is Gay Talese. How ironic for Talese to be one of the main interviewees in a film where 1) many of the interviewees are most informed about their Italian Americanness, either through personal or professional interests, and 2) a good number of the interviewees decry the presence of the Mafia. With regard to the second point, Talese made his reputation, to a significant degree, with a book on the very same subject


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matter that he decries: Honor Thy Father dealt with the reputed gangster Joe Bonanno and his family, both intimate and extended. In addition, and with regard to the first point, Talese could not have done any better to set back further the cause for Italian/American literature, when he published a front-page piece entitled, “Where are the Italian-American Nov12 elists?” In a somewhat self-centered rant on the lack of Italian/American writers, Talese only went on to demonstrate his ignorance on the subject. Instead, he could have saved the New York Times paper; and for other people well-informed on the subject, he could have avoided causing a bad case of agida, had he only consulted the necessary works that were available to him at the time in any decent municipal or college/university library. Rose Basile Green’s 1974 book on the subject matter, The Italian-American Novel: A Documentation of the Interaction 13 between Two Cultures, lists well over 200 novelists in its bibliography, and VIA and Italian Americana have continued to bring to the fore the writings of both young and established American writers of Italian de14 scent. The case of Gay Talese is not at all uncommon among Italian Americans who, as we say in our various Little Italies, made it big. Often these individuals are called on to be a sort of spokesperson for Italian Americans. In some cases we have excellent results; in other cases we are left, at the very least, perplexed by the hubris certain coethics of ours seem to possess when it comes to expounding on Italian/American culture. Talese’s case is further underscored, albeit subtly, by the fact that he has, so gladly it seems, Americanized the pronunciation of his surname. Other examples come to mind. I would only make brief reference to the businessman who, in his already-made speech, refers to Giambattista Vico as a Renaissance thinker, or the medical doctor who coedits a book on Italian/American culture. My intention here is by no means to engage in a discourse of territoriality: however, I am quite sure that nei-

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ther of these two gentlemen would want any literary scholar either to keep their books, or perform surgery on them or their relatives. But this, too, is part of the plight of the Italian American: to have those not necessarily well-informed for the occasion, but who have had success in other totally unrelated fields, expound on the overall, cultural landscape of Italian America. The notion of identity is reserved for the final section of the film. Here, in section VIII, as we follow our narrators throughout their composite voyage from the docks of New York and the marina of San Fran15 cisco, we come to understand that “being Italian American is [indeed] a riddle,” as Robert Viscusi tells us in his narrative interventions; for the ethnic individual can not avoid the constant state of cultural negotiation in which s/he must engage vis-à-vis the dominant cultural paradigm after s/he has consciously rediscovered and deliberately reappropriated his/her 16 Italian Americanness. This, in fact, is what we witness in Little Italy; and in so doing, we also discover that all the Little Italys, those neighborhoods in most cities that became a refuge from that early hostile culture, has also become for the later generations a place to renew bonds with old friends and relatives and, ultimately, revitalize Italian and Italian/American customs and traditions. Little Italy is both an intimate and profound journey into that often misrepresented world of Italian America. A universe often misunderstood by the media’s stereotypical representations of Italian Americans, Parrinello succeeds in bringing to the fore the real issues of Italian America vis-à-vis its past, present, and future. Parrinello draws on the experiences of artists and artisans (Ralph Fasanella, Chris Pomodoro), professors (Donna Gabaccia, Paolo Palumbo, Robert Viscusi, and August Coppola), writers (Diane di Prima, Larry DiStasi, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gay Talese), actors/writers (Chaz Palmentieri, Marco Greco), and other not-so-famous people primarily from the San Fran-


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cisco and New York areas. Indeed, it is this ecumenical aspect of Parrinello’s video that places it above many of the other documentaries done thus far. For he weaves his story from the words of Italian Americans, from all walks of life, and from both the east and west coasts. Documentaries like Little Italy may often run the risk of indulging in both a defensive and overwhelming nostalgia, extolling the virtues of that which really underscored the very stereotypes the members of the ethnic group eschewed while complaining about the unidentifiable and ubiquitous they who supposedly held the group down. Parrinello, to his credit, instead has skillfully avoided this trap; while his interviewees mention the struggles they or their parents and grandparents have endured, they do speak more to the various triumphs these very same people accomplished despite the various roadblocks they encountered. Thus, a positive tone subtends the entire video; and Parrinello’s viewer, especially the Italian American, comes away with a sense of gleeful triumph and pride for his/her group’s success. Through this video more than others, to close with Larry Di-Stasi’s words, the “Italian American public [may find] its own story, its real story.”

Notes 1. 2. 3.

4.

Little Italy. Will Parrinello, producer & director. Mill Valley Film Group, 1995. 55 minutes. I have in mind Robert Viscusi’s seminal essay “Breaking the Silence.” Along with Viscusi’s seminal essay “Breaking the Silence,” see also his more recent engagement in the newly born magazine Bridge 4 (1998): 71–73. I am reminded of the kitchen scenes in Moonstruck—the film many Italian Americans seem to disdain, includes a couple of kitchen scenes where the most important of issues are discussed.

