Why Do We Admire Mobsters?
September 21, 2015 3:59 AM Subscribe
We don’t glamorize all violent crime; no one holds the Son of Sam or Charles Manson in high regard. (It’s hard to imagine their descendants gathering for a celebratory dinner at a steakhouse.) So why are Al Capone, Lansky, Arnold Rothstein, Luciano, and their ilk held up as mythic figures, even heroes of a sort, not just by their families but by the general public? Why are members of the Italian mafia treated more like celebrities than unsavory criminals?
I like mob stories for the same reasons I like Game of Thrones. I don't admire mobsters in real life, even when they are providing a valuable service like evading dumb prohibitions. They are scumbags.
posted by Drinky Die at 4:24 AM on September 21, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by Drinky Die at 4:24 AM on September 21, 2015 [3 favorites]
… because of the huge amount of mob money that's been laundered into movies and entertainment over decades, none of it critical to the nice businessmen who fund it?
posted by scruss at 4:39 AM on September 21, 2015 [9 favorites]
posted by scruss at 4:39 AM on September 21, 2015 [9 favorites]
Even without mob money, a movie critical of the mob (worse: critical of a particular mobster) would be like publishing the Mohammed cartoons. Why ask for trouble?
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:42 AM on September 21, 2015
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:42 AM on September 21, 2015
Son of Sam and Charles Manson were sadistic killers who acted for reasons no rational mind can comprehend. Organized crime is a business where violence is a necessary, but secondary, activity behind bookmaking, extortion, larceny, money laundering, politics, trade unions...
Plus Godfather 2 was the only sequel to ever win an Oscar for best film.
posted by three blind mice at 4:49 AM on September 21, 2015 [12 favorites]
Plus Godfather 2 was the only sequel to ever win an Oscar for best film.
posted by three blind mice at 4:49 AM on September 21, 2015 [12 favorites]
It's a soap opera with blood and guns so guys can like it. Everyone likes incestuous family drama, this just gives Masculine Men an excuse to be a fan of it, too.
posted by Punkey at 4:54 AM on September 21, 2015 [14 favorites]
posted by Punkey at 4:54 AM on September 21, 2015 [14 favorites]
I think this phenomenon goes beyond Italian mafia, though it's the most readily obvious target in the American cultural sphere, thanks to the extensive coverage it's gotten in American films and TV shows. Narcos on Netflix is portraying Pablo Escobar in a similar way. While law enforcement types are the protagonists there (unlike, say, The Godfather movies or The Sopranos), the show does humanize Escobar and engender a weird kind of respect towards him, despite the unflinching portrayal of his murderous tendencies.
It would be interesting to read about the targets of this phenomenon outside the USA. Narco Cultura, for example, seems to point at drug traffickers being just that in Mexico, and I'd wager that other parts of Latin America have similar leanings even in the post-Escobar era.
posted by jklaiho at 4:58 AM on September 21, 2015
It would be interesting to read about the targets of this phenomenon outside the USA. Narco Cultura, for example, seems to point at drug traffickers being just that in Mexico, and I'd wager that other parts of Latin America have similar leanings even in the post-Escobar era.
posted by jklaiho at 4:58 AM on September 21, 2015
Huh. I don't think I buy her conclusion: that people admire the mob because they have psychological distance from the mob, either because of time or because they consider mobsters ethnically alien and other. I think that gangsters are often admired by people who have very little distance, including people in their own communities.
This isn't at all a novel observation, but I think that Americans admire mobsters because we see them as being successful capitalists despite functioning in a society where the deck is totally stacked against their success. If you were Italian or Jewish in late-19th and early-20th century America and used unsavory tactics to make a lot of money, people called you a gangster. If you were a WASP and used unsavory tactics to make millions, they called you a robber baron and named universities after you. People admire the underdog, especially when they see themselves as underdogs, and these were underdogs who on some level were successfully playing society's game.
The problem with that is that gangsters actually did a lot of harm. Probably so did robber barons, but that's neither here nor there.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 4:58 AM on September 21, 2015 [55 favorites]
This isn't at all a novel observation, but I think that Americans admire mobsters because we see them as being successful capitalists despite functioning in a society where the deck is totally stacked against their success. If you were Italian or Jewish in late-19th and early-20th century America and used unsavory tactics to make a lot of money, people called you a gangster. If you were a WASP and used unsavory tactics to make millions, they called you a robber baron and named universities after you. People admire the underdog, especially when they see themselves as underdogs, and these were underdogs who on some level were successfully playing society's game.
The problem with that is that gangsters actually did a lot of harm. Probably so did robber barons, but that's neither here nor there.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 4:58 AM on September 21, 2015 [55 favorites]
Hmm, leesee, Robin Hood. Billy The Kid. Huck Finn. Jesse James. Bugsy Siegel. Michael Corleone. Han Solo. Mal Reynolds.
Charming rogues with a deep sense of honor. Anti-heroes. What a concept!
posted by valkane at 5:04 AM on September 21, 2015 [28 favorites]
Charming rogues with a deep sense of honor. Anti-heroes. What a concept!
posted by valkane at 5:04 AM on September 21, 2015 [28 favorites]
In this day and age, when you look at how the cops and the "legitimate" businessmen behave, it seems difficult to say that the mafia is/was markedly worse than most other institutions of everyday life, which were then and continue to be violent and/or exploitative towards less-privileged people. Which upstanding people are supposed to be the heroes who it's okay to tell stories about? In 1947, the year Elaine Slott met Lucky Luciano, Willie Earle was taken out of police custody and brutally murdered, and white businesses raised funds for the legal defense of the men who lynched him. But I'm okay with using idealized cops and businessmen as heroes for fictional stories, and I feel similarly about mobsters. I don't want a media that accepts the idea that being law-abiding for its own sake is the sole important virtue, certainly. That would reek of fascism.
posted by Sequence at 5:06 AM on September 21, 2015 [15 favorites]
posted by Sequence at 5:06 AM on September 21, 2015 [15 favorites]
I've asked myself this every time I've been goaded into rewatching The Godfather or The Sopranos by trustworthy friends who tell me that there's epic storytelling to be found there…and then it's all just tacky, dreadful people with no vision in pursuit of nothing more substantial than the same old tired bourgeois fantasy that we're all supposed to buy into as the essence of The American Dream™. The criminals become the heroes because, rather than accepting how nonsensical that "dream" is, we just merge the innate moralizing self-hatred we have as a nation founded by puritanical churchninnies with our deranged national paranoia that it's the government and mysterious forces of control separating us from a tasteless happy life of plastic-covered luxury in the suburbs and live vicariously through breathless yellow journalism about a realm of superannuated high school bullies with combovers and absurd nicknames.
Mafia violence or Game of Thrones violence or the rest of that bellowing, Hollywood-gritty ilk just reminds me of when Star Trek got so desperate for new blood for their empire of beige that they turned an old metaphor for Cold War tension into a laughably improbable honor-obsessed warrior race dressed like a heavy metal band that spoke entirely in asthma attacks and only managed to reproduce through S&M…and then all the fans bought in and made that mess into an actual bankable thing of lazy corporate world-building.
To each their own, I guess, but I'd rather watch My Neighbor Totoro for the three hundred and twenty-seventh time with a snoring dog draped across my lap in a world where happiness and contentment can actually exist without violence, graft, or vicious machinations waiting in the wings to shoot up my pastoral humanity.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if more aspiring writers and journalists read Ursula Le Guin's "The Carrier Bag Theory Of Fiction" instead of just surrendering to the usual patriarchal default of heroes and anti-heroes and everyone else is just a nothing nobody loser because it's easier to sell shoot-em-ups than figure-stuff-outs.
posted by sonascope at 5:13 AM on September 21, 2015 [82 favorites]
Mafia violence or Game of Thrones violence or the rest of that bellowing, Hollywood-gritty ilk just reminds me of when Star Trek got so desperate for new blood for their empire of beige that they turned an old metaphor for Cold War tension into a laughably improbable honor-obsessed warrior race dressed like a heavy metal band that spoke entirely in asthma attacks and only managed to reproduce through S&M…and then all the fans bought in and made that mess into an actual bankable thing of lazy corporate world-building.
To each their own, I guess, but I'd rather watch My Neighbor Totoro for the three hundred and twenty-seventh time with a snoring dog draped across my lap in a world where happiness and contentment can actually exist without violence, graft, or vicious machinations waiting in the wings to shoot up my pastoral humanity.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if more aspiring writers and journalists read Ursula Le Guin's "The Carrier Bag Theory Of Fiction" instead of just surrendering to the usual patriarchal default of heroes and anti-heroes and everyone else is just a nothing nobody loser because it's easier to sell shoot-em-ups than figure-stuff-outs.
posted by sonascope at 5:13 AM on September 21, 2015 [82 favorites]
I think that it's definitely a much more complex picture than the one she paints. To start with, Charles Manson definitely has his fans (I don't know about Son of Sam). So do other serial killers. And the more romantic view of mobsters, at least in recent memory, is due almost entirely to The Godfather and the first sequel. There were some mobsters that tried to maintain the fiction that they were Robin Hoods of a sort; Al Capone opened soup kitchens during the Depression, and John Gotti used to put on a big (and highly illegal) fireworks display in his neighborhood on the Fourth of July. But romantic? Not really, not recently; GoodFellas started the trend of warts-and-all mobsters in movies, and that movie is twenty-five years old. It says something about your thesis when you describe someone like Arnold Rothstein as "mythic" and a reasonably well-informed reader (ahem) has to look them up in Wikipedia to find out who they were.
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:22 AM on September 21, 2015 [8 favorites]
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:22 AM on September 21, 2015 [8 favorites]
I would like to point out that Moonstruck is perhaps a dead giveaway as to why mafia movies are well loved.
Moonstruck is like a mafia trope movie without the mafia. Strong, passionate characters involved in admittedly soap-opera style shenanigans, but with amazingly quirky and deep characterization and incredibly quotable dialogue. Entertaining as all get out. The family love portrayed, even with the betrayals is (I think) incredibly attractive to people.
And no violence (well, besides those two slaps), guns or crime (a little sin, perhaps. I mean, what was that second thing, Loretta? that's a pretty big sin).
And I think Cher is definitely an anti-hero in that movie.
posted by valkane at 5:37 AM on September 21, 2015 [15 favorites]
Moonstruck is like a mafia trope movie without the mafia. Strong, passionate characters involved in admittedly soap-opera style shenanigans, but with amazingly quirky and deep characterization and incredibly quotable dialogue. Entertaining as all get out. The family love portrayed, even with the betrayals is (I think) incredibly attractive to people.
And no violence (well, besides those two slaps), guns or crime (a little sin, perhaps. I mean, what was that second thing, Loretta? that's a pretty big sin).
