Pasta Joke

Those wacky Italian-Americans are at it again:

To millions of moviegoers around the world, Robert De Niro is the epitome of the Italian man.
But the tough guy image and parts in blockbusters such as The Godfather II have not endeared him to some Americans of Italian descent.

Yesterday, it emerged that an influential Italian-American organisation had appealed to Silvio Berlusconi, asking the prime minister to cancel Italy's plan to award De Niro honorary citizenship.

I'm assuming that it still holds true that Americans don't do irony, so this bunch asking a gangster to not honour someone for making gangsters look good is serious.

"He has done nothing to promote Italian culture in the United States. Instead, the Osia [Order of the Sons of Italy in America -- really] and its members hold him and his movies responsible for considerably damaging the collective reputations of both Italians and Italian-Americans," the group said.

If that reputation is for being over-sensitive whiners then that's probably a good thing.

Let's face it gangsters are interesting. They are people outside the law who live by their own rules, at least that's the romantic notion of them, in real life I would expect organised crime to be vile and code-of-honour free.

The romantic view, though, is fascinating because it allows film-makers to explore all facets of human experience while still being able to present the protagonist as, in some way, principled.

Italians aren't the only community with gangsters and even De Niro played a Jewish gangster (albeit called Noodles), it just happened that they were high-profile enough (inept?), with characters like Al Capone and Lucky Luciano, that they became part of the public consciousness. It's not Bob's fault that people think of gangsters as Italian, it's the Italian gangsters.

So, while the association is unfortunate (and I wonder how many of Osia have tried to benefit from the connection in some way or other¹) it also happens to have helped make some great art, along with quite a lot of execrable stuff too, so why not celebrate that?

[1] You know conversations like "The Sopranos? Terrible program, completely unbelievable... But, confidentially, that bar over there... Full of made guys. True. Vinnie the Hat's in there all the time."