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5. 6.

Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli. See Charlotte Gowers Chapman, Milocca, A Sicilian Village; and Ann Cornileson, Women of the Shadows. See Mario Puzo, A Fortunate Pilgrim; and Helen Barolini, Umbertina, now available from Feminist Press, 1999. For an early, critical analyses of the figure of the female in literature, see Rose Basile Green, “The Italian Immigrant Woman in American Literature,” in The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America 342. One should also look at Mary Jo Bona’s work thus far in order to get some idea of the woman’s position in Italian/American literature. Along with her book, Claiming a Tradition: Italian-American Women Writers, there is also her edited anthology, The Voices We Carry. In addition to Bona’s critical writing, one need also consult Edvige Giunta’s work on Italian/American women writers, one example being her editorship of the special issue of Voices in Italian Americana (7.2 [1996]), on Italian/American women. Indispensable also, of course, is Helen Barolini’s earlier anthology, The Dream Book: Anthology of Italian American Women Writing, which provided us with our first general look at the Italian/American woman writer. I would also underscore Rachel Guido deVries’s Tender Warriors, and Gianna Patriarca’s poetry collection, Italian Women and Other Tragedies. In addition to Valentine Rossilli Winsey, “The Italian American Woman Who Arrived in the United States before World War I,” Studies in Italian American Social History, ed. Francesco Cordasco, see also Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880–1930; and Betty Boyd Caroli, Robert F. Harney, and Lydio F. Tomasi, eds. The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America.

7.

8.


10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

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For more on women in Italian/American cinema, see Francesca Canadé Sautman, “Women of the Shadows: Italian American Women, Ethnicity and Racism in American Cinema,” DIFFERENTIA review of italian thought 6/7 (Spring/ Autumn 1994): 219–46; and Dawn Esposito, “Looking at Myself but Seeing the Other: Images of Italian Americans in the Cinema,” The Italian American Review 5.1 (1966): 126–35. In retrospect, of course, this scene proves most ironic and truly stands out from the perspective of Godfather III, where it becomes clear that Anthony has totally rebuffed the family business and will do only as he pleases, sing in the opera, despite his father’s wishes to the contrary. Honor They Father. “Where Are the Italian-American Novelists?” New York Times Book Review 14 Mar. 1993: 1+. Also available to Talese were Helen Barolini’s The Dream Book and our own From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana, for him two possible up-dated companion pieces to Basile’s book. Italian Americana dates back to 1974, whereas the first issue VIA appeared in 1990. While I find this film to be one of the most well-balanced of traditional documentaries we have thus far on Italian Americans, I would have preferred to see some attention given also to the Midwest and/or the South. I have in mind both Chicago and New Orleans and their respective surrounding areas. Then I would have been able to write of the “composite voyage from the docks of New York to the marina of San Francisco.” I also remind the reader of August Coppola’s comment I cited at the opening of this chapter, where he states that the United States is, in fact, “kaleidoscopic country [and] not a melting pot.”

Ethnicity, Sexuality, Gender Mariarosy Calleri’s Uncovering

“Filmmaking becomes the place for the recreation of the self.”—Mariarosy Calleri As in other chapters dedicated herein to short films that do not follow a traditional narrative trajectory, the basic semiotic premise with regard to Uncovering (1996) is that the study of signs proves to be most adequate, if not necessary, in the analysis of aesthetics and cultural artifacts, since it examines the signifying process of such artifacts and reveals the epistemological procedure that invests meaning and value in signs. As we already saw with the other films examined thus far, here too, then, semiotics becomes the mode of analysis to identify the procedure of how signs may bear meanings in a specific sign system, as are those we find in this film. Uncovering exudes a sui generis ideology independent of the usual white, hetero-patriarchal control. As such, this counter-hetero, non-white ideology defies the typical white, hetero-[fe]male-sexual gaze in not affording the viewer his/her usual position of control. Indeed, Uncovering is a provocative and delightful short film that demonstrates, among other things, how members of a post-1980s generation deal with issues of in1 tolerance, be such intolerance steeped in gender, race, or sexuality. Furthermore, from the specific view-point of ethnicity, this film figures also as a significant marker of how the [im]migrant Italian living in the United States may perceive the importance and impact of such issues in the United States in the mid-1990s. 93