And I think Cher is definitely an anti-hero in that movie.
posted by valkane at 5:37 AM on September 21, 2015 [15 favorites]
There is a good deal of whitewashing that happens as historical events pass into legend. Most of the accounts of the mob we have are written from the point of view of the mobsters themselves, either as biographies or with the mobsters as main characters. The mobsters want to make themselves look good/successful, so their memories start to distort to puff up their positive qualities. Everyone is the main character in their own book.
I have a friend who wrote a book about a subject that has mainly been told via interview and recollection. Rather than rely on the memories of people 30 years after the fact, he focused on what they wrote at the time. There were a great number of variations between what people wrote then and now, to the point of people claiming that he put words in their mouths. He was able to point at an old zine or something and say, "No, you actually wrote this." and the reply would invariably be "That's not how I remember it."
The same could be said of the mob - there were not a whole lot of internal written records back then, so the memory of the winner could very easily be said to be the truth, even if it wasn't.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 5:37 AM on September 21, 2015 [8 favorites]
I have a friend who wrote a book about a subject that has mainly been told via interview and recollection. Rather than rely on the memories of people 30 years after the fact, he focused on what they wrote at the time. There were a great number of variations between what people wrote then and now, to the point of people claiming that he put words in their mouths. He was able to point at an old zine or something and say, "No, you actually wrote this." and the reply would invariably be "That's not how I remember it."
The same could be said of the mob - there were not a whole lot of internal written records back then, so the memory of the winner could very easily be said to be the truth, even if it wasn't.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 5:37 AM on September 21, 2015 [8 favorites]
While I'm reluctant to watch the Sopranos and even Narcos (I am conflicted about sympathizing with characters/people who, despite the rationale, caused so much suffering), I did watch the Godfather.
And I think many people saw the Godfather and thought to themselves - I'd like a piece of that action! The movie showed very little violence, and of that it was off-screen and/or cartoonish. All the protagonists were attractive and well-dressed, drove fancy cars, lived in opulence, and had relatively-decent table manners. It was a relatively bloodless, sweatless industry. You hardly saw the victims of their work. There were very few unattractive characters. In fact in the first part, they might have mentioned the actual details of "the business" just once. Perhaps this was the intent.
Compare this to the Italian book Gomorrah and its accompanying movie. Not very pleasing to the eye.
We also can't forget about race. It's a lot easier to hate people that don't look like you. If a movie was made in the same fashion (i.e. just the glamour, no rationale as to how they came about) about biker gangs, US inner-city gangs, or a gang in the middle of a Palestinian slum, I think it would be a lot easier for the majority of Westerners to be judgmental because there is less of a physical association to them. We look at Middle-Eastern princes living in opulence, we're critical. We look at North American "princes and princesses" living in opulence, we feature them on the front of magazines.
posted by bitteroldman at 5:40 AM on September 21, 2015 [14 favorites]
And I think many people saw the Godfather and thought to themselves - I'd like a piece of that action! The movie showed very little violence, and of that it was off-screen and/or cartoonish. All the protagonists were attractive and well-dressed, drove fancy cars, lived in opulence, and had relatively-decent table manners. It was a relatively bloodless, sweatless industry. You hardly saw the victims of their work. There were very few unattractive characters. In fact in the first part, they might have mentioned the actual details of "the business" just once. Perhaps this was the intent.
Compare this to the Italian book Gomorrah and its accompanying movie. Not very pleasing to the eye.
We also can't forget about race. It's a lot easier to hate people that don't look like you. If a movie was made in the same fashion (i.e. just the glamour, no rationale as to how they came about) about biker gangs, US inner-city gangs, or a gang in the middle of a Palestinian slum, I think it would be a lot easier for the majority of Westerners to be judgmental because there is less of a physical association to them. We look at Middle-Eastern princes living in opulence, we're critical. We look at North American "princes and princesses" living in opulence, we feature them on the front of magazines.
posted by bitteroldman at 5:40 AM on September 21, 2015 [14 favorites]
It would be interesting to read about the targets of this phenomenon outside the USA.
On the subject of yakuza movies, see here (even if the images don't display) and then here. Short story: yakuza movies come in two flavors, old-timey "chivalry" movies and, since the 60s, gritty and realistic.
Nowadays yakuza are in the news because of the disintegration of the Yamaguchi-gumi, the largest yakuza syndicate, so stuff is kind of happening in real time.
posted by sukeban at 5:42 AM on September 21, 2015 [5 favorites]
On the subject of yakuza movies, see here (even if the images don't display) and then here. Short story: yakuza movies come in two flavors, old-timey "chivalry" movies and, since the 60s, gritty and realistic.
Nowadays yakuza are in the news because of the disintegration of the Yamaguchi-gumi, the largest yakuza syndicate, so stuff is kind of happening in real time.
posted by sukeban at 5:42 AM on September 21, 2015 [5 favorites]
i've been reading about evolutionary ethnography recently, and it seems there's some kind of weird hardwired response in modern humans (i mean, the kind that have communities and social structures that are more complex than other, related animals) towards norms and social groups (this is also of interest in relation to metafilter itself).
anyway, i think that, related to this, there's an automatic interest in cohesive groups of humans. and the mafia are cohesive groups, while isolated psychopaths aren't. and if this has any truth in it at all then it implies there's also a difference between the "family" structure of the mafia and the "cult" structure led by manson.
ps there's a nice photo essay on youtube(!) about the yakuza that i saw recently. no idea where i got the link form. some documentary photographer got access. maybe the guardian linked to it?
posted by andrewcooke at 5:49 AM on September 21, 2015 [4 favorites]
anyway, i think that, related to this, there's an automatic interest in cohesive groups of humans. and the mafia are cohesive groups, while isolated psychopaths aren't. and if this has any truth in it at all then it implies there's also a difference between the "family" structure of the mafia and the "cult" structure led by manson.
ps there's a nice photo essay on youtube(!) about the yakuza that i saw recently. no idea where i got the link form. some documentary photographer got access. maybe the guardian linked to it?
posted by andrewcooke at 5:49 AM on September 21, 2015 [4 favorites]
I've noticed that people who admire mobsters admire them in the way they admire princes and kings. Feudalism was terrible for people, yet people love that shits. Democracy is known and boring, and everyone's reminded of its flaws every day, but not always of its benefits.
You can imagine that maybe you could escape all of your problems by diving into another system – a simpler one where guys solve their problems via swording or shooting, and then eat some spaghetti afterwards. Then they say cool stuff like "Leave the gun. Take the cannoli. That way we can't be traced by the stupid boring government and also my wife will be happy because I'm a regular man-guy like you that has to pick up pastries for the home ladies."
It reminds me of a divorced kid who is tired of Boring Weekday Democracy Mom and fancies spending all their time with Exciting Every-Other-Weekend Feudal Dad, who always takes them to a theme park or movie and says homework is for eggheads. Even though, early in divorced kids life, EEOWF Dad already proved he's irresponsible and horrible for them. But that was long ago, and the kid forgot.
posted by ignignokt at 5:57 AM on September 21, 2015 [14 favorites]
You can imagine that maybe you could escape all of your problems by diving into another system – a simpler one where guys solve their problems via swording or shooting, and then eat some spaghetti afterwards. Then they say cool stuff like "Leave the gun. Take the cannoli. That way we can't be traced by the stupid boring government and also my wife will be happy because I'm a regular man-guy like you that has to pick up pastries for the home ladies."
It reminds me of a divorced kid who is tired of Boring Weekday Democracy Mom and fancies spending all their time with Exciting Every-Other-Weekend Feudal Dad, who always takes them to a theme park or movie and says homework is for eggheads. Even though, early in divorced kids life, EEOWF Dad already proved he's irresponsible and horrible for them. But that was long ago, and the kid forgot.
posted by ignignokt at 5:57 AM on September 21, 2015 [14 favorites]
no one holds ... Charles Manson in high regard.
You've obviously never met a high school freshman stoner who just finished reading Helter Skelter.
posted by bondcliff at 5:58 AM on September 21, 2015 [16 favorites]
You've obviously never met a high school freshman stoner who just finished reading Helter Skelter.
posted by bondcliff at 5:58 AM on September 21, 2015 [16 favorites]
Of the Gangster Movie Big Ten, the only one that doesn’t have Joe Pesci, Al Pacino, or Robert De Niro in it is The Departed, yet none of them have all three in it. That’s a neat stat. I like that stat.
posted by bukvich at 5:59 AM on September 21, 2015 [8 favorites]
posted by bukvich at 5:59 AM on September 21, 2015 [8 favorites]
We've got several Jewish organized crime-types in my family's background, and one cousin married into a very famous mafia family, to boot. Attitudes among our relatives range from mild amusement, like the cousin who reminisced about playing with my great-uncle's bodyguards' guns, to extreme distaste. My father used to tell his students that we were a typical immigrant family: the second generation had the lawyer, the doctor, and the crook.
Al Capone opened soup kitchens during the Depression
The father of one late cousin-by-marriage drove a truck for Capone during Prohibition. My cousin had nothing but praise for Capone: paid well, kept his employees healthy, arranged for groceries to be delivered if there was a cash crunch, rewarded loyal employees with excellent retirement benefits. I did think about what happened to the not-so-loyal employees, but refrained from comment.
posted by thomas j wise at 6:04 AM on September 21, 2015 [9 favorites]
Al Capone opened soup kitchens during the Depression
The father of one late cousin-by-marriage drove a truck for Capone during Prohibition. My cousin had nothing but praise for Capone: paid well, kept his employees healthy, arranged for groceries to be delivered if there was a cash crunch, rewarded loyal employees with excellent retirement benefits. I did think about what happened to the not-so-loyal employees, but refrained from comment.
posted by thomas j wise at 6:04 AM on September 21, 2015 [9 favorites]
there's also a difference between the "family" structure of the mafia and the "cult" structure led by manson.
The Sopranos was basically about family structures from beginning to end. After a few episodes the crime bits could have been deleted and it wouldn't have made much difference. Breaking Bad started like that too (new baby, disabled son, teacher-pupil relationship etc).
posted by colie at 6:06 AM on September 21, 2015
The Sopranos was basically about family structures from beginning to end. After a few episodes the crime bits could have been deleted and it wouldn't have made much difference. Breaking Bad started like that too (new baby, disabled son, teacher-pupil relationship etc).
posted by colie at 6:06 AM on September 21, 2015
Interesting that Sons of Anarchy, which was about an outlaw motorcycle gang, was also all about family, even though that's not an obvious theme for that kind of organization. I think you may be on to something with the family business thing.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:08 AM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:08 AM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
Has no one here seen Hannibal? Jeez!
posted by SPrintF at 6:12 AM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by SPrintF at 6:12 AM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
I think people also admire mobsters because they're imagined to be very rich, because it's possible to enjoy retro evil that would not be okay in the real world (rape doesn't seem quite so bad when it's mobsters in retro clothes, for instance) and at the same time because they're seen as a variant on social bandits.
