Redefining a Gendered : Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Italian

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Daniel Evan Paul, M.A.

Graduate Program in Italian

The Ohio State University

2019

Dissertation Committee

Dana Renga, Advisor

Jonathan Combs-Schilling

Linda Mizejewski

Catherine O’Rawe

1

Copyright by

Daniel Evan Paul

2019

2

Abstract

“Redefining a Gendered Genre: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Italian

Teen Film”, pushes against the generally accepted classification of teen film—with its romantic narratives and its classification as popular culture—as a feminine/feminized genre. I argue instead that such films privilege male protagonists and their coming-of-age experience and thus make central the masculine struggle of growing into adult- and manhood. Through close analysis of ten filmic texts, I demonstrate how Italian teen film proposes innovative forms of masculinity through its male protagonists, ones which often appropriate aspects of femininity such as caretaking and emotional availability. These forms of masculinity at once code the young men as inherently damaged, yet also allow the genre’s stereotypically female audiences to mourn the wounded men so that they can subsequently be recuperated into normative society.

In that the films I discuss often centralize teenage romance, they are quite easily labeled as , or even romantic comedies. A common, though not constant, trope of the melodramatic mode is its tendency to depart from a space of innocence which is often characterized by hearth and home. For a to end happily, it typically does so by centralizing the heterosexual couple or the heteronormative family consisting of husband, wife, and child(ren) in an apparent return to the space of innocence from which it departed. In the dissertation, I contend that Italian teen film subverts the traditional heterocentric happy ending of melodrama by privileging male-male bonding, the surrogate father, and queer desire. By so

ii doing, the male protagonists find new avenues for happiness and fulfillment, ones outside the heteronormative model. I thus argue that, despite its popular address, its consideration as a feminized genre, and its reliance on sentimentality, Italian teen film merits increased attention as a site of negotiation for contemporary notions of masculinity.

iii

Dedication

To my wife, Lisa

iv

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Dana Renga, for her support during my time at Ohio State University. I am extremely grateful for her confidence in my project, her keen intellect, her patience and guidance, and her thoughtful criticism. It hasn’t always been easy to write about Italian teen film, but her unwavering approval has continually spurred me on.

I am likewise indebted to Catherine O’Rawe for her insight and feedback on all things

Italian teen film. Her support in the arduous process of publication has been immeasurable and I am grateful to be her colleague, which is what she made me feel like even as a graduate student.

I am equally grateful for Jonathan Combs-Schilling and Linda Mizejewski, the other members of my committee. It has been a pleasure and honor to work with you both. Thank you for letting me bounce ideas off you and work through some of the issues at play in my corpus.

My gratitude goes out to all of the wonderful professors, staff, colleagues, and friends from the Department of French and Italian at Ohio State. I will miss being among such lively, warm-hearted, and supportive people.

Finally, my sincere appreciation goes to my wife, Lisa, for her unrelenting support and steadfast belief in me, even when I doubted myself. I honestly could not have done this without her. She has kept me sane and motivated during the hardest of times. Despite the difficulty of this undertaking, I knew I was never alone. Thank you for taking this journey with me.

v

Vita

June 2003 ...... Pitman High School

2012 ...... B.A. Linguistics and Italian, Brigham

Young University

2014 ...... M.A. Italian Studies, Ohio State University

2014 to present ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department

of French and Italian, Ohio State Univeristy

Publications

“Marking Their Territory: Male Adolescence Abroad in Recent Italian Teen Film”, California Italian Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 1-18 (Online, cloudfront.escholarship.org/dist/prd/content/qt6w37g1w9/qt6w37g1w9.pdf?t=p4pwzg).

“Conference Report: ‘Italian Screen Studies: Methods and Priorities’, Joint conference of AAIS and CSIS, The Ohio State University, 20-22 April 2017”, Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2. pp. 235-240.

Fields of Study

Major Field: Italian

Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization: Film

vi

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii Dedication ...... iv Acknowledgments ...... v Vita ...... vi List of Tables ...... viii List of Figures ...... ix Introduction: Coming-of-Age in Contemporary Italian Teen Film ...... 1 Chapter 1. Federico Moccia, Teen Film, and Contemporary Masculinities ...... 29 Chapter 2. Marking Their Territory: Male Adolescence Abroad ...... 58 Chapter 3. Lost Fathers Found: Masculinity, Surrogate Fatherhood and the New Italian Family 87 Chapter 4. Call Me by Your Name, Chrononormativity, and the (Queer?) Future of Italian Teen Film ...... 137 Epilogue: Transnational Adolescence and the Female Future of Italian Teen Media...... 167 Bibliography ...... 179 Appendix A. Italian Teen Films, 2003-2013 ...... 205

vii

List of Tables

Table 1. The success of teen film in , by Gross Domestic Earnings ...... 206

viii

List of Figures

Figure 1. The erasure of female adolescence in Niente può fermarci ...... 12 Figure 2. Rain as Step’s tears in Tre metri sopra il cielo ...... 47 Figure 3. Teen film: A genre gendered feminine ...... 59 Figure 4. The homoerotic threat in Lezioni di volo ...... 77 Figure 5. Marco in his natural element in 10 regole per fare innamorare ...... 114 Figure 6. Carlo’s view of his surrogate family in Universitari - Molto più che amici ...... 132 Figure 7. Elio’s productive mourning in Call Me by Your Name ...... 161

ix

Introduction: Coming-of-Age in Contemporary Italian Teen Film

Introduction: Teen Film in Italy Today

Since 2000, the teen and coming-of-age film in Italy have flourished: films such as

Notte prima degli esami [Night Before the Exams] (, 2006) and Scusa ma ti chiamo amore [Sorry, If I Love You] (Federico Moccia, 2008) have placed on the list of the top ten highest grossing films in Italy for their respective years—coming in at number eight and six, respectively—beating out the domestic releases of Hollywood blockbusters like The Departed

(, 2006), (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008), and The Dark Knight (Christopher

Nolan, 2008). In 2007, the films Ho voglia di te [I Desire You] (Luis Prieto), Notte prima degli esami - Oggi [Night Before the Exams - Today] (Brizzi), and Come tu mi vuoi [As You Desire Me]

(Volfango De Biasi) each placed in the top twenty list and together accounted for ticket sales of nearly €45,000,000. Hence, as is clear in Table 1 in Appendix A, teen film represents a stable, reliable, and lucrative genre in Italian cinema.

With statistics like these, it is no wonder that Danielle Hipkins asserts that the “boom of the [Italian] teen movie was launched in 2004” with director Luca Lucini’s adaptation of Federico

Moccia’s novel Tre metri sopra il cielo [Three Steps Over Heaven] (173). The story behind how the novel eventually came to be a film borders on the mythic and provides useful insight into the rather brief, yet extremely profitable, period of what we might label the “teen film craze” in Italy: initially published at Moccia’s own expense in 1992, the book floundered, with few copies printed

1 and the original publisher closing its doors (Dal Bello 30). However, the book began to gain popular ground among adolescents, circulating—in photocopied form—from one student to another, passing from school to school until, in 2001, producer Riccardo Tozzi sought out a copy of the book and, upon reading it, decided to adapt it for the screen (Boero 35). In comments made about the book, Moccia attributes its success to the fact that it responds “to the necessity for adolescents to see themselves represented,” arguing that the novel satisfies “an instinctive need, that is to exorcise their own anxieties by seeing themselves reflected in other people’s affairs”

(Boero 35).1 In one particular interview, Moccia makes the point that films like Tre metri sopra il cielo, and other such films that followed, “were a portrait of the dreams of today’s youth” (Dal

Bello 28).2 Implicit in Moccia’s remarks, then, is the assumption that teen films somehow “speak” to young people and allow them to envision themselves, their concerns, and their aspirations embodied by the protagonists presented onscreen.

In my own estimation, the period spanning from the mid-2000s to the early years of the following decade represents the heyday of Italian teen film. In recent years, the genre has fallen out of favor, and viewers have instead come to the cinema for the laughs and multiple address of popular comedies such as Quo vado? [Where Am I Going?] (Gennaro Nunziante, 2016), Perfetti sconosciuti [Perfect Strangers] (, 2016), Natale col boss [Christmas with the Boss]

(Volfango de Biasi, 2015), [Caribbean Vacation] (, 2015), Si accettano miracoli [Miracles Accepted] (Alessandro Siani, 2014), and Un boss in salotto [A Boss

1 “rispondendo alla necessità degli adolescenti di sentirsi rappresentati; il romanzo appagherebbe un bisogno istintivo, quello di esorcizzare le proprie ansie rispecchiandosi in vicende altrui.” Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this dissertation are my own. 2 “erano un ritratto dei sogni dei giovani d’oggi…” 2 in the Living Room] (Luca Miniero, 2014).3 While teen films have not entirely disappeared from the Italian cinematic landscape, as the recent releases of ’s L’estate addosso

[Summertime] (September 2016), Edoardo De Angelis’ Indivisibli [Indivisible] (September 2016),

Giuseppe Piccioni’s Questi giorni [These Days] September 2016), and Roan Johnson's Piuma

[Feather] (October 2016) attest, their popularity has most assuredly dwindled: out of the four films, L’estate addosso is the only one to have broken the top 100 films of the year, placing at 96.

Perhaps even more telling, the films’ combined gross amounts to less than $3 million in a year which saw a comedy accumulate nearly twenty-five times that sum. With that in mind, I believe it is safe to say that the teen film phenomenon in Italy has reached its end, or, at the very least, has entered a period of dormancy.

Teen Film and Melodrama

In their study of melodrama, John Mercer and Martin Shingler define the term “genre” as a concept which “allows a film to be identified as belonging to a larger body of work with shared themes, styles, attitudes and values” and which “emphasises the role of the audience in the creation of a series of related films” (5). They further argue that “[t]he development of a specific genre or

‘film cycle’ requires a consistently positive audience response to its style and content, its associated stars, directors, plots, props and settings” (Mercer and Shingler 5). Italian teen film certainly adheres to these characteristics, in that the filmic texts which represent the genre center

3 The Checco Zalone fronted Quo vado?, in fact, grossed $72,601,522, a sum surpassed in Italy by only one film, John Cameron's Avatar (2009) which garnered $83,498,193 (as per www.boxofficemojo.com/intl/italy/yearly/?yr=2015&p=.htm). Checco Zalone appears to be box office gold, as his 2013 team up with Nunziante, , grossed nearly $70 million. Furthermore, in 2014, of the six Italian films in the top 15, all of them were comedies and accounted for just over $74 million in profit for that year. 3 on and perpetuate themes of teenage romance, sexual initiation and other rites of passage particular to adolescence, and they also feature adolescent protagonists and youthful milieus such as home and high school. Furthermore, certain stars—for example, , Nicolas Vaporidis, and —and directors such as Federico Moccia, Fausto Brizzi, and Giovanni

Veronesi were for some time almost synonymous with teen movies. Audiences, ideally comprised of adolescents both male and female, also responded positively to such films, shelling out millions of dollars to see themselves represented, and their concerns addressed, onscreen. Thus, in my estimation, “teen film” is a valid generic label for the body of films of interest to this study.

At the same time, however, teen films also rely on a number of the conventions of melodrama for their narratives, such as “chance happenings, coincidences, missed meetings, sudden conversions, last-minute rescues and revelations, deus ex machina endings” (Neale 6).

Moreover, teen films are often marked by “‘lapses’ in realism, by ‘excesses’ of spectacle and displays of primal, even infantile emotions, and by narratives that seem circular and repetitive”

(Williams, “Film Bodies” 3). Such is the case in the popular teen film Notte prima degli esami, where charming high school student Luca glimpses the attractive Claudia at a party and immediately falls for her (chance happenings). When he fails to get Claudia’s number, Luca continually attempts to track her down but is unable to do so; he narrowly misses seeing her on a number of occasions as he frequents his loathed literature professor’s home for tutoring, never realizing that Claudia is, in fact, the professor’s daughter (missed meetings, circular narrative).

When Luca finally spots Claudia sitting on a bench (coincidence), he runs to her and gives her a kiss. At this moment, the scene shatters—quite literally—into pieces as the professor’s voice calls

Luca back to the present and the viewer realizes that this was just a dream (lapse in realism, excess

4 of spectacle). When Luca and Claudia finally do meet again, the two admit that they each have something to say to the other. Luca allows Claudia to go first and she quickly asks him if she can have the number for Luca’s best friend, Riccardo, whom she also met at the party (last-minute revelation). In addition to their designation as teen films, then, texts such as Notte prima degli esami work within the genre, style, and sensibility of melodrama.4

In her remarks in “Melodrama Revised”, Linda Williams stipulates that “melodrama functions as a basic mode of storytelling. The term indicates a form of exciting, sensational, and, above all, moving story that can be further differentiated by specifications of setting or milieu

(such as society melodrama) or genre (such as melodrama)” (51, emphasis in original).

Perhaps it is best, then, not to speak of teen film and melodrama as two separate and distinct genres, but instead, to consider them as one, that is, in Williams’ terminology, as teen film melodramas or even as melodramatic teen films. Applying the label of melodrama to teen films is useful for a number of reasons: first, it allows me to examine, following Barbara Klinger’s line of investigation of the family melodrama, the “problematic sexual dynamics that can bubble up from ‘below the surface’” that either allow or disallow closure and resolution in the coming-of-age narratives I discuss (22). These sexual dynamics can include, but are not limited to, heterosexual friendship, heterosexual desire and pleasure, homosocial bonding, the threat of homosexuality, and homosexual desire, as well as tensions between father and son.

In a treatise on melodrama, Laura Mulvey points out that “the strength of the melodramatic form lies in the amount of dust the story raises along the road, the cloud of overdetermined

4 Mercer and Shingler use the tagline of “Genre, Style, Sensibility” as the subtitle for their reflections on melodrama. 5 irreconcilables which put up a resistance to being neatly settled, in the last five minutes, into a happy end” (“Notes on Sirk” 40). Melodrama thus provides a useful framework with which to examine the “dust” raised along the road—a goal of my project—so as to then determine whether or not that dust is, or can in fact be, settled into a happy end. Though certainly not all melodramas end happily, those that do “[restore] social order” by depicting marriage, a man’s return to the homestead, a mother’s self-sacrifice for the benefit of her child, or some miraculous rescue that saves a protagonist—male or female—from a brutal demise, with each of these ultimately ensuring the restoration and perpetuation of the heteronormative family (Klinger 23). While most of the films I discuss in this dissertation end on a happy note, I argue that the traditional heterocentric happy ending of melodrama is significantly lacking in Italian teen films, where a number of subversive scenarios take its place: one possibility, which we will see in chapter 2 in the journey abroad, is that young men reinforce the male-male bond, constructing what I consider to be homosocial utopias, free from the female threat. Though the male adolescents experiment with, participate in, and apparently enjoy heterosexual relationships and intercourse, such rapports have no place within their homosocial futures. A second possibility, which I discuss in chapter 3, is that young men establish themselves as surrogate or social fathers, either by symbolically caring for children with which they share no blood relation, or by constructing non-nuclear families. What is significant about such arrangements is that the young men do so without accomplishing rites of passage typically associated with fatherhood, such as dating, courtship, marriage, and perhaps most importantly, (hetero)sexual intercourse. A final, and perhaps the most subversive, outcome, which I broach in chapter 4, is the emergence of queer desire.

6

In short, what I set out to do in this dissertation is to interrogate and reevaluate what qualifies as a “happy” ending in the context of Italian teen film by suggesting that Italian heteronormativity, characterized by the failing marriages and crumbling families which populate the texts under consideration, no longer represents an aspiration for young Italian men. Indeed, the male adolescents depicted in the films I examine seem just as content, if not happier, to reestablish their male friendships, to reaffirm the importance of fatherhood by becoming fathers themselves, or to remain alone. At the same time, this dissertation is an attempt to grapple with the crises of adolescence, as well as the crisis of masculinity, as it is depicted onscreen in a corpus of 10 Italian teen films produced primarily between 2004-2013 (though there are exceptions to this period).

Italian Teen Film: Gendering a Genre

As my discussion thus far implies, I am interested in masculinity as glimpsed in Italian teen film. That said, however, in approaching Italian teen film through the lens of melodrama, I am aware of the obstacles which this classification presents as related to my project, particularly because of its association with the feminine. As Mercer and Shingler point out, melodrama and the so-called “woman’s film” had become “largely synonymous” during the 1980s (27). In fact, this synonymity persists even today, such that the term “melodrama” continues to be an inherently negative classifier, emphasizing and exposing, as it does, the emotional and sentimental—and therefore feminine—aspects of a film. As Christine Gledhill argues, in her introduction to Home

Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, melodrama fails to appeal to the “cognoscenti” due to its “association with a mass and, above all female, audience” (6). In other

7 words, in the eyes of scholars and academics, popular culture does not merit a critical eye, connected, as it is, with mass consumption and the female viewer.

As a consequence of this assumption, that is that pop culture = feminine, Italian teen film, like melodrama before it, had, for a time, not received the attention it deserved. Only recently have scholars begun to probe the depths of all that teen film can offer regarding the Italian cinematic and social landscape. Studies on the genre started to emerge in 2009 with Davide Boero and Mario Dal Bello. In the introduction to Chitarre e lucchetti: Il cinema adolescente da Morandi a Moccia [Guitars and Lockets: Adolescent Cinema from Morandi to Moccia], Davide Boero labels his book a “small guide” which he hopes will “invite the reader-spectator to lose him- or herself among the infinite thematic variations” that teen film presents to its audiences (9-10).5

Boero argues that “various [teen actors, such as] Scamarcio, Vaporidis, Crescentini, have embodied the aspirations of their peers, but also their fragilities and their needs,” yet he fails to fully elaborate on what these fragilities and needs might be or why this embodiment is important

(9).6 Lacking any prolonged analysis of his chosen films, Chitarre e lucchetti is most helpful if considered precisely as Boero himself intends, that is, as a guide, a useful roadmap of the history of the genre and a resource and tool in constructing a corpus of teen film.

Mario Dal Bello’s tome Inquieti: I giovani nel cinema italiano del Duemila [Restless:

Youth in Italian Cinema of the 2000s] faces similar drawbacks. Dal Bello posits his work as one of observation: “By observing—the objective of this brief survey—how much the cinema proposes about youth, it seems that it concentrates its efforts, in a peculiar way, on the theme of the ‘search

5 “piccola guida”; “invitare il lettore-spettatore a perdersi tra infinite variazioni tematiche…” 6 “i vari Scamarcio, Vaporidis, Crescentini, hanno incarnato le aspirazioni dei loro coetanei, ma anche le loro fragilità e i loro bisogni.” 8 for happiness’” (10).7 I agree with Dal Bello’s assessment that teen films often center on the search for happiness. However, what interests me about recent Italian teen films, as I have previously mentioned, is not so much the search for happiness, but the ways that happiness is attained, particularly by young men. Typical Hollywood teen films conclude in a fashion similar to classical melodramas that end happily, that is, with the reinforcement of patriarchy or heteronormativity through a heterosexual couple successfully coming together despite whatever odds are stacked against them. In the Italian context, on the other hand, although heterosexual relationships facilitate and insure progress towards adulthood, female love interests quickly disappear from the horizon and are replaced by homosocial bonding, surrogate families, and at times even male singledom.

Although Dal Bello does highlight a number of subgenres within teen film, his discussion of the films comprising his corpus remains superficial. For example, in his section on what he terms the psychological subgenre, Dal Bello examines the theme of adolescence on-the-road—a topic I analyze in my second chapter, “Marking Their Territory: Male Adolescence Abroad”—and he observes that “during a vacation one can understand something about life,” though he does not speculate as to what exactly that something might be (44-45).8 Instead, Dal Bello poses and answers a somewhat rhetorical question: “What will become of these young people? One cannot see the future” (45).9 By doing so, Dal Bello sidesteps the question of adolescent futurity. Despite these perceived pitfalls, Boero’s and Dal Bello’s works represent a concerted effort to raise

7 “Osservando—è il tentativo di questa breve indagine—quanto il cinema propone sul mondo giovanile, sembra che esso concentri i suoi sforzi, in modo peculiare, sul tema della ‘ricerca della felicità’.” 8 “durante una vacanza si possa capire qualcosa della vita.” 9 “Che ne sarà di questi ragazzi? Il futuro non si vede.” 9 awareness of what was a neglected genre in Italian cinema and their corpora provide an essential jumping off point for the subsequent studies I discuss below.

Anglophone Italianists have turned a more critical eye—an outsider’s perspective, one could say—to Italian teen film than their native counterparts. Perhaps because the genre itself is stereotypically considered “feminized”, being ideally addressed to, and consumed by, a primarily female audience, research has tended towards examinations of female adolescents/adolescence and female sexuality.10 For example, active female sexuality, the symbol of postfeminist girl power, is a topic which Danielle Hipkins addresses in her study on the Italian showgirl, known as the velina.

She analyzes female friendship in the comedy Natale sul Nilo [Christmas on the Nile] (Neri

Parenti, 2002), the middlebrow drama Ricordati di me [Remember Me, My Love] (Gabriele

Muccino, 2003), and, most pertinent to my project, the teen film Ho voglia di te (2007), each of which exemplify “key sectors of what can be very broadly defined as popular Italian cinema”

(“Who Wants to Be” 156).11 Working within the parameters of postfeminist discourse, Hipkins argues that “in the context of popular Italian culture, the velina figure incarnates [an] ideal(ized) neo-liberal subject, taking advantage of a new interest in the body, sexuality and celebrity as forms of power” and she further suggests that, as an “ambiguous fantasy product of postfeminist culture,” the velina “provides the key to resolving the current dichotomy between adulation of her

10 See Catherine Driscoll’s Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory, : Press, 2002, 216-226; and Teen Film: A Critical Introduction, New York: Berg, 2011, 3. See also Roz Kaveney’s Teen Dreams: Reading Teen Film from Heathers to Veronica Mars, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006. 11 For further discussion of the velina, see Hipkins’ “‘Figlie di papà’?: Adolescent Girls Between the Incest Motif and Female Friendship in Contemporary Italian Film Comedy.” The Italianist, vol. 35, no. 2, 2015, pp. 248-271; and “The Showgirl Effect: Adolescent Girls and (Precarious) ‘Technologies of Sexiness’ in Contemporary Italian Cinema.” International Cinema and the Girl: Local Issues, Transnational Contexts, edited by Fiona Handyside and Kate E. Taylor-Jones, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 21-33. 10

‘girlpower’ and treatment of her as abject” (156). Although few veline actually populate the films under consideration here, I find Hipkins’ remarks intriguing as the effects of velina culture are clearly apparent in the young women in the texts I examine: not only are they more willing to have

(non-committal) sex, they are often the ones who ultimately allow their bodies to be possessed by their male counterparts. Girls have the power and choose to “give it up”, but only on their terms and in their own time; young men, on the other hand, seem powerless to “get it”.

At the same time, this newfound sexual liberation may in fact be why female adolescents, and women in general, have no place in the homosocial futures created by male adolescents. In preparing for a brief presentation on former teen idol-turned-serious actor Riccardo Scamarcio during my time as a graduate student, I uncovered a set of images from one of the films I discuss in second chapter on male adolescence abroad. The film is Luigi Cecinelli’s Niente può fermarci

[Nothing Can Stop Us] (2013) and the images I discovered evidence the role of women in Italian teen film. In the first image, a group of young people—comprised of 4 males and one female— happily splash through the water together (figure 1). The four young men lost their virginity just the night before and their frolicking on the morning after is meant as a celebratory gesture marking this rite of passage towards adulthood in the process. The presence of Regina, the woman in the picture, emphasizes the importance of heterosexual romance so typical of teen film and, at the same time, assuages the threat of homoeroticism between the young men. This image is used for the film’s cover art but with one significant difference: Regina is missing. Her disappearance has several interesting implications: for one, the female experience is completely erased, leaving no

11

Figure 1. The erasure of female adolescence in Niente può fermarci

visible trace. Moreover, Regina’s erasure draws attention to the homosocial, or perhaps even

homoerotic relationship between the young men. In this rewriting, the male experience of

adolescence is privileged and is productive as the gleeful boys splash off towards their future as

men and men alone. Despite their apparent erasure, young women are central to Italian teen film,

as they typically serve one—or, more often, both—of the following purposes within a given

narrative: first, their bodies are used by young men to prove their masculinity through heterosexual

intercourse; and/or second, they provide an audience for young men’s suffering, such that their

12 masculinity can be validated. However, once these tasks are accomplished, females are—as is the case above—almost immediately dispatched with, abjected as it were, from the films’ narratives.

Thus, girls are typically cast aside so as to allow boys to progress through adolescence and to adulthood with no strings attached. Unfortunately, in teen film, this sometimes means that young women must decide to move on, opting to conform to society’s expectations by “settling” for less dangerous and less subversive—in other words, more “normal”—love interests.12 In this way, the velina—as evidenced in the sexually-empowered females who populate the texts under consideration—exposes and accentuates, in a manner similar to the melodramatic mode theorized by Barbara Klinger above, the problematic sexual dynamics which lie just below the surface in

Italian teen film.

Dana Renga examines some of these sexual dynamics, as well as questions of gender, in her study of a group of five, girl-fronted films, all produced by female directors. These films, she argues, “are atypical of the teen in that they stage coming-of-age plots that overtly critique the status quo instead of depicting teen protagonists who eventually conform to the dominant model” (310). She further contends that such texts “resist the postfeminist project that positions women as consumers who can ‘have it all’” (310). What sets her chosen corpus apart from the films under consideration here is the fact that “most recent Italian films by women directors explicitly foreground politics and religious and legal corruption” (312). Such tensions are rarely invoked in male-centered teen film narratives, and when they are, it is merely in passing.

12 In the worst cases, such as in films like Bianca come il latte, Rossa come il sangue [White as Milk, Red as Blood] (Giacomo Campiotti, 2013) or Un giorno speciale [] (Francesca Comencini, 2012), young women are physically or socially killed off, often by terminal illness, so as to allow male subjectivity to reach new heights. Though I don’t discuss such films here, they deserve an increased attention. 13

Such is the case, for example, in ’s Che ne sarà di noi [What Will Become of

Us] (2004). During a sun-filled jaunt to the beach, the film’s main protagonist Matteo (Silvio

Muccino) launches into a tirade about how the younger generation could change the political situation in Italy. At a certain point, Matteo proposes his studious friend Paolo (Giuseppe

Sanfelice) as Minister of Education, asking his comrade if there is a subject missing from Italy’s curriculum. Paolo initially hesitates but, after some coaxing by Matteo, decides that “Thinking” should be a required subject. After lauding Paolo, much to his own amusement, as the “greatest

Minister of Education in the ”, Matteo soon drops the matter and dejectedly sprawls out on the sand, never to speak of the subject again.

Unlike the female-centered films discussed by Renga, where political, religious, and legal tensions “are not relegated to the sidelines, or subordinated to the more common coming-of-age plotlines of romance and social inclusion,” male-fronted narratives are all too quick to reinstate traditional coming-of-age plotlines, particularly by returning to romantic intrigues (312).

Immediately following the aforementioned interactions on the beach, for example, the scene transitions to a shot of Valentina (Katy Louise Saunders), a girl who secretly has a crush on Matteo, as she gazes longingly at her object of desire as he eats with his group of friends. In this way, Che ne sarà di noi smooths over any overt political message or critique implied in the previous sequence by drawing the viewer’s attention back to the heterosexual romance.

While these foundational studies of Italian teen film provide useful—and much needed— insight into the female experience of adolescence in Italy, they would also seem to confirm the long-standing assumption that teen films are directed at, and consumed by, an ideal audience composed primarily of young women. At the same time, however, Renga’s assertion that the films

14 which she examines are atypical begs the question of what qualifies as “typical” Italian teen film.

In antithesis to these preconceived notions of teen film as a genre gendered feminine, I contend that a large portion of recent Italian teen films centers on a male protagonist—at times with his male friends in tow—whose forays into heterosexuality, masculinity construction, and identity development take center stage. I thus propose that male creativity, male suffering, and masculine point of view are privileged in Italian teen film. As such, I argue that the operating mode in this body of films is not only melodrama, but male melodrama in particular.

I would suggest that the depiction of male suffering in these films is imbued with a sense of loss surrounding the Italian family and, in particular, the Italian patriarch. Whether conscious or not, the young men in the texts I examine embody a profound melancholia associated with changes regarding masculinity and what it means to be a man in contemporary Italian society. As

Juliana Schiesari argues, “melancholia appears as a specific representational form for male creativity, one whose practice converted the feeling of disempowerment into a privileged artifact”

(8). The centrality of images of young males in crisis contained in the films I discuss thus evidence a measure of disempowerment experienced by men, in part due to a reevaluation of gender roles, as well as an apparent feminization of the workplace brought about under feminism. Along these lines, however, I agree with Joy Van Fuqua when she proposes that male melodramas—to include the teen films I discuss—are not so much a “reaction to feminism” or simply about a loss of power or a “perceived loss of control” but are instead a “part of the constantly shifting maneuvers of hegemony, which appropriate the counterdiscourses of feminism … to realign apparently threatened positions of power” (29). In other words, male melodramas shore up male power by

15 depicting a more acceptable version of masculinity, one that audiences may find “more embraceable” (Van Fuqua 29).

Indeed, as Schiesari contends, “the male display of loss convert[s that loss] into gain” and

“recuperates that loss … as a privileged form of male expression, if not as an expression of male privilege” (12, 13). Despite the inherent feminization that occurs with melancholia, this extreme sadness remains the prerogative of men and legitimates their experience; women’s suffering, on the other hand, is not given the same “representational value” and is viewed only as “a debilitating disease and certainly not an enabling ethos” (Schiesari 13, 15; emphasis in original). Or, as Tania

Modleski puts it, “women are unable to turn their sadness into anything productive—into anything but waste” (“An Affair” 120). I thus agree with Schiesari’s conclusion that “the melancholic … stands both in reaction to and in complicity with patriarchy” (14). Indeed, the male melancholic is a symptom of the crisis of contemporary Italian society and is, at the same time, the antidote for that sickness, that is, an image that is deployed in Italian teen film as a means of (re)asserting male dominance in that society.