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Mariarosy Calleri’s thirteen-minute, experimental documentary Uncovering was a finalist at both the 10th European Media Art Festival (Osnabruck, Germany [1997]) and the Mixed Messages Festival of the 1997 Media Studies Graduate Showcase of The New School of Social Research. Analogous to DeCerchio’s narrative film and Parrinello’s traditional documentary, Uncovering calls into question a stereotypical semiotic of the Italian [read also, Italian American]. Whereas Parrinello’s concern in his documentary was more general in scope, and DeCerchio focused in specifically on issues of gayness, Calleri examines the concept of woman, and those notions of the exotic, examined against a backdrop of ethnicity and race. Similar to DeCerchio, then, what Calleri proposes is a new sign system for the narrative, now, of the Italian and Italian/American female. Also, similar to what we saw, Calleri sets up two different sets of sign systems: the traditional, Italian/American sign system of white heterosexuality, which clashes head-on with an Italian/American sign system that has been altered according to woman’s life situation. Such an examination of clashing sign systems within Italian America is one of the aesthetic characteristics that distinguishes Calleri’s documentary from Parrinello’s. Whereas he cogently sets up the usual dialectic of Italian America vis-à-vis the dominant United States, cultural paradigm in Little Italy—only hinting at the internal differences within Italian America—Calleri tackles head-on the issue of internal differences, and implicit, instead in Uncovering, is the dialectic that is explicit in Parrinello’s documentary. What we thus find in this experimental documentary is that this Italian/American female occupies a space that is contrary to the stereotype. No longer at home in the kitchen, nor appendage to her male partner, she sheds all and any sort of prudery both in her physical expression and her male preferences. Throughout a good deal of the film we bear witness to the naked body of the Italian woman. In a caress during the


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middle minutes of the film, she and a naked African/American male constitute the visual “backdrop” for a long series of answers to the first of 2 three questions: “What characterizes an Italian woman?” She metamorphoses, we come to see, from that of a woman with a “great body and an accent, . . . very warm, very family oriented, [and] a great cook,” to “sexy, beautiful,” with “a lot of attitude, . . . a lot of umph, very sensual, . . . a very powerful woman,” to “sophisticated.” Such a metamorphosis is signaled in a most articulate manner. Our very first image of woman appears at the opening of the film: she is “woman with camera,” as the credits tell us, an obvious allusion, we may assume, to the process of filmmaking itself. But, once the series of questions and answers begins, with which we may characterize the heart of the documentary’s narrative, our next image of woman is a mannequin in a store window dressed in a bride’s gown. This is then juxtaposed to the bi-racial couple which has been set-off from the previous image by a few moments of a blank screen framed in black, another sign clamoring quite loudly in what we will see is, from a traditional view-point, a cacophony of signs and sign-functions. Indeed numerous functions of these various signs, much too significant to ignore in this opening series, come to the fore. First, we seem to have two different narrations taking place simultaneously. The woman with camera seems to be set-off as one narrative, juxtaposed to the second narrative of the mannequin in a store window dressed in a bride’s gown, the biracial couple, and the voice-overs. But the woman with camera is ultimately signaled in the second narrative by the presence of the blank screen, which serves as a type of reminder of the camera if not, better still, the very act of filmmaking. This blank screen, moreover, may have a second, alternative function; for while it is true that this blank screen may very well signal the process of filmmaking, it may also signal a cue for the process of film viewing. It may, concomitantly, I would

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tantly, I would add, easily represent the proverbial tabula rasa which, here, is necessary for the viewer to possess in order to grasp more firmly 3 Calleri’s sui generis gendered, ethnic sign system. A second function that comes to the fore concerns the mannequin in the store window dressed as a bride. A more traditional imagistic representation would be difficult to find. Equally significant is her position in this opening series; she is literally bracketed between the “woman with camera” and the biracial couple, each of whom, we come to know, are representative signs of Calleri’s sui generis sign system. Therefore this mannequin dressed as a bride, indeed a simulacrum, we might say, is the sign par excellence of the traditional Italian female who is now placed under erasure, to a certain degree, as she is shadowed by the less traditional figures of the Italian woman. For let us also not forget that the mannequin qua simulacrum is the typical ectomorph we see in many shop windows, advertisements, and other public fora that have obscured a healthy view of the female. More anorexic than not, these svelte figures may often impact negatively on a young woman’ sense-of-self, as some 4 studies have already shown. Calleri’s female, instead, is the opposite. Beginning with the female half of the biracial couple, it is clear we are dealing with a woman who clearly falls into the category of the endomorph. By no means overweight, in a general sense, but surely heavier than the ectomorphs we’re accustomed to seeing, this women is the descendent, we might say, of the female models of Titian, Ruben, and the like. In fact, later in the film, we have at least three examples of the healthy looking female, images that are juxtaposed in some cases to the ever-recurring mannequin: 1) the quick cut-aways to the Renaissance portraits of lounging women either in Titian or other Italian Renaissance painters; 2) the quick cut-aways to photos of the young and buxom Sofia Loren (which may also be a bit ironic, but we can not ignore her consistent presence here in the second half of the film as a counterpoint to the