I surmise that if there's anything unique to American mob-worship, it has to do with our general distrust of the state. The article gets at this a bit, but as a country we do tend to assume that the state is ipso facto bad, hypocritical and incompetent, and that private/charitable/imaginary-mob systems of social support are going to be better.
posted by Frowner at 6:18 AM on September 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
I surmise that if there's anything unique to American mob-worship, it has to do with our general distrust of the state. The article gets at this a bit, but as a country we do tend to assume that the state is ipso facto bad, hypocritical and incompetent, and that private/charitable/imaginary-mob systems of social support are going to be better.
posted by Frowner at 6:18 AM on September 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
There's an interesting book called The Crooked Ladder (mentioned in this article by Malcolm Gladwell on the subject) that argues that organized crime in the first half of the twentieth century in the US served as a way for certain ethnic minorities (Italians, Jews, and Irish, mainly) to achieve the same kind of upward mobility that native-born whites enjoyed and was often denied to those minorities through more legitimate means. It may be that fondness for gangsters is driven in part by how stories about them present a funhouse mirror version of the American Dream: instead of hard work and conformity to social norms leading to success, it's breaking the rules, and maybe breaking some kneecaps, that gets you the life you've always wanted. Think also of Americans' fascination with con artists, from The Sting to Catch Me If You Can.
posted by Cash4Lead at 6:21 AM on September 21, 2015 [7 favorites]
posted by Cash4Lead at 6:21 AM on September 21, 2015 [7 favorites]
> The movie showed very little violence, and of that it was off-screen and/or cartoonish.
I haven't seen The Godfather in a while, but...there's the Italian restaurant scene, the guy who gets strangled to death, the horse's head, and the massacre montage towards the end which includes a naked man and woman being machine gunned to death in their bed and another guy getting shot in the eye.
I will grant you that James Caan getting shot 10,000 times at the toll booth could be considered somewhat cartoonish.
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:29 AM on September 21, 2015 [4 favorites]
I haven't seen The Godfather in a while, but...there's the Italian restaurant scene, the guy who gets strangled to death, the horse's head, and the massacre montage towards the end which includes a naked man and woman being machine gunned to death in their bed and another guy getting shot in the eye.
I will grant you that James Caan getting shot 10,000 times at the toll booth could be considered somewhat cartoonish.
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:29 AM on September 21, 2015 [4 favorites]
People are super into serial killers (I mean, a show as terrible as Criminal Minds just keeps going and going and going) but I don't think they are so publicly willing to admit that they admire or romanticize them. If you admire a serial killer you've got a problem, and you probably shouldn't tell people this fact about yourself, but it's not at all strange to be fascinated and weirdly drawn to their stories. On the other hand, people openly want to be Scarface, or Michael Corleone. They would be proud to be like them and they know that others would envy them for being like them. I think that's an important distinction.
But yeah, I agree with sonascope's sentiment. It's not just psychological distance and an admiration of their old-fashioned chivalric codes of honor, especially since those codes are so easily and often broken: if you fuck with their money, it doesn't matter that you're family. No, there's something really capitalist, authoritarian and proto-fascist about our admiration of mobsters, who despite their alleged love of family, are cold, calculating, heartless men who place money over human life in the most immediate way. They literally kill you because you fail to pay them. Their toughness is really a deep coldness. Perhaps we love them because we feel some of that coldness in ourselves, and wish we didn't have to fight it. It should be no surprise that people love Trump, given how much they love, say, Tommy DeVito, because so many of us just want to steamroll over anyone who gets in our way on our grasping path for material happytimes. I thought that an admirable aspect of the Sopranos was the way in which they showed that Tony was really just a sociopathic narcissist incapable of real fellow-feeling. And yet, somehow, I still fucking love to watch him and all his ilk.
posted by dis_integration at 6:30 AM on September 21, 2015 [7 favorites]
But yeah, I agree with sonascope's sentiment. It's not just psychological distance and an admiration of their old-fashioned chivalric codes of honor, especially since those codes are so easily and often broken: if you fuck with their money, it doesn't matter that you're family. No, there's something really capitalist, authoritarian and proto-fascist about our admiration of mobsters, who despite their alleged love of family, are cold, calculating, heartless men who place money over human life in the most immediate way. They literally kill you because you fail to pay them. Their toughness is really a deep coldness. Perhaps we love them because we feel some of that coldness in ourselves, and wish we didn't have to fight it. It should be no surprise that people love Trump, given how much they love, say, Tommy DeVito, because so many of us just want to steamroll over anyone who gets in our way on our grasping path for material happytimes. I thought that an admirable aspect of the Sopranos was the way in which they showed that Tony was really just a sociopathic narcissist incapable of real fellow-feeling. And yet, somehow, I still fucking love to watch him and all his ilk.
posted by dis_integration at 6:30 AM on September 21, 2015 [7 favorites]
I've always wondered why small, family-owned Italian restaurants have posters from mob movies on the wall...not that Fellini is any less ~problematic, but I'm a little surprised at the lack of Mastroianni or Sophia Loren in those spaces.
posted by pxe2000 at 6:34 AM on September 21, 2015
posted by pxe2000 at 6:34 AM on September 21, 2015
To answer using another New Yorker article: because the history of (white) organized crime in the United States is a feel-good rags-to-riches story.
“This is one of the most interesting things about the Mafia,” Jacobs went on. “They did business and cooperated. They weren’t trying to smash everybody. They created these alliances and maintained these equilibriums. . . . You’d think that they would keep expanding their reach.”
They didn’t, though, because they didn’t think of themselves as ordinary criminals. That was for their fathers and grandfathers, who murderously roamed the streets of New York. Avellino wanted to be in the open, not in the shadows. He wanted to be integrated into the real world, not isolated from it. The P.S.I. was a sloppy, occasionally lethal but nonetheless purposeful dress rehearsal for legitimacy. That was Merton’s and Ianni’s point. The gangster, left to his own devices, grows up and goes away. A generation ago, we permitted that evolution. We don’t anymore. Old Giuseppe Lupollo was given that opportunity; Mike and Chuck were not.
“The pioneers of American capitalism were not graduated from Harvard’s School of Business Administration,” the sociologist Daniel Bell wrote, fifty years ago, in a passage that could easily serve as Goffman’s epilogue:
The early settlers and founding fathers, as well as those who “won the West” and built up cattle, mining and other fortunes, often did so by shady speculations and a not inconsiderable amount of violence. They ignored, circumvented, or stretched the law when it stood in the way of America’s destiny and their own—or were themselves the law when it served their purposes. This has not prevented them and their descendants from feeling proper moral outrage when, under the changed circumstances of the crowded urban environments, latecomers pursued equally ruthless tactics.
posted by AndrewInDC at 6:37 AM on September 21, 2015 [9 favorites]
“This is one of the most interesting things about the Mafia,” Jacobs went on. “They did business and cooperated. They weren’t trying to smash everybody. They created these alliances and maintained these equilibriums. . . . You’d think that they would keep expanding their reach.”
They didn’t, though, because they didn’t think of themselves as ordinary criminals. That was for their fathers and grandfathers, who murderously roamed the streets of New York. Avellino wanted to be in the open, not in the shadows. He wanted to be integrated into the real world, not isolated from it. The P.S.I. was a sloppy, occasionally lethal but nonetheless purposeful dress rehearsal for legitimacy. That was Merton’s and Ianni’s point. The gangster, left to his own devices, grows up and goes away. A generation ago, we permitted that evolution. We don’t anymore. Old Giuseppe Lupollo was given that opportunity; Mike and Chuck were not.
“The pioneers of American capitalism were not graduated from Harvard’s School of Business Administration,” the sociologist Daniel Bell wrote, fifty years ago, in a passage that could easily serve as Goffman’s epilogue:
The early settlers and founding fathers, as well as those who “won the West” and built up cattle, mining and other fortunes, often did so by shady speculations and a not inconsiderable amount of violence. They ignored, circumvented, or stretched the law when it stood in the way of America’s destiny and their own—or were themselves the law when it served their purposes. This has not prevented them and their descendants from feeling proper moral outrage when, under the changed circumstances of the crowded urban environments, latecomers pursued equally ruthless tactics.
posted by AndrewInDC at 6:37 AM on September 21, 2015 [9 favorites]
How is it any different from any other six-year-old's frustrated power fantasy? "One day I'll be big and rich and have a hundred guns and then nobody will tell me what to do!"
Is it any different from wanting to be Batman (a filthy-rich brutal vigilante who is above the law)?
posted by overeducated_alligator at 6:37 AM on September 21, 2015 [6 favorites]
Is it any different from wanting to be Batman (a filthy-rich brutal vigilante who is above the law)?
posted by overeducated_alligator at 6:37 AM on September 21, 2015 [6 favorites]
“By and large, people are under the impression that if they don’t have any dealings with stuff the mob deals with—no drugs, no borrowing money, no illegal gaming—they have nothing to fear from organized crime,”
This is mostly true, unless you catch their attention with a successful business that will suddenly need one of their "insurance policies" to avoid any unfortunate accidents.
posted by dr_dank at 6:38 AM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
This is mostly true, unless you catch their attention with a successful business that will suddenly need one of their "insurance policies" to avoid any unfortunate accidents.
posted by dr_dank at 6:38 AM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
A cousin of my grandmother (my family never had contact with these people) was an honest-to-god mobster. He was indicted for selling meth and later for his part in the murder of a union leader. He spent a couple of decades in prison. When he got out, he was shot in his Lincoln Town Car driving down the streets of Philadelphia, in broad daylight. The murder is unsolved. His son has spent 31 years in federal prison, and is in for life without parole, for a first-time nonviolent marijuana offense. You can bet your ass it's because of who his father is. (It was also quite a lot of marijuana, but seriously.)
I saw pictures of my grandmother's cousin after his murder in the Inquirer. Took all the romance out of the whole notion for me. I don't watch mob movies any more, it's all lies. They're just thugs.
posted by graymouser at 6:48 AM on September 21, 2015 [5 favorites]
I saw pictures of my grandmother's cousin after his murder in the Inquirer. Took all the romance out of the whole notion for me. I don't watch mob movies any more, it's all lies. They're just thugs.
posted by graymouser at 6:48 AM on September 21, 2015 [5 favorites]
It's not something my family discusses often, but I've got some mobsters in my history as well. Like others have said in this thread, organized crime was a way for oppressed minorities--in this case, Jews--to climb up the American ladder. My great-grandfather, whom I never knew, was a bootlegger during Prohibition, with false floorboards in his car and everything. He would send his oldest son, my late great-uncle Charlie (whom I do remember as being a very old man), into speakeasies to make the deliveries from hidden tanks strapped under his clothes. After the repeal, he went straight and opened up some liquor stores, some of which are still in business and, although they were sold off decades ago, still bear the family name.
I'm also a distant relative of Genghis Khan. I don't know what to do with any of this information.
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:58 AM on September 21, 2015 [6 favorites]
I'm also a distant relative of Genghis Khan. I don't know what to do with any of this information.
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:58 AM on September 21, 2015 [6 favorites]
I fucking hate mob stories. I don't find them the least bit romantic or heroic. I can see though where some folk get their notions. It's not the honor bullshit, I mean, come on, cold blooded murder has no honor. It's that they take power back from the rich and mighty that many of us aspire to in our not so secret hearts. They are ours, cops are theirs. It isn't that cops come from money of course, but they've chosen the side of the powerful and wealthy over the powerless, us.
Still, I find mob stories (and biker stories, which are really just mob stories in leather) to be violent, nasty fantasies, brutish, and for me, too damned close to reality to be an entertainment.
posted by evilDoug at 7:02 AM on September 21, 2015 [4 favorites]
Still, I find mob stories (and biker stories, which are really just mob stories in leather) to be violent, nasty fantasies, brutish, and for me, too damned close to reality to be an entertainment.
posted by evilDoug at 7:02 AM on September 21, 2015 [4 favorites]
I saw Black Mass this weekend* and it's rather interestingly put-together... I don't think it really glamorizes Whitey Bulger to the extent that other mob movies glamorize their heroes. The screenplay is shaped to give Whitey "relatable moments", like "here's Whitey petting his mom's cat", "here's Whitey's son dying", "here's his mom's funeral" but Johnny Depp plays the character so opaquely that it rubs against the sympathetic screenplay moments. It's really different from say, the Jack Nicholson portrayal of the quasi-Whitey in The Departed--which I think is a portrayal that reads "I'm having fun acting this character! You're having fun watching this character! This is a fun thriller!" I think Depp does a really good job, but he plays Whitey as a vortex of evil in the middle of the screen.
*No previews at the Somerville Theatre: the manager got on stage and asked the trivia question "Who was the leader of the Winter Hill gang before Whitey Bulger? And what Somerville movie house was he coming out of when he was shot?" A guy with the quintessential townie accent called it out from the balcony, and won free Skittles and a movie pass.
posted by Hypatia at 7:11 AM on September 21, 2015 [7 favorites]
*No previews at the Somerville Theatre: the manager got on stage and asked the trivia question "Who was the leader of the Winter Hill gang before Whitey Bulger? And what Somerville movie house was he coming out of when he was shot?" A guy with the quintessential townie accent called it out from the balcony, and won free Skittles and a movie pass.
posted by Hypatia at 7:11 AM on September 21, 2015 [7 favorites]
I'm working my way through Boardwalk Empire this month and I was surprised that the Al Capone character was written as a coked-up maniac. Isn't he usually portrayed as the gentleman gangster in films?
posted by Drab_Parts at 7:13 AM on September 21, 2015
posted by Drab_Parts at 7:13 AM on September 21, 2015
The movie showed very little violence, and of that it was off-screen and/or cartoonish.
Well, "cartoonish" only in comparison to the sort of ultra-real-and-extreme-to-the-point-of-being-pornagraphic violence of today's films. The scene of Sonny getting machine-gunned was, at the time, considered shockingly realistic.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:15 AM on September 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
Well, "cartoonish" only in comparison to the sort of ultra-real-and-extreme-to-the-point-of-being-pornagraphic violence of today's films. The scene of Sonny getting machine-gunned was, at the time, considered shockingly realistic.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:15 AM on September 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
It's funny, because I watch, say, gangster movies or Game of Thrones because My Neighbor Totoro is far closer reflection of my actual life than Mean Streets. Gangster shows are my escapism.
Which is one reason Sons of Anarchy bothered me so much. Jax is just like a guy I knew in high school. Every time I saw Charlie Hunnam, I saw the dipshit emoting guy I knew, completely killing my ability to buy the story line. (Never mind how unbelievable the show already was.)
I do find the underdog aspect of gangster stories interesting because they are often portrayed as outsiders, wanting to play society's game, but being locked out, so go about making a game with their own rules. "Going legit", but being unable to extract themselves from their past is a fairly recurring theme. Food for a good story in its own right, along with all the foibles one would expect such people exhibit. And the Robin Hood syndrome also seems to be a recurring theme in many infamous real life gangsters, along with their dramatized counterparts. I find characters like Tony Soprano and Walter White quite amusing in their thought processes, their failings, their strengths. Same goes for characters based on historical gangsters.
I suspect people sometimes identify with ethnicity depicted, but I also tend to think this is pretty superficial, and indulged from a pretty safe distance.
posted by 2N2222 at 7:18 AM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
Which is one reason Sons of Anarchy bothered me so much. Jax is just like a guy I knew in high school. Every time I saw Charlie Hunnam, I saw the dipshit emoting guy I knew, completely killing my ability to buy the story line. (Never mind how unbelievable the show already was.)
I do find the underdog aspect of gangster stories interesting because they are often portrayed as outsiders, wanting to play society's game, but being locked out, so go about making a game with their own rules. "Going legit", but being unable to extract themselves from their past is a fairly recurring theme. Food for a good story in its own right, along with all the foibles one would expect such people exhibit. And the Robin Hood syndrome also seems to be a recurring theme in many infamous real life gangsters, along with their dramatized counterparts. I find characters like Tony Soprano and Walter White quite amusing in their thought processes, their failings, their strengths. Same goes for characters based on historical gangsters.
I suspect people sometimes identify with ethnicity depicted, but I also tend to think this is pretty superficial, and indulged from a pretty safe distance.
posted by 2N2222 at 7:18 AM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
I had an aunt by marriage whose mother was a Capone, and my best friend from school used to work for a legitimate business owned by the Gambinos and became friends with one of them. My uncles, on the other hand, are just scary WASPs.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:18 AM on September 21, 2015
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:18 AM on September 21, 2015
“By and large, people are under the impression that if they don’t have any dealings with stuff the mob deals with—no drugs, no borrowing money, no illegal gaming—they have nothing to fear from organized crime,”
Except the ongoing loss of their money. But as with zero interest rates, if you don't see the cost, you find it easier to bear.
It isn't that cops come from money of course, but they've chosen the side of the powerful and wealthy over the powerless, us.
You would prefer to live in society without police? You may do, for all I know. Public policing is, after all, a relatively modern invention.
posted by IndigoJones at 7:22 AM on September 21, 2015
Except the ongoing loss of their money. But as with zero interest rates, if you don't see the cost, you find it easier to bear.
It isn't that cops come from money of course, but they've chosen the side of the powerful and wealthy over the powerless, us.
You would prefer to live in society without police? You may do, for all I know. Public policing is, after all, a relatively modern invention.
posted by IndigoJones at 7:22 AM on September 21, 2015
Depicting humanized crime in general is a standard form in drama, supposedly an inner conflict put in check by a noble goal. Where it is now in long form television's crime drama is a new development, especially given the ethnic stereotyping that serves up expectations. What people are really seeing with their lizard brains is the drama of radically expanded freedom, such as instant revenge; and not just as a fantasy, but firmly grounded in reality or history, otherwise it wouldn't be real enough. This says a lot about our conditions as drones and would-be slaves to really connect with the characterization, and showing piles of cash is important too.
posted by Brian B. at 7:24 AM on September 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by Brian B. at 7:24 AM on September 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
People are super into serial killers (I mean, a show as terrible as Criminal Minds just keeps going and going and going) but I don't think they are so publicly willing to admit that they admire or romanticize them.
Dexter. Hannibal. Just to keep examples relatively recent.
The gangster, left to his own devices, grows up and goes away. A generation ago, we permitted that evolution. We don’t anymore. Old Giuseppe Lupollo was given that opportunity; Mike and Chuck were not.
Yeah, every truly successful criminal eventually learns the One Big Rule: all the best crimes are legal. And then, if they're still alive and not in prison, they very quickly leave the criminal life. I'm reminded of the (fictional) example of Stringer Bell from The Wire, whose goal was roughly the same.
The gangster/mob story offers an alternative lifestyle, and those are always attractive. Pirates were the target of this sort of romanticization, as were bandits (many of whom ended up as straight-up heroic culture heroes, like Robin Hood). This is particularly attractive to people who feel trapped in the society they are actually in, and I don't think that you can tie to directly to "distance" from daily life: the cult of the kingpin is alive in inner city black culture, despite the very in-your-face reality. And its because people want to see that a way up exists, since the mainstream options are only occasionally available.
I think that another key difference between the gangster and the serial killer/monster is precisely that the latter is (usually) a lone figure. We want not just wealth and power, but to be surrounded by people who respect us, who are allies, who partake in the same world and share the same values. That's what the mob offers (what it really did offer for at least some of its denizens, and claimed to offer for many more), that's what a lot of people are missing today, and that's not something you can get from being a violent sociopath. Being part of the Tony Soprano gang is a lot like being part of the Merry Men, or the crew of the Jolly Roger, in that sense at least. Hell, what's the attraction of ISIS, or terrorist groups more generally? What was the attraction of Al Qaeda, or the Red Army Faction, or the Klan? It's not just power. It's respect, it's people who surround you and buffer you against alienation. And it can be and often is directed towards groups whose presence is very real, immediate and dangerous.
It's maybe a bit of a side element, but article also reminded me a bit of the way people have reacted to Donald Trump's overt references to corruption and shady dealings in his own life. The way he "owns up" (in limited and carefully chosen ways, at least) to backroom dealing and what most people would consider corruption. There's a sort of attraction to an honest criminal versus the sort of complex legal dealings which define much of our social and economic life and which seem geared to ensnare ordinary folks. All politicians are crooked, goes the thinking, why not choose the honest crook? And that's what we tend to see in a lot of gangster films - men (almost always men) who don't pretend to be better than they are, who acknowledge and participate in corruption, but who are not hypocrites (this is the portrayal, of course, not at all the reality). I think of the James Ellroy Underground novels, which tie into one vast web of corruption the world of organized crime and that of the highest governmental and financial elites - one can be horrified by the former, but contempt tends to be directed towards the latter.
I think there's a lot of different bits going into why we like gangster fiction in all its forms, and don't think it's going away.
posted by AdamCSnider at 7:33 AM on September 21, 2015 [7 favorites]
Dexter. Hannibal. Just to keep examples relatively recent.
The gangster, left to his own devices, grows up and goes away. A generation ago, we permitted that evolution. We don’t anymore. Old Giuseppe Lupollo was given that opportunity; Mike and Chuck were not.
Yeah, every truly successful criminal eventually learns the One Big Rule: all the best crimes are legal. And then, if they're still alive and not in prison, they very quickly leave the criminal life. I'm reminded of the (fictional) example of Stringer Bell from The Wire, whose goal was roughly the same.
