["Real Italy Behind the Cliche?" (Milan 2017). Foto Rb]
6. Representation of social problems in novels and film
What are the literary and cinematic
representations of the sociological situation of inequality briefly described
in the first part of this paper?[1]
One initial consideration in this respect is the dissatisfaction of the present
writer with the trend of the cultural market offering international
entertainment products, be they films or best-selling novels, which, even if at
times concerned with social questions, are predominantly conceived to simply
divert attention from serious topics and are often also characterized by
violence and superficiality. By contrast, a number of writers and directors
have chosen aesthetic and socially committed paths which mirror society
realistically and address the contemporary human condition responsibly. Several
Italian works could be quoted.[2]
However, out of necessity for brevity, only three examples will be given below
in this paper: Ermanno Rea’s novel La
dismissione, Melania Mazzucco’s novel Limbo,
and Andrea Segre’s film Io sono Li.[3]
6.1. Representation
of social class change: La dismissione
Novels are wider worlds than sociology. Rea’s La dismissione
focuses not only on social class but on difficulties in interpersonal
relationships, the decay of the environment and degradation of social life
vis-à-vis crime in the Naples area.
The first-person narrator, Vincenzo Buonocore, is a
former industrial worker who later became an engineer and was charged with the
decommissioning process of the Ilva steelworks in Bagnoli, a factory to be sold
to a Chinese company. The decommissioning constitutes the end of a significant
economic support for the people living in that area, and, at the same time, the
loss of an alternative to the camorra,
a mafia-style organization which takes over in the unemployment vacuum created
by the end of the factory.
La
dismissione is therefore the metaphor
of the end of the era of classic industry and the traditional working class and
its political culture of discipline, anti-drug attitudes and opposition to
criminal activities. It is the end of a type of identity based on pride to
belong to that class, and of the hopes connected to this condition:
“My use of the word hope is connected to the concept of employment. Over decades young
people in Bagnoli were led towards respectable professions or towards work in
the factory, especially if they were born from working class fathers. The son
of a worker was himself already a half-worker by family tradition. Discipline
and a sense of duty were part of his natural metabolism. They constituted an
added value to the workforce which he represented as such. This is how worker
dynasties had been born. These were the great family clans which originated
from the early days of the factory”.[4]
The narrator gives an account of the vicissitudes of
Ilva from restructuring to the decision of decommissioning taken for political
rather than strictly financial reasons. In brief, this novel is a testimony of
the end of the 20th-century trade-union and left-wing culture as well as the
end of a period in the history of Italian industrialization.
6.2. Representation
of women condition: Limbo
The protagonist of Mazzucco’s Limbo is Manuela Paris, a military
member of the Italian Alpini corps assigned to a peace mission in Afghanistan.
Wounded in action, she becomes partially disabled. Back in Italy, she gradually
tries to overcome her psychological trauma. After being awarded medals, she is
demobilized due to her leg injury and she is assigned a state pension. During
the convalescence in her native town, where she stays with her family, she has
a relationship with Mattia, a former doctor, now under police protection for
having witnessed a mafia murder. The two fall in love with each other, but
Mattia eventually asks to be transferred to a different town to protect Manuela
from involvement in his dangerous life as special witness.
There are quite clearly
several sociological aspects in this novel. The peace mission in Afghanistan
comes out as being more violent than foreseen initially. Manuela’s decision to
join the army makes her into a highly emancipated woman who experiences her
choice of profession as feminist self-realization. Discrimination against women
in military life is presented with clarity and equanimity. Manuela is bound to
gain respect of the group of men she commands through harder than usual work
precisely because she is a woman. The Italian family is portrayed as a
fragmented entity. Manuela’s parents are divorced, her father remarried a
Romanian migrant, and her sister has a relationship with a married migrant from
Morocco. Crime is also present through the sub-story of Mattia.
6.3. Representation
of the migrant question: Io sono Li
Director Segre states in an
interview that he is concerned with “apparently minor social layers to which
the grand media narrative does not grant the right to speak. These situations,
though, often constitute a deeper, more important and more humane point of
view. It is the dignity of these people that I put at the core of my stories”.[5]
This is precisely what happens in Io sono Li, a story of solidarity and compassion between two
migrants, the newly migrated Chinese Li and older Bepi, originally from
Croatia. Their affection is hampered by some members of both communities, the
Italians in Chioggia, where she works as a bartender and he as a fisherman, and
the Chinese organizers of her job. The film is therefore about the difficulties
of social integration. But it is also about the lower class to which most
protagonists of this story – Italians and non-Italians – belong. The positive
values that prevail are compassion, friendship and solidarity. The negative
values, clearly condemned, are racism and prejudice.
Conclusion
This paper started with a description of some
varieties of inequality in 21st-century Italy, and it ended by
positively exemplifying some interesting stories which express inequality in
literature and the cinema, giving hope that intellectual commitment survives,
and perhaps on some levels even thrives, despite prevalent commercial mediatic
models of narrative.
The future scope of the present writer’s work on the
topic of this paper is to continue research by building an online yearly
observatory on Italian social contexts and texts, and expand the research to
other areas, for instance the record on human rights, the intercultural
dimension, and the effects of the electronic era on Italian mentality and
behaviour in the international context.
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DE MARCHI, C., La vocazione, Milan, Feltrinelli, 2010.
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[Roberto Bertoni]
[1] The first part of this paper was published in Carte allineate on 9-11-2017.
[2] See among others, C. De Marchi, La vocazione, Milan, Feltrinelli, 2010, on the perspective of
youth; M. Venezia, Rivelazione all’Esquilimo,
Rome, Nottetempo, 2011, a novella on migrants’ integration in Rome; E.
Crialese’s film Terraferma, 2011, on
relations between illegal migrants and locals in the South of Italy; the rich
literature in Italian by migrant writers such as F. Ahmed, P. Kouma, T. Lamri, S. Methani,
and I. Scego; and many other stories or films some of the social problems
illustrated in this paper,
[3] E. Rea, La
Dismissione, Milano, Rizzoli, 2002, so far untranslated into English to the
knowledge of the present writer; M. Mazzucco, Limbo, Turin, Einaudi, 2012, English translation by V. Jewiss, Limbo: A Novel. New York, Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2014; A. Segre, Io sono Li,
English subtitled version Shun Li and the
Poet, 2006.
[4] La dismissione,
cit., p, 185 (my translation).