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mannequin bride); and the entire bathroom scene of our woman in panties, whose shapely body is much more consonant with one of Titian’s women than those we find in today’s world of advertising. To digress briefly, we would be remiss not to mention this woman’s activity in the bathroom. Basically, she is applying make-up to her face, as if getting ready to go out for the afternoon or evening. There is, however, a curious turn of events: as soon as she finishes applying her make-up, she proceeds to wash her face, thus taking off, discarding, if not erasing, all that which she had just applied on to her person. In so doing, she rejects, we might readily assume, that traditional role (make-up = mask) society often asks of woman. As an aside, I would remind the reader that “mascara” is very similar to the Italian word “maschera” (= mask); I would also point out that the word “truccarsi” (to make oneself up) has as its root “trucco,” which in Italian can mean either make-up or trick of some sort, where the trick here, at first glance, might be seen as played on the woman. But, to the contrary, it is Calleri’s woman who plays a trick on society by eventually ridding herself of the often imposed mask. These, to continue, are the women who populate Calleri’s sui generis sign system, not the mannequin as bride. And, in this regard, let us also not lose the irony in Calleri’s use of the mannequin as a counterpoint; for the mannequin may surely represent a sort of automatism which, in a male-female relationship in a male-centered context, can easily be translated into excessive obedience on the female’s part. Thus all of the above, I would submit, leads us to yet another significant aspect of the biracial couple. For as the voice-over accompanies most of the above-mentioned scenes of the white female and black male caressing, we see their bodies but not their faces. In fact, we only see the woman’s face toward the end of the film, underscoring, I would suggest, each one’s everypersonness, signifying thereby not so much their individuality of personhood but rather their generality of gender, ethnicity, and

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race, which here clamors much more loudly given the broad spectrum these signs must re-present. The remaining two questions in Uncovering are: “How would you describe an Italian woman?” and “What makes her different from an American woman?” to which an array of responses flow. With regard to the second of our three questions, two of the more significant responses are: a) “Brunette, that’s all I can think of.” and b) “Olive skin, dark hair, 5 attractive as far as dark eyes, wilder, southerner.” Both responses call to mind the notion of Italians, especially Southern Italians, as people of color. Let us not forget that this is not so foreign a notion among a good number of Italian Americans. I remind the reader of both the essays and creative works of some people I’ve already mentioned earlier in this study vis-à-vis the relationship between Italian Americans and blacks: e.g., Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Mary Bucci Bush, Jerome Krase, Rose Romano, Pasquale Verdicchio, Maurizio Viano, and Robert Viscusi. All this is then underscored in one of the answers to the third question, when the man responds: More white women or American women are just very passive, an Italian or Hispanic woman would more or less take that extra mile, you know, just to get what she wants. We find the formula “white = American” juxtaposed to one of “Italian = Hispanic,” so that the Italian is indeed part and parcel of a category that we might readily establish as one of color. It is also at this point that the notion of difference is finally punctuated both verbally and visually. In the responses we have seen thus far, the Italian woman is situated in the realm of colorness. In this final list of responses, yet another one underscores the general notion of difference:


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You can’t generalize, the good thing about Italian women, like all Italians, it’s that they are so different, you know. [. . .] They are all different, yah. Italian women are not the same, are they? This response is curiously significant indeed, and, in its own way, nicely ambiguous. The key words here are, of course, generalize and different, both of which underscore plurality; and I would include the adverbial so, which can only emphasize the Italian woman’s distinction among woman. We also see that the notion of difference is extended to Italians in general; so that while Calleri’s film is mostly concerned with the position of the Italian woman, she momentarily takes advantage of the situation here to include in her praise of distinction and singularity also the Italian female’s brother, so to speak. This is one of the few points where Calleri and Parrinello overlap, as they both speak, each in their own way, to the difference between Italians and the rest of the community in which they live. What also becomes significant here, among an array of important components, many of which we have discussed, is the use of the adjective “Italian,” not “Italian American.” Looking at the film in its entirely, we may readily understand “Italian,” here, as an all-encompassing term that includes the Italian in Italy, the Italian immigrant in the US, as also the Italian American. Through such interrogation, the film both questions and ultimately debunks the stereotypes of the Italian and Italian/American female. Finally, we would be remiss a second time were we not to return to the notion of self-reflexivity when we spoke of the woman with camera earlier in this chapter. To continue, we may surely assume that Calleri’s notion of filmmaking is one that situates it as a privileged mode of communication vis-à-vis the logos. Besides the obvious fact of her