The gangster/mob story offers an alternative lifestyle, and those are always attractive. Pirates were the target of this sort of romanticization, as were bandits (many of whom ended up as straight-up heroic culture heroes, like Robin Hood). This is particularly attractive to people who feel trapped in the society they are actually in, and I don't think that you can tie to directly to "distance" from daily life: the cult of the kingpin is alive in inner city black culture, despite the very in-your-face reality. And its because people want to see that a way up exists, since the mainstream options are only occasionally available.
I think that another key difference between the gangster and the serial killer/monster is precisely that the latter is (usually) a lone figure. We want not just wealth and power, but to be surrounded by people who respect us, who are allies, who partake in the same world and share the same values. That's what the mob offers (what it really did offer for at least some of its denizens, and claimed to offer for many more), that's what a lot of people are missing today, and that's not something you can get from being a violent sociopath. Being part of the Tony Soprano gang is a lot like being part of the Merry Men, or the crew of the Jolly Roger, in that sense at least. Hell, what's the attraction of ISIS, or terrorist groups more generally? What was the attraction of Al Qaeda, or the Red Army Faction, or the Klan? It's not just power. It's respect, it's people who surround you and buffer you against alienation. And it can be and often is directed towards groups whose presence is very real, immediate and dangerous.
It's maybe a bit of a side element, but article also reminded me a bit of the way people have reacted to Donald Trump's overt references to corruption and shady dealings in his own life. The way he "owns up" (in limited and carefully chosen ways, at least) to backroom dealing and what most people would consider corruption. There's a sort of attraction to an honest criminal versus the sort of complex legal dealings which define much of our social and economic life and which seem geared to ensnare ordinary folks. All politicians are crooked, goes the thinking, why not choose the honest crook? And that's what we tend to see in a lot of gangster films - men (almost always men) who don't pretend to be better than they are, who acknowledge and participate in corruption, but who are not hypocrites (this is the portrayal, of course, not at all the reality). I think of the James Ellroy Underground novels, which tie into one vast web of corruption the world of organized crime and that of the highest governmental and financial elites - one can be horrified by the former, but contempt tends to be directed towards the latter.
I think there's a lot of different bits going into why we like gangster fiction in all its forms, and don't think it's going away.
posted by AdamCSnider at 7:33 AM on September 21, 2015 [7 favorites]
That piece of shit who killed Trayvon Martin, and then walked because he's white, and now he's partners in a gun shop, and it's all a big funny joke?
If I'm a member of Trayvons family, I'd want to see this human garbage take a bullet through his heart.
But Trayvon's family is powerless. They cannot right this terrible injustice.
If Travon's family was friends of Al Capone, the case wouldn't even have gone to trial. Because Zimmerman would have been dead within a week.
Yes, the family would owe Capone, for sure; they'd be in his debt. But they would thank him for being their friend.
I'd write him a love letter.
That's why people like that sort of criminal.
posted by dancestoblue at 7:40 AM on September 21, 2015 [3 favorites]
If I'm a member of Trayvons family, I'd want to see this human garbage take a bullet through his heart.
But Trayvon's family is powerless. They cannot right this terrible injustice.
If Travon's family was friends of Al Capone, the case wouldn't even have gone to trial. Because Zimmerman would have been dead within a week.
Yes, the family would owe Capone, for sure; they'd be in his debt. But they would thank him for being their friend.
I'd write him a love letter.
That's why people like that sort of criminal.
posted by dancestoblue at 7:40 AM on September 21, 2015 [3 favorites]
If we're doing confessions, my great grandfather was a criminal. Racketeering, robbery, extortion, illegal gambling. Everybody adored him, then one day he was dead at 45.
posted by colie at 7:40 AM on September 21, 2015
posted by colie at 7:40 AM on September 21, 2015
Faint of Butt: After the repeal, he went straight and opened up some liquor stores, some of which are still in business and, although they were sold off decades ago, still bear the family name.
There are liquor store called "Butt Liquor"? For real?
posted by wenestvedt at 7:45 AM on September 21, 2015 [14 favorites]
There are liquor store called "Butt Liquor"? For real?
posted by wenestvedt at 7:45 AM on September 21, 2015 [14 favorites]
Why are members of the Italian mafia treated more like celebrities than unsavory criminals?
Obviously because most of us are sick, twisted SOBs.
Not us here on MeFi, kapeesh.
posted by Twang at 7:52 AM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
Obviously because most of us are sick, twisted SOBs.
Not us here on MeFi, kapeesh.
posted by Twang at 7:52 AM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
Why are members of the Italian mafia treated more like celebrities than unsavory criminals?
They command respect in their organizations, and that's what most people are jealous of.
posted by Brian B. at 8:00 AM on September 21, 2015
They command respect in their organizations, and that's what most people are jealous of.
posted by Brian B. at 8:00 AM on September 21, 2015
* Spoler alert for Godfather *
While there was very little love for Godfather 3, it was quite interesting to watch everything unravel for Michael Corleone (although to me it started in the second part). Wife gone. Daughter dead. Son probably estranged. And to watch him die, alone, in a foreign country, in a stone cold abandoned estate, among dogs and oranges.
Compare that do Vito Corleone who died with his cherished grandchild, at home in his backyard. (also among oranges). Lavish funeral.
I almost wonder if this was one of the reasons why the third part of the movie wasn't loved as much (among the other reasons as well)
posted by bitteroldman at 8:02 AM on September 21, 2015 [7 favorites]
While there was very little love for Godfather 3, it was quite interesting to watch everything unravel for Michael Corleone (although to me it started in the second part). Wife gone. Daughter dead. Son probably estranged. And to watch him die, alone, in a foreign country, in a stone cold abandoned estate, among dogs and oranges.
Compare that do Vito Corleone who died with his cherished grandchild, at home in his backyard. (also among oranges). Lavish funeral.
I almost wonder if this was one of the reasons why the third part of the movie wasn't loved as much (among the other reasons as well)
posted by bitteroldman at 8:02 AM on September 21, 2015 [7 favorites]
I do find the underdog aspect of gangster stories interesting because they are often portrayed as outsiders, wanting to play society's game, but being locked out, so go about making a game with their own rules.
As a member of a class that was traditionally locked out of society's money and power games and still is to some degree, I think most stories about the mafia are reasonably faithful to life in depicting their view and treatment of us (women) as a worthless subspecies, irrelevant and shut out of the formal avenues of power at best, property at second best, disobedient property at very worst. As was already said, very Game of Thrones in that way. I think that the reality of organized crime probably compares to the fiction in much the same way that the real medieval period compares to GoT in terms of gender roles; absolute contempt for women codified into the very unequal rules, but some leeway in day-to-day life for actual human women to get around them and work in the system, especially if they're born into or marry into the right family. and that realm of possibilities holds no interest for that majority of the fans who are in it to see the rules enforced as universally and as hard as possible.
I think to much (not all, sure) of the comfortable male audience for gangster drama, the appeal's got nothing to do with pretending they're rebels or outsiders; it's the same as the appeal of a masonic lodge or the more unpleasant sorts of frats or a D&D group with no girls in it; everything but EVERYTHING has a dumb and elaborate rule, and the approval and orders of more powerful men is your whole world.
For women fans of the stuff, there are some legitimate dirty outlaw thrills to be had; there's always a voyeuristic power-fantasy aspect to getting wound up in stories nobody's watching you watch, the way women's tastes for other sorts of fantasies is always inspected to figure out exactly what pathologies they betray. True crime is a women's genre in many ways, but gang/mob crime stories aren't really; it's an area of privacy in the imagination, which is a big draw; the way pirate and sailor stories were before everybody noticed that women love those.
for me personally, it's the nicknames and the completely and totally bizarre parts, most of which I didn't know about until fairly recently as the Godfather films&book are so repellent. I'm sure I would have had a teenage mafia phase if I'd known about Vincent Gigante back then.
posted by queenofbithynia at 8:02 AM on September 21, 2015 [6 favorites]
As a member of a class that was traditionally locked out of society's money and power games and still is to some degree, I think most stories about the mafia are reasonably faithful to life in depicting their view and treatment of us (women) as a worthless subspecies, irrelevant and shut out of the formal avenues of power at best, property at second best, disobedient property at very worst. As was already said, very Game of Thrones in that way. I think that the reality of organized crime probably compares to the fiction in much the same way that the real medieval period compares to GoT in terms of gender roles; absolute contempt for women codified into the very unequal rules, but some leeway in day-to-day life for actual human women to get around them and work in the system, especially if they're born into or marry into the right family. and that realm of possibilities holds no interest for that majority of the fans who are in it to see the rules enforced as universally and as hard as possible.
I think to much (not all, sure) of the comfortable male audience for gangster drama, the appeal's got nothing to do with pretending they're rebels or outsiders; it's the same as the appeal of a masonic lodge or the more unpleasant sorts of frats or a D&D group with no girls in it; everything but EVERYTHING has a dumb and elaborate rule, and the approval and orders of more powerful men is your whole world.
For women fans of the stuff, there are some legitimate dirty outlaw thrills to be had; there's always a voyeuristic power-fantasy aspect to getting wound up in stories nobody's watching you watch, the way women's tastes for other sorts of fantasies is always inspected to figure out exactly what pathologies they betray. True crime is a women's genre in many ways, but gang/mob crime stories aren't really; it's an area of privacy in the imagination, which is a big draw; the way pirate and sailor stories were before everybody noticed that women love those.
for me personally, it's the nicknames and the completely and totally bizarre parts, most of which I didn't know about until fairly recently as the Godfather films&book are so repellent. I'm sure I would have had a teenage mafia phase if I'd known about Vincent Gigante back then.
posted by queenofbithynia at 8:02 AM on September 21, 2015 [6 favorites]
There are liquor store called "Butt Liquor"? For real?
Well, almost. Maybe Faint Of Butt's real last name is Bunghole.
posted by briank at 8:11 AM on September 21, 2015 [4 favorites]
Well, almost. Maybe Faint Of Butt's real last name is Bunghole.
posted by briank at 8:11 AM on September 21, 2015 [4 favorites]
It would be interesting to see what would happen if more aspiring writers and journalists read Ursula Le Guin's "The Carrier Bag Theory Of Fiction"
Flagged as fantastic. That Le Guin essay deserves a front-page post of its own.
posted by straight at 8:11 AM on September 21, 2015 [3 favorites]
Flagged as fantastic. That Le Guin essay deserves a front-page post of its own.
posted by straight at 8:11 AM on September 21, 2015 [3 favorites]
wenestvedt: "There are liquor store called "Butt Liquor"? For real?"
