Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America

7. Romance: Only a Paper Moon?

chapter 7 Romance Only a Paper Moon? Try as we will to be culturally aggrieved by day, we find the gringos kind of attractive in the moonlight. —Richard Rodriguez, 2002 By the late 1980s, the third and fourth generations of Italian America were coming into their own, with precious little memory of either Italy or immigration. Despite the pull of multicultural chic, individuals of Italian ancestry were taking spouses and life partners from outside the heritage, residing increasingly wherever the postindustrial service sector took them, venturing well beyond even the outer circles of the original industrial settlement in order to secure their places, at last, in the professional-managerial class. Observers both inside and outside the academy, both the many convinced that the old European ethnicities were on the wane and the few struck by the unseemly tenacity of Italian American self-identification, were beginning to wonder, with much sociological and even more political justification: Have we reached the point when Italian Americans know themselves as such only through the images that Hollywood and Madison Avenue produce? And, if so, does that mean Italian Americanness is at best a minor affectation—like Madonna wearing an “Italians Do It Better” T-shirt—and at worst an invidious consumer delusion? In 1987, I spent an afternoon in Geneva, Switzerland, with the great novelist Ishmael Reed, who good-naturedly kept badgering me, aren’t you enraged at Moonstruck? Reed was angry at the film’s Jewish director, its Irish American writer, and its cast full of non-Italian actors, including Cher; he faulted the movie for being totally artificial in its production 128 values—blue-collar stereotypes bordering upon caricature, Toronto locales substituting for the essential Brooklyn, and a Dean Martin exercise in Neapolitan kitsch commanding the soundtrack; and we agreed that the true-love plot had been hatched, more or less, from TV’s romanticcomedy central. Sufficiently embarrassed, I couldn’t defend my intuitive fondness for the film that day. But since that time I’ve noticed a marked discrepancy between the occasional Italian American intellectual who is, as Reed was, offended by the presumed condescension and inauthenticity of mass-market Italian American lite (including such films as Prizzi’s Honor, Married to the Mob, My Cousin Vinny, and Analyze This) and the vast majority of everyday Italian Americans, who tolerate, often enjoy, and in key instances even identify with such blatant versions of consumer ethnicity. Norman Jewison’s Moonstruck is an instance in which Italian Americans, especially the various middle classes, were by and large delighted with the portrayal, which they took as amusing, instructive, and flattering—and were hence tickled by its national appeal. Why? The film is theatrical—a movie written for the screen by an accomplished playwright and shot with the stylized colorfulness of a stage set. Think of the Twin Towers, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the cemetery under that hanging moon: together they look more like one of the set panels for La Bohème (untrucked at the Met as the opening credits roll) than an actual site in Williamsburg or Fort Greene, though that’s what it is. In contrast, the basement ovens at the Cammareri bakery or the overstuffed shelves at Cappomaggis’ deli—fast becoming things of the past in 1989—are hyperrealistic, terrifically familiar yet already a nod toward nostalgia. The movie alternates between not-quite-enough texture (the moonstruck skyline, the Toronto streets, the restaurant) and over-thetop realism (the deli, the bakery), as if the production designer’s tongue were shifting from cheek to cheek. Both forms of texture hint at camp from, as it were, opposite directions (stylized at one moment, minutely detailed at another), but separately and, especially, taken together, they refuse to reduce to camp. Not just place but thought, speech, and action are all exposed as ritualistic, thus ironized, but the irony is neither embarrassed nor disabling. Moonstruck is happily suspended somewhere between mockery and sincerity, mimicry and mimesis. Its staginess—an uncanny because untroubled interplay of the real and the fake—turns out to be much more prole (the buffed-up E Street Band triumphantly romance 129 clowning around in Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” music video) than alienated modern (Samuel Becket’s prisonhouse of social conventions) or arch-postmodern (Spike Jonze’s funhouse of media sophistication). The wry, even loving self-acknowledgment internal to the film portrays an established...