100 Anthony Julian Tamburri having chosen the visual over the verbal, two instances underscore her predilection for film. Uncovering ends with Sheila Chandra singing Woman I am calling you. What becomes significant here, in this regard, is the repetition of the question, as if it were a refrain, “Where do I go to find images of women?” where we can not ignore the emphasis obvi6 ously placed on images. Moreover, equally significant, is what we find a bit earlier in the film. Just before the third question is articulated, there is an Italian rap song. Almost as if in code to her Italian-speaking coethnics, Calleri has us hear in Italian without translation: Le cose importanti sono difficili da dire, e poi le parole le 7 rendono stupide e piccole. Words, that is, are totally useless, we see from above. They render the important unimportant: stupid and inconsequential, for all practical purposes. But, I would submit, words are problematic for another reason. For, while it is true that this brief part of the film may be in code, as I mentioned above, it is also true, we see here, that language has a limited ability in scope; and not just because it renders the important as inconsequential, but it is limiting as to who may or may not understand the message to be communicated. Hence the visual; especially in a film like Uncovering, where language may enhance the film’s communicative act, but is not totally necessary for it to succeed. It is also abundantly clear in Uncovering that Calleri does not want her viewer to lose sight of the fact that s/he is watching a film and must, therefore, interpret it accordingly. There is an initial set of images framed by the woman with camera—the balustrade and veranda; the initial, grainy quality of the film that cuts to the balustrade; the sea, seagull, and jet in the sky; the film framed in black of the seagull; the playground and doll—all of which constitute a set of signs enclosed by the second appearance of the woman with camera. The film framed in black (of the

Italian/American Short Films and Videos 101 seagull), for instance, offers a combination of signs that may be interpreted accordingly: 1) You are watching a film. Therefore you, as viewer, should be ready to seek out meaning, and figure out how signs may signify herein; 2) The seagull, then, may be the one sign you, viewer, should especially consider: its elusive freedom of flight is surely one obvious interpretation of this agile bird zigzagging about. Indeed, the seagull reappears on a few other occasions, lastly but not leastly, as one of the closing images of Uncovering, in a similarly framed screen which may ultimately underscore its allusive, semiotic freedom of flight. It is, in fact, Calleri’s semiotic freedom that allows her to construct the film she does. And, in an analogous sense, it will be up to the viewer’s semiotic to discover that which we may assume to be part and parcel of her desired semiotic. To be sure, Calleri’s Uncovering ultimately proposes a new way of viewing the Italian female and her body, physically and conceptually, in her relationship to gender, sexuality, and race. On the screen, that is, Calleri uncovers woman, both literally and metaphorically, vis-à-vis her relationship to man, accented here by her ethnicity and his race. Calleri, thus, I would suggest, also uncovers her viewer’s relationship to this triad of gender, race, and ethnicity, as her viewer is left to ponder the thirteen minutes of experimental narrative that exudes such an ideologically charged semiotic.

Notes 1.

2.

I use the label post-1980s as a marker precisely because of the decade’s association with what has now become known as the “me generation of the Reagan era,” when government itself was considered by many, in its own way, not to be sensitive to issues of civil intolerance. The image of a black and white person occupying the entire screen occurs in two other of our films in this study. I remind the reader of

102 Anthony Julian Tamburri

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

the close-up shots in Madonna’s Like a Prayer and DeCerchio’s Nunzio’s Second Cousin. In both cases a kiss occupies the entire screen: in the first case, the black Christ and Madonna kiss; in the second case, Anthony and his black male date fill the screen as they kiss. One might also want to see this tabula rasa analogous to, for example, Iser’s gap, or Derrida’s trace, or even Peirce’s unlimited semiosis, all of which require a filling in the sign with some form of significance, be it only preliminary or, if possible, more grounded. For more on the representation of women in cultural productions, see Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body; and Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity. Given the Italian context in which Calleri has and continues to work, this description of the Italian woman may have a strange intertext. It is rather consonant with a general description that calls to mind one of Italian literature’s most controversial female characters: Giovanni Verga’s La Lupa of the eponymous short story. Another repetition that may subtly allude to the visual is the statement, “Women [whose/your] wisdom is in your dreams,” as if to underscore the visualization of her thoughts. Translation: Important things are difficult to say, and then words make them [seem] stupid and small.

After-Thoughts

After-Thoughts Some Concluding Remarks

What should be apparent, first and foremost, from the previous five chapters, is the conspicuous interest in their ethnicity some of the so-called newer generation of Italian/American filmmakers exhibit in their respective films, be such films a fiction, a documentary, or a music video. More significant, however, is the lens through which they see their Italian/American heritage. While the older generations concentrated more on the by now well-known thematics of immigration and organized crime, as well as the debunking thereof, these younger artists/performers of short films have added to the general theme of heritage, at various de1 grees, of race, gender, and sexuality. The films included in this study run the gamut on the reworkings of ethnicity. Greco’s Lena Spaghetti is a wistful adventure into what I have shown to be a prime example of liminal ethnicity. There, he constructed a universal narrative of two person’s desire for friendship and companionship and, in so doing, succeeded in weaving into his narrative those ethnic signs that so clearly, once uncovered, comprise and thus exude a fundamental Italian Americanness. In a similar manner, Madonna’s Like a Prayer also contains Italian/American ethnic markers that figure as liminal interpretants. As part of the background of this video’s narrative, we saw that any wellinformed reader with a semiosic sensitivity to Italian America may readily uncover in this narrative an Italian/American repertoire of signs. But this video also brings to the fore themes and motifs we found in other 105

106 Anthony Julian Tamburri short films examined herein, specifically those concerned with issues of race and prejudice. Race, indeed, constitutes a significant issue in a number of these short films. And while it is true that films such as The Godfather and Mean Streets have shown the deplorable racist behavior of those individuals who populate these films, hardly any Italian/American director has truly dealt up-front and in-depth with the issue in a feature-length film. To my knowledge, there are two films by Italian Americans where the race issue vis-à-vis Italian Americans is in the forefront. The first is A Bronx Tale (1993), directed by Robert De Niro and written by Chaz Palmenieri, where both racism and race-crossing are integral parts of the film. The other film I can recall that includes race-crossing as an integral part of its narrative—though not necessarily vis-à-vis Italian Americans—is the lesser known The Price of Kissing (1997). Written and directed by Vince DiPersio, it tells the story of two white women who have a crush on the same black man. Otherwise, the only well known filmmaker to deal with this issue directly thus far is Spike Lee in his films Do the Right Thing (1989) and Jungle Fever (1991). Here, instead, we see that race also figures prominently in DeCerchio’s Nunzio’s Second Cousin and Calleri’s Uncovering. All three films—a fictional narrative, a music video, and a documentary—question the status quo of the relationship between whites (read, Italian Americans) and blacks. Race, which has became to some degree an ugly stain in Italian/American his2 tory —to our chagrin, is here redefined. Similar to Patrick Gallo’s perspective, these three filmmakers examine the race issue through a similar lens; eschewing the argument of us against them, all three films underscore instead the hopes and necessity of us and them. Gender and sexuality, to continue, constitute the common denominators of Madonna’s Justify My Love and, once again, Uncovering. Both films call into question the issue of woman and her ability and basic

Italian/American Short Films and Videos 107 right to be able to choose, here couched in the personal issue of one’s sexual choices. In Uncovering, one aspect of choice, which we must add to what we have said before, is also synonymous with freedom, is manifested by the woman’s black partner, as race-crossing is not necessarily a prevalent characteristic of Italian America. But Justify My Love also calls into question homosexuality, as, at one point, we saw Madonna’s partner transform, albeit briefly, into a woman. Homosexuality, of course, is what also lies at the base of Nunzio’s Second Cousin, with race as the secondary, though indispensable, motif. Each in its own way, all six films in this study transgress, to one degree or another, those traditional narrative formats we might readily associate with a more conformist discourse of the Italian/American filmmaker. Even Parrinello’s Little Italy examines the conventional themes of Italian/American history through a different lens. In his decision to have an innumerable amount of people tell their own stories, he succeeds in recounting the history of Italian America through a plethora of different voices with a backdrop of film footage and still photographs that, in the end, constitute a unique narrative that is, like the United States, kaleidoscopic in nature. This, too, we learn from all the films herein, is the nature of Italian America; it is a community of individuals, each with his/her own likes and dislikes, who share to a certain degree a similar culture and heritage, which in the end is perhaps the greatest challenge of all—the sharing of commonalities and its resultant transcendence of difference—not just to the filmmakers, writers, and the like, but indeed to every member of the community. What each film has surely succeeded in doing, is to offer to its viewer a new way of seeing Italian America and its many facets. In the end, each film uncovers its viewer’s relationship to the internal and external dynamics of all the Little Italys as notions of race, gender, sexuality, companionship, family, and other issues that come to the fore. In this

108 Anthony Julian Tamburri sense, newness becomes the operative word as these filmmakers, each in his/her own way, have succeeded, at these various stages in their careers, in maintaining an artistic freedom that has allowed them to engage in different forms of a sui generis creativity. In so doing they have, therefore, avoided, at all costs, falling victim to the shackles of both a thematic and formalistic tradition, appropriating, as we have now seen, a more liberating and expansive discourse.

Notes 1.

2.

Indeed, we should not ignore other Italian Americans in between these two generations who have reworked the thematics of crime in general if not, specifically, organized crime. I have in mind Abel Ferrara’s The Bad Lieutenant and The Funeral. Here I remind the reader of what we saw previously with regard to Alfonse D’Amato and John Lombardi, to name two examples.