No saying there is a relation: Mr Butts
posted by Mitheral at 8:12 AM on September 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
No saying there is a relation: Mr Butts
posted by Mitheral at 8:12 AM on September 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
When gobs of rules are stupid, people who rebel against rules in principle are looked up to. In stories. In real life we follow all the stupid rules if we know what's good for us.
posted by bukvich at 8:13 AM on September 21, 2015
posted by bukvich at 8:13 AM on September 21, 2015
It would be interesting to take this further and see a comparison of how organized crime is romanticized/glamorized in film and society throughout different cultures. Japan's Yakuza have already been mentioned, but I would say that the 'mob film' genre is just as established, if not more, in India as it is in America. For countries like China and the pre- and post-Soviet Union it may be a slightly tougher to completely gauge as the governments each in their own way have had more direct control/influence on the media historically. From the couple of films that I've seen and what I've read, the mob genre is also popular in
I think that the reality of organized crime probably compares to the fiction in much the same way that the real medieval period compares to GoT in terms of gender roles
It's not just gender roles that parallel, organized crime also echoes a great deal of the economic and political power struggles in Europe from the post-dark ages until about the early 18th century, when governments became more centralized and the power of regional feudal leaders became less governmental and shifted more to political- and economic-based power.
posted by chambers at 8:16 AM on September 21, 2015
I think that the reality of organized crime probably compares to the fiction in much the same way that the real medieval period compares to GoT in terms of gender roles
It's not just gender roles that parallel, organized crime also echoes a great deal of the economic and political power struggles in Europe from the post-dark ages until about the early 18th century, when governments became more centralized and the power of regional feudal leaders became less governmental and shifted more to political- and economic-based power.
posted by chambers at 8:16 AM on September 21, 2015
Interesting that Sons of Anarchy, which was about an outlaw motorcycle gang, was also all about family, even though that's not an obvious theme for that kind of organization.
Biker gangs, like other gangs, are often surrogate families for lost or rootless men.
posted by jonmc at 8:20 AM on September 21, 2015
Biker gangs, like other gangs, are often surrogate families for lost or rootless men.
posted by jonmc at 8:20 AM on September 21, 2015
I think Sons of Anarchy (and to a lesser extent Justified) was tailored to working class white people who couldn't closely identify with midatlantic Italians or inner city African Americans as the stars of their escapist fantasies.
posted by Ham Snadwich at 8:29 AM on September 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by Ham Snadwich at 8:29 AM on September 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
I like that this features a quotation from psychologist and aptronym-frontrunner Dr. Trope.
posted by davidjmcgee at 8:47 AM on September 21, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by davidjmcgee at 8:47 AM on September 21, 2015 [3 favorites]
It seems like the author is begging a question about the role of protagonists, and just assuming that people see them as aspirational.
I don't know the answer to that either, and I do know that a lot of people see fiction that way, but I also know that it's not universal.
This is something I had an ongoing thing with my mom about. She didn't understand how I could appreciate art that wasn't pretty and media that wasn't 'uplifting,' and I didn't understand how she didn't get tired of that sometimes.
I know it's pretty common for kids to identify heavily with protagonists in their stories, and that it can be a little risky to expose them to certain romanticized imagery about bad people. In fact, I have a deeply disturbing memory of reading something about that old reality show Growing up Gotti, and getting to the comments to see multiple apparently very young girls--like tweens--posting their contact information with appeals for John Gotti's grandsons to get in touch with them.
But most adults aren't in that developmental stage where they're focused on forming their own identity the way kids are. I'm a grownup. I am interested in stories about people I don't want to emulate, and that I would never invite over for dinner. I find it compelling to see flawed and sometimes just outright despicable characters portrayed sympathetically, in such a way that I can understand their motivations without demonizing them entirely like they're cartoon villains. It doesn't mean I admire them. They're not role models, they're character studies.
I mean, I'm not a big fan of mobster movies as a rule, but I wouldn't assume that those who do enjoy them actually admire the mobsters.
posted by ernielundquist at 9:08 AM on September 21, 2015 [3 favorites]
I don't know the answer to that either, and I do know that a lot of people see fiction that way, but I also know that it's not universal.
This is something I had an ongoing thing with my mom about. She didn't understand how I could appreciate art that wasn't pretty and media that wasn't 'uplifting,' and I didn't understand how she didn't get tired of that sometimes.
I know it's pretty common for kids to identify heavily with protagonists in their stories, and that it can be a little risky to expose them to certain romanticized imagery about bad people. In fact, I have a deeply disturbing memory of reading something about that old reality show Growing up Gotti, and getting to the comments to see multiple apparently very young girls--like tweens--posting their contact information with appeals for John Gotti's grandsons to get in touch with them.
But most adults aren't in that developmental stage where they're focused on forming their own identity the way kids are. I'm a grownup. I am interested in stories about people I don't want to emulate, and that I would never invite over for dinner. I find it compelling to see flawed and sometimes just outright despicable characters portrayed sympathetically, in such a way that I can understand their motivations without demonizing them entirely like they're cartoon villains. It doesn't mean I admire them. They're not role models, they're character studies.
I mean, I'm not a big fan of mobster movies as a rule, but I wouldn't assume that those who do enjoy them actually admire the mobsters.
posted by ernielundquist at 9:08 AM on September 21, 2015 [3 favorites]
Seems to me that Goodfellas is the most effective mob movie at humanizing gangsters, but it's also on my top five list of Most Horrifying Movies Ever Made. None of the things that make those guys seem more real also have the effect of making them more attractive or sympathetic. In my mind, anyway. They're all self-made werewolves that can turn savage at any moment and are happy to be that way. Does that make me deaf to the siren song of the romantic outlaw? Then so be it.
posted by Flexagon at 9:09 AM on September 21, 2015 [4 favorites]
posted by Flexagon at 9:09 AM on September 21, 2015 [4 favorites]
I'd rather watch My Neighbor Totoro for the three hundred and twenty-seventh time with a snoring dog draped across my lap in a world where happiness and contentment can actually exist without violence, graft, or vicious machinations waiting in the wings to shoot up my pastoral humanity.
In late, but this articulates so well how I feel that I wish I could favorite it QUITE A LOT.
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 9:20 AM on September 21, 2015
In late, but this articulates so well how I feel that I wish I could favorite it QUITE A LOT.
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 9:20 AM on September 21, 2015
The reason is simple. Watch the first few minutes of Goodfellas. The mob is glamourous. Compare the characters in Mafia movies to Charles Manson, who looks like he's a homeless person, or David Berkowitz, who was a letter carrier. Which do *you* want to be like?
posted by kevinbelt at 9:23 AM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by kevinbelt at 9:23 AM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
I think that another key difference between the gangster and the serial killer/monster is precisely that the latter is (usually) a lone figure We want not just wealth and power, but to be surrounded by people who respect us, who are allies, who partake in the same world and share the same values.
Then again, there are all those stories about rogue criminals going up against the entire mob - assassins and lone operators who derive their power from their alienation. Walter White is an example: he can't stand being an organization man, and sooner or later he destroys any family (criminal or otherwise) that crosses his path.
Other examples: Ghost Dog. Thief. John Wick. Drive. Road to Perdition. The Hunter/Point Blank/Payback/Parker.
posted by Iridic at 9:25 AM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
Then again, there are all those stories about rogue criminals going up against the entire mob - assassins and lone operators who derive their power from their alienation. Walter White is an example: he can't stand being an organization man, and sooner or later he destroys any family (criminal or otherwise) that crosses his path.
Other examples: Ghost Dog. Thief. John Wick. Drive. Road to Perdition. The Hunter/Point Blank/Payback/Parker.
posted by Iridic at 9:25 AM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
The first few minutes of Goodfellas features a grisly and stupid (non-business) murder and the movie ends with the protagonist becoming a rat and in his own words a 'shnook.' It's less glamorizing than most mob flicks.
Also just an observation, SOA does feature more non-whites interacting with the protagionists than any mob film you could name.
posted by jonmc at 9:40 AM on September 21, 2015
Also just an observation, SOA does feature more non-whites interacting with the protagionists than any mob film you could name.
posted by jonmc at 9:40 AM on September 21, 2015
In the United States, white is presumed to be good and not-white is presumed to be suspicious, just by default. The story of romanticized mobsters is the story of Irish, Jews and Italians becoming white, sloughing off their ethnic carapaces and being able to look back with fond nostalgia at their savage non-white past. Once you achieve whiteness, not only are you rendered pure in the here and now, but the deeds of your collective ancestors are retroactively purified, which is why we look back on confederates as heroes and patriots even though the people they are by definition traitors and why we as a nation refuse to condemn the various genocidal, colonialist, imperialist adventures of our ancestors. Compared to that horrific past, the mob were just bush league anyway. Speaking of Bush, as has been pointed out elsewhere, Cheney was straight gangster. "Shoot your buddy in the face and make him apologize" gangsta.
posted by xigxag at 9:45 AM on September 21, 2015 [8 favorites]
posted by xigxag at 9:45 AM on September 21, 2015 [8 favorites]
kevinbelt: Compare the characters in Mafia movies to Charles Manson, who looks like he's a homeless person, or David Berkowitz, who was a letter carrier. Which do *you* want to be like?
I'd say Berkowitz, but I'd think the talking to dogs thing would get old fast. For every well-spoken Lab that advocates murder is a yappy pomeranian who espouses the investment potential of Beanie Babies.
posted by dr_dank at 9:50 AM on September 21, 2015 [3 favorites]
I'd say Berkowitz, but I'd think the talking to dogs thing would get old fast. For every well-spoken Lab that advocates murder is a yappy pomeranian who espouses the investment potential of Beanie Babies.
posted by dr_dank at 9:50 AM on September 21, 2015 [3 favorites]
People like Wolf of Wall Street for the same reasons as Goodfellas. It's a story of the charming, sociopathic underdog taking what they want by immoral means, and being wildly successful at it, up until the inevitable finale when everything unravels. The rise to power and its hedonistic excesses appeal to the American id, while the final karmic retribution provides a moral fig leaf that excuses our vicarious enjoyment.
posted by dephlogisticated at 9:58 AM on September 21, 2015 [8 favorites]
posted by dephlogisticated at 9:58 AM on September 21, 2015 [8 favorites]
Gangsters aren't the only criminals that are glorified in film. Certain crimes are given a pass by Hollywood and others aren't. The most obvious candidates for unrealistic support are con artists (Sting, Grifters, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Catch Me If You Can, Matchstick Men, Focus, American Hustle, Confidence) and burglars, especially cat burglars, bank robbers and art thieves (too many to list, really). I don't think that the familial relationships in Mafia films really explain the phenomenon. We just like movies about charming rogues.
posted by Lame_username at 10:09 AM on September 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by Lame_username at 10:09 AM on September 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
Ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to be a mailman
But then you became disgruntled...
posted by jonmc at 10:11 AM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
But then you became disgruntled...
posted by jonmc at 10:11 AM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
It's a mystery to me, though the fetishization of serial killers is even more bizarre and offputting to me. To the point where I kind of do judge people that get off on them.
posted by tavella at 10:22 AM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by tavella at 10:22 AM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
Of the Gangster Movie Big Ten, the only one that doesn’t have Joe Pesci, Al Pacino, or Robert De Niro in it is The Departed, yet none of them have all three in it. That’s a neat stat. I like that stat.