Despite being male melancholics, it is true that the young men in these films rarely shed visible tears; nor do others typically “do the crying for them” as in the male melodramas that

Modleski analyzes (“” 136). With the exception of rare cases where such emotional excess is pushed onto the mise-en-scène—as it is with Step in Tre metri sopra il cielo which I discuss in chapter 1—tears are surprisingly absent from Italian teen film. Furthermore, though the young men are often plagued by a “sorrow lurk[ing] under the surface,” they most certainly are not the “strong, stoic types” of traditional male melodramas (Modleski, “Clint Eastwood” 136). In his musings on male melodrama, Tom Lutz concludes that “[m]ost of the heroes of male

16 melodrama…are not normative but exceptional figures, individuals who invent or at least suggest new norms when the old ones fail” (199). As I suggest, this is certainly true of the young men who populate Italian teen film, as the re-inscription of the homosocial bond, the figure of the surrogate father, or of the male loner resists the norm—of Hollywood teen film and melodrama—of heterosexual marriage. By breaking such generic tendencies, the young men become exceptional figures. At the same time, however, the prevalence of such male-centered narratives suggests that the type of male adolescence depicted in the films under consideration has indeed become a new norm. My project, then, is an attempt to reexamine—or perhaps better, to re-gender—a genre still typically gendered female; at the same time, it also represents a concerted effort to grapple with the at times problematic representations of male adolescence and to investigate how such representations have become normalized.

Catherine O’Rawe’s chapter, “Mad About the Boy: Teen Stars and Serious Actors”, represents one of the few, if not only, reflections on masculinity in Italian teen film and my work here dialogues rather extensively with hers. In O’Rawe’s examination of masculinity, particularly that of Italian teen stars such as Riccardo Scamarcio and Nicolas Vaporidis, she highlights the role teen film has in identity construction, of both the actors themselves and their (primarily adolescent) audiences. O’Rawe analyzes the stars of teen films as a specific phenomenon created and contested by a community of spectators, many of whom are females. While O’Rawe’s analysis focuses primarily on female fandom, she also acknowledges that, in all of the discussion surrounding films such as Tre metri sopra il cielo and Ho voglia di te, “young male fans are ignored completely”

(33). And although O’Rawe’s analysis of Riccardo Scamarcio is timely and profoundly insightful,

17 her study also highlights the overwhelming lack of attention given to masculinity in Italian teen film.

My analysis of Italian onscreen adolescence focuses on a significant corpus of films produced since 2003, with an emphasis on filmic texts produced after the 2004 boom—identified by Hipkins—inaugurated by Tre metri sopra il cielo. As I have previously pointed out, until recently, Italian teen film has been remarkably understudied which is curious as it is a highly lucrative and popular genre in Italian cinematic production. In many teen film narratives, adolescence in Italy is marred by a parental lack: mothers and, more prominently, fathers have died; progenitors—again predominantly patriarchs—have deserted or simply ignored their spouses and offspring; overbearing parents who nurture too much contrast with “bad” parents who fail to nurture their children. The result of such parental deficiency is the representation of Italian adolescents in a state of crisis. Adolescence is often inherently characterized as a period of crisis, a product of challenging developments such as the undertaking of establishing one’s own identity, physical changes in the body brought on by puberty, changing social roles, creating peer relationships, increased responsibility and school work, and the list goes on. In order to successfully navigate such choppy waters, young men and women look to their adult counterparts for guidance.13 However, in the films under consideration, the absence of loving and caring matriarchs and patriarchs has produced a generation of young people who struggle to establish their identity and come of age appropriately. This is particularly the case with young men, whose

13 On adolescence as a necessary step towards adulthood, see Mallan, Kerry, and Sharyn Pearce. “Introduction: Tales of Youth in Postmodern Culture.” Youth Cultures: Texts, Images, and Identities, edited by Kerry Mallan and Sharyn Pearce, Praeger Publishers, 2003, ix-xix; and Côté, James E., and Anton L. Allahar. Generation on Hold: Coming of Age in the Late Twentieth Century. New York University Press, 1996. 18 difficulties in developing concrete identities is reflected in a crisis of masculinity as well.14 As I will show, the transitionary period of growing up, situated between child- and adulthood, is inherently connected to what appears to be an ongoing trope of masculinity in crisis theorized most comprehensively in the Italian tradition by Catherine O’Rawe, who identifies this predicament among thirty- to forty-year-old men (45). Sergio Rigoletto’s work on masculinity pinpoints a similar crisis occurring in Italian cinema of the 1970s.15 My project, then, builds upon, yet diverges from, these foundational studies by examining masculinity within the context of adolescence using a corpus composed of teen films produced entirely in the twenty-first century.

As I mentioned above, Davide Boero’s and Mario Dal Bello’s volumes out of Italy largely look to construct the corpus of Italian teen film. We have yet to see, however, a comprehensive critical and analytical study of the genre. I intend to remedy this lacuna with my project. In my discussion of Italian teen film, I argue that adolescence represents a period of crisis, akin to that affecting older Italian males, during which young people must confront, grapple with, and (attempt to) work through the tragic loss of familial bonds in order to successfully come of age and become fully functioning subjects within Italian society. In particular, my dissertation looks at several interesting variations of the coming-of-age narrative to include the rebellious male adolescent, the

14 On the crisis of masculinity, see Edwards, Tim. Cultures of Masculinity. Routledge, 2006.; Horrocks, Roger, and Jo Campling. Masculinity in Crisis: Myths, Fantasies, and Realities. St. Martin's Press, 1994.; Kimmel, Michael S. “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity.” Privilege: A Reader, edited by Michael S. Kimmel and Abby L. Ferber, Westview Press, 2003, pp. 51-74; MacInnes, John. “The Crisis of Masculinity and the Politics of Identity.” The Masculinities Reader, edited by Stephen M. Whitehead and Frank J. Barrett, Polity, 2001, pp. 311-29.; and Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation. Thames and Hudson, 1997. On masculinities in a general sense, see Connell, R. W. Masculinities. 2nd ed., University of California Press, 2005.; and Kimmel, Michael S., and Amy Aronson. Men and Masculinities: A Social, Cultural, and Historical Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO, 2004. On gay masculinities, see Nardi, Peter M. Gay Masculinities. Sage Publications, 2000. 15 See Rigoletto, Sergio. Masculinity and Italian Cinema: Sexual Politics, Social Conflict and Male Crisis in the 1970s. Edinburgh University Press, 2014. 19 journey abroad, fatherhood, nostalgia, and queer adolescence. A central question of my research is which type of adolescence is allowed, privileged, and condemned on and offscreen. Ultimately, as I will show, Italian teen film, despite being stereotypically directed at female viewership, positions white, heterosexual, male adolescence and its coming-of-age as the dominant model.

Though, as my analysis of Call Me by Your Name [Chiamami col tuo nome] (,

2017) in chapter 4 suggests, a new space for gay masculinity might be in process, as long as it is still white, male, and has participated in heterosexuality.

In my view, one cause of the crisis of adolescence and adolescent masculinity can be located in the previous generation’s failure to firmly establish their own identities. As O’Rawe maintains, the “thirty- or forty-something male professional who is suffering from anxiety relating to paternity, maturity, ageing, or monogamy” has become commonplace in Italian cinema (45).

Such insecurity and apprehension regarding identity has, in a certain sense, rubbed off on the younger generation, who subsequently struggle with the difficult task of coming of age. What is more, the young men in the films I examine are plagued by adulterous, overzealous, patronizing, or absent fathers (or occasionally mothers), a lack which throws young people into a tailspin at a critical point in their development and thus impedes and delays their progression towards adulthood and heteronormativity, the culturally dominant model in Italy. Further, borrowing from

O’Rawe, I speculate to what extent the feminized image of Berlusconi might have affected adolescent Italian masculinity.16 I likewise wonder how much the ex-premier’s sexual stance towards women, the scandals with prostitutes and underage women with which he is associated,

16 See Stars and Masculinities in Contemporary Italian Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 5-8. See also Nicoletta Marini-Maio’s book A Very Seductive Body Politic: Silvio Berlusconi in Cinema (Mimesis International, 2015). 20 and his sexualization of media through the promotion of the figure of the velina, might dialogue with and shed light on the onscreen process of female maturation.

In short, in the films under consideration in my dissertation, I assert that white heterosexual adolescence is privileged. While many of the films I examine feature, or at the very least include, a female protagonist, their futures look bleak as many of them are imprisoned, exploited, addicted to drugs, hospitalized, killed off, or simply lost in the transition to adulthood. With the exception of the recent Academy Award-Winning film Call Me by Your Name, young women are joined by those individuals, be it male or female, who do not adhere to expected sexual norms such as the homosexual and queer subjects in Né Giulietta né Romeo [A Little Lust] (Veronica Pivetti, 2015) and Un Bacio [One Kiss] (Ivan Cotroneo, 2016), which I discuss in my final chapter. Thus, as happens in male melodrama, I propose that Italian teen film privileges male suffering, despite its ideal female audience.17 This preference causes us to question whether the genre indeed “speaks” to young women and how girls derive pleasure from the various texts presented to them.

Chapter Breakdown

Chapter 1: “Federico Moccia, Teen Film, and Contemporary Masculinities”

As mentioned above, Hipkins designates Tre metri sopra il cielo (Lucini, 2004) as the inception of the boom of teen film in Italy. The film is thus an apt starting point for the body of my study. As previously discussed, twelve years elapsed before Federico Moccia’s novel was

17 See such work as Lutz, Tom. “Men’s Tears and the Roles of Melodrama.” Boys Don’t Cry?: Rethinking Narratives of Masculinity and Emotion in the U.S., edited by Milette Shamir and Jennifer Travis, Columbia University Press, 2002, pp. 185-204.; MacKinnon, Kenneth. Love, Tears, and the Male Spectator. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002.; Modleski, Tania. “Clint Eastwood and Male Weepies.” American Literary History, vol. 22, no. 1, 2009, pp. 136-58.; and Van Fuqua, Joy. “‘Can you feel it, Joe?’: Male Melodrama and the Feeling Man.” Velvet Light Trap, vol. 38, 1996, pp. 28-38. 21 transformed into a . Such a protracted cult following demonstrates the staying power of media directed at, and representative of, adolescents/adolescence. In the years following Tre metri sopra il cielo’s 2004 debut, a whopping four of Moccia’s other novels were adapted to the screen: Ho voglia di te (Prieto, 2007), the more successful sequel to Tre metri sopra il cielo; Scusa ma ti chiamo amore and it sequel, Scusa ma ti voglio sposare [Sorry, If I Want to Marry You]

(Moccia, 2008 and 2010); and finally Amore 14 [Love 14] (Moccia, 2009). Federico Moccia emerged, therefore, as a staple of Italian teen film for more than half a decade.

Catherine O’Rawe’s compelling analysis of Tre metri sopra il cielo and Ho voglia di te addresses how the two films shaped the trajectory of then teen idol Riccardo Scamarcio from

“unwilling teen heartthrob” to “serious protagonist of middlebrow drama” (23). My analysis, however, takes Moccia himself as a starting point and identifies the ways in which Moccia uses

Riccardo Scamarcio’s character, Step, as a sort of avatar that allows him to work through some of the anxieties of his own (adolescent) masculinity, even though he is an adult when the film debuts.

I further argue that these two films set a precedence for many, if not all, of the teen films produced in the subsequent decade or so following 2004. Tre metri sopra il cielo, for example, centralizes an outdated form of masculinity based in violence, athletic prowess, and virility. Traces of this masculinity surface in a number of films that I analyze. Tre metri sopra il cielo also foregrounds the homosocial finale that we will likewise see in chapter 2 in my discussion of the journey abroad.

As I suggested above, there is a connection between the adolescent crisis of masculinity depicted in the films I discuss in this dissertation and the crisis of the thirty- or forty-something identified by Catherine O’Rawe. By examining Moccia’s protagonists, and his relationship to them, the connection between the older generation and the upcoming one are clearly evidenced.

22

Chapter 2: “Marking Their Territory: Male Adolescence Abroad”

User rating data from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) shows that men make up a significant portion of teen film viewership, even though, as I have previously pointed out, teen film is thought of as a genre that is primarily consumed by and directed at female audiences by the community of film critics. While young women consistently assign higher ratings for films such as Tre metri sopra il cielo, Notte prima degli esami, and Scusa ma ti chiamo amore, male spectators appear to be more willing to share their opinions about them. Although male ratings only slightly edge out those of females for Tre metri sopra il cielo (1171 male to 1163 female), Notte prima degli esami boasts a drastic imbalance between the sexes (2079 male to 499 female) and Scusa ma ti chiamo amore is considerably skewed as well (1960 male to 1337 female). Clearly, teen film has an audience of male viewers.

This chapter—which further elaborates on some of the tropes discussed in the previous chapter, in particular the journey abroad—examines a corpus of four films which depict masculinity coming of age outside the confines of Italy’s borders: Che ne sarà di noi (Giovanni

Veronesi, 2004), Niente può fermarci (Luigi Cecinelli, 2013), Lezioni di volo [Flying Lessons]

(, 2007), and Last Minute Marocco [Last Minute Morocco] (Francesco

Falaschi, 2007). In these films, young men travel to exotic locations, taking flight from the responsibilities of adulthood. Once there, they engage in sexual relationships, homosocial bonding, and other rites of passage as they learn appropriate norms so as to eventually be adopted into heteronormative society. Their erotic encounters abroad enable them to shore up their masculinity, thus becoming real men through the demonstration of their heterosexuality.

23

In addition to questions of masculinity tied to heterosexual intercourse, I also identify a process of infantilization which occurs with the young (and adult) men who populate these films.

In Che ne sarà di noi, the main protagonist Matteo often refers to himself as a child, once stating that he even has the “lisp of a child”. Likewise, in Niente può fermarci, each of the four male adolescents suffers from some handicap or impairment: Leonardo (Federico Costantini) has rupophobia, the fear of dirt and uncleanliness; Mattia (Guglielmo Amendola) is narcoleptic;

Augusto (Vittorio Emanuele Propizio) suffers from addiction, specifically to the internet; and

Guglielmo (Vincenzo Alfieri) has Tourette’s Syndrome. These disabilities characterize the young men as children, an immaturity which they must overcome through successful copulation with females.18 Pollo (Andrea Miglio Risi), the central protagonist of Lezioni di volo, is often depicted as being weak and feeble. When he arrives in a small commune in India, his love interest Chiara

() gives him chores helping maintain the clinic she supervises.

It is clear in these films that the journey abroad remains a primarily male affair and the films beg the question of why young women are not given the same freedom as young men to come of age abroad. In the end, I argue that these four films contribute to a , albeit one that fails to capture the female experience with coming of age outside of Italy. The question of national cinema is one to which I return in my final chapter on Call Me by Your Name. This chapter draws on work done on masculinity, disability, and postcolonialism, and interrogates why young men must flee the peninsula in order to come of age and what factors have caused this male-

18 Along these lines, Tom Shakespeare notes, that “[d]isabled people are subject to infantilisation, especially disabled people who are perceived as being ‘dependent’” (“Power” 199). Elsewhere he argues that “[i]n some ways, disabled men are never ‘real men’” (“Politics” 60). Likewise, Ronald J. Berger contends that “[i]n patriarchal societies that have historically denigrated women as the ‘frail sex,’ disabled men have been perceived as feminine and denied their sense of masculine competence” (37). 24 only flight. In addition, it questions whether the crisis of masculinity present in middle-aged Italian men may in fact be creating a similar crisis in their younger counterparts.

Chapter 3: “Lost Fathers Found: Masculinity, Surrogate Fatherhood and the New Italian

Family”

In this chapter, I examine three films—Prova a volare [Try to Fly] (Lorenzo Cicconi Massi,

2007), 10 regole per fare innamorare [10 Rules for Falling in Love] (Cristiano Bortone, 2012), and Universitari - Molto più che amici [Universitarians - Much More Than Friends]—in order to demonstrate how young men become fathers without passing through traditional rites of passage

(such as dating, coupledom, or marriage) typically required for fatherhood. Whereas the previous chapter situated happiness in the construction of homosocial utopias, the films I discuss in this chapter posit fatherhood as the most fulfilling aspect of masculinity. In these films, young men create surrogate families, which often include non-biological children, in order to overcome the absence created by their dead or emotionally abusive fathers. Young men accomplish this, I suggest, by creating new forms of masculinity relating to fatherhood, ones which counteract those embodied by their own fathers.

The three male protagonists I examine in this chapter each incorporate some aspects of the so-called “bad father”, such as a focus on work, breadwinning, and gendered approaches to parenting. Yet, at the same time, they strive to be “good fathers”, characterized by emotional involvement with children and family members, caregiving, play, and a general being there for their surrogate families. In that fatherhood is not a typical concern for young people, especially within the teen film genre, this trend provides insight into contemporary notions of masculinity

25 and what it means to father in Italy. It also suggests, in its own right, an additional way in which young men subvert heteronormative expectations surrounding marriage, fatherhood, family and child-rearing, in that they become surrogate fathers without dating or even having sex. The films thus situate the solution to the absent father problem in the son, who becomes a father in his own right.

Chapter 4: “Call Me by Your Name, Chrononormativity, and the (Queer?) Future of Italian

Teen Film”

As we will see in the other chapters of the dissertation, heterosexual romance and desire is the modus operandi of Italian teen film narratives. This final chapter diverges significantly from the previous films I have discussed in that it takes as its focus a narrative that centralizes queer romance and desire. Derek Duncan and John Champagne have brought increased attention to queer cinema in Italy.19 Within their corpus of work, however, Italian teen film remains un(der)studied even despite the fact that adolescence represents a formidable period of sexual experimentation and, in many cases, the interval in which young people go to great lengths to solidify their identities, sexual and otherwise. The lacuna of work on queer teen cinema may be attributed to the fact that there has been a lack of narratives featuring queer subjects within the genre. This chapter focuses primarily on the queer coming-of-age experience as depicted in Italian Luca

Guadagnino’s recent 2017 Oscar-nominated film, Call Me by Your Name.

19 See Duncan, Derek. “The Geopolitics of Spectatorship and Screen Identification: What's Queer About Italian Cinema?” Italianist, vol. 33, no. 2, 2013, pp. 256-261. and “‘Is It Because I’m a Wop?’: Queer Diaspora and Postcolonial Italy.” New Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies: Volume 1: Definitions, Theory, and Accented Practices, edited by Graziella Parati, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012, pp. 175-194.; Champagne, John. Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama: Caravaggio, Puccini, Contemporary Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 26

In addition to Call Me by Your Name, two other recent films centralize homosexual—as opposed to heterosexual—romance, namely Veronica Pivetti’s Né Giulietta né Romeo [A Little

Lust] (2015) and Ivan Cotroneo’s Un bacio [One Kiss] (2016). While on the surface the representation of gay romance in these latter films seems to open up new possibilities regarding accepted onscreen sexualities available to young people, these two films subtly marginalize same- sex relations. Indeed, the gay protagonists—Rocco (Andrea Amato) in Né Giulietta né Romeo and

Lorenzo (Rimau Ritzberger Grillo) in Un bacio—are problematically condemned to die, whether physically or socially. As I argue in this chapter, this is not the case for Call Me by Your Name, where Elio’s queer desire is productive and becomes an effective part of his future.

Epilogue: “Looking Back, Looking Forward: The Future of/and Italian Teen Media”

Continuing the glance toward the future provided by Call Me by Your Name, this brief epilogue presents some recent developments taking place within the genre of Italian teen film, in particular, the possibility of a transnational Italian adolescence, on the one hand, and a shift of adolescent-centric narratives from the big screen of the cinema to the small screen of television, on the other. In order to address the possibility of a transnational Italian adolescence, I briefly discuss Giovanni Veronesi’s 2017 film Non è un paese per giovani [Not A Country for Young

People] and the way in which it foregrounds the youth employment crisis in Italy. I also draw attention to the manner in which Federico Moccia, the father of Italian teen film, has been

“exported” with the adaptation of Tre metri sopra il cielo [Three Steps Over Heaven] and Ho voglia di te [I Desire You] into their Spanish versions, Tres metros sobre el cielo and Tengo ganas de ti (Fernando González Molina, 2010 and 2012 respectively). In addition, I observe that

27

Moccia’s most recent novel, Tres veces tu [Three Times You] was published first in Spanish, and only subsequently in Italian.

I conclude my dissertation with an analysis of two recent Italian-produced television series:

HBO’s My Brilliant Friend [L’amica genial] and Netflix’s Baby. Both of these series focus on the friendship between two girls/young women—Elena (played as a child by Elisa del Genio and by

Margherita Mazzucco as a teenager) and Lila (played as a child by Ludovica Nasti and by Gaia

Girace as a teenager) in My Brilliant Friend and Chiara (Benedetta Porcaroli) and Ludovica (Alice

Pagani) in Baby. Although both duos are surrounded by a supporting cast of various young men, the girls’ narratives and experiences of adolescence take center stage which, as I have suggested throughout the dissertation, is not typically the case of Italian teen film. The shift to a new medium which privileges girlhood represents a positive future for media directed at young people.

28

Chapter 1. Federico Moccia, Teen Film, and Contemporary Masculinities

Introduction: Federico Moccia, The Phenomenon

In this opening chapter, I focus on a central figure within the landscape of contemporary

Italian teen film, that is, author and director Federico Moccia. Moccia is central to an extended analysis of the teen film genre, precisely because his novels provide the foundation and inspiration for many of the now canonical movies of the genre, specifically Tre metri sopra il cielo [Three Steps Over Heaven] (Luca Lucini, 2004), Ho voglia di te [I Desire You] (Luis

Prieto, 2007), Scusa ma ti chiamo amore [Sorry, If I Love You] (Moccia, 2008), Amore 14 [Love

14] (Moccia, 2009), and Scusa ma ti voglio sposare [Sorry, If I Want to Marry You] (Moccia,

2010). In addition to these adaptations, Moccia also wrote and directed two other films not based upon his novels, Universitari - Molto più che amici [Universitarians - Much More Than Friends]

(Moccia, 2013)—which I discuss in my final chapter on fatherhood—and, most recently, Non c’è campo [No Signal] (Moccia, 2017). Overall, the Moccia films have grossed nearly $56,000,000, with $54.3 million of that coming from his first five films alone, a rather substantial sum even for Italy’s relatively productive national cinema, especially considering that Moccia' works

29 within a part of society— popular culture—and a genre—teen film (and teen literature)—that are often scorned by critics and audiences alike.1

An article by Maria Giovanna Tarullo, written in conjunction with a 2010 visit by Moccia to Sapienza University of to discuss his then recent film Scusa ma ti voglio sposare, highlights the contempt directed at Moccia’s work and at Moccia himself. In it, Tarullo notes the presence on of over 100 Anti-Moccia groups with names such as “Let’s Kill Federico

Moccia” [“Uccidiamo Federico Moccia”], “Those who hate Federico Moccia” [“Quelli che odiano Federico Moccia”], and “Let’s Bury Federico Moccia three meters underground”

[“Seppelliamo Federico Moccia tre metri sotto terra”], with this final group name obviously parodying the novel/film that began the Moccia phenomenon, that is, Tre metri sopra il cielo.

Moccia is, of course, conscious of such scorn; however, as Moccia himself contests, rather than have disdain for his work, a critic should “have the capacity to understand a successful phenomenon, because if a film makes 13 million at the box office, it must mean something”

(“Moccia ci riprova”).2 In this regard, I tend to agree with Moccia, and it is for this reason that I turn a critical eye on the Moccia films.

Moccia’s prolific writing and directorial career has likewise made him an international celebrity: his first novel, Tre metri sopra il cielo sold 1.85 million copies and was published in

1 John Mullan, writing for , observes that “[p]opular culture has always been [high culture’s] ill-mannered twin” and that part of the goal of media studies is to “rescue popular culture for serious discussion.” As for teen film, Catherine Driscoll notes how commercial success has been equated with the assumption that “the directing and the script are unremarkable” and she goes on to state that “definitive or watershed films in the genre … are subject to the presumed triviality and planned obsolescence of the genre” (Girls, 216, 217). 2 “Il critico dovrebbe avere la capacità di comprendere un fenomeno di successo, perché se un film ha fatto 13 milioni al botteghino, qualcosa vorrà dire.” (All translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own.) 30 all of Europe, as well as in Brazil and Japan, while its sequel, Ho voglia di te sold over 2 million copies.3 Spain has proven to be a particularly fertile field evidencing what has come to be known as the “fenomeno Moccia” or Moccia phenomenon. In 2010, director Fernando González Molina directed the Spanish adaptation of Moccia’s first novel, Tres metros sobre el cielo [Three Steps

Over Heaven]. The film came in at 13th place that year, grossing nearly $13.5 million and performing much better than its Italian counterpart, which came in at 120th place in 2004 and made a measly $916,927.4 The Spanish sequel, Tengo ganas de ti [I Desire You], faired even better than its predecessor, placing 9th overall and earning almost $16 million. Likely due to the success of these films, and the apparent decline of the teen genre in Italy, Moccia has taken up what I will call a “literary residence” in Spain: not only are his official website and all of his social media done in Spanish but one of his most recent novels, Tres veces tu [Tre volte te/Three

Times You] was published first in Spanish and only subsequently in Italian.

Despite his literary and filmic success, however, little critical attention has been given to

Federico Moccia and his role as the catalyst for what Danielle Hipkins terms the “boom of the

[Italian] teen movie” heralded in by Luca Lucini’s adaptation of Tre metri sopra il cielo in 2004

(173).5 Indeed, it is precisely the international success of Moccia’s work which makes him a

3 As per the article “Arriva ‘Tre volte te’, il nuovo libro di Moccia” posted by user “redazione” on www.theromanpost.com/2017/03/arriva-libro-moccia/. See also Moccia’s official website, www.federicomoccia.es/autor/. 4 Financial statistics taken from Box Office Mojo: www.boxofficemojo.com/intl/spain/yearly/?yr=2010&p=.htm; www.boxofficemojo.com/intl/italy/yearly/?yr=2004&sort=gross&order=DESC&pagenum=2&p=.htm; www.boxofficemojo.com/intl/spain/yearly/?yr=2012&p=.htm. 5 As mentioned in the introduction to this dissertation, Hipkins’ work on girlhood, female sexuality, and the velina, such as “The Showgirl Effect: Adolescent Girls and (Precarious) ‘Technologies of Sexiness’ in Contemporary Italian Cinema” and “Who Wants to Be a TV Showgirl? Auditions, Talent and Taste in Contemporary Popular Italian Cinema”, as well as Dana Renga’s “Italian Teen Film and the Female Auteur” provide much needed insight into the status of young women in Italian media, while Catherine 31 useful jumping off point for my discussion of the representation and reception of contemporary masculinities in Italian teen film. As a producer of literary and visual culture aimed at young people, Moccia occupies a unique position within Italy’s cultural landscape and it is from this space of influence that he expresses—and attempts to work through, as I later detail—anxieties regarding adolescence, the coming of age process, masculinity, and adulthood in contemporary

Italy. He accomplishes this by creating male protagonists who struggle with their masculine identity, both as adolescents—in Tre metri sopra il cielo and Ho voglia di te, which I discuss in this chapter—and as grown-ups—in Scusa ma ti chiamo amore and Scusa ma ti voglio sposare, which I discuss briefly in my conclusory remarks to the chapter.

Literary scholar Roberto Carnero, in his work on writers “under 40”, or what he terms

“giovani autori” (“young authors”), observes that a “young” writer like Moccia recounts not only

“the condition of youth” but also the condition of adulthood, “often offering a portrait of one’s own generation” (2).6 While Carnero’s remarks refer specifically to literature, I would extend this duality—at once, a depiction of youth and adulthood—to cinema, where these written narratives are made visual. I propose in this chapter that, in some way, Moccia’s own masculinity is tied up with that of the protagonists in the films under consideration, in particular

Step in Tre metri sopra il cielo and Ho voglia di te, though the character of Alex in Scusa ma ti chiamo amore and Scusa ma ti voglio sposare is equally intriguing. I suggest that although the

Moccia films are directed primarily at juvenile audiences, they also reflect certain

O’Rawe’s chapter “Mad About the Boy: Teen Stars and Serious Actors” in Stars and Masculinities in Contemporary Italian Cinema represents one of the few, if not only, discussions of the role of men in Italian teen film. 6 “un racconto della condizione giovanile, spesso offrendo un ritratto della propria generazione.” 32 preoccupations on the part of the adult generation to which the author himself pertains. Since

Federico Moccia represents the source of these depictions, it would seem that he has an important role in helping construct contemporary notions of masculinity. In this chapter, I explore how the Moccia films function as a site of negotiation of crisis masculinity, as laid out in my introduction, by creating a spectacle of male suffering—particularly for the assumed female spectator—such that masculinity can be mourned by those spectators, and subsequently recuperated back into a normative future.

The transgenerational nature of masculinity in crisis becomes obvious in the Moccia films, which function as a site of negotiation for Moccia’s own insecurities about masculinity and what it means to be a man in contemporary society. Moccia recounts in an interview how

Tre metri sopra il cielo retraces his adolescent life in a romanticized key:

I had my Honda 350 but I didn’t ride like a crazy person. There wasn’t that adrenaline.

Babi was my girlfriend, my first love at age 15, named Fabrizia—a story that swept me

up. When I discovered that love also entails fear and pain. Step is my projection, he was

what I would have wanted to be, especially since as a youngster I only ever got beat up.

… Step is my literary revenge. (Lucas, emphasis mine)7

The figure of Step (played by then teen heartthrob Riccardo Scamarcio) therefore allows Moccia to express his masculinity in a way that he did not, or could not, as an adolescent. In this sense,

7 “Avevo la mia Honda 350 ma non correvo come un pazzo. Non c'era quell'adrenalina. Babi era la mia ragazza, il mio primo amore da quindicenne ovvero Fabrizia. Una storia che mi ha travolto. Quando scopri che l'amore è anche paura e dolore. Step è la mia proiezione, era quello che avrei voluto essere, anche perché da ragazzo le ho solo prese le botte. … Step è la mia vendetta letteraria” 33

Step functions as a melodramatic “if only” for the director.8 At the same time, Step comes to embody, as Moccia puts it, a means of revenge on all the young men who beat him up. Through

Step’s violent and virile demeanor, Moccia too demonstrates—at least to some extent—his own manliness and perhaps can even work through his own crisis of masculinity.