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110 Anthony Julian Tamburri Bona, Mary Jo. “Broken Images, Broken Lives: Carmolina’s Journey in Tina De Rosa’s Paper Fish.” Melus 14.3–4 (Fall–Winter 1987): 87–106. Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Bush, Mary Bucci. Drowning. San Diego: Parentheses Writing Series, 1995. ———. A Place of Light. New York: Morrow, 1990. Calvino, Italo. “Cybernetics and Ghosts.” In The Uses of Literature, trans. Patrick Creagh. New York: HB, 1986. ———. “Whom Do We Write For?” In The Uses of Literature, trans. Patrick Creagh. New York: HB, 1986. Caroli, Betty Boyd, Robert F. Harney, and Lydio F. Tomasi, eds. The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America. Toronto: The Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1978. Casillo, Robert. “Moments in Italian-American Cinema: From Little Caesar to Coppola and Scorsese.” In From the Margins: Writings in Italian Americana, ed. Anthony Julian Tamburri, Paolo A. Giordano, and Fred L. Gardaphé, 374–396. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1991. Chapman, Charlotte Gowers. Milocca, A Sicilian Village. Cambridge, MA: Schenkan, 1971. Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1978. Convento, Elisabetta. “Madonna’s Like a Prayer and Calleri’s Uncovering: Italian/American Women in Search of an Identity,” Florida Atlantic Comparative Studies 5 (2002).

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Italian/American Short Films and Videos 113 Green, Rose Basile. “The Italian Immigrant Woman in American Literature.” In The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America America. Toronto: The Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1978. ———. The Italian-American Novel: A Documentation of the Interaction between Two Culture. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1974. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation.” Framework 36 (1989): 69. ———. “Race, Culture, and Communications: Looking Backward and Forward at Cultural Studies.” Rethinking Marxism 5.1 (1992): 10– 18. Halperin, David M. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love. New York: Routledge, 1990. Hutcheon, Linda. On Irony. New York: Routledge, 1997. ———. The Politics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1989. Iser, Wolfgang. “How Acts of Constitution Are Stimulated.” In The Act of Reading, 180–231. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. ———. The Implied Reader. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974. Kaplan, E. Ann. “Feminist Criticism and Television.” In Channels of Discourse, ed. Robert C. Allen, 211–53. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1987. Kirby, John T. “Aristotle on Metaphor.” American Journal of Philology 118 (1997): 517–54. Krase, Jerome. “Bensonhurst, Brooklyn: Italian-American Victimizers and Victims.” Voices in Italian Americana 5.2 (1994): 43–53. Lawton, Ben. “What Is ‘ItalianAmerican’ Cinema?” Voices in Italian Americana 6.1 (1996) 27–51.

114 Anthony Julian Tamburri Lejeune, Phillipe. On Autobiography. Foreword by Paul John Eakin, translated by Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. Lentricchia, Frank. Review of Delano in America & Other Early Poems, by John J. Soldo. Italian Americana 1.1 (1974): 124–5. Levi, Carlo. Christ Stopped at Eboli. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1947. Levy, Edmund. Making a Winning Shot: How to Write, Direct, and Edit a Short Film. New York: Holt, 1994. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Foreword by Fredric Jameson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. McClary, Susan. “Living to Tell: Madonna’s Resurrection of the Fleshy.” Genders 7 (Spring 1990): 1–21. Merrell, Floyd. Sign, Textuality, World. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992. Montanari, Massimo. The Culture of Food. London: Blackwell, 1993. Parati, Graziella. Public History Private Stories: Italian Women’s Autobiography. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. Patriarca, Gianna. Italian Women and Other Tragedies. Toronto: Guernica, 1994. Peirce, C. S. Principles of Philosophy. In Collected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1960. ———. “What Is a Sign?” (1894). In Philosophical Writings of Peirce, 98–104. New York: Dover, 1955. Prince, Gerald. “On Textual Readers and Evaluators,” VS (Versus) 52/53 (1989): 113–20.

Italian/American Short Films and Videos 115 Puzo, Mario. A Fortunate Pilgrim. New York: Putnam, 1963. Ricci, Franco. “Disenfranchisement, or ‘Your Life or Your Life’.” In The Flight of Ulysses: Studies in Honor of Emmanuel Hatzantonis, ed. Augustus A. Mastri. AdI. Studi & Testi 1. Chapel Hill: AdI, 1997. ———. “Madonna: Towards a Transvaluation of Values.” Metro Magazine (November 1990): 40. Romano, Rose. “Coming Our Olive in the Lesbian Community.” In Social Pluralism and Literary History: The Literature of the Italian Emigration, ed. Francesco Loriggio, 161–75. Toronto: Guernica, 1996. Russo, Mary. The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity. New York: Routledge, 1995. Russo, Vito. The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies. Revised edition. New York: Harper and Row, 1987. Sautman, Francesca Canadé. “Women of the Shadows: Italian American Women, Ethnicity and Racism in American Cinema.” Differentia review of italian thought 6/7 (Spring/Autumn 1994): 219–46. Scott, Ronald B. “Images of Race and Religion in Madonna’s Video Like a Prayer: Prayer and Praise.” In The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theories, ed. Cathy Schwichtenberg, 57–77. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993. Stefanile, Felix. The Country of Absence, 54–9. West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera, 2000. Talese, Gay. “Where Are the Italian-American Novelists?” New York Times Book Review 14 Mar. 1993: 1+. Talese, Gay. Honor Thy Father. New York: Doubleday, 1971.