Get ready to add Depp to that category. When I watched that trailer, I thought they let Whitey outta prison.
posted by prepmonkey at 10:28 AM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
Get ready to add Depp to that category. When I watched that trailer, I thought they let Whitey outta prison.
posted by prepmonkey at 10:28 AM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
When was the last time you saw an American-made movie that portrayed Russian organized crime sympathetically?
We are very curiously selective when it comes to our glamorization of crime and criminals and while people are correct about some of the elements that have been discussed the rules are more complicated than anybody here has yet laid out..
posted by Nerd of the North at 10:49 AM on September 21, 2015 [3 favorites]
We are very curiously selective when it comes to our glamorization of crime and criminals and while people are correct about some of the elements that have been discussed the rules are more complicated than anybody here has yet laid out..
posted by Nerd of the North at 10:49 AM on September 21, 2015 [3 favorites]
It's a mystery to me, though the fetishization of serial killers is even more bizarre and offputting to me. To the point where I kind of do judge people that get off on them.
No doubt, there are people who 'get off' on things like that, but I had a gig for a while reviewing true crime books, and the vast majority of them were framed kind of as cautionary tales targeted primarily toward women.
And most of the mainstream serial killer media, the 'escapist' stuff, is heavily slanted toward cops and investigators trying to catch the bad guys. It's extremely moralistic in most cases, and is rarely sympathetic at all toward murderers. The escapism revolves around confronting and vanquishing evil, not perpetrating it.
Morbid fascination is a normal thing that many people experience, and it's almost always motivated by a desire to confront their fears and the problem of evil.
There are a whole lot of things I find problematic about that sort of thing, but that is not one of them.
posted by ernielundquist at 10:56 AM on September 21, 2015 [5 favorites]
No doubt, there are people who 'get off' on things like that, but I had a gig for a while reviewing true crime books, and the vast majority of them were framed kind of as cautionary tales targeted primarily toward women.
And most of the mainstream serial killer media, the 'escapist' stuff, is heavily slanted toward cops and investigators trying to catch the bad guys. It's extremely moralistic in most cases, and is rarely sympathetic at all toward murderers. The escapism revolves around confronting and vanquishing evil, not perpetrating it.
Morbid fascination is a normal thing that many people experience, and it's almost always motivated by a desire to confront their fears and the problem of evil.
There are a whole lot of things I find problematic about that sort of thing, but that is not one of them.
posted by ernielundquist at 10:56 AM on September 21, 2015 [5 favorites]
"The Last Psychiatrist" explains "why we love sociopaths" (with reference to Tony Soprano, and others).
posted by theorique at 11:44 AM on September 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by theorique at 11:44 AM on September 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
Cheney was straight gangster.
Rumsfeld, at least verbally, was the purest gangster of the era.
Sample quote: "Osama bin Laden is either alive and well or alive and not too well or not alive."
posted by colie at 11:55 AM on September 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
Rumsfeld, at least verbally, was the purest gangster of the era.
Sample quote: "Osama bin Laden is either alive and well or alive and not too well or not alive."
posted by colie at 11:55 AM on September 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
Rumsfeld in 1976. The Soviet Union has been busy.
posted by bukvich at 11:59 AM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by bukvich at 11:59 AM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
I went to school with a girl who grew up in New Jersey, where her father was a dentist. Some of his clients were mob-adjacent, if not just mobbed up. But he was a service provider, and none of them were shaking him down. They just needed their teeth cleaned.
Then, in high school, his daughter (the girl I knew) had her heart broken by a teenage boy, as is wont to happen. At some dental appointment, doing non-organized-crime smalltalk, one of the dentist’s patients asked how his family was doing, and he made a rueful comment about his daughter getting over being dumped.
The patient said that was rough, and then he offered to break the boy’s legs to teach him a lesson about treating girls right. He could do that as payment for the exam he had just received, he suggested.
The dentist said thanks but no thanks, you can just pay like usual. The patient said okay, and did.
All that is to say: I think at least part of the pop culture interest in the mob is how intimate their MO is, whether real or imagined. You come to me on my daughter’s wedding day. Fixation on food, clothes, furniture. Take the cannolis. Opening a soup kitchen. Spraying pesticides on the tomatoes. Teaching a kid how to cook good meat sauce in the middle of a gang war. Hey doc, it sucks that your daughter got dumped by a punk kid, let me offer my services. It is like a weird combination of a vast criminal empire AND a meddling grandma who wants you to eat, EAT, why you wanna be so skinny??
posted by a fiendish thingy at 12:00 PM on September 21, 2015 [7 favorites]
Then, in high school, his daughter (the girl I knew) had her heart broken by a teenage boy, as is wont to happen. At some dental appointment, doing non-organized-crime smalltalk, one of the dentist’s patients asked how his family was doing, and he made a rueful comment about his daughter getting over being dumped.
The patient said that was rough, and then he offered to break the boy’s legs to teach him a lesson about treating girls right. He could do that as payment for the exam he had just received, he suggested.
The dentist said thanks but no thanks, you can just pay like usual. The patient said okay, and did.
All that is to say: I think at least part of the pop culture interest in the mob is how intimate their MO is, whether real or imagined. You come to me on my daughter’s wedding day. Fixation on food, clothes, furniture. Take the cannolis. Opening a soup kitchen. Spraying pesticides on the tomatoes. Teaching a kid how to cook good meat sauce in the middle of a gang war. Hey doc, it sucks that your daughter got dumped by a punk kid, let me offer my services. It is like a weird combination of a vast criminal empire AND a meddling grandma who wants you to eat, EAT, why you wanna be so skinny??
posted by a fiendish thingy at 12:00 PM on September 21, 2015 [7 favorites]
Oh that Rumsfeld link is great. Where does he map onto the great Hollywood gangsters? Why can't I see Jack Nicholson or Dustin Hoffman or Jon Hamm portraying him on Netflix?
posted by colie at 12:03 PM on September 21, 2015
posted by colie at 12:03 PM on September 21, 2015
Gangsters aren't the only criminals that are glorified in film.
I guess when it comes to 'acceptable' glamorizing the acts and lifestyles of organizations that involve such things as murder, extortion, torture, intimidation, etc., pretty much comes down to who's signing the protagonist's paychecks, and not the acts themselves.
The protagonists of espionage/spy genre films, from the over-the-top James Bond films to the more murky, gritty films such as Tinker, Tailor, Solder Spy, or even many of the police/detective/crime genre films employ most or all of those acts I listed above to varying degrees as well.
If a mobster comes to a business and threatens the well-being of them, their business, or their family if they do not cooperate with them in some fashion, it's a contemptible act of criminal thugs, but barely anyone bats an eye when a detective in a film threatens to shut down their business by calling in health inspectors or auditors, threaten other legal or police action on them or people they care about, or even gets physically violent if they aren't cooperative with their demands. Where would the world's intelligence/espionage agencies be without things like blackmail, murder, torture and extortion at their disposal to get what they need? Of course, in real life there are supposed to be rules and accountability to limit or prevent this and act for the good of their country, but there's not a government in the world that doesn't have at least a few people set aside that operate outside of these restrictions in some manner, whether it's on the small-scale "good cop/bad cop" scare tactics in a police interrogation room, or as big as toppling governments.
I know I'm skirting the edge of the 'black hole' of relativism here. I'm not trying to say that there is absolutely no difference between mobsters and governments in film or in real life, only that at times the contents of their toolboxes are strikingly similar. How curious it is that if you took a synopsis of a generic mobster film and swapped 'families' with 'governments,' and 'mobster' with 'agent' and a perhaps a few small tweaks to the opposition to give it an international scope, but leave every criminal/violent/immoral act they do in it untouched, the 'mobster' version would be criticized for glamorizing those same acts while the 'spy' version would be accepted at worst as 'a dirty business, but it needs to be done' sort of thing, or 'daring adventure, action-packed, and full of perilous, thrilling intrigue' at best.
posted by chambers at 12:04 PM on September 21, 2015 [6 favorites]
I guess when it comes to 'acceptable' glamorizing the acts and lifestyles of organizations that involve such things as murder, extortion, torture, intimidation, etc., pretty much comes down to who's signing the protagonist's paychecks, and not the acts themselves.
The protagonists of espionage/spy genre films, from the over-the-top James Bond films to the more murky, gritty films such as Tinker, Tailor, Solder Spy, or even many of the police/detective/crime genre films employ most or all of those acts I listed above to varying degrees as well.
If a mobster comes to a business and threatens the well-being of them, their business, or their family if they do not cooperate with them in some fashion, it's a contemptible act of criminal thugs, but barely anyone bats an eye when a detective in a film threatens to shut down their business by calling in health inspectors or auditors, threaten other legal or police action on them or people they care about, or even gets physically violent if they aren't cooperative with their demands. Where would the world's intelligence/espionage agencies be without things like blackmail, murder, torture and extortion at their disposal to get what they need? Of course, in real life there are supposed to be rules and accountability to limit or prevent this and act for the good of their country, but there's not a government in the world that doesn't have at least a few people set aside that operate outside of these restrictions in some manner, whether it's on the small-scale "good cop/bad cop" scare tactics in a police interrogation room, or as big as toppling governments.
I know I'm skirting the edge of the 'black hole' of relativism here. I'm not trying to say that there is absolutely no difference between mobsters and governments in film or in real life, only that at times the contents of their toolboxes are strikingly similar. How curious it is that if you took a synopsis of a generic mobster film and swapped 'families' with 'governments,' and 'mobster' with 'agent' and a perhaps a few small tweaks to the opposition to give it an international scope, but leave every criminal/violent/immoral act they do in it untouched, the 'mobster' version would be criticized for glamorizing those same acts while the 'spy' version would be accepted at worst as 'a dirty business, but it needs to be done' sort of thing, or 'daring adventure, action-packed, and full of perilous, thrilling intrigue' at best.
posted by chambers at 12:04 PM on September 21, 2015 [6 favorites]
Why Do We Admire Mobsters?
I don't.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 12:41 PM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
I don't.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 12:41 PM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
I don't either, but I think part of the appeal of gangsters is the sense of belonging. Yeah, they're criminals and all, but you are part of a brotherhood. Everyone has their nickname, and, in theory, you know they've got your back. I mean, it is sometimes called "Our Thing" and not "Their Thing".
posted by Samizdata at 12:56 PM on September 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by Samizdata at 12:56 PM on September 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
-Brief derail ahead-
Rumsfeld in 1976. The Soviet Union has been busy.