Thus, in certain respects, this chapter is an attempt to grapple with Federico Moccia’s role in the construction of masculinity in contemporary Italian society, made evident through the male protagonists of his films. Although Moccia’s novels certainly merit a study of their own, I focus primarily on the visual rather than the literary texts as the focus of my project is Italian teen film. However, I also agree with Millicent Marcus who, in her work on adaptation theory, explains that “To read a book and to see a movie, though they might treat the same story, are two very distinct activities with vastly different sociocultural implications” (18). Thus, by focusing on the visual texts, rather than the novels, I am able to grapple with some of the sociocultural implications depicted therein. For instance, as I discussed in the introduction to the dissertation, I am intrigued by the ways in which the films under consideration subvert the traditional happy ending of melodrama which centralizes the heterosexual couple or the heteronormative family comprised of a mother, father, and child(ren). This move away from the heterocentric happy ending is, by my estimation, a unique trait of Italian teen film and it is precisely the Moccia films which set the standard for subsequent teen films produced over the decade or so following 2004.

8 As theorized by Steve Neale, the “if only” of melodrama is typically constructed for the spectator, who is led to wish “if only”: “if only this character realised the other’s worth, if only she or he were aware of the other's existence, if only they had met in different circumstances in a different time, in a different place” (12). 34

Furthermore, I focus on the films because I am interested in exploring how the Moccia films foreground many of the themes and tropes that are now standard in contemporary Italian teen film—in particular the finale with a focus on the homosocial bond, the use of the male melodramatic mode, the marginalization of women, and the parental (and most often paternal) lack. By so doing, I propose that these films function as prototypes for many Italian teen films, and for all of the films which I will discuss in this dissertation, perhaps with the exception of

Call Me by Your Name in Chapter 4. By analyzing the Moccia films, this chapter seeks to shed light on adolescent masculinity and the crisis of such in Italian society, and, at the same time, to provide insight into the crisis of masculinity plaguing Moccia’s own generation. For, as masculinities scholars Susanne Kord and Elisabeth Krimmer propose, “there is an inextricable link between the fate of masculinity and that of the nation. Narratives of empowered nationhood often go together with images of dominant masculinity…, whereas crumbling male authority is co-joined with the decline of Empire” (6-7). In other words, the crisis of adolescent and adult masculinity made apparent in Italian teen film is inherently connected to a crisis within the contemporary Italian state, in particular, the feminized image and fall from grace of Silvio

Berlusconi.

A final sociocultural implication of my analysis, and the primary focus of the dissertation, is the construction of masculinities in contemporary Italian teen film. On the one hand, the centrality of male suffering and the male experience of adolescence within the genre suggests that the depiction of masculinity in crisis is indeed hegemonic. That is to say that the replication, reproduction, and repetition of narratives showing young men grappling with their identity and masculinity has become the dominant model for Italian teen film, all this despite the

35 fact that the genre is so stereotypically gendered feminine. The focus on male characters like

Step in Tre metri sopra il cielo and Ho voglia di te, Matteo in Che ne sarà di noi (Chapter 2),

Marco in 10 regole per fare innamorare (Chapter 3), and Elio in Call Me by Your Name

(Chapter 4), as well as Moccia’s prolific contributions to teen culture in Italy, further evidences the way in which teen film privileges masculinity. What is more, the popularity and financial success of the genre and of the Moccia films in particular, reflects a possible way in which we can consider the representations of masculinity contained therein as culturally privileged; as with hegemonic masculinity, these films “claim[ed] and sustain[ed] a leading position in social life” which guaranteed the genre “[a] dominant position” at the Italian box office for about a decade and insured the “subordination of women” who ideally comprised the majority of the audience

(Connell, Masculinities 77).

As I mention in the introduction to the dissertation, teen film has recently been dethroned at the Italian box office in favor of traditional comedies. The displacement of teen film as a privileged genre reflects a tendency common to genre films, in which a particular genre gains extreme popularity for a relatively short period of time, often less than a decade, only to be replaced by another, more acceptable, more stable, more (financially) successful genre, upon which the cycle starts over.9 A similar cycle takes place—though perhaps at a less frenetic pace—with hegemonic masculinity: a certain type of masculinity, perhaps one defined by violence, becomes dominant within a society, yet it will most assuredly be replaced by another form of masculinity which will takes its place atop the masculinity hierarchy. As with genre

9 This pattern is characteristic of the Italian filone, or genre film, as formulated by Dana Renga in “Pastapocalypse! End Times in Italian Trash Cinema.” The Italianist, vol. 31, no. 2, 2011, pp. 243-257. 36 cinema, masculinities often compete with each other, vying for dominance in a given society. As

R. W. Connell argues, hegemonic masculinity “is not a fixed character type, always and everywhere the same. It is, rather, the masculinity that occupies the hegemonic position in a given pattern of gender relations, a position that is always contestable” (Masculinities 76).

What I am trying to suggest through this comparison is that genres are, in a manner similar to hegemonic masculinity, contestable, always competing against each other for power.

In their book Media and Society: An Introduction, Michael O’Shaughnessy and Jane Stadler argue that “genres became a way for [a] society to reflect on itself, its history, and its development, a way of [a country] ‘talking to itself’” (209). Furthering the connection between genre and dominant masculinity, I would argue that young men like Step, or Matteo, or Marco, or Elio essentially talk back to the country which produced them, being “visible bearers of hegemonic masculinity” and thus exemplars for men to model themselves after (Connell,

Masculinities 77). A reflection on the representation of masculinity contained in Tre metri sopra il cielo and Ho voglia di te, then, seeks to reflect on the state of Italian society itself.

Tre metri sopra il cielo, A Brief Introduction

Tre metri sopra il cielo focuses on the unlikely romance between biker bad boy Step

(Scamarcio) and the innocent, high school socialite Babi (Katy Louise Saunders), their budding romance, and its subsequent demise. As his biker boy persona suggests, Step performs a type of masculinity that is based—at least at first—in violence, physical activity, and virility, traits which reflect entrenched and outdated ideals of masculinity. Such ideals hark back to the turn of the 20th century with the movement and its call for supermanism, that is, the appeal for

37 men to be “more bestial, brutal and barbarous, devoid of any romantic spirit” (Gori,

“Supermanism” 159). Futurism was, of course, a precursor to fascism, and although Step is most certainly neither futurist nor fascist, it is likewise true that the type of masculinity he embodies is reminiscent of masculine ideals promulgated by futurism and, more prominently, by Benito

Mussolini during the fascist regime.10 The film is quick to foreground Step’s violent tendencies: in the opening moments, he arrives at a sort of modern-day colosseum, a space inherently coded—like its more famous Roman counterpart—as a site of combat and violence. Without saying a word, Step confronts one of the men congregating there, promptly greeting him with an explosive head butt, an act which functions as a performance of his masculinity and which allows him to demonstrate his dominance within the group.

The unexpectedness of this violence leaves the spectator wondering as to the motivation behind Step’s aggressive behavior. As I will discuss in more detail below, it is only later on in the film that details regarding Step’s violent past (re)surface in the form of washed out and choppy flashbacks. Suffice it to say for now that this is not Step’s first physical outburst, nor will it be his last. Indeed, before meeting and wooing Babi, Step is defined by violence, a trait alluded to by the voiceover from Radio Caos as Step and his best friend Pollo leave the colosseum following the aforementioned assault: “BPM, Beats Per Minute. No break.” Step’s brutality, coupled with his iconic look—his leather jacket, black motorcycle, and t-shirt—places him within the “tradition of Hollywood rebels” along the lines of James Dean (O’Rawe 26). Like

Dean’s character in Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955), Step’s rebellious demeanor

10 For more on masculinity under fascism, refer to Gigliola Gori’s “Model of Masculinity: Mussolini, the ‘New Italian’ of the Fascist Era.” The International Journal of the History of Sport, vol. 16, no. 4, 1999, pp. 27-61. 38 and hardened exterior make him a threat to normative society. If he is ever to be recuperated back into that normative society, as indeed he must be in order to successfully come of age, then his hardened exterior needs to be softened and he must learn to conform social norms.

In this section, I focus my attention on the way Step’s masculinity is initially constructed as inadequate and undesirable in relation to acceptable contemporary constructions of masculinity. I will then explore how he is redeemed, on the one hand, through his relationship with Babi, and through the various homosocial bonds he constructs, on the other. Ultimately, I argue that Tre metri sopra il cielo alters the traditional heterocentric happy ending of melodrama, positing instead the reinstatement of the homosocial bond in its place. As is common with other films that will be discussed in subsequent chapters, Tre metri sopra il cielo deploys the heterosexual relationship and heterosexual intercourse as requisite rites of passage towards adulthood, yet centralizes the homosocial bond as the restorative sign of normativity. The homosocial bond, in turn, wards off the damage caused by the parental lack, here evidenced by

Step’s difficult relationship with his mother and, as a result, his father. Finally, the fact that Babi breaks up with Step in favor of the stereotypical boy-next-door near the end of the film represents another trope of Italian teen film, that is the precarity of young women. While Babi is a necessary part of Step’s coming of age process, she holds no role in his future as an adult subject.

Violence, The Damaged Man, and Homosocial Bonding in Tre metri sopra il cielo

In his early interactions with Babi in Tre metri sopra il cielo, Step attempts a brutish conquest for her love, one which again evidences his tendency towards violence. One such

39 instance occurs after Babi throws a glass of champagne in Step’s face at a party. In response,

Step first accosts Babi’s boyfriend, throwing him into a nearby table. Step then hefts Babi onto his shoulder, carrying her off to the bathroom where he showers her not with love and affection but with cold water. This is, of course, just one of a number of Step’s violent displays. Step uses violence to reinforce his masculine side, for, as R. W. Connell argues “an unmasculine person would behave differently: being peaceable rather than violent, conciliatory rather than dominating, … uninterested in sexual conquest, and so forth” (67). Step’s violence is, however, only a performance masking the fact that he is, in fact, a damaged man. In her analysis of

Deckard in ’s Blade Runner (1982), Christine Gledhill theorizes the damaged man as one “wounded by patriarchy but redeemable through his capacity to identify with [a] female character. For the female viewer such a figure may offer the gratifying spectacle of masculinity crossing the gender divide, revealing a vulnerability beneath a tough exterior” (“Women Reading

Men” 87).

Though separated by more than 20 years, Gledhill’s analysis of Deckard likewise pertains to Step, in that he is redeemed through his relationship with Babi. Yet, as I lay out below, it is also this relationship which results in his eventual feminization, which bridges the gender divide.

In her remarks, Gledhill also sheds light on a possible reason for the success of the teen film genre, that is, the female viewer’s enjoyment of male suffering and the breaking down of strict, albeit stereotypical, gender dichotomies—i.e. that men are violent, brutish, sexually active, and unemotional; that women are docile, gentle, virginal, and emotional. As I suggested above and as

I discuss in more detail below, Tre metri sopra il cielo initially reinforces such stereotypes, but ultimately depicts a subtle shift in such gender dynamics.

40

While not immediately evident, Step is indeed coded as wounded by patriarchy. This damage comes to the fore through two flashbacks which depict the choppy details surrounding

Step’s problematic relationship with his mother. Though these flashbacks evince the parental lack that is common to Italian teen film, the figure of the absent mother is somewhat exceptional.

As we will see in chapters 2 and 3, the majority of teen films centralize instead the absent or emotionally abusive father and his relationship with his son. In a surprising turn, Step’s father is actually depicted—at least to some extent—as attentive, in that he tries to (re)connect with his son and to help keep him out of trouble, even in spite of the fact that Step does his best to avoid interacting with the man. Step’s avoidance of his father is, I would argue, a symptom of his failed relationship with his mother: as we eventually discover, Step’s original trouble with the law comes about because he found out that his mother was having an affair and he subsequently assaults his mother’s lover, nearly beating him to death. When questioned as to why he beat the man, Step stays mum, though his motivation for doing so is not clear. The film seems to suggest—through a comment made by Step’s brother Paolo (Ivan Bacchi) in the closing moments of the film—that it was to protect his father (and not his mother). This decision thus emphasizes a type of unspoken homosocial bond between father and son, even despite their separation. The construction of this homosocial bond, which also includes Step’s brother Paolo, evinces a kind of postfeminist backlash aimed at the mother: she has, it would seem, sexual desire in excess, and it is that new found sexual desire that tears Step’s family apart. Thus, she is seen as the cause of the severing of familial bonds, as well as the source of Step’s damaged masculinity. At the same time, Step’s decision to protect his father evidences a crisis of masculinity, by insinuating that, in one way or another, his father failed at being a husband.

41

The film foregrounds the homosocial bond in other, more obvious ways through Step’s interactions with three male figures: first, his best friend, Pollo; second, Babi’s father, Claudio

(Claudio Bigagli); and finally, his brother, Paolo. Step’s relationship with Pollo is made evident early on in the film, and it is to Pollo that Step first admits that he has fallen in love with Babi.

The admission comes as Pollo works on his motorcycle, a narrative object laden with meaning for the young men’s masculinity. In this sense, the motorcycle recalls the elusive bicycle of

Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette [] (1948), which, in addition to being a temporary symbol of hope for Antonio’s future, is also requisite for his job hanging posters and thus inherently connected to his role as breadwinner for his family and therefore, his masculinity.11 However, the bikes also supply a space onto which the men can project their homosocial desire. In fact, the one explicit act of homosociality shared between the two, that is,

Pollo’s celebratory embrace of Step, occurs after the latter wins one of the illegal races. This brief and rather unexpected coming together exemplifies “the exciting, troubling relation between two male bodies” and also “figures a masculine hegemony …, an all-male unit transcending race and class distinctions to produce stable self-identity” (Fuchs 194). Yet at the same time, Pollo’s remarks during their brief interaction underline Step’s movement away from the masculine and towards the feminine.

Pollo notes first and foremost the fact that Step has been so obsessed with a girl that he has forgotten to race. Pollo’s allusion to the races situates them as an important part of Step’s performance of masculinity in a setting defined by contest, power, control, and the public eye. At

11 For more on the symbolism of the bike in Bicycle Thieves, see Millicent Marcus’ chapter “De Sica’s Bicycle Thief: Casting shadows on the visionary city” in her book Italian Film in the Light of , Princeton University Press, pp. 54-75, 1986. 42 the same time, Pollo’s mention of the competition recalls Connell’s argument that “sport has come to be the leading definer of masculinity in mass culture” in that it provides “a continuous display of men’s bodies in motion” and brings those bodies “into stylized contests with each other,” wherein “a combination of superior force”—in this case, the condition and specs of the motorcycle—and “superior skill”—the adeptness of the ride—results in the winner (54). By alluding to the races, and the fact that Step is distracted from them, Pollo links masculinity back to the bike: by failing to participate in the motorcycle competitions, Step also fails, at least to some extent, to engage in a proper performance of masculinity.

As Pollo begins his interrogation of Step, romantic music is heard and the effect is not so much to remind us of Step’s relationship with Babi—though it certainly does—but to romanticize the friendship between the two young men. The music is thus used to heighten the melodrama of this moment, while Pollo’s questions, particularly the last one, “She makes your heart pound?” recalls Linda Williams’ discussion of melodrama as one of three “body genres”.

In her discussion of these genres, Williams points out that emotion is traditionally manifested through the female body, which offers the “most sensational sight” (“Film Bodies” 4). Here, however, this feminized position is fulfilled by Step, as Pollo’s final question creates a figurative spectacle of Step’s body “caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion,” in his pated heart palpitations (Williams, “Film Bodies” 4). This conversation has the added effect of pulling the men in two opposite directions: on the one hand, their discussion of their romantic relationships with Babi and Pallina, is a case of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick refers to as the

“traffic in women” which is “the use of women as exchangeable, perhaps symbolic, property for the primary purpose of cementing the bonds of men with men” (25-26). Thus, their conversation

43 strengthens their rapport with each other, bringing them closer together. On the other hand, however, their pursuit of their heterosexual relationships, cuts off the male-male bond, pushing

Step and Pollo farther apart from each other. This is, in effect, the beginning of the end of the homosocial bond between these two best friends.

Less important, and perhaps more subtle than the rapport between Pollo and Step and between Step and his brother Paolo, is Step’s connection with Babi’s father, Claudio. In many of his interactions with his wife, Raffaella (Galatea Renzi), Claudio seems to be subjected to her domineering will. Upon discovering Babi’s participation in the illicit motorcycle races, Raffaella tells Claudio that “it’s about time [he] showed some authority,” a comment which suggests that he does not typically do so. She then hands him the license plate number to Step’s motorcycle, demanding Claudio to “find him.” Claudio’s facial expression and double-handed gesture of exasperation—a visual sign of “che palle!” or “this sucks!”—evidence his frustration with his loss of power thanks to his wife’s authoritarian demeanor, as well as his own lack of masculinity.

This interaction also codes Claudio as embodying a submissive form of masculinity, in that he is clearly subordinate to his wife. As we will see, such interaction with men sets up the central homosocial bond—that between brothers—which appears in the film’s final moments as Step and his brother ride off into the sunset.

Inverting Sexual Dynamics, or Problematizing Step’s Masculinity

The relationship between Step and Babi begins in a fashion in line with conventional love stories, with Step being the sexually desiring subject and Babi the sexually desired object. The film makes this apparent through Step’s first encounter with Babi: while Step gazes at Babi as

44 she passes in a car, Babi does not return his gaze, instead staring straight ahead. While the non- coincidence of their gazes represents a typical melodramatic tendency,12 it has the added effect of coding Babi as not actively looking for romance. Later, when Step and Babi have sex for the first time, it is equally clear that Babi is the passive object, rather than the active subject of sexual desire. Though it is true that she is the one to decide to have sex with Step, she seems to let him take her virginity in that she has not actively sought to lose it herself. And, while such a statement could be taken as a simple question of terminology, Babi’s demure demeanor and restrictive upbringing prohibits her from expressing sexual desire. Indeed, Step embodies active sexuality by placing Babi gently on the bed, unbuttoning her shirt, and removing her underwear, before taking position atop her. The staging of this sequence would therefore seem to suggest the passive role adopted by Babi in this, her first sexual encounter.

The first sexual encounter between the two represents a turning point in their relationship and in Step’s performance of masculinity. Up to this point, Step used rather questionable tactics to express his affection, such as breaking into her room to hang a picture in her closet or stealing professor Giacci’s dog and blackmailing her so she will be nicer to Babi. Though carried out in a somewhat romantic tone, such actions recall Step’s rebellious and barbaric nature; though he is not quite devoid of romance, his endeavors border on the illicit and allow him to be viewed as manly, despite his growing infatuation with Babi. This is not the case in the events leading up to the couple’s first time. On the one hand, Step once again relies on a felonious act—breaking and entering— in order to facilitate their sexual encounter. On the other hand, the act is pregnant with emotional significance for Babi, in that he fulfills her childhood dream of being a princess

12 See Steve Neale, “Melodrama and Tears”, pp. 10. 45 by taking her to the castle where they consummate their love. In the montage following their sexual liaison, Step’s romantic side is even further evidenced, as Babi glimpses the titular phrase,

“io e te tre metri sopra il cielo” [“you and me three steps over heaven”] painted on an overpass and when she finds a bouquet of flowers left on her desk as school. To some extent, these scenes code Step as what Powrie et al. refer to as “the man feminised by spectacle and display,” in that it is precisely these public displays of affection which result in his feminization (12).

Babi, on the other hand, follows an antithetical trajectory to that of Step. As the two grow closer together, Babi starts to embrace more subversive, at times even more masculine traits: for instance, she assaults a biker girl who tries to interfere with Step and Babi’s relationship by insinuating that Step had spent the night at her house. This violent outburst was immediately preceded by shots of Babi getting a tattoo, with the penetration of the needle acting as a precursor to sexual penetration. The tattoo, which in a way brands Babi as Step’s property, is an act of rebellion against her parents. At the same time, it shows how far Babi has fallen, in that her body modification recalls her earlier cautionary remark regarding her sister Daniela’s belly button piercing: “If mom sees you, she’ll kill you!” [“Se ti vede mamma ti uccide!”]. After losing her virginity to Step, Babi becomes more actively sexual, a desiring sexual subject. In the montage following their first time, the couple is depicted having sex a second time, though the positioning of each party is significantly different. Whereas Babi was once positioned on the bed, this time Step takes up that spot. In contrast to their first sexual experience, Babi strips off her own underwear—now a shade of pink marking her budding sexuality—a mischievous grin on her face. Babi’s appropriation of the traditionally masculine traits of violence, evidenced earlier

46

Figure 2. Rain as Step’s tears in Tre metri sopra il cielo

in her encounter with the rival love interest, as well as her increasingly active sexuality results in a reversal of gender roles, which in turn draws Step’s masculinity into question.

Step’s feminization culminates in the aftermath of the death of his best friend Pollo whose passing also triggers Babi’s breaking up with Step. Pollo’s demise severs the homosocial bond and characterizes the film as a male melodrama in that it centralizes Step’s mourning of his male friend. Indeed, Step’s sadness—because of the death of his friend and that of his heterosexual relationship with Babi—becomes one of the film’s most iconic sequences (figure

2): waiting outside Babi’s home in a torrential downpour in the aftermath of their break up,

Step’s suffering and emotions are displaced—in typical melodramatic fashion—onto the mise- en-scène such that his tears become, quoting Thomas Elsaesser, “part of the composition of the

47 frame, more subliminally and unobtrusively transmitted to the spectator” (505). By making a spectacle of Step’s mourning, and by only showing Babi shedding a single tear, the film privileges male suffering. At the same time, it suggests that heterosexuality, while necessary for a young man’s coming of age, does not provide a happy future in contemporary Italian society.

Instead, as the film’s final image implies, it is the homosocial bond which gives hope for a happy ending: as Step and his brother ride off into the sunset, the reinstatement of the homosocial bond shores up the feminine threat—presented by Babi and by Step’s feminization at her hands. In this way, Tre metri sopra il cielo decentralizes the heterosexual couple, replacing it with the male- male bond.

Ho voglia di te, A Brief Introduction

Although Ho voglia di te represents a continuation of the tale of Babi and Step, the narrative complicates the somewhat simplistic romance of its predecessor through the addition of

Gin (), a new love interest for Step. The film opens with Step’s return to Italy following a two year stay in America, a subtle detail which hints at a common trope of Italian teen film which we will see in the next chapter, that is, the journey abroad as a formational rite of passage. The foreign sojourn functions much differently here for Step than it does in the films I discuss in the next chapter, as Step has—for all intents and purposes—already gone through a coming-of-age process in Tre metri sopra il cielo. Step does go through another such process in

Ho voglia di te, but it takes place entirely in Italy, not outside national boundaries. Furthermore, rather than provide Step with opportunities to engage in heterosexual relationships and intercourse, as it does in the other films, his foreign sojourn seems to have provided him with a

48 much-needed respite from romance, as the film suggests that Step has not been in a relationship since his previous break up with Babi. Thus, in very melodramatic fashion, Ho voglia di te begins from the space of loss created by Pollo’s death and by Step’s falling out with Babi depicted at the end of Tre metri sopra il cielo, which has left Step seemingly “permanently and neurotically scarred” even despite reconnecting with his brother (Neale 18).

Another trope of Italian teen film, the precarious position of young women, which we saw with Babi in Tre metri sopra il cielo, is likewise made evident in Ho voglia di te. One way in which this precarity is manifest is precisely through Babi. After engaging in sex with Step as a means of proving to herself that he is not “the one”, Babi opts to go through with her wedding, assumedly with the boy next door from Tre metri sopra il cielo. Despite this decision, however,

Babi does not seem to have a happy ending, as a look of regret replaces her smile as she tries on her wedding dress. The marginalization of women is also expressed in Ho voglia di te through a type of “moral panic” surrounding images of active female sexuality (Hipkins, “Who Wants to

Be” 159). For instance, a subplot of the film involves Babi’s sister Daniela, an apparent product of velina culture who becomes pregnant following a drug-induced sexual encounter with an unknown man. Her eventual confession of her pregnancy to her parents evidences a polarized reaction to active female sexuality: on the one hand, her mother—in a manner similar to Don

Ascalone in Sedotta e abbandonata [Seduced and Abandoned] (, 1964)—calls

Daniela’s pregnancy a “disaster”, one that they must keep hidden away from prying eyes.13 This connection to Don Ascalone clearly codes Raffaella as embodying a type of female masculinity—a trait which, as we will see, Gin also embodies. Daniela’s father Claudio, on the

13 For more on Don Ascalone, see my discussion of Prova a volare in chapter 3. 49 other hand, in a somewhat surprising turn of events, responds with compassion and sympathy for his daughter. In contrast to Tre metri sopra il cielo, then, Claudio’s apparent feminization at the hands of his wife is coded as a positive part of his masculinity, as it allows him to have an emotional connection with his daughter in a time of crisis. Claudio’s reaction thus makes clear that “[t]he ideal man is one who is partly de-masculinised in order to be partly feminised; who is deconstructed to be reconstructed … Wounding makes men more accessible to women’s imagination” (Kirkham 107, emphasis in original). Simply put, within the world of Ho voglia di te, the feminized, emotionally available man represents a positive aspect of masculinity, not a negative one.

While there are certainly other such examples of female precarity, including the near rape of Gin’s friend and fellow velina Eleonora (Susy Laude), what is most interesting in the film is how gender roles are thrown into question through the use of the gaze. In her work on Tre metri sopra il cielo and Ho voglia di te, Catherine O’Rawe discusses the “textual strategies that position [Riccardo] Scamarcio as a brooding object of the camera’s gaze” and the way in which this objectification “highlights the problem of the male pin-up” (23). O’Rawe’s analysis draws attention to the fact that Scamarcio’s eyes and face become a stand-in for the exposed male body in Tre metri sopra il cielo, while Gin’s scopophilic voyeurism as Step’s stalker in Ho voglia di te suggests an inversion of the traditional gender paradigm of the gaze (26-27). As Laura Mulvey argues in her seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, the male gaze is active while the female is passive, with women being “coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (19). By looking at Step through the lens of her camera, Gin appropriates the active gaze and thus reverses the gendered paradigm laid out by

50

Mulvey. O’Rawe complicates the role of the gaze, particularly in Ho voglia di te, by pointing out that the obsessive focus on Scamarcio’s face and eyes allows him to return an “extradiegetic gaze” onto the audience (27).

In certain regards, the gaze in Ho voglia di te problematizes the gendered paradigm set up by Mulvey: on the one hand, Step is the passive object of an active gaze, a position which, according to Mulvey’s scheme, is coded as female or feminine. On the other hand,

Step/Scamarcio’s ability to cast an extradiegetic glance back at the audience situates him, somewhat contradictorily, as an active looker, in a position gendered as male. O’Rawe’s analysis of the gaze is extremely useful, particularly for her study of the way in which Scamarcio’s masculinity is entangled with the characters he played on screen in his early career. The star is, after all, “the literally embodied site where masculinity … take[s] on [its] most idealised, powerful and immediate [form], [the impression] of lived authenticity” (Powrie et al. 5).

However, in that I am more concerned with the diegetic depiction of masculinity itself, and not so much the extra- or intra-diegetic star embodiment of it, I find O’Rawe’s remarks about Gin’s appropriation of the male gaze and the resultant inversion of the gendered paradigm of the gaze most pertinent to my project. As I argued above, the male/active and female/passive binary of the gaze played out in Tre metri sopra il cielo primarily through the sexual dynamics between Step and Babi and, following Babi’s deflowering, Step’s position as passive sexual object of Babi’s active, sexual desire. As I contend in this section, Step’s objectification continues in Ho voglia di te through Gin’s scopophilic and voyeuristic gaze and it is only by recuperating that gaze that

Step is able to reassert his masculinity—though significantly altered—and take up a position as active subject. Whereas Step’s feminization was shored up through the homosocial bond in Tre

51 metri sopra il cielo, here Step’s masculinity is reinforced through his heterosexual relationship with Gin. However, as I argue, the heterosexual finale of the film subverts the traditional melodramatic happy ending, at least for Step, in that his relationship with Gin seems to be a moment of settling for both parties involved.

Reconfiguring the Gaze: Reconstructing Step’s Masculinity in Ho voglia di te

In her analysis of the film, O’Rawe draws attention to the way in which the opening sequence situates Step as the object of a gaze, specifically through the positioning of the camera and through the diegetic sounds of a camera snapping pictures of him (27). Though it is not made known right away, the viewer comes to understand—in typical melodramatic fashion in the last few minutes of the film—that it is Gin who snapped the pictures. Unlike in Tre metri sopra il cielo, where the violent Step was the active bearer of the gaze, here he starts out as the passive object of Gin’s sexual desire. As such, Step is, albeit unbeknownst to him, inherently feminized for much of Ho voglia di te. Step is further exposed as feminized when Babi decides to go through with her marriage despite having a last-minute tryst with him, the suggestion being that he was unable to win her back because the sex didn’t rekindle the couple’s flame.

Early on in the film, Gin is shown to embody a kind of female masculinity: in addition to her role as Step’s stalker, an appropriation of the active male gaze, Step mistakes her for a man at a gas station. During a subsequent exchange in the car, Gin informs Step that she is “third dan in karate” and is well-versed in kick-boxing, boxing, and wrestling. Though such hobbies recall the violence taken up by Step in Tre metri sopra il cielo, they are played to comedic effect here, as

Step mocks her comment with his addition of “Sumo?” While such masculine pastimes are

52 appropriate for men like Step, they are, it would seem, unacceptable for women like Gin. Later, over dinner with some of Step’s acquaintances, Gin wears a wife-beater, a rather classic accoutrement of masculinity. In another instance, Gin effectively incarcerates Step in her closet, an act which evinces an apparent power dynamic such as that between an inmate and prison guard. At the same time, Step’s space of confinement, that is, the closet, is laden with meaning inasmuch as it represents a site of negotiation for gay masculinity.14 Despite the rather progressive representation of female masculinity contained in Ho voglia di te, it is precisely

Gin’s appropriation of traditionally masculine traits which, as Judith Halberstam proposes,

“affords us a glimpse of how masculinity is constructed as masculinity” (Female Masculinity 1).