116 Anthony Julian Tamburri Tamburri, Anthony Julian. “Black & White, Scungill’ & Cannoli: Ethnicity and Sexuality in Nunzio’s Second Cousin.” In Adjusting Sites: New Essays in Italian-American Studies, ed. William Boelhower and Rocco Pallone, 183–200. Stony Brook, NY: FILibrary, 1999. ———. “Uncovering Ethnicity, Race, and Sexuality in Mariarosy Calleri’s Uncovering.” Bridge 5 (1999): 72–75. ———. A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In (Re)cognition of the Italian/American Writer. Albany, NY: SUNY P, 1998. ———. “The Madonna Complex: Justification of a Prayer.” Semiotic Spectrum 17 (April 1992): 1–2. ———. To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate? The Italian/American Writer: An Other American. Montréal: Guernica, 1991. ———. “Aldo Palazzeschi’s :riflessi: Toward a Notion of a ‘RetroLector’.” The American Journal of Semiotics 7.1/2 (1990): 105–24. Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure,95–100. Chicago: Aldine, 1969. Vecoli, Rudolph. “Are Italian Americans Just White Folks?” In Through the Looking Glass: Italian and Italian/American Images in the Media, ed. Mary Jo Bona and Anthony Julian Tamburri, 3–17. Staten Island: AIHA, 1996. Viscusi, Robert. “From America to Italy in Search of a Mirror.” Bridge 4 (1998): 59–61. ———. “Breaking the Silence: Strategic Imperatives for Italian American Culture.” Voices in Italian Americana 1.1 (1990): 1–13. Volosinov, V. N. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986.

Italian/American Short Films and Videos 117 Winkler, John J. The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece. New York: Routledge, 1990. Winsey, Valentine Rossilli. “The Italian American Woman Who Arrived in the United States before World War I.” In Studies in Italian American Social History, ed. Francesco Cordasco. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1975. Yans-McLaughlin, Virginia. Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880–1930. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977.

Ethnic Studies/Film Studies This book constitutes a first look at the little-known phenomenon of the Italian/American short film. What becomes apparent is the conspicuous interest these members of the newer generation of Italian/American filmmakers exhibit vis-à-vis their ethnicity, be such films a fiction, a documentary, or a music video. Equally significant is the lens through which they see their Italian/American heritage. While the older generations concentrated more on the by now well-known thematics of immigration and organized crime, as well as the debunking thereof, these younger artists/ performers of short films have added to the general theme of heritage, at various degrees, that of race, gender, and sexuality.

Anthony Julian Tamburri is a professor of Italian at Florida Atlantic University, where he is also chair of the Department of Languages and Linguistics. He is the author of seven other books, including A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In (Re)cognition of the Italian/American Writer and To Hyphenate or Not to Hypenate: The Italian/American Writer: Or, An Other American? and is editor or co-editor of twelve Digital-I B ooks An imprint of Pu rdue Universit y Press West Lafayette, Indiana

collections, including the best-selling anthology From the Margin (1991/2000) and Screening Ethnicity (2002). He is a co-founding editor of Voices in Italian Americana: A Literary and Cultural Review.

ISBN 1-55753-232-X

Italian American Short Films and Music Videos: A Semiotic Reading

Writing, Directing, and Producing Documentary Films and Videos Third Edition

Writing, Directing, and Producing Documentary Films and Videos Third Edition

Writing, Directing, and Producing Documentary Films and Videos, Revised Edition

Animated Short Films

Music: A Very Short Introduction

The sense of music: semiotic essays

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Italian Music Incunabula: Printers and Type

A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy

A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy

Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture

Producing Videos: A Complete Guide

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Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music

Music: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

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Early Music: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

Music: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

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A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy

Folk Music: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

A Semiotic Theory of Language

Italy's Divided Memory (Italian and Italian American Studies)

Better reading Italian: a reader and guide to improving your understanding written Italian

Better Reading Italian : A Reader and Guide to Improving Your Understanding of Written Italian

A New Guide to Italian Cinema (Italian & Italian American Studies)

A New Guide to Italian Cinema (Italian & Italian American Studies)

Italian American Short Films and Music Videos: A Semiotic Reading

Writing, Directing, and Producing Documentary Films and Videos Third Edition

Writing, Directing, and Producing Documentary Films and Videos Third Edition

Writing, Directing, and Producing Documentary Films and Videos, Revised Edition

Animated Short Films

Music: A Very Short Introduction

The sense of music: semiotic essays

American Music

Italian Music Incunabula: Printers and Type

A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy

A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy

Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture

Producing Videos: A Complete Guide

Film Music A Very Short Introduction

Producing Videos: A Complete Guide

Producing Videos: A Complete Guide

Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music

Music: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

Film Music: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

Early Music: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

Music: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

Music for Piano: A Short History

A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy

A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy

Folk Music: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

A Semiotic Theory of Language

Italy's Divided Memory (Italian and Italian American Studies)

Better reading Italian: a reader and guide to improving your understanding written Italian

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