Of Stigmas, Stereotypes, ‘Sopranos’

La Cosa Nostra and cement shoes revisited . . .

Although Americans complain about organized crime, they are fascinated by it as long as it doesn’t touch them personally. So coming to TNT in June is “Boss of Bosses,” with Chazz Palminteri as Paul Castellano, notorious head of the Gambino crime family, in what’s called “a glimpse inside the strong ties and brutal politics of the mob.”

But wait.

Wasn’t HBO’s “Gotti” about the boss of bosses? Or was it Showtime’s “Bonanno: A Godfather’s Story?” No, no, it was NBC’s “Witness to the Mob” miniseries about Sammy “The Bull” Gravano.

Or was it that fictional CBS pair, “The Last Don” and “The Last Don II?” Or the fantasized “Bella Mafia” on CBS? Or . . .

You see where this is going.

Let’s have less about mobsters named Guido, more about “the strong ties and brutal politics” inside Hollywood, and especially more about the vast majority of Italian Americans who are law-abiding and wouldn’t know omerta from Oprah.

Yet old habits endure as long as blood oaths. The entertainment industry still appears to view Italian Americans and organized crime myopically, believing every mob guy’s name ends in a vowel. To be fair, recent years have also brought Warren Beatty’s Bugsy Siegel and Richard Dreyfuss as Meyer Lansky, a mensch of a mobster who straddled good and evil so ambivalently on HBO that you didn’t know whether to deck him or daven with him. But these are rare cracks in the Italian monolith.

So no wonder many Americans of Italian origin have had it up to here with portrayals of them on TV, and in enough movies, from “The Valachi Papers” to “The Godfather” trio, to fill this space 10 times over.

Although the link between Italian Americans and organized crime is no myth, the number of them involved is a tiny blip compared with their numbers (estimates running as high as 30 million) in the U.S. That means as a group, these movie and TV depictions of them as mobsters are nearly as distorting as the saccharine stereotype from the opposite pole, that Italian Americans are always products of good-hearted families with good hair.

The Italic Studies Institute in New York says it’s commissioning a study measuring the influence of the negative stereotypes on youngsters of Italian descent. Studies can be useful.

Yet why pick on “The Sopranos,” as some are doing?

“The Sopranos” is a fat mark because it’s hot, widely discussed and highly visible. It’s also one of the very best series in more than half a century of U.S. television. So why make it a scapegoat for decades of stereotyping, when worthier targets abound? Why unfairly burden it with the baggage of the ages? Why not blast TV’s lesser badas and bings and allow this exceptional drama room to breath on its own terms?

That isn’t happening.

Although ever growing in popularity, HBO’s transcendent serial about a conflicted New Jersey mob boss’s families--one violently Mafioso, the other a relatively stable wife-and-two-kids-on-the-home-front--is again catching heat from Italian American activists in the early weeks of its third remarkable season. The criticism is again splintered, ranging from the National Italian American Foundation in Washington to a myriad of smaller groups.

Some of these seem to believe that Americans are incapable of separating Giorgio Armani from Vito Corleone.

“The Sopranos” tells viewers that “average Italian Americans, even their children, are not really what they seem,” says John Mancini, chairman of the Italic Studies Institute. “It is the oldest form of propaganda that demonizes a minority using repeated visual images that linger long after in the minds of viewers.”

History teaches us that Mancini is correct about the cumulative power of propaganda. He is wrong, though, about Italian Americans being stigmatized as a group.

From Frank Capra and Leonardo DiCaprio to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, they are far too numerous and deeply ingrained in all aspects of U.S. life to be herded into one category. Even after all these movies and TV shows, the overwhelming bulk of Americans still don’t believe that the “I” crowd thrives primarily on crime. They may believe that all mobsters are Italian, but not that all Italians are mobsters.

Contrast that with the more dangerous stereotyping of other minorities, especially African Americans. Historically, for many reasons, most whites have not had the kinds of close relationships with African Americans that would override years of exposure to negative black stereotypes. This distance, geographical and emotional, has bred suspicion and ignorance.

But that is not the case with Italian Americans, whose integration into the wider U.S. culture is complete. Italians are nearly everywhere and everyone, your next-door neighbors as well as your companions at work. Americans celebrate nearly everything Italian, from opera to furniture to food. They flock to Italian restaurants and eat there beside other diners who they know are more likely to be spot welders than ruthless Tony Sopranos plotting “waste management.” Speaking of dining, taking away their pasta would send Americans to rehab. Without trattorias and pizza, life would not be worth living. And Italy, by the way, has long been a favorite vacation spot for Americans traveling abroad.

Just as Italian gangsters have been a favorite of movies and TV programs, most of them recycled Corleone.

Yet being just a fan of “The Sopranos” can be dicey, especially for Italian Americans, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has learned.

Giuliani is the “winner” of the just-announced Pasta-Tute award given by the Italian American One Voice Committee in New Jersey. The award goes annually to the Italian American who “has done the most to tarnish the image of his own people.”

You’d think that Giuliani had defaced da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

Instead, what were the mayor’s high crimes of tarnishing, as seen by the committee? Not only publicly doing Godfather impressions from time to time, but allowing the cast of “The Sopranos” to take part in last year’s parade honoring the New York Yankees as baseball’s world champions. The very idea.

Giuliani has surely demonstrated that he has his blind spots when it comes to art, but liking “The Sopranos” is not one of them.

Pasta-Tute runners-up include Italian American David Chase, who created “The Sopranos,” and Michael Imperioli, the actor who plays Tony Soprano’s volatile nephew, Christopher, and writes for the show. He also co-wrote “Summer of Sam,” a feature film whose Italian American characters also ticked off the committee.

Because protest comes with democracy, this bashing of “The Sopranos” for ethnic reasons will continue indefinitely. As will TV’s flow of lower-brow Mafia stories that actually deserve the criticism.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at [email protected].