Skip to content

The mother-shaped hole

When I was 14 mum would take me to five-star hotels and blag her way into free stays. At 15, we wandered through central Europe. 17 marked the end of my formal education, all 6 years of it.

House of Gucci: Immigration and Estrangement

House of Gucci. I’ll start with the premise that I have a very flimsy claim to being a DOC Italian. I wasn’t born there, Italian isn’t my first language, and only my father is Italian. But I did spend a key formative period of my life there, from 9 to 24, did most of my grade school there, and I speak the language fluently. At best, I’m a bastard Italian, but no other culture comes close to having shaped me as much as Italy has. Cultural and identitarian purity is a mirage of course, and the topic of endless and mostly fruitless debate. I’d also argue that cultural purity is hardly desirable either. When I watch a film or a TV show that’s principally about situating itself within a geographical region and language, the result nearly universally is “culture as pastiche” if not “culture as soporific performance of insularity”.

Generalisations aside, authentic Italian culture is intensely regional. I’m using the term “authentic” with caution but it is appropriate here, as unlike countries like Britain or France, there isn’t a strong historical correlation between nation and state as the formation of the Italian state happened in the mid to late 19th century and was driven not by history so much as it was by ideas fashionable at the time with those with enough power to not only decide unification was desirable but also achievable. Naples, Sicily, Milan, and Florence (to name a few) didn’t so much as share a common language prior to unification. Received Italian and the Italian state were imposed onto this complex collection of city states, principalities and kingdoms.

Read More →

The Little Provincial Girl

The Little Drummer Girl, 2018

“Do you wish to fight the Zionists, or the entire world?” was the question the Palestinian terrorist recruiter poses to Charlie (Florence Pugh) in The Little Drummer Girl, John le CarrĂ© novel adapted to a TV series by Park Chan-wook. She knows what the recruiter wants to hear, but her simmering resentment against the world is barely masked beneath the surface. This inchoate rage against the world is not unique to this character, and I found this was a particularly accurate and disturbing representation of the tourist radicals of the early 80s provincial European youth.

Read More →
%d bloggers like this: