ESSAY, POP CULTURE
The Evolution of Gangsters Portrayed in Pop Culture
Why do we like mobsters?
The Romanticized Mafioso
Let’s face it, men love gangsters. There is the obvious answer why: they look cool, they take risks that we never would, and they represent status, power, and money. The not too obvious answer is because we resonate with them on a level that connects us with our past. You guessed it: it’s nostalgia. Longing after something that slipped through our hands a long time ago.
Don Winslow puts it perfectly in his novel, The Winter of Frankie Machine:
“Hanging out with mob guys, Frank thought, was like being frozen in some perpetual junior high school time warp. The conversations were always about sex, food, farts, smells, girls, small dicks, and homos. And crime, of course.”
Films like The Godfather I-II, Mean Streets, and Scarface, had managed to romanticize their antiheroes in a way that was beyond engaging (if you haven’t seen those, you know what to do). They were represented as passionate, self-made individuals. Men of honor. The Corleone family and Tony Montana lived by their own principles.
They were sort of incarnations of the Wild West’s bandits and outsiders. Criminal immigrants — that’s…
