How did the mafia come to be so heavily romanticized?

How did the mafia come to be so heavily romanticized?

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  1. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Same reason Hong Kong triads, Yakuza, and British gangsters are all romanticized
    Criminal underworld organizations are cool

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Jewlywood

      Nobody gives a frick about those

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        >Nobody gives a frick about those
        Yeah nobody, except for influential Hong Kong Action & Japanese Cinema and one of the biggest British TV shows as of late.

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          Not just peaky blinders (which is behind a lot of British crime’s revival in pop culture) but Guy Ritchie movies and British gangster flicks in general have always been very popular.
          Hell there’s romanticization of pretty much every big ethnic gang’s subculture. Blacks fantasize about bustin a cap in they busta punk asses with movies like straight outta Compton and the gangbanging culture of SoCal in the 1980s/90s.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      The opposite actually, they were pushed into the spotlight many times until they commissioned white washed depictions themselves

  2. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    >Romanticized
    It's not. The Godfather ends with Michael being a senile lunatic who screams at night with regret about murdering his own brother.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Everything about Vito Corleone is romanticized as frick though

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        He lost his favorite son in of the most brutal ways possible, and got to see his good son slowly get into the business, plus he was shot and hit five times and was never fully recovered, also he knew was betrayed by someone working deep in the family.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      And De Palma's Scarface ends with Montana being lonely, betrayed and killed. Yet tons of morons think he's so cooland identify with him.
      This

      Everyone is bored out of their minds and just wants to fricking do something with their life already

      is the right answer.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Romanticism is tragic.

  3. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Everyone is bored out of their minds and just wants to fricking do something with their life already

  4. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Because crime is fascinating and movies about law abiding pacifists are boring as shit

  5. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    This is going to sound stupid but masculine Latin culture has always been kino, and everything set in America's golden age, during the golden age of film also, is interesting and enjoyable. So when you put all 3 of those together with a talented director and cast, you get the timeless classic that is The Godfather I

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      It sounds stupid since Italians aren't latinxs

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        they are literally latins and only mutt gays use "latinxs" term

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          South americans have appropiated that term, using it for a different ethnicity only leads to confusion.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            the term "latinxs"?
            No
            the term "latin"?
            Don't care, if they want to be ignorant, let them but don't become one

  6. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Literally precisely the exact movie you posted, which is ironic because the Godfather is heavily critical of the mob overall. People just looked at surface level stuff like the aesthetics and language and that's all they took.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      When are the movies/books ever heavily critical of Vito Corleone, apart from the Luca Brasi thing?

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Unfortunately it is impossible to do a film about violence that doesn't end up glorifying it to some extent. Same reason you cannot make an anti-war movie that features combat scenes, because fighting just inherently looks cool. Some people saw the Omaha Beach scene in Private Ryan and were like "frick yeah, I wanna do that."

      I guess the only way to make a really anti-violence or anti-mob film would be to barely even show the mobsters doing the violence, and the whole film would have to follow victims recovering from permanent injuries.

  7. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    probabl;y because they were involved with hollywood

  8. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Because Italian Americans related to it and saw a lot of their culture in it. They thought it was cool.

  9. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    They bankrolled the israelites' takeover of the entertainment industry in the 30s with the money they made selling illegal alcohol.

  10. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    >How did the mafia come to be so heavily romanticized?

    100% the movie The Godfather.

    You can look at popular culture before that (eg, The Untouchables tv series (1959-63)), and the equivalent of the mafia (the word itself was often used) were just reasonably well-organized thugs, with a stylish guy at the top. Or the thuggish band seen in On the Waterfront.

    The movie The Godfather absolutely 100% created the romantic mafia mystique.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      *(the word itself **wasn't** often used)

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Gee it's not like there's an entire canon of crime drama movies out there made during the golden age of the Mafia that glorified the perpetrators of said crimes who happened to be Mafia

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        Sure there's a whole canon of crime movies, but The Godfather was something new on the block.

        Tell me a movie that presents as romantic or remotely potent an image of the mafia prior to The Godfather. You can't.

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          Scarface you stooge
          >inb4 comes up with excuses that only betray his not having seen it

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            No. It's a good film, but the criminals are all goofy. Not **remotely** romantic wrt its presentation of the mafia. Nor did that movie create *any* sort of larger public interest in the mafia, much less a mafia mystique.

            You can't name a precursor to The Godfather, because there is no such film. I have seen them all.