Opposed to Gin’s female masculinity is what might be termed Step’s male femininity.

Whereas he was portrayed as violent in much of Tre metri sopra il cielo, in Ho voglia di te he is depicted as a suffering, male melancholic, mourning the loss of life—through Pollo’s unexpected death—and love—his relationship with Babi. In what are the film’s only interruptions to narrative continuity, Step projects both of these figures into his present: Babi, onto a brunette at the bar during his first “date” with Gin, and Pollo into a crowd of onlookers right before taking part in a motorcycle race. These appearances evidence Step’s emotional scarring and code him as a damaged man, which reveals, to recall Gledhill above, “a vulnerability beneath the tough exterior” that allows him to be redeemed by female viewers (“Women Reading Men” 87). As in

Tre metri sopra il cielo, Step’s mourning is validated and praised, making of Ho voglia di te a male melodrama. This is made particularly obvious in an extremely melodramatic sequence

14 For more on the closet, see Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, Harper & Row, 1987; and Melanie Kohnen’s Queer Representation, Visibility, and Race in American Film and Television: Screening the Closet, Routledge, 2016. 53 depicting Step kicking his motorcycle into the river. Within the diegesis, Gin and Pallina, Pollo’s ex-girlfriend, are both present at the event, while the assumed ideal female audience participates at the extra-diegetic level, creating a multifaceted spectacle of male mourning. The intersection of the diegetic and extra-diegetic gazes firmly positions Step as a passive object of that gaze.

Towards the end of the film, however, Step is able to return—and more importantly, reappropriate—that gaze. He accomplishes this through his discovery of Gin’s journal, in which he quite literally sees himself, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Lacan’s mirror stage, becoming, as a result, a knowing subject of the gaze.15 Though this moment is preceded by one of Step’s only violent outbursts in the film, that is, his beating of Eleonora’s rapist, he does not construct his masculinity—as he did at the beginning of Tre metri sopra il cielo—solely around this trait. Instead, he develops a type of hybrid masculinity, one which breaks down “former clear distinctions between the masculine and the feminine” and incorporates violence when called for, but also sentimentality, emotional availability, romantic gestures, and a tendency towards reconciliation rather than separation (Beynon 94). Such a type of masculinity, the film suggests, has a restorative power: on the one hand, it is this softer type of masculinity which allows for Step to reconnect with his dying mother, which subsequently reinstates the parental bond that was missing in Tre metri sopra il cielo. On the other hand, the montage preceding

Step’s final manifestation of his affection for Gin depicts Eleonora connecting with her crush,

Marcantonio (Filippo Nigro), Pallina kissing the boy she has always considered “just a friend”,

15 See “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” Ècrits, Translated by Bruce Fink, W. W. Norton & Company, 2006, pp. 75-81. 54 and Claudio and Raffaella finally embracing. In some way, then, this hybrid form of masculinity facilitates and reinforces heteronormativity.

To add to all this, Step’s ploy to win Gin back seems to find success, as the two symbolically share a kiss through the large photomontage prepared by Step. However, O’Rawe notes that the smoothing over of Step’s misdeed—his one-night-stand with Babi—“is not without ambivalence”: “just as the viewer might wonder at Step’s willingness to overlook Gin’s obsessive behavior and her objectification of him, it is easy to read Step’s half-smile at the end as one of slightly melancholy resignation, rather than romantic ecstasy” (29). I tend to agree with

O’Rawe’s analysis, as Step seems to settle for Gin simply because his possible future with Babi has been cut off. Step’s somewhat melancholy resignation thus mimics the expression made by

Babi that occurs just moments before, as she tries on her wedding dress. Thus, although Ho voglia di te appears to centralize the heterosexual couple—not only through Step and Gin but by the three other couples in the montage—it subverts the traditional melodramatic happy ending, replacing it with an unsettling sadness.

Conclusion: Moccia, Masculinity, and Male Identity

I conclude this chapter by returning to Federico Moccia, so as to briefly discuss his relationship with the depictions of masculinity in Tre metri sopra il cielo and Ho voglia di te. As

I mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, the character of Step allowed Moccia to demonstrate a particular type of masculinity, that is, one defined by violence. In a way, Step was also inherently violent in that, as Moccia professed, Tre metri sopra il cielo permitted him to take literary revenge on all those presumably young men who beat him up. The gender dynamic here

55 is clear: as a teenager, Moccia occupied a feminized space as the object of other young men’s scorn. By constructing Step, and personifying him in the manner that he did, Moccia used Step to exert his dominance and take revenge for being confined to such a position. I would argue, then, that Step represents a sort of masculine ideal that Moccia desired as an adolescent but was never able to attain.

In another interview, Moccia elaborates on his relationship with the onscreen personality of Step, explaining that “Step, the boy who is a bit of a drifter, who is aggressive and violent because he doesn’t know how to handle the rage he has inside, was me at his age. I wanted to talk about the problems associated with the lack of dialogue with adults, parents and professors, of the damage that mothers and fathers can cause their children, even when motivated by the best intentions” (Palma).16 As this statement suggests, in addition to being a means for constructing his own identity, Step is a site from which Moccia is able to address a crisis affecting Italian society, that is, an apparent disruption of the heteronormative family, a disconnect between children and parents, and between husbands and wives. By situating a damaged man at the center of his books and their subsequent films, and by allowing Step to be redeemed—whether by female audiences or otherwise—Moccia proposes that it is by letting men bridge the gender gap that heteronormativity can potentially move forward.

Though the original structure of this chapter included two of Moccia’s other films, Scusa ma ti chiamo amore [Sorry, If I Love You] (2008) and Scusa ma ti voglio sposare [Sorry, If I

Want to Marry You] (2010), I ultimately decided not to include them. That decision was made in

16 “Step, il ragazzo un po’ sbandato, aggressivo e violento perché non sa gestire la rabbia che ha dentro, ero io a quei tempi. Volevo parlare dei problemi legati allo scarso dialogo con gli adulti, genitori e professori, dei danni che madri e padri possono causare ai figli, anche se spinti dalle migliori intenzioni.” 56 part because the films’ main male protagonist, Alex (), is not—like the other characters which I discuss throughout the dissertation—an adolescent, but rather a relatively well-established thirty-something-year-old. That said, he is an intriguing character, particularly because he seems to inhabit a prolonged adolescence, even despite having many of the accoutrements of adulthood, including his own apartment, a (previously) stable relationship, and a lead position at an advertising company. As O’Rawe observes of men like Alex in films like

Scusa ma ti chiamo amore and Scusa ma ti voglio sposare, they are depicted “as being constantly pulled back toward the pleasure of youth” (56). Indeed, Alex falls into what Michael Kimmel labels as “Guyland”, “a stage of life, a liminal undefined time span between adolescence and adulthood that can often stretch for a decade or more, and a place, or, rather, a bunch of places where guys gather to be guys with each other” (Guyland 2008). Alex thus functions for Moccia as a means of delaying adulthood, a kind of nostalgic longing for the adolescence embodied by

Step. Though Alex and Niki do come together at the end of both films, their somewhat subversive relationship—the older man coupling with a woman 20 years his junior—represents a slight shift in what is considered acceptable in heteronormative society. However, even despite this rather progressive outlook, the fact that Alex entertains the prospect of marriage in Scusa ma ti voglio sposare suggests that he also represents a hopeful look forward to the future of masculinity: although his anxiety about getting married and starting a family causes the rupture in his relationship with Niki, it is ultimately his decision to marry her that insures the perpetuation of heteronormative society.

57

Chapter 2. Marking Their Territory: Male Adolescence Abroad1

Introduction: Ungendering a Gendered Genre

As I discussed in the introduction to the dissertation, due to its alignment with popular culture, the teen film is often considered a feminized genre or mode, one ideally addressed to, and consumed by, a primarily female audience. As Catherine Driscoll argues in Girls: Feminine

Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory, “[r]egardless of their audience and even in spite of some of their content, teen films are received as girl films because of the transience of their form and content—their romantic narratives of transformation mediated by overt commodification” (217). As we saw in the previous chapter, teen films foreground, and at times make light of, adolescent heterosexual romances, they are easily classified as melodramas, chick flicks, or romantic comedies (romcoms), genres which are likewise part of mass culture and, consequently, feminized. Roz Kaveney’s study of teen film also implies a gendered assumption: the title of her tome, Teen Dreams: Reading Teen Film and Television from Heathers to Veronica

Mars, draws particular attention to two female names/titles. Furthermore, the cover design of her book—a notebook page reminiscent of a girl’s diary, featuring an image of Alicia Silverstone as

Cher in Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995), another image of J.D. (Christian Slater) and Veronica

1 A version of this chapter was published as “Marking Their Territory: Male Adolescence Abroad in Recent Italian Teen Film” in California Italian Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 1-18. (cloudfront.escholarship.org/dist/prd/content/qt6w37g1w9/qt6w37g1w9.pdf?t=p4pwzg) 58

Figure 3. Teen film: A genre gendered feminine

() from Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1999) enclosed in a heart, and a set of kiss lips—are highly suggestive of the type of audience which consumes teen films (figure 3).

Despite this inherent gendering, however, recent scholarship has made inroads in problematizing such gendered assumptions. As I mentioned in the introduction to the dissertation,

Catherine O’Rawe’s chapter “Mad About the Boy: Teen Stars and Serious Actors” is one of the few, if not the only, reflections on masculinity in the genre.2 As her point of entry, O’Rawe takes actor Riccardo Scamarcio, whose roles in the films Tre metri sopra il cielo [Three Steps Over

Heaven] (Luca Lucini, 2004) and its sequel, Ho voglia di te [I Desire You] (Luis Prieto, 2007)

2 In Stars and Masculinities in Contemporary Italian Cinema, pp. 23–44. 59 firmly situated him as a teen idol. More specifically, O’Rawe analyzes Scamarcio’s transition from

“teen heartthrob” to “serious protagonist of middlebrow drama,” a process which requires a certain disavowal of both beauty and the feminine (35). The successful transformation of Scamarcio’s identity as an actor leads O’Rawe to conclude that “[s]eriousness is something […] that can only be claimed by mature men” (35). In other words, to be serious is to be—and to act like—a man.

In my discussion of teen film below, I argue that the disavowal of the feminine and, as we shall see, of the childish, is an essential trait of hegemonic masculinity.

Hegemonic masculinity is a highly loaded term. Generally speaking, it refers to the “most honored way of being a man,” and is a form of masculinity which requires that “all other men […] position themselves in relation to it” as it insures ideological legitimation of the idea that women are subordinate to men (Connell and Messerschmidt 832). Because different iterations of masculinity become privileged depending on social, cultural, historical, and even racial factors, hegemonic masculinity is often theorized as fluid and as a site of contest.3 The four films I examine in this chapter promulgate a rather traditional form of dominant masculinity, wherein young men engage in heterosexual intercourse in order to demonstrate their adherence to the expected norm.

The form of masculinity privileged by the films requires that male adolescents negate and/or repress any qualities they embody that could somehow characterize them as less than a man—such as showing emotion, caregiving, homosexual desire, or even lisps and other feminizing impairments, as I discuss below. Ultimately, however, the boys’ masculinity is shored up through

3 See, for example, R. W. Connell’s Masculinities. University of California Press, 2005, pp. 76; R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt’s “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.” Gender & Society, vol. 19, no. 6, 2005, pp. 832–833; and Michael S. Kimmel’s The Gender of Desire: Essays on Male Sexuality. State University of New York Press, 2005, pp. 25–26. 60 the reinstatement of homosocial bonds and the creation of female-free, homosocial utopias comprised of the all-male group of friends privileged in the closing moments of each film. In this way, the films assert both heterosexuality and homosociality as key features of hegemonic masculinity.4

Intrinsic to this formulation of masculinity are compulsory heterosexuality and heteronormativity. Simply put, to be a man—to be masculine—is to have sexual desires for, and sexual intercourse with, women. For a long time, the construction of the heteronormative family— composed of a father, mother, and child(ren)—was considered the standard assertion of adherence to heterosexuality. However, as is apparent in the films I discuss in this chapter, the heteronormative family no longer represents a necessary aspiration espoused by young men.

Instead, heteronormativity, as epitomized by the heteronormative family, is shown to be failing, with fathers deserting their wives and families, paying too much attention to their jobs, their mistresses, or both; being emotionally unavailable to their sons; or dictating every facet of their children’s lives. By engaging in heterosexual intercourse, the young protagonists demonstrate their willingness to conform to society’s norms. Yet, by subsequently breaking off their relationships with women and establishing homosocial utopias, they express their suspicion of, and dissatisfaction with, the standard heteronormative model.

4 Although homosociality, and the latent homoerotic or homosexual threat inherent to it, could be viewed as in opposition to heterosexuality, sexuality scholars argue that the two work hand-in-hand in the construction of hegemonic masculinity. For example, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that “men’s homosocial and heterosexual desires need not be opposites but may be entirely complicit” (Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Columbia University Press, 1992, pp. 57). Jane Ward even goes so far as to propose that “homosexuality is an often invisible, but nonetheless vital ingredient— a constitutive element—of heterosexual masculinity” (Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men. New York University Press, 2015, pp. 5). Thus, neither the homosocial nor the homosexual are out of place in contemporary iterations of hegemonic (heterosexual) masculinity. 61

That the young men take pleasure in—and indeed, seem to prefer—their relationships with their male friends suggests a significant alteration of the classical melodramatic denouement which so often privileges the heterosexual couple. Laura Mulvey, in her work on the genre, draws attention to the dust that melodramas raise, “the cloud of overdetermined irreconcilables which put up resistance to being neatly settled, in the last five minutes, into a happy end” (“Notes on

Sirk” 40). Recalling the formulation laid out in the introduction to the dissertation, in conventional melodrama, these finales (whether happy or bittersweet) usually consist of marriage, a mother’s self-sacrifice for the benefit of her child, a man’s return to the homestead, or some miraculous rescue that saves a protagonist—male or female—from a brutal demise, with each of these ultimately ensuring the restoration and perpetuation of the heteronormative family. Linda Williams suggests that melodrama begins, and hopes to end, in a space of innocence characterized by the

(heteronormative) home: “The narrative […] ends happily if the protagonists can, in some way, return to this home, unhappily if they do not” (Race Card 28). I argue, however, that this happy end is significantly lacking in the four Italian teen films I examine in this chapter, where young men, disillusioned by their own failing families, reinforce homosocial bonds, despite their experimentations with, participation in, and apparent enjoyment of, heterosexual relationships and intercourse.

In order to demonstrate this tendency, I discuss four films, produced over the course of about a decade, which highlight this trend: Giovanni Veronesi’s Che ne sarà di noi [What Will Become of Us] (2004), Francesca Archibugi’s Lezioni di volo [Flying Lessons] (2007), Francesco

Falaschi’s Last Minute Marocco [Last Minute Morocco] (2007), and Luigi Cecinelli’s Niente può fermarci [Nothing Can Stop Us] (2013). In each of these films, an all-male group of friends flee

62

Italy’s confines, arriving in exotic locations—Greece, India, Morocco, and Spain respectively— in search of love, sex, and adventure. In these foreign spaces, the young male protagonists are free to explore their sexuality and, consequently, begin to construct adult identities. More importantly, they begin to establish and experiment with their masculinity by engaging in relationships with women. By fulfilling their erotic desires, male protagonists disavow their youthfulness and, in so doing, are eventually accepted into Italian normative society. In addition, heterosexual relations often provide the means by which these men may reconcile with their absent or inattentive fathers and ultimately demonstrate their adherence to cultural norms vis a vis masculinity.

The films naturally divide into two categories: those taking place outside of Italy, though still within the European Union (Che ne sarà di noi, Niente può fermarci); and those set in more exotic locations, far from the comfort and safety of that confederation (Lezioni di volo, Last Minute

Marocco). In the first two films, the young men share a liminal existence, inhabiting spaces untouched by tourists, such as deserted beaches, hard-to-access habitations, and rural farms lacking an internet connection. Furthermore, they participate in “youthful” activities: they drink, get high, and attend music festivals. Despite this context, the protagonists are seldom confronted with individuals that are coded—linguistically, racially, or visually—as explicitly “other.” Rather, the protagonists themselves are othered through a process of infantilization often foregrounded by the presence of a physical impairment (a lisp in the case of Che ne sarà di noi; rupophobia, narcolepsy, addiction, and Tourette’s Syndrome in the case of Niente può fermarci). These ailments must subsequently be overcome, a process that is accomplished, as the films suggest, by traveling abroad and, more importantly, through heterosexual couplings.

63

In the second group of films, otherness is foregrounded through the racialized bodies and linguistic differences of the inhabitants of India and Morocco, respectively. Faced with more radical images of otherness than those presented in the two previous films, the young men must come to terms with their privileged position—as white, heterosexual Italians—while simultaneously discovering their own (Italian) heritage. One of the characters in Lezioni di volo,

Marco ‘Curry’ (Tom Kharumaty), represents an exception to this white privilege: born in India and adopted by an Italian family, his dark skin sets him apart from the other young men present in this section. As I discuss below, Curry’s coming of age is also different from that of his (white)

Italian counterpart, Apollonio ‘Pollo’ (Andrea Risi).

My claim is that a number of recent Italian teen films have constructed a male-only space through the journey abroad despite, as I have mentioned, the long-standing assumption that the genre is specifically directed at, and consumed by, adolescent girls. These four films displace the crisis of masculinity from “the thirty- or forty-something male professional” and nostalgic Italian men of contemporary Italian comedies and melodramas onto adolescent boys, creating what might in fact be a trans-generational male crisis (O’Rawe 15). These films open up new and exciting areas for the study of masculinities and melodrama within contemporary Italian cinema.

Growing out of Infantile Masculinity in Che ne sarà di noi

In her discussion of the contemporary Italian coming-of-age narrative, Ilaria Masenga defines the coming-of-age process as “a ‘delaying of age’, a postponement of adulthood (and a

64 retreat into youth) as a reaction to an increasingly unstable and unwelcoming adult society” (63).5

Many, if not all, of the adolescent protagonists in these four films exemplify just such a reaction: the young men are sons of emotionally distant fathers. Young men thus turn to their male friends for support and camaraderie, and it is in these groups that they begin to experiment with their own

(adult) identities. Lacking any real adult male role models, however, the young men in these films struggle to develop—and conform to—traditional forms of masculinity, often becoming infantilized, at times through some physical impediment and at others through their romantic relationships with motherly women.

One such instance of this infantilization occurs with Matteo (Silvio Muccino) in Che ne sarà di noi. Despite attempts to assert his power over his girlfriend Carmen (Violante Placido), Matteo takes a passive position in their relationship. The voiceover when Matteo drops Carmen off at home clearly demonstrates his passivity. He fantasizes how she will stop, come back to him, kiss him, and say that she loves him, though he makes no attempt to go after her himself. On another occasion, Matteo grabs Carmen by the neck when she tries to rejoin her friends; she immediately rebukes him, however, telling him that he is “such a baby” when he lashes out in jealousy. Her remark makes literal Matteo’s infantilized masculinity. In yet another instance, Matteo refers to himself as a “ragazzino” (“little boy”); and elsewhere he confesses to Carmen that he is a little kid in both age and physique. He even suggests that he has the lisp of a little kid. Matteo’s identity crisis is thus bound up with his sense of masculinity, both of which represent an almost insurmountable obstacle in his progression towards manhood.

5 See also Jan Kozma’s take on arrested maturation in “Grow Up! Grazia Deledda’s Adult-Adolescent Males of Arrested Maturation.” Annali d’Italianistica, vol. 15, 1997, pp. 329–40; and Michael S. Kimmel’s Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. Harper, 2008. 65

Matteo’s friends Paolo (Giuseppe Sanfelice) and Manuel () undergo a similar process of infantilization at the hands of their parents. After Paolo loses to his father in a game of squash, his father emphasizes his own masculinity, insinuating that he plays with his strength while his son plays with his brain. By drawing attention to his own virility and physical prowess, Paolo’s father diminishes his son, characterizing him as weaker. Paolo’s inability to look his father directly in the eye, his downcast glances, and his submissive posturing, here and throughout the film, further situate him as childish. Manuel’s mother’s behavior is equally degrading: after she orders him to help around the shop, Manuel lashes out in a childish manner, exclaiming that he doesn’t want to live like a dog, as his father had. By refusing to fill the void left by his deceased father, he exemplifies the “commonsense view” that “[y]oung people are believed to be biologically and emotionally immature and therefore unsuited to be admitted to society as full-fledged members”

(Côté and Allahar XII). When Manuel’s mother slaps him and refers to him as a dandy, the viewer is reminded of his failure to conform to normative ideals of adult masculinity; indeed, the slap marks Manuel as a child being chastised by his mother.

As an attempted rebellion against this infantilization, the boys embark on a formative journey to determine their identity and desires. While the main goal of the boys’ travel is to establish their masculinity and to develop their own subjectivity, self-discovery is not the sole impetus for their trip. John Stephens has observed that teen films focus on the representation of subjectivity and inter-relationality as well as the ways in which young adults lose, or are failed by, their families

(124). The latter concept is central to the narrative of Che ne sarà di noi: Manuel’s father died of cancer; Paolo’s father, though still alive, fails to take on the role of the “good” father, nurturer, and guide. Instead, he micromanages his son’s future, depriving Paolo of agency. Thus, Paolo’s father

66 is also an ineffective parent. Matteo’s father, by abandoning his wife and son to live with his girlfriend, is equally absent from his son’s life. This moment of drastic change in the composition of Matteo’s familial unit functions as a traumatic event, provoking Matteo’s crisis of identity. Even when Matteo pleads with his father to come home, if only to get his mother to stop crying, his father refuses. A second objective of the boys’ voyage, then, is to come to terms with this loss, to become men in their own right so that they can replace the missing—or ineffective—patriarch.

After their arrival in Santorini, each boy pairs off: Matteo finds Carmen and tries to convince her that she loves him; Paolo develops an interest in Bea (Valeria Solarino), a mysterious tourist he meets on the ferry and subsequently courts; and Manuel develops a bond with a stray dog that follows him around. These relationships have a significant effect on the young men and condition their maturation. The pregnant Bea, for example, helps Paolo become a caring and nurturing father figure, stepping in for her baby’s absent father. The dog that follows Manuel recalls the earlier comment he made to his mother and, at the same time, functions as a haunting reminder of what

Manuel does not want to become. The apparent link between dog and father is made obvious when the animal is beaten by a group of men and Manuel comes to its defense. By rushing to the animal’s aid, he takes on the role of protector, a trait that his father did not exemplify. The young men’s relationships thus expose parental lack and are the impetus for developing a masculinity that is counter to that embodied by their fathers.

Through a shared voiceover that effectively signals the transition to adulthood, Paolo, Manuel, and Matteo express their desires for the future. In so doing, they also draw attention to the kind of men they do not want to become. Paolo’s wish to control his life eventually finds fulfillment with his decision to go to Turkey with Bea. The concern that Paolo shows for Bea’s well-being and that

67 of her unborn child opposes the harsh treatment exemplified by his father. Although Paolo’s tendencies towards caregiving could be viewed as feminizing and therefore not masculine, they instead situate him as somehow manlier than his domineering father.6 Manuel, during his own section, reiterates his disdain at the prospect of becoming like his father. After Manuel sacrifices his own well-being for that of the dog, however, he changes his mind, having realized the time and effort his father spent to provide for his family. While his father was clearly not nurturing in the most traditional sense, Manuel comes to understand his father’s masculinity as connected to his breadwinning. When Manuel phones his mother to inquire about the store, we get the sense that he can now return home to take on his father’s familial responsibilities, having accepted this new— for him—type of masculinity.

Matteo, by contrast, wants to wake up the next day as a thirty-year-old to see what will have become of him, Paolo, and Manuel in the future. Matteo’s desire could be understood as a rather juvenile dream: he wishes to be older so that Carmen will date him. However, his comment becomes more meaningful when taken in conjunction with the aspirations of Paolo and Manuel.

Their expressions function as a disavowal of their misconceived notions of, and assumptions about, masculinity as embodied by their fathers. On the one hand, Matteo’s wish is not simply to be an adult, but to not be a child. On the other hand, Matteo, like Paolo, refuses to become like his father, who is disloyal to his family and unfaithful to his marriage vows. In the end, this is the reason why

Matteo cannot settle for Carmen even when she reciprocates his love, seeing in her a female version of his father.

6 For further discussion of caregiving in relation to masculinity and fatherhood, see chapter 3. 68

The shared voiceover is significant in that it forges a homosocial bond that excludes Carmen altogether while it unites the young men, making collective their individual quests to find their own identities and develop their own versions of masculinity. While Matteo does have heterosexual intercourse with Carmen, and thus participates—albeit temporarily—in a form of heteronormativity, the relationship between the two falters and then fails. Therefore, unlike traditional melodramas and romantic comedies, which end happily with the perpetuation of heteronormativity through the privileging of the heterosexual (married) couple, Che ne sarà di noi disallows a similar felicitous finale. Instead, it proposes a new kind of happy ending that centralizes the homosocial couple of Manuel and Matteo as they return home to Italy. At the same time, this new, male-only happy ending calls into question the gendered paradigm of teen film and melodrama as inherently feminine.

Re-Enabling Disabled Masculinity in Niente può fermarci

Whether or not heterosexual sex actually takes place seems irrelevant in these films, as long as the young men abandon their female love interests by the end of the film and return to each other. While sexual intercourse inhabits a central position within the narratives of all four films, it is most ubiquitous, and is treated most comically, in Luigi Cecinelli’s Niente può fermarci. The film shares common themes with Paul and Chris Weitz’s iconic iteration on coming of age in the

United States, American Pie (1999), which also follows a group of male adolescents who attempt to lose their virginity as an essential step in the transition to adulthood. These films adhere to the conventions of what John Troyer and Chani Marchiselli have termed “dude cinema,” in that “the new dude’s [i.e. the protagonists’] subjective awakening always takes the form of an epic quest,

69 the pursuit of some Holy Grail,” exemplified here by the first intimate liaison with the opposite sex (265). Due to its primary focus on the male friendship, the dude movie is “fraught with homosocial anxieties: its heroes are confused adolescent homophobes, frightened of, yet also bent on escaping, paternal controls and fixated on the talismanic bodies of women” (267). The looming threat of erotic encounters between men is often made apparent in these films through the inquiry as to whether or not the young men are gay. Heterosexual couplings therefore function as a means of staving off this threat by shoring up hegemonic masculinity and reinforcing heteronormativity.

At the same time, the disallowance, often on the part of young women, of the heterosexual relationship results in new approaches to the construction of masculinity.

Despite the similarities between these two films, Niente può fermarci complicates the somewhat simplistic coming-of-age narrative presented in American Pie. Unlike their American compatriots, who whet their sexual appetites more or less from the comfort of their own homes, the Italian teenagers in Niente può fermarci seek sexual fulfillment abroad, traveling to Ibiza in search of recreation and copulation. The protagonists of Cecinelli’s film must not only grapple with the difficulties of adolescence itself, but they must also do so as impaired individuals whose health challenges position them on the margins. As the viewer discovers through the film’s opening sequence, each of the boys suffers from some kind of disability: Leonardo (Federico Costantini) has rupophobia, the fear of dirt and uncleanliness; Mattia (Guglielmo Amendola) has narcolepsy;

Augusto (Vittorio Emanuele Propizio) has an internet addiction (impulse control disorder); and

Guglielmo (Vincenzo Alfieri) has Tourette’s Syndrome. As disabled adolescents, then, the group inhabits a position of double marginalization vis-a-vis normative Italian society.

70

Leo, Mattia, Augusto, and Guglielmo meet for the first time at Villa Angelika, a treatment and recovery clinic. They are united by a common bond: their parents have placed them in the facility in hopes that the boys will be cured of their maladies and, as a result, will—like their non- impaired peers—grow into adulthood as functioning subjects. James Côté and Anton Allahar insist that a necessary step in that transformative process is developing appropriate biological and emotional maturity; those who fail to accept this necessary part of the life cycle, they argue, indicates that “there must be something wrong with them” (XII). Not only do these adolescents already have “something [biologically] wrong with them”—that is, their impairment—but their impairments have kept them from establishing the emotional maturity expected for adulthood. In this way, the young men are doubly disapproved of by society and it is this disapproval that causes their parents’ concern. The outsourcing of the young men’s care to an institution underlines a parental lack, that is, that the adults are unable, unwilling, or perhaps too ashamed to appropriately nurture their children. The boys’ impairments represent a physical manifestation of that parental deficiency.

None of the parents, moreover, appear to be married, nor do they adhere to a normative vision of the family. The forfeiture of conventional parentage and parental responsibilities, I argue, creates an identity crisis within the young men who subsequently escape from Villa Angelika, an act that signals the commencement of their coming-of-age journey. Niente può fermarci legitimates Stephen’s claim that because adults are too realistic, idealistic-minded teens often attempt to avoid the constraints of adulthood (134). Indeed, only after his father fails to accept him as he is (i.e. impaired) does Guglielmo agree to Mattia’s proposal to flee the country. In their parents’ eyes, the boys must overcome their disabilities in order to effectively transition from

71 adolescence to adulthood. However, it is only by demonstrating their masculinity through heterosexual couplings that the boys ultimately succeed in overcoming their impairments and then integrate into normative society.

As these complex interactions suggest, masculinity, sexuality, and (dis)ability are problematically intertwined. R. W. Connell asserts that “[t]rue masculinity is almost always thought to proceed from men’s bodies—to be inherent in a male body or to express something about a male body” (Masculinities 45). What happens to masculinity, then, if the male body is also a disabled one? Ronald Berger has argued that disabled masculinity is feminized and inherently in crisis (37), whereas Tom Shakespeare observes that the disabled are infantilized, denied agency, and deemed unworthy as sexual subjects (“Power” 192). In this way, Leo, Mattia, Augusto and

Guglielmo are similar to Matteo from Che ne sarà di noi in that, like him, they suffer—albeit through no choice of their own—from an infantilized masculinity, an effect of their impairments.

For disabled men, masculinity and sexuality are barriers that must be overcome in order to successfully navigate the transition from adolescence to adulthood. In other words, by overcoming their impairments, the boys can engage in heterosexuality which in turn allows them to embody appropriate forms of masculinity and subsequently be accepted into normative society.

Niente può fermarci foregrounds the boys’ sexual inadequacies, positioning them as virgins or sexually inexperienced. Travel is a means for them to expunge this marker of naivety. Due to their impairments, the boys see sexual pleasure as somehow unattainable. The decision to travel to Ibiza therefore represents a first step towards achieving sexual pleasure. In fleeing from both the medical clinic and their parents, the young men assert their agency and, by so doing, begin to take an active role in their own future, a trait that exemplifies masculine ideals.

72

The journey as well as the development of the boys’ masculinity culminate at the music festival in Ibiza. Here, Leo, Mattia, Augusto, and Guglielmo break down the barriers of their disabilities, showing their true selves to the youthful masses attending the festival. During an awkward silence caused by Guglielmo’s clumsiness, he lets fly an expletive-filled outburst onstage. His father is quick to cheer him on, with the crowd soon following suit. As the music starts back up, Guglielmo begins to sing along—in his non-native English no less—as two scantily clad women dance beside him. He suffers no other outbursts, the music having apparently cured his ailment, however temporary this remedy may be. As Guglielmo’s flawless performance makes clear, the young men have learned how to make their own choices, and their decisions thus far have led them towards heterosexual relationships—manifested in this instance by Mattia’s interaction with the attractive DJ Helen Reed () and Guglielmo’s dance with the onstage. As Robert McRuer notes “compulsory heterosexuality is intertwined with compulsory able-bodiedness; both systems work to (re)produce the able body and heterosexuality”

(389). What is most worrisome to the young men’s parents is that their children’s disabilities might keep them from conforming to heterosexual norms, that is, that they might never lose their virginity and consequently never reproduce. By babying their children, instead of letting the boys be boys, the parents have become an additional obstacle in the development of their sons’ masculinity.

The boys’ impairments likewise impede their access to (hetero)sexual intercourse, the primary manifestation of masculinity. According to Cynthia Barounis, an active voice in disability studies, in a narrative like Niente può fermarci, “the [impairment] provides the opportunity for the reassertion of masculinity, but only insofar as [impairment] is made into the obstacle which the subject must overcome in order to access normative categories of gender and sexuality” (446).

73

Therefore, by engaging in sex, the young men conquer their disability and, as a consequence, reassert their masculinity. This is apparent in Leo’s interactions with Regina when, in response to his confession of fear regarding sexual intercourse, she orders him to “sii uomo” [“be a man”].

Facing that fear and overcoming his impairment, then, is the means through which Leo can indeed become a man. However, Leo can only demonstrate his masculinity by hugging and subsequently coupling with Regina, an act likewise requiring the suppression of his disability.

Having gained control over their impairments and fulfilled their sexual desires, thereby asserting their masculinity, the boys return home as men. When Leo, Mattia, Augusto, and

Guglielmo attend a wedding in the film’s final moments, the youths manifest no signs of ever having suffered from any disability. Considering Mark Sherry’s argument that “disability is often used as a metaphor for the problems experienced by a nation,” then, what Niente può fermarci intimates is that the crisis of masculinity currently taking place in Italy, like the boys’ impairments, can be cured through participation in heteronormativity (95). The happy ending of heterosexual marriage, despite its obvious presence in the wedding reception, is disallowed for the four protagonists, who do not get married themselves. Instead, the young men happily place arms on shoulders and fall into a pool, a symbolic christening of their newly constructed all-male utopia.

Learning Masculinity and Ethnicity in Lezioni di volo

The films under scrutiny thus far suppress images of cultural difference due to their setting within the European Union, where the protagonists encounter bodies that, for the most part, resemble their own. Because these films are organized around the coming-of-age of a group of white, heterosexual boys, little attention is given to the individuals populating the foreign countries

74 they visit. When foreigners are present in these two films, it is usually for comic effect—as with the Greek landlady in Che ne sarà di noi, with her broken Italian and eccentric rental rules—or because they play an important role in one of the boys’ coming-of-age process, as is the case of

Monique (Anna Dalton), the French girl whom Augusto connects with along the journey. Ai (Jun

Ichikawa), the Asian girl with whom Guglielmo copulates, is an exception to this suppressed alterity, as she is primarily coded as “other” through the pair’s use of English as the lingua franca, and not necessarily by her cultural background. In this way, Che ne sarà di noi and Niente può fermarci disregard questions of race and ethnicity.

In opposition to the previous two films, Lezioni di volo and Last Minute Marocco draw attention to issues of race, ethnicity, and cultural belonging by constructing narratives that, as

Berghahn argues, “frequently centre on pivotal moments in which the adolescent protagonist makes a choice between two cultures that will determine his or her adult identity” (240). Lezioni di volo follows the friendship of Apollonio, “Pollo,” an Italian adolescent of a bourgeois family, and Marco, “Curry,” a boy born in India who was adopted (we assume as a child) and raised by a wealthy Italian family. The two boys travel to India with the declared intention of finding themselves. For Pollo, this journey functions as a requisite step towards adulthood and grants him the possibility to experiment with his sexuality and masculinity through his relationship with

Chiara (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), an Italian doctor living and working in India as part of the organization Medecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders). While the voyage is certainly an essential rite of passage for Curry to enter normative Italian society, his journey is also technically a return home. Thus, Curry faces the challenging task of simultaneously constructing his identity vis-a-vis his ancestral ties to India as well as in relation to Italy. Thus, what is at stake

75 in Pollo’s self-discovery is sexual difference and appropriate gender and sexual norms. Curry’s coming of age, on the other hand, revolves around racial and cultural difference and learning how to bridge the gap between the two cultures he embodies.

In India, Curry is clearly aligned with the native population through his racialized body, here employed as “a visual and narrative stratagem to foreground questions of cultural, gender, and sexual identity” (Berghahn and Sternberg 8). For example, patrons tip him, thinking him a hotel worker when he holds the door for them out of courtesy. The scene is comic, yet, the gesture codes

Curry as different from Pollo. Earlier, during a night spent at an abandoned train-station-turned- hostel, Curry observes one of the squatters and comments, “mi assomiglia!” [“He looks like me!”].

The camera cuts to reveal an elderly balding man, someone with whom Curry shares no physical similarity other than the pigment of his skin. Racial difference is once again foregrounded when

Curry is sent away to join the crowds of indigenous people protesting outside their hotel while

Pollo is ushered safely inside. This separation causes an initial interruption of the homosocial bond;

Pollo soon falls ill and seems pale, emaciated, and feeble. Although he is heartened somewhat by

Chiara and the discovery that she is Italian, he is happiest when he is reunited with his best friend.

Upon glimpsing Pollo in his sickbed, Curry runs to his friend, jumps into his bed, and gives him a full-body embrace, a gesture imbued with homoeroticism (figure 4). In keeping with the failed male love story in the bromantic comedy, as theorized by Tania Modleski, in an effort to subvert the threat of homosexuality, the boys must displace their desire onto other objects (“Affair” 134).

While Pollo focuses on developing his relationship with Chiara, Curry diverts his attention to discovering his Indian heritage through his relationship with Apu and his pregnant, teenage wife.

76

Figure 4. The homoerotic threat in Lezioni di volo

Eventually, Chiara takes Pollo and Curry with her to the desert village where she works.

Situated at a distance from the nearest city of Jodhpur, the small settlement is a liminal space. This peripheral location is crucial to the coming-of-age narrative as it represents “the space in which normative social relations are interrupted, in which the symbolic death of the initiates is implied by the suspension of normative social laws of the community, [such] that the young novice can freely ‘play’ with the antistructural elements that mark the liminal phenomenon” (Barone 24).7

One such suspension of normative social relations is had in what could be considered an erotic encounter between Chiara and Pollo. With her back to the boy, Chiara removes her clothes, much

7 “il luogo in cui si interrompono le relazioni sociali normali, in cui la morte simbolica degli iniziandi si riflette sulla sospensione delle leggi sociali che normano la vita della comunità, al punto che il giovane novizio può «giocare» liberamente con gli elementi antistrutturali che segnano i fenomeni liminali.” 77 as a mother might in the presence of a young child. Pollo’s focus on Chiara’s foot as he removes her sock, and on the scar on Chiara’s back, recalls the child’s fetishization of parts of the mother’s body. Pollo’s willingness to perform chores around the clinic, coupled with his inability to start the crank generator, further characterizes him as childish and emphasizes his lack of masculinity.

Thus, like the young men in the other films, Pollo, too, is infantilized and feminized.

Although Pollo does not copulate with Chiara in this instance, he is eventually successful in his sexual conquest of her and it is the consummation of their coupling that another suspension of normative social relations occurs. Whereas the age difference between Chiara and Pollo might be considered taboo in normative society, it appears acceptable in this marginal existence. And while

Chiara likely would not cede to the sexual advances of someone of Pollo’s age and stature in normative society, she seems to only half-heartedly resist him here. Pollo’s erotic encounter with

Chiara allows him to assert, at least to some extent, his dominance and demonstrate his masculinity. Once intercourse occurs, however, Pollo’s masculinity is no longer contingent on his relationship with Chiara and he eventually reunites her with her husband, the (assumed) biological father to her unborn child. By so doing, Pollo helps perpetuate the heteronormative family, here— as elsewhere—represented by father, mother, and child.

Whereas Pollo’s coming of age facilitates heteronormativity, Curry’s maturation is facilitated by heteronormativity, specifically the heteronormative couple composed of Apu and his young wife, Tara (Nirmala Knichi). As a self-proclaimed Indian orphan, Curry is primarily concerned with understanding his roots and with comprehending where he fits in as a foreigner in Italian society. By traveling to India, Curry attempts to come to terms with his dual identity by interrogating what it means to be Italian, yet of Indian descent. He accomplishes this by seeking

78 out his biological mother and finding his sister. His journey therefore functions as a type of racial and ethnic mirror stage in which he rather literally sees himself—as I have previously noted—in the natives’ faces and subsequently situates himself in relation to an Other, embodied by Pollo.

Lezioni di volo obsessively returns to this question of racial difference through a series of separations and reunifications that occur between Pollo and Curry. Not only are they physically separated early on in the film, but they are also separated by their various pursuits once in the

Indian village. Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg note a certain link between maturation and the culture with which adolescents identify (10); by choosing Chiara, and the Italian-ness she embodies, Pollo distances himself from India and from Curry; by identifying with Apu and his wife, and sympathizing with their plight, Curry likewise accepts his Indian heritage more fully, casting aside, at least in part, his cultural upbringing. When Curry finally discovers his sister, and symbolically—and later, legally—adopts her into his Italian family, Curry stands in as a father figure for her. Akin to Pollo’s sexual encounter with Chiara, this moment functions as a demonstration of Curry’s masculinity and allows him to reconcile his Indian heritage with his

Italian identity.

The boys’ absence from home also exposes the failures of parental relationships and the crumbling rapports between husbands and wives. Although both sets of parents permit their children to travel abroad, neither couple understands the boys’ motivations for doing so. As with all the parents represented in the films discussed here, Pollo’s and Curry’s progenitors give their children either too much or too little attention. On the one hand, Curry’s mother, like Paolo’s father in Che ne sarà di noi, forces her own interests onto her son to such a degree that she becomes overbearing rather than supportive. Pollo’s father, on the other hand, pays his son and his wife too

79 little attention, focusing his efforts on his religion and his business rather than on his family.

Instead of helping their children progress along the path to adulthood, the parents represent an obstacle to be overcome, as was the case with Niente può fermarci.

The parental crisis in Lezioni di volo, however, is subtler than in the other films. Here, the family unit is implicitly critiqued and shown to be lacking. Indeed, the signs revealing the destruction of familial relationships are obfuscated: a bruise around Pollo’s mother’s eye—with the insinuation that her husband struck her—hidden beneath a pair of sunglasses; an intimate dinner with a female colleague, which suggests an impending affair on the part of Curry’s father.

It is the sons’ attainment of masculinity, however, which allows them to be reconciled with their fathers, and husbands to reconcile with their wives. After Pollo decides to reunite Chiara with her husband, an act requiring a measure of maturity, his father in a hospital in Italy momentarily regains consciousness and expresses concern about his son’s well-being for the first time in the film. His wife rushes to his side, forgetting any violence he may have inflicted upon her. In a similar vein, Curry’s father receives a phone call from his son—another first—informing him of his son’s decision to find his biological mother. Curry instructs his father to pass the news on to his mother, thus encouraging his parents’ coming back together. Curry’s phone call home, then, both accentuates and provides the remedy for the familial crisis at the core of his personal identity crisis. Curry’s successful navigation of adolescence is projected onto his father and reinscribes the homosocial bond between the two.

The final moments of Lezioni di volo privilege another homosocial bond, that between Pollo and Curry. Standing on the terrace of an apartment building, the two take turns spitting seeds onto pedestrians below. In both the beginning of the film and here, their victims are female: first, a

80 busty blonde woman who somewhat resembles Pollo’s own mother and, in the end, Curry’s mother and sister. The boys thus forge their bond at the expense of women, particularly the maternal figures in their lives. And although the heteronormative is present throughout the final sequence through images of Chiara and her baby boy, it is ultimately the male-male relationship which is privileged. As in the other three films, although the young men return home, to the classical space of melodramatic innocence, they do not find a heteronormative family—or even the possibility of one—waiting for them there. Instead, the boys find happiness in the arms of their male cohort.

Trans-Generational Maturation in Last Minute Marocco

“Congratulations, Dad.” These two words, scrawled on a scrap of paper, exemplify the relationship between father, Sergio (), and son, Valerio (Daniele De Angelis), who adopt this manner of communication in place of face-to-face conversations. Valerio’s relationship with his mother, Valeria (Maria Grazia Cucinotta)—whose name explicitly links her to her son—is equally problematic. Valerio’s ringtone for his mother (a tune reminiscent of the

Jaws soundtrack), together with the picture of a shark baring its teeth and the name “DANGER!” immediately suggest that Valerio is overwhelmed by her unbearable coddling. Scenes such as these intimate the reasons for Valerio’s decision to journey abroad and also imply that the parents’ relationship is in crisis.

The heteronormative family, once united, is now in shambles: Sergio and Valeria are separated—if not divorced—and constantly blame each other for their destroyed marriage.

Sergio’s failure to keep his family together situates him as lacking masculinity, a conclusion confirmed by his mistress, who tells him “non sai nemmeno scopare” [“you don’t even know how

81 to shag!”]. The journey to Morocco, undertaken by both father and son, therefore functions as a moment of what Gaoheng Zhang refers to as “masculine marginalization,” in that neither male adheres to ideal forms of masculinity and therefore both inhabit the peripheries of normative society (267). Sergio’s ill-conceived obsession with constructing windmills in Italy, reminiscent of Don Quixote, positions him on the margins. Because the voyage represents the possibility of engaging in (sexual) conquests for both Sergio and Valerio, the two become complicit in their efforts to (re)attain appropriate levels of masculinity. By so doing, the two create an “extensive homosocial collaboration” in an effort to eventually reestablish “the patriarchal society and derive benefit from it” (Zhang 267). This homosocial bond, forged despite their geographical and temporal separation, grants them the opportunity to (re-)learn appropriate sexual norms and (re-

)discover their individual agency, both essential traits for adulthood.

On the ferry to Morocco, Valerio takes a liking to Jasmina (Esther Elisha). As a daughter of a first-generation Moroccan immigrant to Italy, she embodies both sexual and racial difference and almost immediately becomes Valerio’s object of sexual desire. The exotic setting of the journey emphasizes Jasmina as Other, and causes Valerio, like the other adolescents under discussion in this chapter, to reflect on his native culture (Corrado and Mariottini 82). Thus, when

Valerio discovers that Jasmina’s father has promised her in an arranged marriage, he demonstrates his masculinity by attempting to colonize her, imposing his cultural mores upon her. He insists that Jasmina join the boys on their trip to Essaouira, confident that by doing so, he will save her from her father—the stereotypical embodiment of third-world “backwardness”—and, at the same time, potentially fulfill his desire for sexual conquest.

82

Last Minute Marocco significantly diverges from the narrative structure of the previous films

I have discussed, however, in that heterosexual intercourse never occurs for Valerio. Although he accompanies Jasmina throughout the entirety of the film, their romance never develops beyond intimate conversations, shared scooter rides, and late-night partying. Nevertheless, her abiding presence centralizes heterosexuality by leaving open the possibility of engaging in sexual intercourse. In addition, the film insinuates the successful sexual conquests carried out by Valerio’s friends, Giacomo (Lorenzo Balducci) and Andrea (Nicolas Vaporidis): back aboard the ferry heading home, the former is seen kissing a girl, and the latter shows the others a picture of the girl he apparently bedded. Valerio’s masculinity is not contingent upon having sex, but rather on

“saving” Jasmina from marriage, arranged or otherwise.

Although she does not copulate with Valerio, Jasmina has a key role in his developing masculinity. More than once during his journey, Valerio draws attention to his ineffective parents, confessing to Jasmina that his mother is oppressive and his father is more like a (younger) brother.

For him, the severance of parental and nuptial bonds, and the failure of relationships between parents and son and between husband and wife, represents the collapse of heteronormativity. In

Valerio’s eyes, Jasmina’s parents represent another negative kind of heteronormativity, one that forces a daughter into an arranged matrimony, evidently void of any emotional connection or affect. However, Jasmina pushes against the entrenched patriarchal structure embodied by her father by convincing him to allow her to pursue her relationship with her Italian boyfriend. By so doing, she inadvertently shows Valerio that he does not have to end up like his parents and that he can take control of his own future. By beginning his journey abroad, he starts to accomplish this; by assisting Jasmina in standing up to her father, he moves closer to attaining ideal masculinity;

83 by accepting the punishment for “kidnapping” Jasmina—a punch from his friend Samir (Jamil

Hammoudi)—he becomes a man.

Returning briefly to Sergio and his journey, it is notable that, in opposition to his son, he does engage in heterosexual intercourse. Indeed, his is the only explicit instance of an erotic encounter in the entire film. Although at the beginning of his voyage abroad he evinces an infantilized masculinity, through his relationship with the exotic Tamu (Kesia Elwin), he is able to recuperate his lost masculinity. When Sergio eventually finds his son, Valerio suggests that his father finally did something “da padre” [“fatherly”], a conciliatory remark that valorizes Sergio’s quest to reassert his masculinity. Because Sergio’s identity was initially ambiguous (father, or brother?), he was unable to guide his son through the process of self-discovery required to construct an identity and become a functioning adult male subject (Côté and Allahar 71). Such ambiguity creates a dual crisis, glimpsed in both adults and their offspring. However, what Last Minute

Marocco makes clear is that coming of age abroad remains a strictly male endeavor. Although

Last Minute Marocco allows the heterosexual coupling between Sergio and Tamu, it disallows any romantic satisfaction for Valerio. Instead, it is the reconnection between father and son, as well as the reunion of Valerio with his group of male friends, that marks the journey to Morocco as a success, thus situating the homosocial as the site of the happy ending.

Conclusion: Italian Teen Film as National Cinema?

In their assessment of adolescence, Kerry Mallan and Sharyn Pearce assert that “youth- centered images and narratives open up spaces of possibility for young people in their efforts to give expression to the meaning of their lives—their desires, dreams, and fears” (XII). For the

84 young Italian men that populate the films under consideration in this chapter, their desires and fears are the same: in the boys’ decisions to flee adult responsibilities by traveling abroad, they demonstrate their anxieties regarding adulthood; at the same time, the voyage qualifies them for, and ultimately pushes them towards, acceptance into normative society. And normative society seems more than willing to welcome them, even despite their evident disavowal of heteronormativity and subsequent construction of homosocial utopias. That these films privilege the all-male groups of friends suggests a new formulation of the traditional happy ending, one that insists on the reinforcement of homosocial bonds and simultaneous disavowal of heterosexual coupledom and the heteronormative family.

In his work on national cinema, Andrew Higson argues that generic repetition and reiteration are crucial to the production and promulgation of a cultural identity (Waving 5). The repetitive images of Italian, middle-class, (primarily) white adolescent males in crisis draw attention to how this particular cultural identity is privileged in Italian teen film. Indeed, films such as those discussed here depict teenaged boys as a community defined by fears, anxieties, pleasures, and desires. Their mode of address thus invites this diverse group of individuals “to recognize themselves as a singular body with a common culture, and to oppose themselves to other cultures and communities” (Waving 7). By so doing, such films construct a homosocial bond which transcends a singular, set identity. The protagonists’ individual journeys abroad become a unifying gesture that marks their shared undertaking of transitioning from adolescence to proper adulthood.

The voyage, then, functions as a means of negotiating childish, feminized, or yet-to-be-attained masculinity and, at the same time, presents innovative examples of what adherence to hegemonic masculine norms might look like in the Italian coming-of-age process.

85

The emergence of male-centric coming-of-age narratives and the reformulation of the traditional happy ending that I have been discussing in the dissertation thus far are a significant development in Italian teen film. What Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie observe about national cinema could just as easily apply to genre films: as with all genre films, we must be attuned “not only to the expressive dimensions of [genre] films, but to what these films and their categorization as elements of a [particular genre] may elide or strategically repress” (4). In the films under scrutiny in this chapter, that which is clearly yet strategically ignored is precisely the maturation of young women.8 Within this recent trend of films, girls and women are confined to the margins.

Though they facilitate their male counterparts’ coming of age, they are destined, in many cases, to a state of limbo. The male adolescents of these films use women strategically, calling on them to make them men—often, though not solely, through sexual intercourse—before casting them aside on their way to adulthood. The women are thus an essential part of the narratives and are, in this way, made highly visible in these filmic texts. In other words, women are rather contradictorily both central yet peripheral, both everywhere and nowhere in Italian teen film. This apparent conflict leaves many questions about whether Italian teen film should continue to be considered, as I mention above, a genre primarily addressed to, and consumed by, young women.

8 In addition to the films highlighted by Dana Renga in “Italian Teen Film and the Female Auteur,” Danielle Hipkins analyzes Dillo con parole mie [] (, 2003), another film featuring female coming-of-age, in “‘Figlie di papà’?: Adolescent Girls Between the Incest Motif and Female Friendship in Contemporary Italian Film Comedy,” The Italianist, vol. 35, no. 2, 2015, pp. 248–271. 86

Chapter 3. Lost Fathers Found: Masculinity, Surrogate Fatherhood and the New Italian Family

Io non ho figli, ma sono sempre più convinto che la maggior parte dei problemi di oggi derivino dai rapporti tra i padri e i figli.

(I don’t have kids, but I am always more convinced that the majority of problems today derive from the relationship between fathers and sons.)

Vincenzo Salemme, the actor who plays on-screen father of Marco in 10 regole per fare innamorare1

Introduction: Failing Fathers, Finding Fathers

In the previous chapter, I examined a group of films in which the traditional melodramatic happy ending was displaced from the presence of the heterosexual couple onto the creation of homosocial utopias. In this chapter, I continue to demonstrate how Italian teen film subverts the heterocentric finale of melodrama by analyzing three films—Prova a volare [Try To Fly] (Lorenzo

Cicconi Massi, 2007), 10 regole per fare innamorare [Ten Rules for Falling in Love] (Cristiano

Bortone, 2012), and Universitari - Molto più che amici [Universitarians - Much More Than

Friends] (Federico Moccia, 2013). Like the young men in the last chapter, the male adolescents in

1 See Francesco Lomuscio, “Intervista 10 regole per fare innamorare – Conferenza stampa.” everyeye.it, 15 March 2012, cinema.everyeye.it/articoli/intervista-10-regole-per-fare-innamorare-conferenza-stampa- 16384.html. 87 these films struggle with their absent fathers; however, instead of establishing homosocial utopias in order to find happiness, the protagonists in the films under discussion in this chapter find happiness in the role of father, as they become surrogate fathers to children and families with which they share no biological connection. The young males depicted in the above-mentioned films become fathers without participating in typical rites of passage associated with fatherhood, such as dating, coupledom, marriage and, perhaps most importantly, heterosexual intercourse. The men eventually “get the girl”—an obvious expectation of the , another genre with which these films certainly share generic qualities. However, the narratives suggest that it is the young men’s role as surrogate or social father, a role I will elaborate on below, which actually makes them happy. In other words, it is not the possible heteronormative future—represented by the heterosexual couple that is established, in typical melodramatic (and romantic comedy) fashion, in the last five minutes of the films—that provides for the happy ending.2

These three films are united by a number of themes, not least of which is an outright disillusionment with the biological nuclear family and, in particular, the role of biological father.

Whereas the protagonists in traditional (Anglophone) melodramas are, in the words of Steve Neale,

“permanently and neurotically scarred by a fundamental loss of and separation from the mother, by the dissolution of a union they wish desperately to restore,” this is not the case for Italian teen films—which, as we will recall, often rely on the melodramatic mode for their narratives (18).

Instead, it is the loss of and separation from the father, as we will see in this chapter, which young men desperately wish to restore. Indeed, the male protagonists, Alessandro (Riccardo Scamarcio)

2 For more on this tendency, see Laura Mulvey’s “Notes on Sirk and Melodrama.” Visual and Other Pleasures. Indiana University Press, 1989, pp. 40. 88 in Prova a volare, Marco (Guglielmo Scilla) in 10 regole per fare innamorare, and Carlo (Simone

Riccioni) in Universitari - Molto più che amici, each have a father that is absent and that disapproves of his sons’ choice of career, whether explicitly or implicitly. In the case of Prova a volare, for example, Alessandro’s father bequeaths his son the family metalworking company, with the expectation that he will take over the family business. This becomes a cause of crisis for

Alessandro who feels guilty for abandoning his father’s company yet aspires to create his own future by pursuing his dream to be a videographer/director. In this case, the father implicitly disapproves of his son’s career choice, assuming that his son would want to take over the job, instead of a more qualified colleague.

In 10 regole per fare innamorare, Marco is compelled to hide from his father the fact that he has dropped out of college and, instead of becoming an astrophysicist, has been working in a daycare. Although Marco finds sincere satisfaction with the position, he is unable to voice such sentiments to his domineering father, whose career as a highly sought-after plastic surgeon—coded as masculine—contrasts starkly with Marco’s rather feminized role as a caregiver. Marco’s failure to carry through with the educational and occupational goals laid out by his father becomes a comedic moment as his lack of expertise leads to rushed web searches during a dinner with an esteemed scientist. Moments such as these contribute to the romantic comedy aspect of the film, as I discuss below, yet also accentuate both the father’s inattentiveness and the son’s crisis.

Whereas Prova a volare and 10 regole per fare innamorare merely hint at the threat of fatherly disapproval towards their sons, Universitari - Molto più che amici makes such displeasure obvious: during a particularly heated exchange in which Carlo’s parents fight about their son’s future occupation, Carlo himself confesses to his parents that he wants to be a director. Carlo’s father

89 immediately responds that, in his view, it would be better if Carlo became a thief [“Per me è meglio che tu vai a rubare.”].

The sons’ failure to live up to the expectations laid out by their fathers, whether directly or indirectly stated, instills in them a certain anxiety about their future identities and, more particularly, about whether their occupational choices will allow them to be considered as real men by their fathers. Though the films suggest a certain feminization of the sons’ chosen professions, it is true that the apparently feminized traits they embody represent an important part of their future masculinity. Characterized by caregiving and displaying emotions, Marco’s role at the daycare best evidences the feminization of the workplace—an unstated consequence of feminism—and of

Marco himself. That Carlo’s father, a ballerino by trade, scoffs at Carlo’s choice of occupation likewise implies that becoming a director is somehow less manly than dancing for a living. While their fathers cannot accept such blatantly feminine characteristics, it is precisely the sons’ somewhat motherly tendencies which make them suitable romantic partners for the women in the films.

Although the young men seem to seek their fathers’ approval, it is clear that they have no desire to become like their own fathers. As we will see, the self-involved, egotistical, unemotional kinds of fatherhood that the fathers embody no longer represent a desired form of masculinity for the young men. While active, virile, sexually-charged, and body-centered masculinity— reminiscent of the type of masculinity promulgated by Mussolini under the fascist regime in

Italy—was once the dominant model, in that it was culturally and socially privileged, that kind of

90 masculinity has now become outdated in contemporary Italy.3 Indeed, the focus on virility, social standing, and the body—which also recalls, at least to some extent, ex-prime minister Silvio

Berlusconi’s obsession with his appearance, plastic surgery, and the party lifestyle—is characterized as inherently shallow-minded and undesirable. As O’Rawe concludes in her analysis of Berlusconi, such traits evidence “a degraded Italian male sexuality” which gives way to a

“palpable anxiety about the idea of feminization or the loss of hegemonic masculinity” (5, 6).

Rather than conforming outright to the outdated forms of masculinity, the young men in this chapter create a kind of hybrid masculinity that becomes privileged.

In addition, the films evince a feeling of skepticism regarding the apparent stability of the biological nuclear family. Even in spite of their own failed fathers, the young men in the films I discuss here have a strong impulse to become fathers, perhaps to make up for where their own fathers have fallen short or to prove that they are not damaged goods when it comes to fathering.

Given the absence of the father figure in these films, one might expect the presence of a surrogate father, one who is not directly related to the son by blood but who “steps up” and fulfills the role of father for the fatherless son. The figure of the social or surrogate father, as Tracy Morison and

Catriona Macleod contend, “counterbalances the potentially negative effects of having an absent father” (130). While I would tend to agree with Morison and Macleod, their formulation of the surrogate father suggests that the son can only be “saved” through another man and not through their own volition. That is, they must be protected by an external source and are, therefore, unable to protect themselves. However, as I argue in this chapter, the young men in these films are

3 See Gigliola Gori’s “Model of Masculinity: Mussolini, the ‘New Italian’ of the Fascist Era.” The International Journal of the History of Sport, vol. 16, no. 4, 1999, pp. 27-61. 91 surrogate fathers themselves, taking care of children and families to which they are not related by blood. Instead of waiting around for another father figure to come to their aid, they develop their own masculinity and become fathers in their own right. This surrogate fatherhood is unique in that it allows the men to incorporate aspects of traditional, breadwinning fatherhood—often coded as masculine—and non-traditional, caregiving and emotionally connected fatherhood—often coded as feminine—constructing, as a result, a rather innovative form of masculinity. In this way, the young men depicted in the films I discuss in this chapter make sense of their fathers’ mistakes and fill the void created by their own absent fathers with themselves.

Family and the Father Crisis

In 2011, sociologist and masculinity studies scholar Elisabetta Ruspini argued that Italy is defined as a “familistic society,” one which shows “a strong attachment and loyalty to one’s family” and includes “a strong reliance on family for material and emotional help” (59, emphasis in original). Although Ruspini’s remarks certainly seem to apply to the traditional Italian family,

I am also convinced that Italy is not as familistic a society as it once was. As I argued in previous chapters, the Italian family—at least the depictions of it in contemporary Italian teen film—has been somewhat lacking, with images of families destroyed by death, divorce, adultery, and abuse populating screens as early as 2004, in films like Tre metri sopra il cielo [Three Steps Over

Heaven] (Luca Lucini, 2004) and Che ne sarà di noi [What Will Become of Us] (Giovanni

Veronesi, 2004). Such representations are not restricted to teen film, however, with similar depictions going back to the , in commedia all’italiana films like Divorzio all’italiana

[Divorce, Italian Style] (Pietro Germi, 1961) and Sedotta e abbandonata [Seduced and

92

Abandoned] (Germi, 1964).4 The rather overwhelming presence of broken families and damaged offspring which has populated Italian screens for decades draws the existence of a “traditional” family into question. While I disagree with Ruspini as to the strong attachment and loyalty within the contemporary Italian family, I am indeed intrigued by the title to her chapter, “And Yet

Something Is on the Move: Education and New Forms of Masculinity and Paternity in Italy.” As we will see in this chapter, something is in fact “on the move” in representations of masculinity and fatherhood, particularly in a genre where one would perhaps least expect it. That is, Italian teen film.

The familistic society proposed by Ruspini relies heavily on “traditional” gender relations:

“Familism requires and encourages a specific two gender model, where the gender categories

‘man’ and ‘woman’ carry with them peculiar expectations about how to act, what to do, who to love, and so on” (60). Left unstated in Ruspini’s comments, though I believe equally pertinent for her discussion and mine, is an apparently gendered division of labor when it comes to familial roles, that is, that men do the job of fathering and are thus fathers and that women, then, must mother and be mothers. Thus, when Ruspini argues that “the idea of ‘feminine’ behavior says as much about how men are not supposed to act as it does about how women are supposed to act” and that “hegemonic masculinity exists in contrast with that which is feminine,” she also means that “motherly” behavior says as much about how fathers are not supposed to act as it does about how mothers are supposed to act (60). Put simply, in a traditional gender paradigm, to be a man, to be masculine, and to be a father is to not be a woman, to not be feminine, and to not be a mother.

4 Jacqueline Reich’s work on masculinity in Beyond the Latin Lover: , Masculinity, and Italian Cinema (Indiana University Press, 2004) discusses this tendency at length. 93

And yet, as we will see in this chapter and to quote Ruspini’s title again, something is on the move. In 2011, the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) reported a rise in separations and divorce rates, from 158 separations and 80 divorces for every 1,000 marriages in 1995 to 311 and 182 respectively in 2011 (“Separations and Divorces in Italy”). The passing of the so-called

“fast divorce law” [“divorzio breve”] on May 6, 2015 likewise had an immediate impact on the number of divorces in Italy, jumping from 52,355 in the previous year to 82,469, an increase of

57% (“Marriages, Separations and Divorces”).5 At the same time, financial instabilities caused by the 2008 crisis have made the construction of the nuclear family difficult, at times even unfeasible, and have resulted in a rise in single-child and childless households. The financial downturn likewise exposes the fragility of the traditional masculine approach to fathering situated in one’s ability to provide for the family, that is, the father as breadwinner. The dwindling number of biological offspring and the increase in divorce and separation has created a crisis surrounding the family, bringing about a notable change in the definition of “family” in contemporary Italian society.

As familial bonds begin to deteriorate—evidenced onscreen by death, inter-spousal contention, and a general narcissism—so too do the roles inherent to that institution, that is, the role of father and mother. Themes of family crisis and, to some extent, the fatherhood crisis underpin the narratives of almost every film I have discussed thus far, from Tre metri sopra il cielo, to Lezioni di volo [Flying Lessons] (Francesca Archibugi, 2007), to Niente può fermarci

[Nothing Can Stop Us] (Luigi Cecinelli, 2013). The figure of the absent father, which is perhaps

5 For more on the “fast divorce” law, see Philip Pullela’s article “‘’ becomes easier, faster with new law” or Giuseppina Vassallo’s piece “Divorzio breve: la legge in Gazzetta Ufficiale”. 94 most apparent in the three films I discuss in this chapter, has clear societal implications, as well as ramifications for the young men who come of age in these films. In their work on parenthood in

South Africa, sexuality and reproduction scholars Tracy Morison and Catriona Macleod argue that

“[t]he fatherless family [is] seen as a problem. It [is] depicted … as posing a threat not only to children’s welfare, but as a potential cause of societal decline” (119). They further posit that

“concerns about male absence in families centre on the supposed threat to the heteronormative nuclear family and the perceived moral decay associated with this threat” (133). Their remarks seem to suggest a threat that flows from the family and the absent father, back to the society at large, such that a society’s decline or decay is born out of the father’s absence. As we will see, each of the film’s discussed in this chapter code the young men as bearers of what masculinities scholar Jack Kahn refers to as the “father wound,” an emotional scarring which occurs “[w]hen boys are disconnected from, and long for, their fathers” (199). However, it is important to point out that, while the young men depicted in Prova a volare, 10 regole per fare innamorare, and

Universitari - Molto più che amici initially appear at a disadvantage as victims of emotionally and physically absent fathers, the young men themselves are situated as harbingers of new approaches to familial arrangements and as the solution to the absent father problem. Whereas comedies, according to O’Rawe’s analysis, depict middle-aged men and fathers as “being constantly pulled back toward the pleasure of youth,” the films I analyze in this chapter code young men as hastening toward adulthood precisely through fatherhood (56). Indeed, as I will show, by establishing themselves as surrogate or social fathers, the young men depicted in these films are ultimately enabled to be adults. Such images, then, shed light on what it means to be a “good father” in contemporary Italy.

95

While I agree with Morison and Macleod that the absent father has an effect on a society’s stability, in the ways outlined above, I would also suggest that the effect could go the other direction, that is, that the absent father is a direct consequence of a symbolic evacuation of the role of Father in Italian society. In particular, I am thinking about ex-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi whose scandalous and feminized image represents an apparent crisis of masculinity. As Eleanor

Andrews explains, Berlusconi “draws on his masculinity and authority and exploits the idea of being a father figure to [Italy]” (55). During his 1994 campaign, Berlusconi explained—in response to his son’s remark that his daddy’s job was to fix televisions—that “he would not have time to mend television sets because he had to mend Italy” (Andrews 56). Berlusconi’s crisis of masculinity, then, coupled with his own image of himself as the father figure to Italy, results in a crisis of fatherhood.6 The films I discuss in this chapter evidence the tension between father and son and, more importantly, the son’s failed relationship with the father, which would seem to suggest that the moral decay of the Father (re)produces the image of the absent father in contemporary Italian teen film. That is, the films here considered evidence a feedback loop wherein the failure of the political Father—represented by Berlusconi—highlights the failure of the father within the institution of the Italian family and vice versa.

A Brief Word on Genre

While Prova a volare, 10 regole per fare innamorare, and Universitari - Molto più che amici seem to be directed at young people and are certainly coming-of-age or teen films, they are

6 Catherine O’Rawe’s introduction, “Trouble Men: Masculinity, Stardom, and Italian Cinema” and Nicoletta Marini-Maio’s book, A Very Seductive Body Politic, in particular her introductory remarks, “Berlusconismo and Cinema”, offer a more in depth analysis of Berlusconi. 96 also easily classified as romantic comedies or melodramas and deploy many of the conventions of these modes and genres, as I will explain in more detail in subsequent sections. As we have seen with other texts I have discussed (such as those in chapter 2 on coming of age abroad), one such convention of the rom-com, and of the melodrama, is the centrality of the heterosexual couple, which looms large in this small corpus of films. The importance of the heterosexual couple is made apparent through the relationships—which begin as platonic but shift towards the romantic— between the primary male and female protagonists: Alessandro and Gloria in Prova a volare,

Marco and Stefania in 10 regole per fare innamorare, and Carlo and Francesca in Universitari –

Molto più che amici. At the same time, however, these relationships remain merely possibilities throughout the majority of each narrative and, while the films suggest the successful coming together of the couples, I believe the heterosexual couple remains only that, that is, a suggestion.

Indeed, each pair shares a kiss relatively late in each film, typically within the last five minutes or so.7 And although there is a strong prospect for a heterosexual relationship between each couple in each film’s denouement, there is no guarantee that the relationship will come to fruition. In

Prova a volare, which I discuss at length below, the final sequence of the film is reminiscent of a wedding scene, with Gloria wearing a white dress and Alessandro bringing Gloria a ring which she gleefully dons. And yet, both Gloria’s ex-boyfriend—the biological father to her newborn son—and Alessandro, her hopeful new beau, are present at the family party. Thus, the symbolic wedding is undermined by the presence of Gloria’s ex who she had previously left at the altar.

7 This tendency to tie up all the loose ends of a melodrama in the last five minutes is part of what Laura Mulvey considers, citing Sirk, the “strength of the melodramatic form” (“Notes on Sirk” 40). 97

That which remains central, then, is the presence of the surrogate father and the continuity of the family that he stands in for.

These wistful endings, which at once allude to the centrality of the heterosexual couple and yet subvert the actual institution of marriage, underline the typical melodramatic moment of the

“if only” (Neale 12). At the same time, they also raise the question of whether it is “too late” for the young men to partake in the institution of marriage, the ultimate symbol of melodrama’s happy—that is, heterosexual—ending (Neale 8). The issue of “if only” is best capsulated in Carlo’s voiceover at the end of Universitari, particularly in his use of the word “maybe” [“magari”] which, coupled with his use of the future tense, expresses a certain wishful thinking to his remarks:

“Maybe Francesca and I will have a beautiful love story … and I will get along with my father and will make a film in Argentina that will be successful.”8 As Carlo’s remarks make clear, his future with Francesca is not guaranteed but can only be hoped for. It is likewise important to note that

Carlo foregrounds his relationship with his father which, as an allusion to the homosocial bond, functions as a counterpoint to Carlo’s relationship with Francesca and underlines the obsessive need for fatherly presence and approval. Although there is an obvious turn towards the centrality of the heterosexual couple, the fact that it is left up in the air and merely hoped for suggests, at the very least, an alteration of the traditional melodramatic happy ending. At the same time, however, the privileging of the surrogate family, and the happiness each of the men find in their relationships with their surrogate children, is at once an innovative and rather traditional instance of that happy

8 “Magari Francesca ed io vivremo una bella storia d’amore … e io andrò d’accordo con mio padre e farò un film in Argentina e sarà un successo.” 98 ending: innovative, in that the adolescent surrogate father marks a new phenomenon; traditional, in that it does indeed centralize a family and, at times even the heterosexual couple.

Trying to Fly a New Fatherhood Flag: Renegotiating Masculinity in Prova a volare

In certain regards, Prova a volare is positioned on the brink of the teen film phenomenon in Italy. The circumstances surrounding the film’s release are rather strange: it was initially filmed and produced in 2003—before the Italian teen film boom—but its debut was subsequently postponed until August 2007. The delayed release was an attempt to capitalize on Riccardo

Scamarcio’s meteoric rise to teen idol with his role as Step in Tre metri sopra il cielo (2004) and

Ho voglia di te [I Desire You] (March 2007), as well as Alessandra Mastronardi’s successful turn in Cristina Comencini’s 2005 film La bestia nel cuore [Don’t Tell]. However, even despite the draw of the cast, which also included renowned actors and , the film tanked at the box office, grossing a mere €315.000. Viewers who shared their opinions of the film hammered it for being “annoying”, “absent of emotion”, “obscene”, “shameful”,

“horrible”, and even “painful”.9

Why did Prova a volare elicit such a vehement reaction from its audiences? One possible reason for the film’s scathing reviews might be the rather traditional, boy meets girl, boy gets girl romantic narrative it contains. While films like Tre metri sopra il cielo and Ho voglia di te certainly centralize heterosexual romance, they are not as simplistic and straightforward as Prova a volare.

As we saw in the first chapter, Tre metri sopra il cielo disallows the heterosexual couple in the film’s denouement, privileging instead Step (Scamarcio) and his brother as they ride off into the

9 See the public reviews on filmup.leonardo.it/opinioni/op.php?uid=4660&pag=1&ord=1. 99 sunset. The happy ending of melodrama, characterized—as I have previously mentioned—by the promulgation of the heteronormative home, is here rewritten by the homosocial bonding between brothers. Ho voglia di te, on the other hand, complicates the romantic narrative through the love triangle composed of Step, Babi (Katy Louise Saunders), and Gin (Laura Chiatti). Although Step and Gin ultimately do come together in the film’s final moments, it is only after Step has sex with

Babi one last time so that she can insure that Step is indeed not “the one” she is meant to marry.

As a result, Step is forced to “settle” for Gin simply because Babi no longer reciprocates his affections.

Another reason for the film’s negative reception, I would argue, is that Prova a volare appears to normalize traditional forms of fatherhood and masculinity and to reinforce patriarchal gender dynamics wherein women are subjected to men. Along these lines, one viewer noted how the film succumbs to “the lowest commonplace and prejudice, as if forced marriages, enslaved women, and despotic fathers still exist!!!”10 Although this observation suggests that such dictatorial fathers no longer characterize the Italian family and, in particular, the Italian family depicted onscreen, many of the fathers in the films I examine in this chapter still embody—at least to some extent—just such a domineering approach to fatherhood. This is the case with

Alessandro’s (Scamarcio) father in Prova a volare who, upon his death, bequeaths the family business to his son and, by so doing, coerces his orphaned son into an occupation for which he has no interest. As we will see, the same can be said of 10 regole per fare innamorare, where the father imposes his rules for sexual conquest onto his more romantic and sentimental son, and in

10 This according to Matteo (21 years old, living in Macerata). filmup.leonardo.it/opinioni/op.php?uid=4660&pag=1&ord=1. 100

Universitari - molto più che amici, where the father criticizes his son for his educational and professional aspirations to become a director and blames his wife for permitting such illusions to become aspirations. In these ways, fathers expose themselves as fitting the despotic father bill.

Most representative of this traditional fatherhood, however, is Gloria’s (Mastronardi) father Pietro (Fantastichini) in Prova a volare, who has much in common with Don Vincenzo

(Saro Urzì) in Pietro Germi’s classic commedia all’italiana film, Sedotta e abbandonata [Seduced and Abandoned] (1964). Sedotta e abbandonata follows the life of Agnese Ascalone (Stefania

Sandrelli) as she is first seduced and subsequently impregnated by her sister’s fiancé, Peppino

Califano (Aldo Puglisi). When Agnese’s father, Don Vincenzo, learns of her pregnancy, he goes to great lengths to cover it up, not for her own good, but in order to keep the family’s image and honor intact. Don Vincenzo keeps Agnese quite literally under lock and key, except during their trips to and from the tribunal where the Ascalone and Califano families attempt to reach some kind of amicable accord that appeases both sides. In the end, Don Ascalone hatches a highly theatrical plan wherein Peppino kidnaps Agnese and takes her into the countryside. Upon their return,

Peppino confronts Don Ascalone and, in a very public display, suggests that he has raped Agnese but is willing to take her hand in marriage in order to smooth over any wrongdoing.

Ultimately, Don Ascalone does more damage to his family than good: Agnese is forced into a loveless marriage with Peppino (who wanted a virgin for a wife); Matilde, the daughter to whom Peppino was previously engaged, resigns herself to a convent, another kind of loveless life.

In the closing moments of the film, a bust of Don Ascalone, placed as a grave marker, is shown in isolation. The words Honor and Family (Onore e famiglia), which adorn the tombstone, are indeed the words which caused Don Vincenzo’s death. Sedotta e abbandonata thus represents a scathing

101 critique, not only of the kind of masculinity that Don Ascalone embodies, but also of the society which fostered and even institutionalized such patriarchal control over female sexuality. The film therefore unmasks the “performance of hypermasculinity”, typical of the Latin Lover, by making the obsession with “protection of honor, procreation, and sexual segregation” a comedic object

(Reich 9-10). However, as we will see, Sedotta e abbandonata contrasts sharply with Prova a volare, in that Germi’s comedy leaves little to no hope for a happy future. Indeed, the film functions as a warning to those who fall into Don Ascalone’s trap: do so at your own risk.

Like Sedotta e abbandonata, Prova a volare foregrounds the tension between a father, the rich businessman Pietro, and his daughter, Gloria. Like Don Ascalone before him, Don Pietro is fixated on family for, as he professes, “Family makes the world run.” [“La famiglia è il motore del mondo.”]. Gloria obviously does not share her father’s sentiments as she leaves her fiancé at the altar, an act signaling her disillusionment with the heteronormative family and its reproduction.

She subsequently escapes with wedding photographer and unwilling accomplice Alessandro in her father’s Mercedes Benz. At this point, the film takes the form of a mix of a romantic teen film and a redemptive road film as the pair go on the lam from Gloria’s oppressive father. As the narrative progresses, Gloria opens up to Alessandro, informing him of her arranged nuptials set up by her father who neglected to consult with her on the matter. Thus, in a manner similar to Agnese,

Gloria’s future has been dictated by her father.

Unlike Agnese, however, Gloria refuses to accept the future laid out for her by her father.

She manifests her distaste for the institution of family by refusing to wed the biological father of the baby she is carrying and by making plans to terminate that child through abortion. This latter decision is made more problematic by the fact that the everyone assumes that the child is a boy

102 which, as we eventually discover, it is. Because her father only hopes to have the male child he never had, to carry the child to term, in Gloria’s mind, would be to risk the continuation of the male line and the oppressive system she is attempting to escape. The prospective termination of the baby, then, serves a dual purpose: on the one hand, it allows Gloria to (re-)take control of her own body, putting an end to the patriarchal dominance that her father has exercised over her up until this moment; on the other hand, it functions as a means of cutting off any possible promulgation of the traditional, and no-longer acceptable, form of masculinity that her father embodies. If the child is to be born, it seems, a much-needed transformation in masculinity must occur.

Despite his looming presence throughout the film, Gloria’s father is situated as the

(emotionally) absent and feckless “bad father”. Not only does he not understand his daughter’s decision to flee from her wedding, he also cannot empathize with her plight, claiming at one point that if Gloria has an abortion, he will no longer recognize her as his child. In short, like his Germi- ian counterpart, Pietro treats his daughter as his property, and not as the human being she actually is. Pietro likewise adopts a strictly-gendered stance on parenting, leaving the unconditional, instinctive kind of affection to his wife. For Pietro, showing emotion and taking care of both her physical and emotional well-being are acts traditionally associated with—or perhaps even inherent to—mothers and women. Emotional involvement in his child’s life has no place in Don Pietro’s formulation of masculinity because this type of caregiving is “an activity that decreases masculinity and increases femininity” and must therefore be defended against (Magaraggia 80).

Indeed, Pietro’s insistence that Gloria earn his affection or be erased from his heart suggests that he is quick to shore up his masculinity against this feminine threat.

103

Pietro’s version of masculinity stands in stark contrast to that of Alessandro’s employer,

Tonino (Antonio Catania) who, in an effort to support his daughter, takes on her boyfriend as his new assistant, even despite the young man’s inexperience and lack of talent for the work. Tonino’s choice to do this evinces traces of the “good father”, one who cares enough about keeping his daughter in his life and making her happy that he will compromise the success of his own startup in order to do so. As Sveva Magaraggia puts it, “[f]athers eager to be caring, participatory and emotionally involved [e.g. Tonino] who reject the conventional model of the peripheral father [e.g.

Pietro] … must constantly deal with past cultural norms that are unable to integrate innovative practices. The result of these negotiations is a complex redefinition of what it means to be a father today” (78). Thus, if Pietro’s strict, unforgiving fatherhood represents an entrenched form of dominant masculinity that is ripe for replacement, then Tonino’s presence counteracts that masculinity and draws attention to, and opens up a space for, a new definition of masculinity as it relates to fatherhood, one not based solely on breadwinning.

While in Prova a volare there is certainly a critique—along the lines of that contained in

Sedotta e abbandonata—of outdated forms of masculinity, it is likewise true that this more recent film provides some semblance of hope for a brighter masculine future. This is accomplished in part through Tonino, who is the sympathetic voice of reason opposite Pietro’s harsh, almost self- destructive logic; however, it is the character of Alessandro that provides more insight into the shifting definition of masculinity vis-a-vis fatherhood. Like other melodramatic texts, Prova a volare departs from a space of innocence which is, at the same time, a space of loss. The space of loss is, as Linda Williams observes, a trope which melodrama “endlessly repeat[s]” (“Film Bodies”

11). The film opens on a shot of a body bag being placed into a coffin. The camera’s movement

104 then slowly reveals a forlorn Alessandro staring blankly out a rain-soaked car window—an image somewhat reminiscent of the famous rain sequence in Tre metri sopra il cielo which I discussed in chapter 1. The spectator soon discovers, through the reading of a will in voiceover, that

Alessandro mourns his father’s untimely demise. The rain in the previous scene is thus a melodramatic moment wherein excess emotion is pushed onto the mise-en-scène. What is more, the unexpected suddenness of Alessandro’s father’s death, coupled with the severance of the father-son bond, functions as an instance of the father wound, as I laid out in the introduction to this chapter. While all three of the young men in the films I discuss in this chapter clearly suffer from the effects of a father wound, the finality of Alessandro’s tragic and traumatic separation from his father sets him apart from his counterparts in 10 regole per fare innamorare and

Universitari - Molto più che amici. Whereas Marco and Carlo, respectively, are eventually able to reconnect with their fathers in somewhat meaningful ways, Alessandro is cut off from that possibility. And it is the severance of the possibility that throws him into crisis and forces him into the task of constructing a stable adult identity on his own accord. Furthermore, by situating this death, and Alessandro’s subsequent suffering, in the film’s first minutes, Prova a volare immediately invokes male melodrama as one of its operating modes.

In her work on masculinity in popular cinema, Nicola Rehling argues that “male melodramas most often focus on father-son narratives,” and this is true for Prova a volare, even in spite of the fact that Alessandro does not have a living father (66). Instead, his father becomes a haunting presence throughout the film and is crucial to both the narrative and to Alessandro’s coming-of-age process and his development of adult masculine norms. Indeed, much of

Alessandro’s struggle derives from his father’s death and his subsequent inheritance of his father’s

105 metalworking company. The position at the factory is inherently coded as masculine, not only because Alessandro would inhabit a place of power among the workers, but also because the factory itself represents modernity and progress, as well as tiresome, laborious work that traditionally could only be carried out by hard-bodied strong men.11 Implicit in Alessandro’s decision to pursue his career as a videographer, then, is not only the father’s disapproval of that career choice but also the understanding that, as I mentioned above and as we will see below in my discussion of Universitari - Molto più che amici, a job as videographer is somehow feminized.

Despite this apparent feminization, however, it is Alessandro’s work as videographer which facilitates the heterosexual relationship with Gloria as he is eventually tasked to film her wedding, becoming her unwitting accomplice on the road. Thus, here, as in the other films discussed in this chapter, the father, whose haunting presence is glimpsed in the looming figure of the factory, represents an obstacle to the successful coming together of boy and girl, and to the potential heterosexual romance.

With the father out of the picture, young men like Alessandro are free to be their true selves, unencumbered by outdated forms of masculinity such as those embodied by Pietro and by

Alessandro’s own father. Though Alessandro is not thrilled with escorting Gloria to her destination, it is likewise true that the journey allows him to vent his frustrations about losing his father to someone who has equally problematic issues with her own father. As is typical of other road movies, the car provides a safe space in which Alessandro can grapple with, and eventually

11 For more on the hard body, see Susan Jeffords’ aptly titled Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (Rutgers University Press, 1994); and Yvonne Tasker’s Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (Routledge, 1993). 106 come to terms with, the trauma of his father’s passing.12 At the same time, the trip—which takes the two towards the margins of the region—gives him a safe space from which to do so.

Indeed, the pair’s liminal existence grants them the possibility to experiment with various iterations of their identities without any lasting repercussions.

Gloria and Alessandro’s emotional baggage finally comes to a head as their journey comes to an end outside Pietrasanta. It is here that we discover the striking similarities between

Alessandro and Gloria’s paternal woes, as both have been forced into a life that they did not ask for: in Gloria’s case, this is a life of reproduction represented by the unborn child and the institution of marriage being forced upon her by her father. On the other hand, Alessandro’s dream to produce films is superseded by the undesired life of production connected to running the family factory.

Indeed, although Gloria accuses Alessandro of having no idea what it is like to have his life decided for him, it is clear that he knows exactly how she feels. There are, of course, obvious and complex differences between their plights (among them, issues of gender norms and expectations, as well as patriarchal control of sexuality, marriage, and childbirth). However, that which gives

Alessandro pause, I would argue, is the simple fact that Gloria could work things out with her father if she wanted to, whilst he cannot. By finally recognizing the effects of his loss, Alessandro is able to successfully work through the traumatic passing of his father. Indeed, this confession about his father and the exposure of his emotions codes Alessandro as a “feeling man” and allows

12 For more on the road film genre and the role of the vehicle, see The Book, edited by Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, Routledge, 1997; David Laderman’s Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie, University of Texas Press, 2002; and Ronald Primeau’s Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway, Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1996. 107

Gloria to view him as worthy of her love.13 At the same time, this sentimentality counters Gloria’s father’s inability to express his own affection towards his daughter and is another example of the shifting definition of what it is to be a man. Only after Alessandro makes this revelation is the heterosexual relationship between he and Gloria given space to flourish and is consummated by a kiss.

In typical melodramatic fashion, Prova a volare ties up—or at least attempts to tie up—all of its loose ends, allowing the dust to settle in the last five minutes of the film. Through the narrative events, the spectator is lead to believe that Gloria goes through with the abortion of her child. After she approaches her father in the town square of Pietrasanta following the supposed procedure, the film cuts to a sequence depicting Alessandro leaving his job at the foundry, his shirtless appearance suggesting he has taken a job on the factory floor instead of behind the desk.

Although he does not yet have a family of his own, the romantic relationship he has taken up with

Gloria leaves the possibility open that he will eventually have one. Thus, his choice of a blue- collar life over a white-collar one evinces the vestiges of a traditional model of fatherhood, the so- called “good provider” who “place[s] work above family” (Magaraggia 79). Indeed, Alessandro’s late arrival at Gloria’s birthday party would seem to confirm such a reading.

At the same time, Alessandro soon informs his friend that he will have enough money to buy a videocamera in two months. This implies that he is not working to support a family, but instead hopes to finally realize his dream of becoming a videographer. In addition, it is important to note that Alessandro is not yet married to Gloria, and that we never witness a marriage between

13 See Joy Van Fuqua, “‘Can you feel it, Joe?’: Male Melodrama and the Feeling Man.” The Velvet Light Trap, vol. 38, 1996, pp. 28-38. 108 the two, even despite the numerous weddings—including Gloria’s failed one—that have populated the screen up until this point. Nonetheless, in my estimation, fatherhood continues to be a central concern, particularly during Gloria’s birthday celebrations. Set around the table—a central space in the traditional Italian wedding—Alessandro presents Gloria with a bright and shiny diamond ring. His white collared shirt and Gloria’s white blouse, accompanied by the image of Alessandro placing the ring on the middle finger of Gloria’s left hand, codes this moment as a symbolic wedding of the two, and their subsequent hug and kiss—and the applause that follows—seals their metaphorical marriage. The image invokes the rather hopeless finale of Sedotta e abbandonata and the forced and loveless marriage of Peppino and Agnese. And yet the absence of an official wedding, even despite the obvious nuptial imagery, at once deemphasizes the centrality of the heterosexual couple and suggests a potential happy ending, particularly through Lorenzo, Gloria’s son.

Lorenzo’s presence in the closing moments of the film is significant for a number of reasons, not least of which is to make clear the fact that Gloria did not go through with the abortion.

The newborn’s presence likewise draws attention to the redemptive power of the child: not only is

Pietro shown bonding with the boy over a tractor ride, but he ultimately reconnects with his daughter through his grandson. The child thus evidences Pietro’s changed attitude toward fathering, coding him as a “good father” who is there for his daughter and grandson. When the tractor comes to a stop, the child’s biological father approaches and takes the baby from Pietro, another example of involved fathering; even despite the fact that Gloria herself confesses that she doesn’t love her now ex-fiancé (and he, it seems, does not love her), he is still there for his offspring. Alessandro too is present and his inquiring as to the child’s whereabouts likewise

109 situates him as a sort of surrogate father to the baby. Although he had no part in creating little

Lorenzo, Alessandro demonstrates himself to be a worthy father figure, both through his dedication to his work and through his apparent commitment—symbolic or not—to Gloria.

The convergence in this final sequence of these three fathers—grandfather, biological father, and surrogate father—highlight the emergence of alternative forms of fatherhood that change long-entrenched definitions of dominant masculinity. Emotional involvement, care taking, and “being there” for children are shown to be traits that are no longer restricted to, and indeed only expected of, mothers and women. Instead, men have begun to (re)appropriate such characteristics in an effort to shore up their masculinity in the face of what have traditionally been labeled “feminine” acts.14 This apparent breaking down of the gendered paradigm of parenting suggests, as Carol Smart and Bren Neale put it, that “new styles of fatherhood can only be promoted by diminishing motherhood and mothers” (120). The construction of new forms of fatherhood and masculinity mark a shift in the traditional melodramatic denouement which centralizes the heterosexual couple. Indeed, although the film nods to the successful coming together of Alessandro and Gloria, their wedding is disallowed, replaced, as it were, by a type of homosocial utopia composed of the three fathers, with Lorenzo at its nucleus. As the film suggests, it is in the (male) child that men can find true happiness—a sentiment which, we will see, is made all the more obvious in 10 regole per fare innamorare.

