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Italian-American men have stepped out of the screen
and into everyday life and language.
What it means in screen terms to be an Italian-
American man can tell us much about what it means
to be a white man. It is crucial that white male heterosexuality
is made visible, is put under the critical microscope,
in this way because it has always maintained
its dominance by virtue of its invisibility. As Richard
Dyer has argued in his essay ‘White’: whiteness, like
heterosexuality, secures power by appearing not to be
anything in particular. It is simply there, transparent,
the given and ‘natural’ way to be. ‘Italian-American’
is one typification which whiteness has constructed of
itself – a group of stereotypes which provide us with
a starting point for understanding how whiteness sets
itself up in a dominant position.
In the 1970s, white American culture seemed to be
in crisis. The Watergate fiasco, the war in Vietnam, the
rise of black, gay and women’s liberation movements
all meant that the hallowed American way lost its direction.
Hollywood’s reaction was to look to ethnicity as a
means of reinstating the white heterosexual males’ central
position of power, returning him to his role as the
Real Thing. We can admire and trust Don Corleone’s
power because it does not appear to be compatible with
WASP power. Italians were a way of getting back to
basics through the depiction of a truly ‘American’ ethic
of the struggle for survival in a land where nobodies can
become somebodies – as in The Godfather, Rocky, and,
rather differently, in Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon
and Saturday Night Fever. In addition, Italian culture
had the added attraction of l’ordine della famiglia to
help (re)glorify patriarchy and put women back in their
place: in the home, supporting their men from beneath.
However, since the Italian American man’s ‘realness’
is so often represented as physicality – we know he’s
authentic because we can see his sweating body – the reality
of his heterosexuality is considerably destabilised.
The power and danger of the ‘Italian’ body on screen
are heavily eroticised qualities. Male WASP heroes of
the 70s, like Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson, are
invisible bodies who display little emotion, epitomising
rigid stoicism and phallic control. In Dirty Harry
(1971), Eastwood is always poker faced, never ruffled
or sweating very much, his power coolly contained
within his .44 Magnum pistol. The Italian man is often
opposed to such straightness, flexing his muscles, getting
all hot blooded and passionate, demonstrating his
body as the signifier of his masculinity and ethnicity.
The display of the male body as erotic object is a
troublesome area: how do we make these bodies,
which are supposed to be active, hard, non-malleable,
into ‘passive’ objects of the cinema audience’s gaze – a
role traditionally reserved for the female body? One
way to do it is through sporting images – the excuse
for looking at a man’s body being the admiration of
BUY Francis Ford Coppola films online from and
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