            Care to try again, sonny? I'll be happy to shoot down your next weak effort.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            For the same reason why pirates are romanticized.

            The old gangster films were also popular and people loved the gangster characters and romanticized them. Young people emulated people like James Cagney in the 1930s.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            >The old gangster films were also popular and people loved the gangster characters and romanticized them.

            This is absolutely true. Scarface is distinctive, but its general approach to gangs and gangsters is of a piece with its era, that is, they are handled in the style of movies like The Public Enemy and Little Caesar.

            These films *did* romanticize *gangsters* because the actors who played the gangsters - especially Cagney and Edward G. Robinson - were so charismatic, such great antiheroes. But the films did not remotely romanticize the mafia, as such. The Mafia is a very vague concept in the movies until The Godfather, with the partial exception of a mediocre film called The Brotherhood, which was not a success, and which nobody thought was particularly good. Indeed, The Godfather was designed, in part, to address the shortcomings of The Brotherhood:
            >some films had attempted to present a more thorough and accurate picture of Mafia society, as witness The Brotherhood, which does contain some subcultural themes, images, and markers, and which also depicts several scenes in ancestral Sicily. Nonetheless, it was precisely the failure of The Brotherhood to achieve the desired level of authenticity in its portrayal of the Mafia that led Robert Evans, the director of Paramount Studios, the same company that made The Brotherhood, to insist that, in the Paramount production of The Godfather, he wanted to “smell the spaghetti.” By this Evans meant that he wanted to raise the genre of the Mafia film to a hitherto unapproached level of believability in its handling of the Mafia as a specifically ethnic subject.

            https://thedigitalbits.com/columns/history-legacy--showmanship/goodfellas-25th-anniv

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      >The Godfather absolutely 100% created the romantic mafia mystique

      No, because the original Scarface already existed.

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        Scarface (1932) is not remotely an example of a film that popularized a romantic conception of the mafia.

        Anyone who's seen the film knows that. There is zero mafia mystique in that film.

  11. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    The idea of an underground society with different rules, ranks and influence all across society is very appealing to the masculine mind. And the lack of typical "gangsterism" is an aspect. No one besides inner cities youths idealize life an a penny pushing drug dealer. But people do ooo and ahhh mob bosses and captains.

  12. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    After WW2 the US government instituted the mafia as a branch of the Italian government, which could carry out political assassinations and enforcement measures against far right and left political groups. They coordinate heavily with the Christian Democratic Party through a loose structure of Freemason lodges.

    Previous to the war the mafia had been almost entirely eradicated by Mussolini and had very little influence in society, politics, or the economy.

    Since the US was employing bands of criminals to murder political organizers they had make the Mafia look cool and noble somehow, so they used their own propaganda networks in Hollywood to promote this stupid romantic idea of organized crime. It helps that many prominent political families also have links to organized crime, which further served to flatter the American elite.

  13. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Because it was the boomer version of capeshit (mobshit)

  14. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    The better question to ask would be why the israeli maffia got memory holed as hard as it did?

  15. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Mafia done well

  16. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    People who break the law are perceived as powerful.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      The only correct answer. Masses cling to what they perceive as the strongest, especially in times of turmoil.

  17. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    The real life mafia is a lot more violent and a lot less friendly than we think.

  18. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Because crime became sloppy and less "honorable". More rapes and kidnappings and random gang shootings made people in the 70s and 80s fantasize about a more "civilized age". Crime was more family oriented, certain people were considered off limits - there were rules, the police kept it from getting out of control by turning a blind eye to lower level stuff, & it was white.

    It's all bullshit, those guys used to slit peoples' throats and throw them in rivers with anvils tied to their ankles, but ya know - to them it's "the good ol 'days".

  19. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Nobody rubbernecks for a traffic accident that didn’t happen, and nobody wants to watch a movie about working stiffs minding their own business and going about their dull, uneventful lives.

    Humans like a good tragedy and there is nothing more tragic than some lowlife in a ghetto rising rapidly to wealth and notoriety by sacrificing his humanity, only to be struck down by the very system responsible for his success in the first place.

    I can’t think of a single gangster movie that glamorizes the lifestyle. Almost all of the great and memorable ones: Godfather, Goodfellas, Scarface, etc, are presented as tragedies. Because these are stories told well, morons lionize them but it’s not like getting swept up in shady get-rich-quick schemes where the old eat the young didn’t happen before gangster movies.

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