14 O’Rawe notes a similar tendency at work in contemporary Italian comedy in her chapter “Comedy and Masculinity, Italian Style.” Stars and Masculinities in Contemporary Italian Cinema, pp. 45-69. 110

10 regole per fare innamorare: Fatherhood, Part Too (Late)?

As I mentioned in the introduction to the dissertation, recent years have seen comedies dominating the Italian box office. It may come as no surprise, then, that the top grossing film in

Italy in 2012 was a comedy titled Benvenuti al nord [Welcome to the North], a sequel to the 2010 hit Benvenuti al sud [Welcome to the South].15 Another 2012 film, that is, 10 regole per fare innamorare represents, in my own estimation, an attempt to capitalize on this growing trend.

Although the film fits rather easily into the teen film category, in that it centralizes adolescence, adolescent romance, and a coming-of-age narrative, it is perhaps more obviously a romantic comedy, in that the romance between main protagonist Marco (Guglielmo Scilla) and Stefania

(Enrica Pintore) plays out in very humorous ways. While Claire Mortimer points out that

“classifying a film as a romantic comedy can be problematic” in that its characteristic elements— romance and comedy—are present in most films, she also attests that, at the most basic level, a romantic comedy features “a narrative that centres on the progress of a relationship, and, being a comedy, [results] in a happy ending. The dynamic of the film rests on the central quest—the pursuit of love—and almost always leads to a successful resolution” (3, 4). In that romantic comedies like

10 regole per fare innamorare centralize the happy ending, they also invoke the melodramatic mode. As Leger Grindon observes, “[t]he plot of most romantic comedies could be presented with the earnestness of melodrama, but the humorous tone transforms the experience” (2).

As we will see, in both 10 regole per fare innamorare and Universitari - Molto più che amici, the happy ending initially appears to centralize the heterosexual couple. However, as I

15 According to BoxOfficeMojo, Benvenuti al nord was the highest grossing film for 2012, garnering $33,498,625, while its predecessor, Benvenuti al sud, which placed #2 overall for 2010 and came in over $40,000,000 behind James Cameron’s Avatar, grossed $43,015,634. 111 argue, these films subvert the happy ending in subtle ways, in particular by situating happiness within a non-traditional family, with the young male protagonists as surrogate fathers. In addition, the young men in these last two films—10 regole per fare innamorare and Universitari - Molto più che amici—construct these surrogate families without passing through rites of passage typically associated with family-hood, such as steady dating, coupledom, eventual marriage and, most importantly, engaging in heterosexual intercourse. Though the young men in these films successfully “get the girl,” it is not the heterosexual relationship or even the potential for one which provides for the young men’s happiness but, rather, their position as father in their constructed family units. The emergence of the surrogate father, viewed in the son, facilitates the reconciliation between absent fathers and their sons, which in turn contributes to the happy ending for the young men.

Within the publicity and marketing of the film, two crises emerge which are, I believe, of primary concern to the film’s narrative: the first is the crisis of masculinity made apparent in the selection of Guglielmo Scilla for the role of Marco. Though perhaps not immediately obvious,

Scilla’s transition from goofy internet sensation WillWoosh to big screen actor draws attention to the actor’s rather natural fit for the role of Marco and evidences the way in which he embodies a particular type of masculinity, one that is, in my estimation, reminiscent of the Italian anti-hero, or inetto theorized by Italian masculinities scholar Jacqueline Reich. As she argues, the inetto emerged as “the dominant cultural representation of masculinity” in film and literature in the period following World War II (2). The inetto is defined variably as “an agent in his own destruction”, as passive, and as a “[failure] rather than [success]” (Reich 6, 7).

112

Guglielmo Scilla seems to fit this bill particularly well: when asked how he was chosen for the film, Scilla responded “[i]n reality, the sensible and nice boy that they were looking for for the film didn’t have to be anything other than a loser, so I was perfect for the role and the fact that I got nervous at my audition and forgot my lines made me appear even more appropriate for the role” (Lomuscio).16 In another interview, Scilla stated that his job “was to draw out a boy that falls in love, that turns out to be clumsy, that makes a fool of himself and has a conflicting relationship with his dad” (Proto, “10 regole”).17 Scilla’s description of Marco as a “loser” [“sfigato”] and his tendency to “make a fool of himself” [“fa[re] brutte figure”] are expressions that clearly code him as a contemporary version of the inetto. In some way, then, Marco—by means of Scilla—is immediately characterized as feminized and lacking in masculinity. As we will see, the film also codes him in such terms, primarily through his job as a teacher and caretaker at a local daycare.

The second crisis that emerges from the reviews and interviews is the crisis of fatherhood, made evident through both Scilla’s and Salemme’s comments surrounding the film’s depiction of the decaying father-son relationship. For his part, and recalling the epigraph for this chapter,

Salemme explains that, despite the fact that he doesn’t have any “heirs”, he is convinced that

“many of the problems of the current generation are precisely the result of the absent fathers of my own generation” (De Leo).18 Not only does this remark manifest the image of the feckless and emotionally and physically lacking father, but it also reveals the inherent crisis of the childless,

16 “In realtà il ragazzo sensibile e buono che cercavano per il film altro non doveva essere che uno sfigato, quindi io andavo benissimo e il fatto che al provino mi sono emozionato e ho dimenticato le battute mi ha fatto apparire ancora più adatto al ruolo.” 17 “Il mio compito era quello di tirare fuori un ragazzo che si innamora, che risulta goffo, che fa brutte figure e che ha un rapporto conflittuale con il padre.” 18 “Io purtroppo non ho eredi … ma credo che molti dei problemi di questa generazione siano proprio dovuti all'assenza dei padri della mia generazione.” 113 aging man—a trope recently popularized in ’s Academy-Award-winning film,

The Great Beauty.19 At the same time, Scilla’s own background personalizes and exemplifies the crisis pointed to by Salemme: in an interview, Guglielmo revealed that “[m]y father left home 14 years ago when he separated [from my mother]. Now he lives in and I hardly ever see him”

(De Leo).20 The character of Marco thus emblematizes and makes visible Guglielmo Scilla’s own life history and allows it to be played out—at least to some extent—within the narrative of 10 regole per fare innamorare through his troubled relationship with his father.

Figure 5. Marco in his natural element in 10 regole per fare innamorare

19 For further analysis of , refer to the Afterword to Catherine O’Rawe’s Stars and Masculinities in Contemporary Italian Cinema, pp. 162-165. 20 “Mio padre è andato via di casa 14 anni fa quando si è separato. Ora abita in Sicilia e non lo vedo quasi mai.” 114

The first time we see main protagonist Marco (Guglielmo Scilla) in 10 regole per fare innamorare, he is surrounded—in a sort of Dantean primum mobile—by children who attentively listen as he explains how the Earth revolves around the sun and the moon revolves around Earth

(figure 5). His interactions with the kids in these opening moments characterize Marco as loving and caring, and position him as an ideal father figure for his youthful charges. For example, when young Lucia interrupts Marco’s explanation to express her embarrassment for having soiled her pants, Marco responds with all the empathy of a parent: not only does he flash Lucia a reassuring smile, telling her that “nothing happened”, he also refers to her as “amore”, an endearing term often reserved for husbands and wives and their offspring. Later, when the entrancing Stefania

(Enrica Pintore) meanders into the nursery in search of directions, Marco takes one of the boys with him. Although we assume Marco’s intention is to use the child as a prop to earn points with

Stefania, this act has the additional effect of coding Marco as fatherly in that he holds the boy’s hand for the duration of the exchange. Despite the fact that Marco has dropped out of college and is not married—two milestones typically required or at least expected for fatherhood, his job at the nursery has allowed him to establish a symbolic familial unit, with himself as patriarch. As Marco shares through voiceover, his position at the nursery fulfills him. In my estimation, the image of

Marco as tender father functions as the space of innocence from which the narrative departs and to which it attempts to return.21

21 For more on the role of innocence in melodrama, see Christine Gledhill’s “The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation.” Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, edited by Christine Gledhill, BFI Publishing, 1987, pp. 5-39; as well as Linda Williams’ “Melodrama Revised.” Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, edited by Nick Browne, University of California Press, 1998, pp. 42-88; and Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson. Princeton University Press, 2001. 115

This new ideal familial unit, composed of a single father and his children, stands in stark contrast to Marco’s own family. As with many—if not all—of the films discussed in this dissertation, Marco comes from a broken home: his father, we discover, is routinely unfaithful to his wife and the couple are divorced (or in the very least, separated and living in different cities) for quite some time. In addition, Marco makes clear that he has never been able to be the “super son” [“super figlio”] that his father always wanted. Marco’s failure to live up to his father’s expectations, as a matter of fact, instill him with a “performance anxiety” [“un’ansia da prestazione”] of which he “still bears the marks” [“porto ancora gli strascichi”]. Marco’s language here makes evident an interior crisis, bordering on the traumatic, created by his desire to win his father’s approval yet to do so without becoming his father’s protégé. Marco’s turmoil, therefore, derives from his inability—and, more importantly, his unwillingness—to adhere to the kind of masculinity that his father embodies and attempts to coerce his son into.

Furthermore, the conflict between father and son that is so central to 10 regole per fare innamorare stems from the disparities between their definitions of normative masculinity: for father Renato (Vincenzo Salemme), masculinity is inherently linked to sexuality, sexual and physical prowess, and the body.22 This becomes evident when Renato, a tennis enthusiast, takes issue with his wife’s new boyfriend simply because he plays curling, a sport that is far from the

22 Scholars who theorize masculinity as a social construction and as a performance, often through the body, include (but are most certainly not limited to) Judith Butler in “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal, vol. 40, no. 4, 1988, pp. 519-531; Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990; and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Routledge, 1993; Sally Robinson in Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis. Columbia University Press, 2000; Michael S. Kimmel in “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity.” Privilege: A Reader, edited by Michael S. Kimmel and Abby L. Ferber, Westview Press, 2003. 51-74; Todd W. Reeser in Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010; and Fintan Walsh in Male Trouble: Masculinity and the Performance of Crisis. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 116 aggressiveness, activity, grunting, and screaming of his own favorite pastime. In another instance,

Renato wears an apron which displays the chiseled abs and toned pectorals of a male body. This image, coupled with Renato’s position as one of the most sought-after plastic surgeons in the area, clearly evinces his belief that ideal masculinity can be read through the body. In addition, the apron highlights the performativity of masculinity in that Renato can pretend to have the figure displayed there, whether his actual figure adheres to that ideal or not. Although the cooking sequence foregrounds Renato’s bodily masculinity, it also codes that masculinity as feminized: not only is

Renato cooking dinner, a task that is often associated with women within Italian culture, but his occupation—and to some extent his costuming—evokes another feminized man equally obsessed with cosmetic surgery, ex-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

For Marco, on the other hand, being a real man signifies being a father that is faithful to, supportive of, and caring for both spouse and offspring. Indeed, such attributes are precisely those which Marco adopts in his position at the nursery school, particularly in relation to Lucia as I discuss below. It comes as no surprise, then, when Marco explains that his father did not understand that his son would never be like him, that he never wanted to become a winner [“un vincente”], nor a shameless betrayer [“un traditore senza vergogna”], a calculating cynic [“un cinico calcolatore”], a heartless egotist [“un egoista senza cuore”], or a chronically immature man

[“un immaturo cronico”]. All of the attributes Renato views as essential to his form of masculinity are viewed as negative in Marco’s rather vehement tirade about his father.

Marco departs from the space of innocence (i.e. his familial unit at the nursery) when he reluctantly accepts his father’s proposition to help him woo Stefania. As is the case with regards to their respective ideas regarding masculinity, Renato and Marco have antithetical beliefs about

117 love: for the father, love does not happen at first sight, but instead is a conquest that has rules, love can be broken down into a science that one can learn and then put into practice. For Marco, on the other hand, love is defined by destiny, fate, and inevitably involves love at first sight [“colpo di fulmine”]—even though he admits that he does not entirely know what that phrase means. In her work on melodrama, Linda Williams argues that one of the primary features of the genre is its

“compulsion to ‘reconcile the irreconcilable’—that is, its tendency to find solutions to problems that cannot really be solved without challenging … older ideologies” (“Melodrama Revised” 75).

This is certainly apparent in the relationship between Renato and Marco, with father representing entrenched norms regarding what it is to be masculine (e.g. virility, activity, a muscular body, etc.).

All the while, his son attempts to propose a new masculine ideal, effectively challenging the no longer effective form of manliness to which his dad adheres.

Ideological loggerheads are further foregrounded through two opposing relationships: that of Renato and Marco and that of Marco and Lucia. Renato’s interactions with his son are often characterized as undesired and insensitive, so much so that Renato’s arrival to and extended stay in Rome are quite obviously a nuisance and inconvenience for Marco. Such a dynamic is expected within romantic comedy, as the genre is one wherein family—which for my purposes I take to be primarily the father—can be “oddly absent” or “problematic, providing complications and opposition to the [romantic] relationship” (Mortimer 8). Not only does Renato convince Marco’s roommates to insert themselves into their friend’s romantic endeavors, but Renato continually critiques his ex-wife’s new fiancé, abasing the man in order to put himself on a pedestal. More importantly, Renato’s plan to help his son woo Stefania pushes Marco to abandon his morals and indeed his own identity, turning him into a dishonest liar, a performer in an inauthentic farce which

118 ultimately does not yield Marco’s hoped for results. Perhaps Renato’s only redeeming moment occurs when he passes on Marco’s journal to Stefania so that she can discover, and subsequently fall in love with, the “real” Marco. In a very typical, though contradictory way, then, Renato functions as an obstacle to but also (eventual) facilitator of the heterosexual relationship between

Marco and Stefania.

In his interactions with Lucia, on the other hand, Marco is shown to be wildly different from his father. One such encounter occurs at Stefania’s tennis club after Marco pretends to re- injure his leg during a tennis match so as to not be exposed as a fraud. While Marco and Stefania engage in a conversation poolside, young Lucia approaches and says hello. Upon hearing the little girl’s salutation, Marco is initially taken aback, but turns to face her and returns her greeting.

Marco’s subsequent interactions with Lucia characterize him as a tender and caring father: when

Lucia observes Marco’s recent absence from the nursery, he switches focus from Lucia as an individual to his group of students as a whole, a tactic which allows him to express his displeasure in spending time away from his symbolic family. At the same time, his transition from individual to group recalls the parental duty of not picking favorites within the family. When Lucia inquires as to whether Stefania is Marco’s girlfriend [“Chi è quella, la tua fidanzata?”], Marco assures her that only she is the apple of his eye [“Lo sai che sei tu la mia fidanzata.”] and, although this remark could be viewed as bordering on pedophilia, I argue that it futher codes their relationship as paternal in nature. Indeed, this comment is one that a single father might say to his daughter upon reentering the dating pool following a divorce and it has the additional effect of endearing Marco to Stefania. What is more, the statement helps assuage Lucia’s fear that she, as Marco’s surrogate

119 child, has not lost his attentions and affections and it therefore situates Marco more clearly as a

“good” father, or at the very least, as an emotionally conscious and present father figure.

The father-daughter dynamic is brought to the fore on two other occasions. In one instance,

Lucia approaches a depressed-looking Marco who nurses a hurt ankle which he suffered in a failed attempt to impress Stefania during a disastrous outing in the countryside. Lucia asks her teacher if it hurts, and although we might assume she is talking about his ankle, the fact that Lucia looks

Marco in the face instead of gesturing towards his foot suggests that there is another meaning to her inquiry. After Marco reassures her and encourages her to get back to playing with her classmates, Lucia gently touches him on his shoulder, a sign of support and sympathy. Lucia continues to be of comfort to Marco, particularly in the aftermath of Stefania’s breakup with the unfaithful Ettore (Giulio Berruti) and the subsequent fallout between Marco and Stefania. After

Marco calls Stefania in an attempt to comfort her, he picks up a handmade card. As he opens it, the camera focuses on a drawing of two stick figures—a girl and a boy—who appear to be holding hands, a heart placed between them. To the right of the picture, in characteristically childish print, is the name Lucia. In this moment, the specter of the family which Marco had created through his position at the nursery school, once again haunts him. By chasing after Stefania, Marco has abandoned the one thing that really mattered to him and, by so doing, has become more like his father than he ever wanted to be.

Marco redeems himself, however, by returning to his family in the nursery school. There, he easily takes up where he left off, watching over his children as he directs them in a group gardening session. When Stefania arrives and sees Marco in his element, a smile flashes across her face and just as quickly disappears. After a brief exchange, Stefania informs Marco that she is

120 leaving for Paris to have some time alone. In a very melodramatic fashion, Marco chases after her and gives her a kiss, asking if it is “too late” for them now. In this moment, 10 regole per fare innamorare evinces its roots in romantic comedy, as the film ends with “the woman making significant sacrifices for a traditional heterosexual partnership; she embraces the romantic dream and is whisked off her feet by the right guy, having realised that love conquers all” (Mortimer 30).

With Stefania’s sacrifice, the film is most clearly coded as a male melodrama in that it effaces

Stefania’s would be formative trip to Paris, while simultaneously centralizing Marco’s creativity in the form of his own nursery school. Indeed, the depiction of Marco as an emotionally present caregiver—made obvious by the setting of the film’s finale within the nursery—helps “reinforce the patriarchy, as the hero becomes empowered by moral superiority and sensitivity, able to

‘“instruct’ women about relationships, romance and femininity itself’” (Mortimer, citing Kathleen

Rowe 49).

This seemingly happy end of the coming together of the heterosexual couple is however only a foil for the real happy ending glimpsed instead in Marco’s voiceover explaining that he received a loan and built his own daycare. The images accompanying this news depict Marco showing his father around his school where he will be a great teacher [“un grande maestro”].

Significantly lacking from this scene, however, is Stefania. Although she is later present with

Marco and his roommates as they toast Marco’s career success, Stefania’s absence from the newly- founded nursery suggests that she does not fill the maternal role of the family. Furthermore, the presence of Marco’s father, with whom Marco has rarely had a positive relationship, codes the space as one of homosocial and familial solidarity. The father-son relationship in 10 regole per fare innamorare, as a romantic comedy, thus “expresses its subversive social implications in that

121 the conflict between generations [which] results in the overthrow of the old by the young, but

[also] its counter-tendency toward stability [which] results in the eventual reconciliation of the feuding parties in the creation of a new family” (Grindon 3-4). In truth, however, 10 regole per fare innamorare creates not one, but two new families with the reestablishment of Marco’s biological familial unit and the ideal, surrogate family in the nursery, with himself as the patriarch.

By helping his father learn and accept a new masculine norm for fathering, Marco inspires his father to reconnect with his estranged wife. Thus, the presence of the surrogate father, situated within the son, has the power to mend the wound created by the absent and abusive biological father and bring hope to a society reeling from shifts in the landscape of the traditional Italian family.

Universitari - molto più che amici: A Father, More Than Friend

At the time of the 2013 release of Federico Moccia’s Universitari - molto più che amici, director Moccia’s name had become almost synonymous with teen film: as I have pointed out elsewhere in the dissertation, his novels Tre metri sopra il cielo and Ho voglia di te were adapted for the screen by Luca Lucini (2004) and Luis Prieto (2007), respectively. Following up on this success, Moccia himself transposed his novels Scusa ma ti chiamo amore [Sorry, If I Love You] and Scusa ma ti voglio sposare [Sorry, If I Want to Marry You] into cinematic texts in 2008 and

2010, with the former becoming the highest grossing teen film in Italy to date. Between these,

Moccia’s Amore 14 was likewise adapted, gracing the screens in 2009. Although each of these films exemplify many of the generic conventions of teen film, they focus in particular on teenage romance, the coming-of-age process, and the vicissitudes associated with these. Considering the

122 almost decade-long span of time between the release of Tre metri sopra il cielo and that of

Universitari – Molto più che amici, it is true that an adolescent viewer in 2004—say a 12-year- old—could have certainly “come of age” with Moccia’s films.

Whereas many of Moccia’s previous films privilege adolescent milieus, with an emphasis on high school settings like those of Tre metri sopra il cielo, Scusa ma ti chiamo amore, and Amore

14, Universitari – Molto più che amici represents a significant deviation from such loci. Just like the young people who would have watched Tre metri sopra il cielo as teenagers, the protagonists of Universitari have grown into adulthood and must now face new struggles and dilemmas as they attend institutions for higher education and subsequently approach entrance into the working, adult world. As one critic puts it, “[w]ith Universitari - Molto più che amici Federico Moccia attempts a change of audience by seeking the attentions of a more mature public. And it is in this way that the ever-enduring protagonists of his films—adolescents at the mercy of hormones—are replaced, without too much regret, by university students who are unsure about their futures” (carlotta.asti).23

And yet Moccia’s notoriety as the catalyst of the teen film phenomenon would have certainly attracted a younger audience. I therefore agree with this critic’s conclusion that “the twenty year olds who are immortalized in [Universitari – Molto più che amici] are completely identical to those in Tre metri sopra il cielo and in the more recent Amore 14, who, as the title effectively suggests, were 14 years old” (carlotta.asti).24 To simplify, then, the protagonists, milieus, and themes of

23 “Con Universitari - Molto più che amici Federico Moccia tenta un cambiamento di audience ricercando le attenzioni di un pubblico più maturo. Ed è così che i sempreverdi protagonisti dei suoi film— adolescenti in balia degli ormoni—vengono rimpiazzati senza troppi rimpianti da universitari insicuri del proprio futuro.” 24 “i ventenni immortalati da quest’ultimo lavoro [sono] completamente identici a quelli di Tre metri sopra il cielo e del più recente Amore 14, che, come suggerisce efficacemente il titolo, avevano 14 anni.” 123

Moccia’s films have changed, but not really. Universitari thus acquires a dual address, speaking both to an only-slightly-older audience of college-aged men and women, and to a slightly-younger adolescent audience, for whom university is still on the horizon. As such, I consider the film to be a sort of hybrid teen film, primarily in the sense that Universitari speaks to an audience comprised of various age groups at different points in their lives, though perhaps not different developmental stages of life.

At the same time, it is possible that the film depicts a type of prolonged adolescence, wherein young men over the age of 18—the typical demarcation of adulthood—resist conventional coming-of-age rites of passage, electing to remain adolescents for a period that is longer than expected. This extended adolescence recalls Michael S. Kimmel’s formulation of what he terms

“Guyland,” “[a] kind of suspended between boyhood and manhood, … [lying] between the dependency and lack of autonomy of boyhood and the sacrifice and responsibility of manhood”

(Guyland 6). “In this topsy-turvy, Peter-Pan mindset,” Kimmel argues, “young men shirk the responsibilities of adulthood and remain fixated on the trappings of boyhood, while the boys they still are struggle heroically to prove that they are real men despite all evidence to the contrary”

(Guyland 4). Universitari - Molto più che amici thus functions as a teen film in that it foregrounds the coming-of-age narrative of Carlo who, as an advanced university student, is generally not viewed as an adolescent. However, as with many of the other protagonists in the films I have discussed in this and previous chapters, I believe that Carlo inhabits a space that is situated between boyhood and adulthood, the prolonged adolescence theorized by Kimmel. As such, thinking of

Universitari - Molto più che amici as a teen film is not too far-fetched.

124

Universitari – Molto più che amici initially centers on a group of three guys: Carlo (Simone

Riccioni), an aspiring cinematographer/director, Alessandro (Primo Reggiani), a business student and activist who spends his nights on stage as a comedian, and Faraz (Brice Martinet), a student from Iran hoping to receive a scholarship so he can return to his homeland to study. When their landlady decides to rent out more rooms in the ex-clinic where they reside, their all-male utopia is invaded by three girls: Francesca (Sara Cardinaletti), a rather timid girl studying medicine, Giorgia

(Nadir Caselli), an ambitious fashionista, and Emma (Maria Chiara Centorami), an actress whose biggest dream is to star in Grande Fratello (Italy’s version of the popular reality series Big

Brother). Despite their differences and various dilemmas, the six students somehow manage to come together, creating a sort of family unit. In an interview, in fact, Moccia himself proclaimed that “[t]he main idea of the film is that these six people who are so diverse and who so often have an absent family behind them, form a new family that meets the needs of everyone, a family that is welcoming and which gives a sense of security” (Proto, “Universitari”).25 Although familial and intergenerational conflict are certainly present in many (if not all) of Moccia’s previous films, it becomes an explicit theme in Universitari – Molto più che amici. I certainly see the relevance and importance of the absent family—and the need to reconstruct it—in the film; however, as I have discussed up to this point in this chapter, it is the issue of fatherhood, and how it relates to family,

25 “L’idea portante del film è che questi sei ragazzi così diversi e con una famiglia spesso assente alle spalle, formano una nuova famiglia, che risponde alle esigenze di tutti, che è accogliente e che dà sicurezza.” Moccia supports this theme in other interviews about the film: “The point is that all of these young people [in the film], in one way or another, were missing support from their families, and in the end the family becomes their group [of friends]” (Guglielmino). [“Il punto è che a tutti questi ragazzi manca in qualche modo un sostegno familiare, e la famiglia alla fine diventa il loro gruppo.”] 125 which emerges as a primary—though perhaps implicit—theme in Universitari – Molto più che amici.

As I will show in this section, Carlo’s upbringing—depicted in his flashbacks through his always-feuding parents, their subsequent divorce, and his father’s abandonment of his family— leaves an indelible mark upon him. Instead of perpetuating his father’s failed form of dominant masculinity, however, Carlo uses his newfound family as a safe space in which to construct a novel form of masculinity which includes resolving conflict rather than creating it, showing emotion towards his friends, and caring for his surrogate family. By so doing, he makes himself a worthy companion, husband, and father and it is for this reason that he is allowed the possibility of a happy ending through a potential relationship with Francesca, and a prospective reconciliation with his father. By developing and conforming to a new masculine norm located in non-traditional fatherhood, Carlo—like his counterparts Alessandro and Marco—initially subverts heteronormativity in that he is able to create a family without heterosexual intercourse.

Heteronormative romance is eventually reinstated, if only symbolically, as Carlo departs for

Argentina to live with his father, with Francesca and his wayward sister in tow, a subtle suggestion of another non-traditional family unit comprised of a father, his prospective wife, and his daughter/sister.

The Father Wound, Trauma, and Masculinity

In An Introduction to Masculinities, Jack Kahn theorizes the crisis of masculinity as an effect of the failing connection between fathers and their sons. He argues that “social changes have created an atmosphere that makes it difficult for boys to identify with their fathers. As men find

126 the world changing and becoming ‘feminized,’ they have fewer and fewer spaces to ‘be men.’ Men are increasingly spending less time with their sons, who do not know how to internalize a healthy gender identity of maleness” (198). Ironically, it is the need to provide financially for the family

(through employment) which so often removes fathers from the home and causes this decrease in father/son interaction. Where it is the mother who leaves the home to work, the so-called “Mr.

Mom” or the Italian mammo (or male mother), with its inherent sentimentality, care-giving, and mothering—as opposed to fathering—presents an apparent threat to “real” masculinity. As

Magaraggia puts it “Italian fathers who actively participate in everyday childcare have to avail themselves of a language that describes them as androgynous and emasculated, as if caring cannot be attributed to fathers” (80). According to Magaraggia, and as I have suggested above, the caring father is feminized and, as such, he draws masculinity into question. The ideal father, then, must navigate these choppy waters, finding a balance between the too-masculine image of the “good provider” and the too-feminized one of the mammo.

As we will see, Carlo’s father most assuredly fails in this regard; however, he is not the sole cause of Carlo’s difficulties. Indeed, the opening sequence of Universitari foregrounds an almost total parental failure. As the film commences, university-aged Carlo lies on the floor, evidently passed out from what we only later discover is a condition he has suffered with since childhood, that of a broken heart [“la malattia del cuore infranto”]. In this moment of pulmonary distress, Carlo’s life quite literally flashes before his eyes through a series of flashbacks. The first underlines the parental lack as a very young Carlo realizes that his parents have forgotten to pick him up from school. Although they eventually show up, they do so from opposite sides of the frame and immediately begin to argue. Later, when the two move to take Carlo home, they each

127 head off in their own directions, leaving their son once again abandoned by both. In this way, the mise-en-scène and staging evidence the parents’ separation and codes their relationship as constantly contentious.

Another flashback then depicts an adolescent-aged Carlo engaged in what appears to be foreplay with a young woman. He is interrupted by a phone call from his mother who claims to have a big problem: her DVD isn’t working. This phone call codes his mother as self-centered, assuming that her son has nothing better to do than to help her with such an insignificant problem.

It likewise confirms our suspicions that Carlo’s parents are separated in that Carlo’s mother calls her son instead of her husband to fix her problems. In addition, by interrupting Carlo’s erotic endeavors, Carlo’s mother represents an obstacle to normative sexual relations and she is, therefore, an impediment to his proper coming of age.

Carlo’s parents’ disputes come to a head in the subsequent flashback wherein the two argue over whether Carlo should attend university or not. Although Carlo’s mother initially advocates for his continued education, when Carlo butts in to inform his mother and father that he wants to be a director, they both respond with shock and disgust. His father even berates him, as I mentioned above, explaining that it would be more acceptable that Carlo become a criminal. Carlo’s father’s response becomes all the more hypocritical a few moments later when we discover that he makes a living as a dancer (“il ballerino”), an occupation that can be considered feminine and one that would seem even more looked down upon—and needless to say, even lower on the masculine totem pole—than Carlo’s dream job as a director. There is thus an apparent disconnect between father and son characterized by his father’s perceived hypocrisy, the likes of which, recalling Kahn, manifests Carlo’s “father wound” (199). As Carlo’s parents continue to contend with one another,

128 their son’s father wound manifests itself for the first time as he faints and falls to the floor. The years of constant bickering between husband and wife which Carlo has done his best to repress for so long have left their marks on him and they finally bubble to the surface in the form of this physical ailment, an expression of the traumatic experience of growing up under such conditions.