That video made it seem like those "non-acoustic methods" they are talking about was just some nebulous boogie man they invented out of thin air. I'm fairly certain that one of those methods was passive detection of submarines via Cherenkov radiation coming from the reactors of nuclear-powered subs. Cherenkov radiation would cause the seawater outside the reactor of the sub to faintly glow blue, could be seen at night, and was termed "Blue Haze."
There was considerable concern and research put into this from at least the 70s and onward regarding this as a possible method of detection, and this research paper from 2004 seems to indicate it is possible to do it, if you have $15 billion to throw at it.
Dr. Anne Cahn is not wrong in what she said, but she has to be selective in what she can say when it comes to how classified the projects around this situation were, and there's a lot more to the story than "they had no evidence." Back then, it was seen as theoretically possible, but I don't think it's an unreasonable thing to be concerned about the Soviets figuring out how to actually make it work before we could, as it could very well remove every bit of stealth our submarines had, not only for launching nukes or attacking ships, but also preventing them from being used as a way to safely insert/extract covert ops forces anywhere they wanted. There may be all sorts of other projects grouped into the collective term "non-acoustic methods" that were downright ridiculous, but at least this one in particular had at least some merit.
Not that Rumsfeld and the DoD didn't take that concern and those like it and run with it as far as they could whenever they needed to, justified or otherwise - I'm not trying to exonerate Rumsfeld & Co, but just adding some context to that particular situation, and can't miss a chance to talk about submarines that glow in the dark.
/end derail.
posted by chambers at 1:10 PM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
Rumsfeld in 1976. The Soviet Union has been busy.
That video made it seem like those "non-acoustic methods" they are talking about was just some nebulous boogie man they invented out of thin air. I'm fairly certain that one of those methods was passive detection of submarines via Cherenkov radiation coming from the reactors of nuclear-powered subs. Cherenkov radiation would cause the seawater outside the reactor of the sub to faintly glow blue, could be seen at night, and was termed "Blue Haze."
There was considerable concern and research put into this from at least the 70s and onward regarding this as a possible method of detection, and this research paper from 2004 seems to indicate it is possible to do it, if you have $15 billion to throw at it.
Dr. Anne Cahn is not wrong in what she said, but she has to be selective in what she can say when it comes to how classified the projects around this situation were, and there's a lot more to the story than "they had no evidence." Back then, it was seen as theoretically possible, but I don't think it's an unreasonable thing to be concerned about the Soviets figuring out how to actually make it work before we could, as it could very well remove every bit of stealth our submarines had, not only for launching nukes or attacking ships, but also preventing them from being used as a way to safely insert/extract covert ops forces anywhere they wanted. There may be all sorts of other projects grouped into the collective term "non-acoustic methods" that were downright ridiculous, but at least this one in particular had at least some merit.
Not that Rumsfeld and the DoD didn't take that concern and those like it and run with it as far as they could whenever they needed to, justified or otherwise - I'm not trying to exonerate Rumsfeld & Co, but just adding some context to that particular situation, and can't miss a chance to talk about submarines that glow in the dark.
/end derail.
posted by chambers at 1:10 PM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
We admire people who have interpersonal power and esteem; this is basically amoral; film at 11.
posted by grobstein at 1:27 PM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by grobstein at 1:27 PM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
I'm not trying to say that there is absolutely no difference between mobsters and governments in film or in real life
It's not a wholly inaccurate thing to say, though. Ultimately, governments are in power because they have the biggest guns, the meanest lawyers, and the policies and procedures to make it all work with the support and consent of the citizens (more or less). If they lose this support, someone else is probably going be the government - if not immediately, then eventually.
In places where the state is weak, non-state entities can bid for popular support and even compete with or supplant the "official" government. See, the narcos in northern Mexico, the warlords in Somalia, ISIS in the Middle East.
posted by theorique at 1:40 PM on September 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
It's not a wholly inaccurate thing to say, though. Ultimately, governments are in power because they have the biggest guns, the meanest lawyers, and the policies and procedures to make it all work with the support and consent of the citizens (more or less). If they lose this support, someone else is probably going be the government - if not immediately, then eventually.
In places where the state is weak, non-state entities can bid for popular support and even compete with or supplant the "official" government. See, the narcos in northern Mexico, the warlords in Somalia, ISIS in the Middle East.
posted by theorique at 1:40 PM on September 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
I think the idea of psychological distance is a bit wrong. Most impoverished communities make use of a gray market economy that requires a system of extra-legal enforcement.
Something that is at once alienating and attractive. The immediacy and efficiency of that kind of retribution for – perhaps not injustice – but unfairness or more egregious transgression. And that kind of violence is a hazard in those situations and very much up close. So a car thief is tolerated and protected, but a car thief who is also rapist is not.
IIRC the Sopranos had a story where Dr. Melfi gets raped. The police drop the ball and the rapist walks. And she fantasizes about telling Tony Soprano who the rapist is so he would exact revenge. And she tells her own therapist that there’s something very satisfying in that.
And indeed, we engage in those kinds of fantasies all the time.
Revenge movies like “Taken” or the Charles Bronson stuff.
Superhero movies are big too. No one considers Clark Kent a mobster or thinks of Superman as a vigilante. But he skirts the law.
Granted, he upholds the law, but he circumvents it in a very real way that is very similar to the extra-legal action that is so appealing about thumbing one’s nose at ‘bad laws and the establishment.’
"I'm not trying to say that there is absolutely no difference between mobsters and governments in film or in real life, only that at times the contents of their toolboxes are strikingly similar."
That's for sure. Concessions are made for assets for even the most egregious violations.
I mean, yeah, 'gangster for capitolism' duh. But I think the appeal for gangster films over bank bailouts for middle aged accountants and CEOs is no one wants to watch a film about someone shaving numbers in an office all day.
Although the point of "The Wolf of Wall Street" seems to have been lost on a lot of people too.
So maybe drama is just drama. People like gangster stories for the same reasons they gawk at car accidents or train wrecks.
posted by Smedleyman at 2:57 PM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
Something that is at once alienating and attractive. The immediacy and efficiency of that kind of retribution for – perhaps not injustice – but unfairness or more egregious transgression. And that kind of violence is a hazard in those situations and very much up close. So a car thief is tolerated and protected, but a car thief who is also rapist is not.
IIRC the Sopranos had a story where Dr. Melfi gets raped. The police drop the ball and the rapist walks. And she fantasizes about telling Tony Soprano who the rapist is so he would exact revenge. And she tells her own therapist that there’s something very satisfying in that.
And indeed, we engage in those kinds of fantasies all the time.
Revenge movies like “Taken” or the Charles Bronson stuff.
Superhero movies are big too. No one considers Clark Kent a mobster or thinks of Superman as a vigilante. But he skirts the law.
Granted, he upholds the law, but he circumvents it in a very real way that is very similar to the extra-legal action that is so appealing about thumbing one’s nose at ‘bad laws and the establishment.’
"I'm not trying to say that there is absolutely no difference between mobsters and governments in film or in real life, only that at times the contents of their toolboxes are strikingly similar."
That's for sure. Concessions are made for assets for even the most egregious violations.
I mean, yeah, 'gangster for capitolism' duh. But I think the appeal for gangster films over bank bailouts for middle aged accountants and CEOs is no one wants to watch a film about someone shaving numbers in an office all day.
Although the point of "The Wolf of Wall Street" seems to have been lost on a lot of people too.
So maybe drama is just drama. People like gangster stories for the same reasons they gawk at car accidents or train wrecks.
posted by Smedleyman at 2:57 PM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
HEISENBERG!
posted by clavdivs at 4:25 PM on September 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by clavdivs at 4:25 PM on September 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
And indeed, we engage in those kinds of fantasies all the time.
Revenge movies like “Taken” or the Charles Bronson stuff.
Superhero movies are big too. No one considers Clark Kent a mobster or thinks of Superman as a vigilante. But he skirts the law.
For most of human history, this was less a fantasy, and more like the way "law enforcement" was actually performed.
For example: the tribe ten miles upriver stole a herd of your cattle and killed the boy who was watching the herd? The head of your clan would get together fifty of your brothers and cousins, saddle up and take the cattle back. And probably leave a couple of heads of the rival tribe on spikes as a warning not to try that again.
The idea of a full-time standing army is a relatively recent innovation (few thousand years), and a full-time municipal police force is even more so (couple of hundred years). But humans have been doing violence to each other in groups, in response to real or perceived slights, for a lot longer than that.
posted by theorique at 5:18 PM on September 21, 2015
Revenge movies like “Taken” or the Charles Bronson stuff.
Superhero movies are big too. No one considers Clark Kent a mobster or thinks of Superman as a vigilante. But he skirts the law.
For most of human history, this was less a fantasy, and more like the way "law enforcement" was actually performed.
For example: the tribe ten miles upriver stole a herd of your cattle and killed the boy who was watching the herd? The head of your clan would get together fifty of your brothers and cousins, saddle up and take the cattle back. And probably leave a couple of heads of the rival tribe on spikes as a warning not to try that again.
The idea of a full-time standing army is a relatively recent innovation (few thousand years), and a full-time municipal police force is even more so (couple of hundred years). But humans have been doing violence to each other in groups, in response to real or perceived slights, for a lot longer than that.
posted by theorique at 5:18 PM on September 21, 2015
Related story: ordinary apartment manager gets recruited to help capture Whitey Bulger when he turns up in the dude's building.
I'm not super into mob stuff, but I did find The Gold Coast and The Gate House, about a rich preppie couple who get seduced (in different ways) by the mobster who moves in next door, to be a really interesting way to handle the topic of mob fascination.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:45 PM on September 21, 2015
I'm not super into mob stuff, but I did find The Gold Coast and The Gate House, about a rich preppie couple who get seduced (in different ways) by the mobster who moves in next door, to be a really interesting way to handle the topic of mob fascination.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:45 PM on September 21, 2015
In America, Mafiosi are seen as interesting because they provide us with desirable, yet illegal goods and services. However, just take a look at a place like Naples and you'll see what happens when you put the bookie with a stylish hat in charge of mundane shit like collecting your garbage and running your town.
posted by panama joe at 10:14 PM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by panama joe at 10:14 PM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]
Hmm.... Why do people like to see movies containing violence, corruption, well-dressed men, and their sexy women?
That is a conundrum.
Oh, well, off to binge-watch Hippy Love-Ins, a documentary about Mother Theresa, and the Dennis the Menace movie. Just like everyone else with access to HBO.
posted by IAmBroom at 3:38 PM on September 22, 2015 [1 favorite]
That is a conundrum.
Oh, well, off to binge-watch Hippy Love-Ins, a documentary about Mother Theresa, and the Dennis the Menace movie. Just like everyone else with access to HBO.
posted by IAmBroom at 3:38 PM on September 22, 2015 [1 favorite]
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posted by sukeban at 4:21 AM on September 21, 2015 [1 favorite]