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.

Pasolini was one of the many intellectuals acutely aware of the artificiality of the bureaucratic language and the issue of defining the concept of an Italian nation. What was this nation’s shared values, who should govern it, where was it heading, how would the fractures of uneven industrial development and wealth inequality be addressed by the fledgling , weak state? These questions about national identity weren’t just intellectual parlour games, and these weren’t just personal questions about individual identity either. It’s hardly a wonder that Italy underwent a long post-war period of intense political unrest. Few Italians do not remember vividly the bombs, the prime minister that was kidnapped and murdered by left extremists, The Ustica massacre, the chronic institutional crises and Berlusconi who united Italy in the name of self-interest, etc..Unrest and conflict that was not resolved but merely abstracted away by the progressive growth of the EU and the increasing tendency of the Italian government to rule by decree with the benediction of the Troika.

Whether it be a family or a nation, unresolved (and unresolvable) conflicts, are exhausting. Immigrants have to make the tough decision of leaving one place to find something better elsewhere. And Italians did this in waves all throughout the 20th century. The faustian bargain of immigration is the loss of one’s cultural identity over the long term in exchange for material benefits immediately. As unquestionable the motivation to make a better life elsewhere is, cultural identity and the living & breathing, reality-defining technology we call language rarely survives the immigrant’s destination home culture. This is doubly true when those destinations are Anglophone colonies.

The American founding fathers, unlike their Italian counterparts, recognised instinctively that identity uncertainty was inimical to nation-building. To build a strong colonial nation with immigrants, over the ruins of many indigenous ones, national identity could not be left to chance. The founding myth needed to be driven home endlessly from grade school. The immigrant’s ability to preserve a home culture already fractured and tenuous didn’t stand a chance. The Italian-American diaspora over a single generation became something new, hybrid, and barely recognisable to their Italian counterparts.

The most notable elements are the loss of language and regionalisation that so characterises Italy. The gabagools (as they are derisively called by “real” Italians), have faint traces of “Italianness”, vaguely relatable popular dishes, a smattering of Italian words and gestures, but none of the complex elements constitutive of that fractured Italian soul many many intellectuals and poets sought to characterise in their quest to understand that old question: what is Italy? I’ve sometimes referred to second-generation diaspora as “cultural zombies”. This is of course unfairly unkind, Italian immigrants do very much have a cultural identity, it’s just not something that I can understand very well.

This hopefully provides the necessary context for me to talk about “House of Gucci” and how strange and unheimlich it made me feel. Ridely Scott spawned another monster. Not a predatory Alien monster but Jared Leto dolled up in body prosthetics playing an overweight, balding Italian Gucci scion. Not as the cold haunting depths of the Nostromo but the inconsistent Italian location shots across Milan, Rome, and Milan, that give zero fucks about regional distinctions or local dialects, and lead actors that do an Italian accent with the most open of possible interpretations. To me, Adam Driver and Jeremy Irons were the most reassuring elements of the film, as famous American actors playing “culturally-diverse” characters is pretty familiar terrain.

It is Lady Gaga and Al Pacino who I found truly unsettling. Why is Pacino, so natural a shoe-in for American-Italian roles with his brash wit and big swaggering energy, so surreal playing (of all things) a Tuscan business patrician? Lady Gaga’s undeniable Italian ancestry and acting skills as the buxom matriarch-to-be felt like a character in an airline commercial for Lavazza or Barilla shot by someone who’d only ever visited Italy once for three weeks and done a guided tour of Venice, Florence, and Rome. Maybe this whole convoluted question of national identity can be resolved by Italians simply accepting the caricatured cultural kitsch of “Italy as American rom-com setting” as their own. It certainly is great for the tourism and export industries.I’m not arguing against artificiality, I don’t think that House of Gucci should have been a thoughtful, historically-accurate (and boring) biopic.

I’m not really arguing a position at all, but I had to some way attempt to make sense of the estrangement I felt when watching this strange film. Had it been explicitly slapstick I would have laughed hard and simply enjoyed the fun. I can’t help but imagine that Pacino and Gaga wanted to do this project, as immigrants they were looking back at their origins with as many complex feelings and comprehensibility barriers as I feel when I look at Italian-Americans. The film is of course classic postmodern kitsch, a celebration of global brands and the impressive dominance of American soft power. However it did make me think personally of immigration identity “ruptures” and estrangement. That inevitable process of estrangement and misrecognition that the immigrant faces.

To close with a Kundera quote:“Emigration is hard from the purely personal standpoint as well: people generally think of the pain of nostalgia; but what is worse is the pain of estrangement:the process whereby what was intimate becomes foreign. We experience that estrangement not vis-a-vis the new country: there, the process is the inverse: what was foreign becomes, little by little, familiar and beloved… Only returning to the native land after a long absence can reveal the substantial strangeness of the world and of existence.”