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- Title
Family Values and Feudal Codes: The Social Politics of America's Twenty-First Century Gangster.
- Authors
Fields, Ingrid Walker
- Abstract
This article focuses on the social politics of two contemporary gangster/gangsta narratives, David Chase's television series The Sopranos and Jim Jarmusch's film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. A pragmatic portrayal of the Mafia in mainstream American culture, The Sopranos dramatizes the struggle of the middle-class American family as mob life. The Soprano clan's vitality lies not in the impermeability of its mob organization so much as in its sense of entitlement to social status and financial success. David Chase's series sets out in broad strokes a complex portrait of a mob fully entrenched in American capitalism. The Sopranos and Ghost Dog taken as fin de si'ecle gangster stories depict a logical evolution of their respective narrative expectations and contemporary social conditions. Each narrative foregrounds the importance of a code, but whereas Ghost Dog becomes and succumbs to the warrior role of his code, Tony struggles to bridge the gap between the power of the Godfather in a fictional mobster past and his baby-boomer middle-age anxieties. Both contemporary gangster/gangsta narratives reflect social order: the family and class anxieties central to Italian American culture contrast the social alienation and disenfranchisement in African American culture.
- Subjects
SOPRANOS, The (TV program); GHOST Dog (Film); GANGSTERS in motion pictures; GANGS; MAFIA
- Publication
Journal of Popular Culture, 2004, Vol 37, Issue 4, p611
- ISSN
1540-5931
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/j.0022-3840.2004.00089.x