Introduction

For this assignment I am going to explore the idea that consuming and producing certain kinds of popular culture can have a negative effect on people. I am not trying to make the argument that media can turn people in to monsters. This argument has been made in the past against computer games, comics and horror films, many of which we can appreciate today are harmless, and do not lead to violence. Instead I want to talk about a more subtle effect, where those involved in the making of art can be traumatised, and those involved in consuming art can have their emotions and personalities subtly changed, and begin thinking in ways that warp their ideas of reality, and even behave in ways that can be dangerous and offensive to people from other cultures.

To explore this idea, my essay is going to focus mainly on the cultural phenomenon of the Italian-American mafia or gangster film, particularly the Martin Scorsese films Goodfellas, The Departed, and the recent The Irishman, and the HBO tv series The Sopranos. Ever since I can remember, i've aways wanted to be a gangster, so I thought it would be good to focus on this genre as I have a personal interest in. As my essay is dealing with the way that popular culture effects people, I have had difficulty finding contemporary fine artists to write about that support my argument. However I did find that the artist Hardeep Pandhal from Britain has made pieces that reference Sopranos and the actors Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, his work has also been described as engaging with 'forms of pleasurable fear undergoing consumption today' (ref?). It is also appropriate to what I will discuss in the essay because as far as I can tell Mr. Pandhal is not italian-american in any way. I have made some reference to Mr. Pandhal's work in the essay and also I emailed the artist to ask if he would provide some illustrations for the essay, which he did.

Part 1: Impressions of a Gangster

My [28F] boyfriend [29M] of two years will not stop speaking in a fake Italian-American accent and keeps making up foreign words

tl;dr - my boyfriend won't stop speaking in a stupid "tough guy" italian american accent and is starting to make up fake italian-sounding words. i'm really annoyed / worried if this might be a red flag

Okay to preface this, I love my boyfriend and he is a super sweet, nice, smart guy that I feel lucky to have but his behavior lately is freaking me out and makes me worried for the future.

My boyfriend loves movies, especially mob movies. He has all of the Sopranos DVDs at his place and I'm pretty sure he still watches them that way. That's fine, obviously you can watch and enjoy whatever you want. But last week he saw "The Irishman" with some friends and since then he will NOT stop talking in like a fake stereotypical mobster accent. We were in an uber the night after going out to dinner and admittedly the driver was going a little fast but my boyfriend kept muttering things like "Who's this fucking guy, huh? Dale Earnhardt Jr over here" and shouting "HO!" as we took corners. He would NOT shut up and even gave the driver a one-star review saying it was about "respect." (throwawayitalia7383, 2019)

The quote above, although it is worrying, is testament to the success of Martin Scorcese's 2019 film The Irishman. The Irishman was very successful and generally received critical praise and good viewing figures. The Irishman is a long film, and is perhaps slower in pace than other famous Scorsese gangster films such as Goodfellas and Casino. Scorsese himself and his famous actors De Niro, Pacino and Joe Pesci are all aged now, and the film deals with the aging of the characters. Scorsese has used digital techniques to 'de-age' the characters so that they can play younger versions of themselves. Some critics found this technique distracting, but I think we can see from the experiences of 'throwawayitalia7383' that this did not impact on the film's realism and the influence it can have on impressionable viewers.

We can find another example of the influence of Scorsese gangster films on impressionable viewers with the film The Departed, and also how this influence can warp people's perception of reality. The Departed is the story of two 'rats' and there is a lot of reference to rats in the film, at one point Jack Nicholson even does an impression of a rat with pointy teeth. The final shot of the film shows a live rat scurry across a balcony rail. One man on the internet was so upset about the rat that he set up a kickstarter fund, Digitally Erase the Rat From the End of The Departed. The man claimed that the rat was 'cheesy' and that it spoiled what he thought was a subtle film. I enjoyed The Departed, like many other gangster films, but I did not think it was subtle and I think it is strange he feels he should change the film, because he was no way involved in making the film. However he did raise thousands of dollars, which shows there are other impressionable people out there. I thought it would be good to set up a rival kickstarter campaign to digitally alter the final shot to make it even cheesier, maybe as the rat walks across the balcony it stops and turns directly to the camera and it has Jack Nicholson's face doing the rat impression, and it says "I'm the Fucking Rat!". However this might now be difficult to get off the ground, as I have noticed the original kickstarter has been hit by a copyright infringement notice by Warner Bros which says "This campaign is to digitally remove a rat from the end of our motion picture, and is promising to distribute the edited footage upon completion, which violates our copyright in this film."

Part 2: Too Much Sauce?

Everyone has their quirks, I get it, and they can be what makes someone special. At first it was even kind of cute / funny but I just can't really understand this shift all of a sudden. It's been a week and he continues to make asides in this voice and when he gets drunk he speaks in made up Italian. Like we were having desert at my sister's and he came up to me and said "Hey, ma, I gotta get home and hit the drippini." I'm the DD (I don't drink) so I asked him why he wants to leave and what a drippini is ??? His response was "Ya know, like a shower." Drippini is NOT a word! In ANY language! He also never called me "ma" before ever and now he does it almost all the time. I feel crazy, like is this going to be a permanent feature of his personality now?

I know this sounds incredibly stupid compared to some of other serious issues on here but I am just really nervous about what this means about his personality / mental health. He really is a sweet loving guy with a wonderful family and we have a lot in common but just like, I don't even know how to begin to approach this. I want to tell him off and be like why do you keep doing this voice can you please stop. We don't live together so thankfully it's not a constant thing but like, what if we did and it was?? Is this the kind of thing you just deal with when its someone you love?

EDIT: I just want to add that he's NOT italian at all either so im also worried people will get offended when we're out or something (throwawayitalia7383, 2019)

In the second part of the essay I am going to use another example to examine the way that being involved in producing art can effect people negatively. I am going to use the animated series of the popular computer game Pacman as an example, as the series was extremely graphic and the animators working on it became disturbed. This also links to the artist Hardeep Pandhal who has made a documentary about the Pacman tv series, focusing on how the writers accidentally used a word that is offensive word to British people. Finally there is a link between Pacman and the world of mob movies, as in both there is a lot of eating and greedy consumption.

In the Pacman tv series the animators were looking at what would happen if you took the relentless appetite of Pacman and let him loose in the real world. Of course Pacman causes a lot of destruction and pain just through eating so much, there is also humour to be found as Pacman lands different jobs in the city such as testing cakes and eating trash. There are also social messages which the viewer learns through Pacman's experiences, for example when he gets placed in prison because he looks different. Pacman has a family and all the family have a similar range of experiences such as when the Pacman kids first go to school they try and eat the other kids and end up devouring a teacher.

The animators on the program rendered the eating habits of the Pacman family very graphically, and reported to be disturbed by the process, for example in the scene where the kids are eating the teacher the animators did painstaking research into how piranhas strip the flesh off large mammals like a horse or cattle.

As they would say in The Sopranos, these animators were from the old school. It is important that the reader remembers, back in those days, they use to draw everything out by hand, frame-by-frame.

Like the giants in Attack on Titan, Pacman has a big round belly but no digestive system, so simply throws up the contents of his stomach once he's full. In the series the entire Pacman family does this together around the dinner table at the same time every day. This is a good image to represent the idea of over-consumption in relation to producing art and consuming art. How did viewers at the time not turn off at this disgusting spectacle? Perhaps it is because, like with Tony Soprano, we do not judge Pacman, and also forgive his casual racism. Perhaps we want to eat at the same pace, to belong to the family, and do not want to be the ones turning our noses up at the food?

Conclusion:

The aspect that connects this essay is that we can see certain people over-consume these kind of cultural outputs as though they are gorging on food. They really have had 'too much sauce'. This gorging leads to a pressure to produce more and more rich media to consume, which eventually can have an effect on the producers as well as consumers. I have shown in this essay how certain people get overcome by the influence of art and media, whether they are producing art or consuming art. Do you think I am one of those people? If not, the conclusion of my essay may surprise you. As I quoted earlier from Goodfellas, ever since I can remember, I've always wanted to be a gangster. But I am not italian-american, and as far as I can tell there has been no kind of criminal activity in my family background. But I can still become a gangster legend and prove the point of my essay, by arranging a hit on myself which I have done. If I can't live like a gangster then I can still die like one, so I've arranged to be killed, I even instructed the hitman to shoot me in the face so my mother couldn't give me an open casket in the funeral. They probably wouldn't have an open casket anyway but it is much more violent and dramatic if I'm shot in the face. It will create a horrifying scene to discover, I have also arranged to have the scene of the crime photographed properly. Ultimately I suppose we can say we are defined by our appetites, but you can't eat culture, you consume it but you are never full, and finally you have to throw it back up again.