That mother and father continue to argue over Carlo’s motionless body intimates their lack of care and concern for the wellbeing of their son.

On the surface, Universitari – Molto più che amici is at odds with itself in its presentation of fatherhood. In one instance, for example, Carlo turns down a picture of he and his father which holds a place of prominence within his mother’s apartment. This suggests that Carlo does not approve of his father’s decision to abandon his family; yet, at the same time, keeping the photograph in also infers that Carlo’s mother somehow still cares for her husband despite his abandonment of his family and his own flesh and blood. Although Carlo demonstrates his disapproval towards his father—and the self-interested and egotistical version of masculinity he embodies—by turning down the photograph, it is likewise true that he tells his friend Faraz that the best way to handle their new (female) roommates is to “curb them, dominate them, and impose

[them]selves upon them” [“Arginarle, dominarle, imporci”]. While such a comment surely plays to the males’ self-preservation, the reestablishment of male power, and the reinforcement of male bonds to stave off the feminine threat posed by their new roommates, the nonchalant, almost joking manner in which he makes this statement deprives it of its force.

The absent, feckless, and perhaps even sexist father is a haunting presence throughout the film through Carlo’s fainting bouts. At the same time, the film marks qualities of the so-called

“good father”—such as showing emotion, care-giving, and being there for the family—as a site of

129 ridicule. This is made most evident during a scene in which Emma expresses her desire to still have a father following a frustrating exchange between Alessandro and his father. As Emma recounts her father’s passing 700 days prior, melancholic music heightens the melodrama as she confesses that she can barely bring herself to speak the word father. She recalls a few memories, the last vestiges of her missing father: how he put up the Christmas tree, how he would hold her tight when she had bad dreams, how he called her “his beloved little girl”. By exhibiting such traits, Emma’s father is coded as a kind and caring patriarch, the complete opposite of Alessandro’s or Carlo’s fathers in the previous two films discussed in this chapter. However, upon finishing her story, Emma reveals the account to be a farce, a performance (seemingly) void of sentimentality as a sign of her bravura as an actress. The group delights in Emma’s revelation, laughing off the image of the endearing, yet apparently fake, father which she has just fabricated. At the same time, we might read their reaction as one of incredulity, as though it was silly for them to ever believe in a good father in the first place.

Only later do we discover, though, that Emma’s father was killed in a car accident a mere two years—or little more than 700 days—earlier and that his death created a rift between mother and daughter. When Faraz, Alessandro, and Giorgia attempt to surprise Emma at her home, the girl’s mother confesses to them that Emma was very attached to her father [“Emma era attaccatissima a suo padre”]. Not only does this disclosure force us to reevaluate Emma’s previous performance at the Villa, it also reinforces the long-standing tradition of the stand-offish, bad father (such as Carlo’s or Alessandro’s) through the apparent killing off of the kind, caring, good father (such as Emma’s). As I have discussed here, in one way or another, all of the characters are haunted by their missing, ineffective, and/or overbearing father figures. Indeed, although the film

130 does not explicitly position Emma’s father’s death as the catalyst to her decision to become an erotic dancer and a velina—or TV showgirl—I would argue that this is the effect of her father’s passing. The rift between Emma and her mother, on the other hand, is clearly attributed to the man’s unexpected demise, and is yet another sign of the consequences of the physical and emotional absence of good fathers. Emma’s narrative thus makes clear that the absent father is a

“threat to the heteronormative nuclear family,” and her choice of occupation evidences “the perceived moral decay associated with this threat” (Morison and Macleod 133).

The absent father leaves the most indelible marks on Carlo, however, who, in the midst of all the mess, emerges as a counter to the entrenched form of fatherhood embodied by his own patriarch. Key to this innovative form of masculinity is Carlo’s attitude towards his family—both biological and surrogate. Although Carlo seems to embody his father’s inadequacies, such as his rather phallocentric logic of reasserting male power within the Villa Gioconda, he is, underneath it all, an example of the loving and protective father figure. Not only does he provide economically for his mother and sister through his work at the front desk of a local hotel, but he also provides for them temporally by performing fatherly tasks such as fixing a broken washer, making his sister return to school when she plays hooky, and even going in search of his sister after she skips school for three days straight. In this way, he occupies the “breadwinning role,” a characteristic, according to Glenda Wall and Stephanie Arnold, often associated with older iterations of fatherhood (509).

At the same time, Carlo embodies traits of the “new father” in that he is “more emotionally involved, more nurturing, and more committed to spending time with his [family],” initially comprised of his mother and sister (Wall and Arnold 510). The same can be said of his surrogate family at university where he attempts to defuse problematic situations and strengthen

131

Figure 6. Carlo’s view of his surrogate family in Universitari - Molto più che amici

relationships between his roommates. It is Carlo, after all, who insists on giving Emma—with all of her father-related baggage—the villa’s coveted sixth spot, perhaps sensing in her a camaraderie as victims of the shifting constructions of the family in contemporary Italy.

With all of the pressure Carlo puts on himself to not follow in his father’s footsteps, it comes as no surprise that he passes out after his film is ruined and his sister steals his rent money.

In his eyes, he has failed as a father: in an instant, Carlo loses the means to provide for his surrogate family—the rent money—and falls short in taking care of his biological one, as his sister has ultimately become a high school dropout and drug addict. Having temporarily lost all that set him apart from his father, Carlo’s father wound once again rears its head, forcing him to the floor as he blacks out (figure 6). When he regains his faculties and explains his condition, another flashback to his adolescence occurs. In it, a doctor explains to Carlo’s parents that the issue with his heart, 132 in addition to being one of having a broken heart, is also a “problem of sensibility” [“un problema di sensibilità”]. While it is this sensibility which makes Carlo less manly from his father’s perspective, I would argue that it is precisely this quality which makes him a man and allows him to become a father figure to his roommates. In this way, Universitari – Molto più che amici grapples with “the issue of the [emotionally] abusive or absent father, [which renders] the father the inflictor of wounds, but then also posits the father as the site through which those wounds are healed in the following generation, when the damaged son accedes to a more sensitive paternal function” (Rehling 65). As Carlo gazes up at the faces of his roommates encircled about him, he realizes that his wounds can be healed thanks to the new family he has constructed with himself as the group’s patriarch. Thus, like the other men in this chapter, Carlo creates, protects, cares and provides for a surrogate family, one that required no heterosexual intercourse to fabricate.

As I have previously suggested above, the ideal father must find a balance between being too masculine—the breadwinning, though emotionally-detached bad father—and being too feminine—the caregiving, involved good father. I argue that, in his desire to fulfill his dream of becoming a director, to work hard to keep his new family together, and to provide for their well- being, Carlo exemplifies a new type of masculinity, one not defined solely by virility, sexual prowess, and breadwinning. Carlo’s emotional sensibility, I contend, is ultimately what allows him to eventually pair off, in the closing moments of the film, with Francesca—the mother-figure of the movie. Once again adhering to the melodramatic tendency to tie up all loose ends in the last five minutes of the film, Francesca reunites with Carlo in the airport. Carlo’s plan to travel to

Argentina has a dual purpose: on the one hand, Carlo hopes to force his dad to be a father by looking after his delinquent sibling Martina. On the other, it facilitates his reconciliation with his

133 absent patriarch. Thus, in Universitari – Molto più che amici, as in the other films I have discussed in this chapter, the development of this innovative form of masculinity based in surrogate fatherhood has the power to heal the wounds caused by the physically and emotionally lacking father figure.

Conclusion: Subverting Procreation

As I have demonstrated in this chapter, depictions of the son in crisis, who successfully comes of age by situating himself as a surrogate father, have surged in recent Italian teen films.

The images of the damaged son—the victim of the father wound—that are presented in Prova a volare, 10 regole per fare innamorare, and Universitari - Molto più che amici evidence a crisis taking place in Italian society. That such images of the young surrogate father are depicted in films marketed to and ideally consumed by adolescents is telling and marks an important shift for Italian teen film, particularly because procreation is not typically a trope of teen film, whether in the

Italian context or elsewhere. Indeed, many young people are not entirely concerned with getting married, settling down, or having children. Instead, adolescents and young people in coming of age films are depicted as living rather hedonistic lives, continually in search of ways to have fun, get girls (or boys), and whet their sexual appetites. This accounts for Jim Levenstein’s altogether messy encounter with a warm apple pie in American Pie (Paul and Chris Weitz, 1999). It is also the motivation behind the pleasure-seeking lifestyle that is made apparent through the trope of the party—and its accompanying alcohol and drugs— in countless teen films, including Anglophone iterations such as Can’t Hardly Wait (Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan, 1998) and

(Greg Mottola, 2007) as well as Italian films like Che ne sarà di noi [What Will Become of Us]

134

(Giovanni Veronesi, 2004) and Last Minute Marocco [Last Minute Morocco] (Francesco Falaschi,

2007).

It is therefore noteworthy that depictions of young men as fathers have recently started to emerge, and even more particular because of where such depictions are coming from, that is, teen film. Two films are of note in this regard, specifically Slam - Tutto per una ragazza [Slam - All for a Girl] (, 2016) and Piuma [Feather] (Roan Johnson, 2016) in that they represent adolescent couples grappling with the consequences of pregnancy and all that that entails. Films such as these, as well as the films I have discussed at length in this chapter, would seem to confirm

Morison and Macleod’s observation that “parenthood is not only viewed as an essential characteristic of mature adulthood, but is also an expected, even prescribed, stage in the heterosexual life course” (7).

As Morison and Macleod further contend, “[t]he culmination of the heterosexual matrix is procreation. Having children represents adherence to the expected heteronormative life course in which desire each other, form a partnership, usually through marriage, and then procreate” (23). Morison and Macleod’s comment suggests a certain sequence of tasks that must be accomplished in order to become full adults starting with sexual attraction (often characterized as love), which leads to dating or courtship, the logical result being coupledom and the formation of a partnership. In a traditional model, this partnership would eventually give rise to a desire to wed, the “natural” consequence of which is the production of offspring. Just as heterosexual intercourse is an inherent part of heteronormativity, so too is procreation a part of what Morison and Macleod refer to as “[p]rocreative heteronormativity,” the consummation of what I have laid out above (24). That the young men in these films become fathers without ever

135 engaging in the process of reproduction, that is, heterosexual intercourse, would seem to suggest that the heteronormative family no longer represents a desired goal for young men. These films make clear that it is not the heteronormative that counts, only the family and, more specifically, the role and responsibility of father.

136

Chapter 4. Call Me by Your Name, Chrononormativity, and the (Queer?) Future of Italian Teen Film

Introduction

In this chapter, I discuss Call Me by Your Name, Luca Guadagnino’s most recent film and third installment of what he refers to as his “desire trilogy”. Although Call Me by Your Name is a transnational production that, according to Guadagnino and a majority of the film’s critics, has an apparently universal appeal, I situate the film as specifically Italian and as a teen film. I characterize Call Me by Your Name as an Italian teen film by demonstrating how it promotes the

Italian brand, particularly through the dolce far niente lifestyle, and how the film centralizes the coming-of-age narrative. I further argue that the film is inherently queer despite some critics’ contention to the contrary, that is, that the film is, at least on the surface, not gay or queer, but a universal love story that appeals to a heterosexual audience as much as a homosexual one. Using

Elizabeth Freeman’s theorization of chrononormativity and queer time, I analyze three aspects of the film’s production that contribute to Call Me by Your Name’s queerness: first, I discuss the film’s soundtrack and how John Adams’ song Hallelujah Junction undermines typical arrangements of meter and rhythm and, by so doing, subverts chrononormative time; second, I consider Elio’s (Timothée Chalamet) watch as a Macguffin, arguing that, although the timepiece becomes prominent during apparently chrononormative events (meals, heterosexual intercourse, post-dinner piano playing), it is instead a foil for Elio’s first (homo)sexual encounter with Oliver 137

(). Finally, I draw attention to the use of shallow focus in the film’s final images and I suggest that, by privileging Elio’s mourning—instead of focusing on the dinner preparations happening in the background—the film leaves open the possibility of a queer future. In this way,

I situate Call Me by Your Name as a queer text. I conclude by suggesting that the film’s positive representation of same-sex desire, coupled with its refusal to be easily classified as only Italian or as only a teen film, opens up new avenues for future Italian teen films to explore the adolescent condition.

Call Me by Your Name centers around the summer romance between 17-year old Elio

Perlman, and Oliver, the 24-year old graduate student and research assistant working with Elio’s father () during the summer in a small nameless town in Italy.1 Call

Me by Your Name is a queer coming-of-age story that garnered an Oscar nomination for Best

Picture, among many other awards and nominations. Despite being lauded for its serious actors and its cinematographic beauty, Call Me by Your Name’s post- sex-scandal release created quite a stir and brought the film under fire from critics and the general public for the way it apparently normalizes and romanticizes pedophilia and statutory rape in the age difference between Elio and Oliver.2 In this way, Call Me by Your Name was immediately politicized, even though on the surface the film might not seem overtly political.

1 Outside of the film’s narrative, we know that the town is, in fact, Crema, a suburb of Milan and the hometown of Guadagnino himself. Indeed, many of the objects in the Perlman apartment are Guadagnino’s own possessions and thus become interesting artifacts which could contribute to the film’s queerness, blurring the lines between the fantasy world of the film and the real world in which Guadagnino himself lives. 2 See, for example, Jeffrey Bloomer’s review for Slate, “What Should We Make of Call Me by Your Name’s Age-Gap Relationship?”. Armond White, writing for the , defines pedophilia as “unequal sexual relations” and characterizes Elio and Oliver’s relationship as such, while Doug Mainwaring, of the politically-charged Life Site, calls it by its name, saying that the film is “about pederasty” (his emphasis). Interestingly, few took issue with the age gap between Alex and Niki in Scusa 138

I point out the political charge of the film as a sort of homage to the political project behind the term queer, that is, the reclamation—carried out by the gay and lesbian community, in particular activist groups like Queer Nation—of a word that was originally used in a negative and derogatory way.3 I employ the term queer as a means of exploring how Call Me by Your Name confronts and perhaps subverts entrenched ideas regarding gender and sexuality. Although I sometimes utilize “queer”—albeit rather simplistically—to mean non-normative, I am also interested in how the same-sex relationship between Elio and Oliver pushes against heteronormativity, creating a space in which same-sex desire (and intimacy) can effectively ruminate and perhaps even thrive. By labeling Call Me by Your Name as a queer text, I mean that the film questions and problematizes long-standing notions of normativity as being strictly heterosexual. I thus consider Call Me by Your Name as a site of negotiation for new narratives for queer Italian cinema, ones that do not end badly but which allow for a possible future for its protagonists.4 Indeed, Call Me by Your Name differs from other queer films, such as Brokeback

ma ti chiamo amore [Sorry, If I Love You] and Scusa ma ti voglio sposare [Sorry, If I Want to Marry You], a detail which suggests the normality of a heterosexual—rather than homosexual—age gap. 3 Foundational texts of queer theory include, among others, Teresa De Lauretis’ “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities - An Introduction.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, edited by Teresa De Lauretis, vol. 3, no. 2, 1991, pp. iii-xvii; Annamarie Jagose’s Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York University Press, 1996; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay “Queer and Now” and Judith Butler's entry “Critically Queer”, both contained in The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, edited by Donald E. Hall et al. Routledge, 2013, pp. 3-17 and 18-31, respectively. Cathy J. Cohen’s piece in the same reader, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” (pp. 74-95), as well as Butler’s remarks, touch upon the important process of reappropriating the term “queer” that occurred in the early 1990s. 4 For more on queer Italian cinema, see Duncan, Derek. “The Queerness of Italian Cinema.” A Companion to Italian Cinema, edited by Frank Burke, John Wiley & Sons, 2017, pp. 467-483; Duncan, Derek. “The Geopolitics of Spectatorship and Screen Identification: What's Queer About Italian Cinema?” The Italianist, vol. 33, no. 2, 2013, pp. 256-61; and Rigoletto, Sergio. “Against the Teleological Presumption: Notes on Queer Visibility in Contemporary Italian Film.” The Italianist, vol. 37, no. 2, 2017, pp. 212-227. 139

Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005), Benzina [Gasoline] (Monica Stambrini, 2001), Né Giulietta né Romeo

[A Little Lust] (Veronica Pivetti, 2015), or even Saturno contro [] (Ferzan

Özpetek, 2007), in that those who experience same-sex desire or who engage in erotic encounters with those of the same-sex do not succumb to death, be it physical or social.

Overall, Call Me by Your Name presents a rather utopic vision of a period defined by sexual and identity crisis, both in relation to the period of Elio’s adolescence and to 1980s Italy. It is interesting that, despite being set in 1983, the year in which HIV first arrived in Italy, the film makes no mention of the burgeoning HIV/AIDS epidemic and the subsequent crisis created by that epidemic. This is perhaps attributable to the shift in time period from 1987—the year in which the eponymous novel is set—to the 1983 of the film. This change in setting could be considered as the first sign of the film’s queerness and evinces a sense of nostalgia for a kind of prelapsarian, HIV- free period. At the same time, this is a telling shift in historical period, especially considering

Italy’s complacency and lateness in recognizing the LBGTQ community within Italian society; instead of grappling with the AIDS crisis, the film elects to forgo such a confrontation and provides, on the other hand, a nostalgic and utopic refuge from the threat of that epidemic.

Combined with the absolute acceptance, and even encouragement, of Elio’s relationship with

Oliver on the part of his parents, which I expand upon below, as well as the heterosexuality of the actors who play Elio and Oliver, I argue that the film represents a queer fantasy, one in which heterosexual men embrace their same-sex desire and in which both disease and (cultural and social) disdain are absent.

Despite the film’s central romance between two males, critics hailed Call Me by Your Name as a “universal” love story, one which appealed and appeals to, according to Tim Gray,

140

“[a]udiences of all sexual persuasions and ages”. As we will see below, Gray is just one of the many voices from the pro-universality camp that appears to originate with director Luca

Guadagnino and which is subsequently promulgated by many of the film’s critics and audiences.

As I argue, characterizing the film as universal normalizes the same-sex relationship between Elio and Oliver and results in a general skepticism of Call Me by Your Name as a queer text. Rather than highlight the film’s universalism, I instead draw attention to the film’s transnational production and the way in which it blurs linguistic, racial, and above all, national boundaries.

Unlike the cry of universality, I contend that the film’s transnationalism lends itself to the film’s queer project. At the same time, this transnationalism also gives space for the film’s positive outlook for what is to come, particularly for the genre of Italian teen film but also, perhaps hopefully, for the LGBTQ community in Italy. Produced by a conglomerate of companies based in Italy (Luca Guadagnino’s own Frenesy Films), France (La cinéfacture), Brazil (RT Features), and the (Water’s End Productions), the film stars a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic cast that freely code switches between French, English, and Italian. The film received financial backing and support from Italy and its Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism (MiBACT

- Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo) and from France. Further, the film is of course based on the book composed by André Aciman, an American author who identifies as heterosexual, who was born and raised in Alessandria, Egypt and who also spent time in Italy as a refugee.5 Considering all this, Call Me by Your Name represents the epitome of transnational

5 In his article “How can a straight man write so well about gay sex?” in the February 2007 issue of Out Magazine, Ilya Marritz points out that Aciman is “a married father of three” who says “he has never had a gay relationship in his life.” Yet, Aciman also confesses in the interview that “‘if, because of this novel [Call Me by Your Name], I became known as a writer of “gay books,” or a “gay writer,” I would be very 141 cinema and, in breaking down linguistic, racial, and national boundaries, succeeds in creating a narrative that does not end in death, like so many other queer (Italian) texts.

Call Me by Your Name: a (queer) Italian teen film?

Call Me by Your Name is neither an Italian nor a teen film, at least in the most basic sense: despite its Italian setting, Italian is not the primary spoken language and the main cast is made up of non-Italian actors. While such traits do not inherently make a film Italian, they are often a benchmark of a film’s Italianness. In a similar way, Call Me by Your Name is not readily considered a teen film, perhaps due to the film’s serious subject matter and its more obvious classification as a melodrama. As I discuss at length how the film is queer in what follows, let me first briefly clarify my use of the modifiers “Italian” and “teen” and why I consider Call Me by

Your Name to be representative of Italian national cinema and the genre of teen film.

Call Me by Your Name is an Italian product for a number of reasons. For one, native Italian director Luca Guadagnino has stated, in an interview with Andrew Pulver of The Guardian, that

Italian cinema has become a product to promote tourism and travel to Italy: “I am more interested in revolutionary beauty than in the great beauty, to be honest. Italian cinema is now mostly a bureau for tourism”.6 Though I am reluctant to take Guadagnino at his word, I do concede that his film depicts an environment and a lifestyle, not to mention stunning landscapes, which viewers, especially non-Italians, might immediately consider as somehow exotic and would then just as

happy’” (32, 33). This latter comment, coupled with Aciman’s appearance as one half of the gay couple in the film, certainly trouble his straightness in interesting ways that I do not have space to pursue here. 6 www.theguardian.com/film/2016/feb/04/bigger-splash-director-luca-guadagnino-italian-cinema-is- mostly-a-bureau-for-tourism. 142 immediately associate such exoticness with Italy. Following Michael Z. Newman’s analysis of

Italian-American kitchen guru Giada de Laurentiis’ cooking show Everyday Italian, Call Me by

Your Name provides its audience with a “vision of good taste,” high social standing, and seemingly unlimited time constraints, presenting as a result “a model of how to live that [a viewer] might attain, but more likely merely aspire to” (332). The luscious and lingering shots of the Italian landscape, furthermore, allow viewers to escape from the mundane routine of their everyday social reality to “a fantasy realm of sensual pleasures” wherein the audience can vicariously indulge in an evidently “more authentic and dignified” way of life glimpsed in the Perlman’s lavish home and in Elio’s spatial mobility and sexual freedom (Newman 332, 333).

The lure of this Italian way of life—the dolce far niente that characterizes Italy and is emblematized in Call Me by Your Name—has, in fact, resulted in increased tourism to Crema and its surrounding environs.7 It is no stretch of the imagination to connect this visual tourism and touristic promotion to the fact that the film received financial support from MiBACT, which in itself is another marker of the film’s cultural value to Italy. The Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività

Culturali e del Turismo (MiBACT), which has lost its final “T” and reverted to the MiBAC since

Call Me by Your Name’s release,8 gives patronage to “events and initiatives of national or international character, of high cultural, scientific, artistic, and historical importance and of

7 See Christopher Brennan’s article for NY Daily News, “Crema, idyllic Italian city in ‘Call Me by Your Name,’ deals with surprising boost in romantic tourists.”. In addition, the Michelangelo International Travel website even advertises an 8-day “Call Me by Your Name” tour with stops in Venice, Verona, Lake Garda, Crema, Cremona, Bergamo, and Milan (“Call Me by Your Name group tour inspired by the Oscar Winning movie.” www.michelangelo.travel/us/our-group-tours/reise/tour-call-me-by-your-name- in-the-footsteps-of-the-oscar-multi-nomined-masterpiece/). 8 See “Il MiBACT torna MiBAC, il Turismo accorpato all'Agricoltura e guidato da Centinaio.” Finestre sull’Arte, 3 July 2018, www.finestresullarte.info/flash-news/1894n_mibact-torna-mibac-il-turismo-passa- all-agricoltura.php. 143 touristic promotion” (“Patrocinio, Contributi e agevolazioni).9 Thus, not only does the MiBACT funding confer cultural and artistic relevance and significance to Call Me by Your Name, but it also assigns the film a measure of cultural capital: on the one hand, by purchasing a ticket to see the film, viewers can experience a temporary escape from their own reality; on the other hand,

Call Me by Your Name offers viewers an image of a certain kind of Italian lifestyle that could be purchased or attained so long as one has the time and financial means to do so. In this way, the film promotes Italy and the Italian brand encapsulated in the iconic dolce far niente.10

Call Me by Your Name also foregrounds Italy and its history, linking the nation directly with Elio and Oliver’s budding relationship: as Elio begins to discuss his desire for Oliver in an open piazza—a move which conflates the public/private dichotomy, the camera momentarily leaves Elio, tracking up to frame the Italian flag and a soldier atop a monument dedicated to the

Battle of Piave. When Oliver goes off to collect his research, Elio meanders through the square, stopping to gaze up at the cupola of a nearby church and the cross that sits atop it. By drawing the viewer’s attention to the monument, the flag, and the cross, Call Me by Your Name condenses

Italian history, Church, and State into one significant, yet simple, sequence.

While Call Me by Your Name’s narrative often exhibits Italianness—especially through family meals, popular Italian music, and the focus on Italy’s agricultural past through the

Perlman’s seemingly never-ending supply of apricots and other fresh fruit, it is likewise true that the film is also uniquely transnational, both in its production and its address. Although its

9 “eventi e iniziative di carattere Nazionale o Internazionale, di alto rilievo culturale, scientifico, artistico, storico e di promozione turistica.” (www.beniculturali.it/mibac/export/MiBAC/sito- MiBAC/MenuPrincipale/Ministero/Contributi-e-agevolazioni/index.html). 10 For more on nation branding, see Melissa Aronczyk’s Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity. 144 transnationalism complicates the film’s simplistic designation as “Italian”, the two terms (i.e.

“Italian” and “transnational”) are not mutually exclusive. Italian genre cinema, particularly the , has been read as uniquely Italian,11 and yet has also been considered as somehow transnational (though perhaps not explicitly labeled as such). A film like Per un pugno di dollari (, , 1964), for example, one which Gian Piero Brunetta hails as “one of the all-time great successes of Italian cinema,” was produced by Italian director

Sergio Leone and scored by famed Italian composer , yet also relied on English as its primary spoken language, was not set in Italy, and starred Clint Eastwood, an American actor who subsequently gained international acclaim thanks to Leone’s films (205). Despite its apparent transnationalism, however, Peter Bondanella, Christopher Frayling, and Brunetta each classify the film as part of Italy’s national cinema. As follows, Call Me by Your Name can be considered as representative of Italy and Italian cinema despite, or perhaps even because of, its transnationalism.

I thus agree with Steven Rawle when he contends that “transnational cinema does not replace thinking about national cinemas, but supplements it” (2).12 Indeed, I would argue that it is precisely the film’s transnational appeal which evidences its uniquely Italian style and setting.13

Though making the case for Call Me by Your Name as an Italian film is not without its flaws, as I have made clear, there is sufficient evidence to support such an argument. Attempting

11 See Peter Bondanella’s chapter “A Fistful of Pasta: Sergio Leone and the Spaghetti Western” in his book A History of Italian Cinema (Continuum, 2009, pp. 338-371); Christopher Frayling's analysis of the film in Giorgio Bertellini’s edited volume The (Wallflower Press, 2004). 12 See also the introduction to Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden’s co-edited volume Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, as well as Andrew Higson’s entry in that volume, “The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema” (pp. 15-25). 13 For more on the Italianicity of Call Me by Your Name, see Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover’s “Untimely Desires, Historical Efflorescence, and Italy in Call Me by Your Name.” Italian Culture, vol. 37, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1-18, doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2019.1609220. Accessed 16 July 2019. 145 to designate the film as a teen film, on the other hand, is less straightforward and a bit more problematic. In his history of the Hollywood teen movie, Stephen Tropiano considers teen films as those that are made “about teens for teens” (11, emphasis in original). Call Me by Your Name certainly fulfills the first requirement as it centers primarily on the teenaged Elio and represents his coming of age and his struggle with his sexual identity. In this way, Call Me by Your Name has the potential to be classified as a teen film; yet, as we will see below, it is not clear that the film is made specifically for teens. Catherine Driscoll, in her work on teen film, includes aspects such as the youthfulness of main protagonists; a focus on young heterosexual romance; intense peer relationships and conflicts; and coming-of-age plots dealing with virginity, graduation, or the makeover in her list of conventions that help define the genre (Teen Film 2). Call Me by Your

Name adheres to some, though not all, of these conventions: in particular, despite Elio's heterosexual relationship with Marzia (), it is his homosexual relationship with Oliver that seems to most shape his adolescence. In addition, although other young people are present in the film, Elio’s most intense relationship is not with any of his peers but with the significantly older Oliver. What is therefore central to my consideration of Call Me by Your Name as a teen film is its focus on a youthful protagonist (i.e. Elio), on his experience of adolescence, and on his coming of age.

As a genre, teen film is often considered in relation to a film’s address, that is, a teen film is ultimately directed at a teenaged or adolescent audience (or, to use Tropiano’s language from above, teen films are not only about teens but they are also made for teens). As I have previously discussed, this audience is typically primarily composed of females, though we can—and, as I have been arguing in this dissertation, indeed should—include male audience members within this

146 group. In an interview with Ashley Lee for , director Luca Guadagnino characterized Call Me by Your Name as a “universal” love story, one which, as his comment suggests, can be enjoyed by and induce pleasure for all viewers, indiscriminate of one’s sexuality, sexual orientation, age, gender, or race. Although some have taken issue, as I do below, with the film’s universality,14 those critics and audience members who identify and embrace Call Me by

Your Name’s universal appeal seem to far outweigh those of the opposing camp.15 Obviously, this problematizes the question of audience and who the film is made for or ideally addressed to.

However, the film’s universal address does not preclude the possibility that it may have appealed to adolescents above all, particularly because adolescents might more easily identify with Elio’s confusion regarding his sexuality because they would be grappling with the struggles of adolescent sexuality in a process mirroring his.

Further complicating matters is the fact that Call Me by Your Name is the product of an up and coming Italian auteur and is a film whose aesthetic beauty and inherent Italianness epitomizes arthouse cinema. I point out this designation because I believe that such a label grants the film a certain measure of prestige that the films I have discussed up to this point do not enjoy, inasmuch as they are genre films, and, as such, a part of popular culture and meant for mass consumption.

14 See, in particular, Glenn Dunks’ and Garrett Schlichte’s reviews of the film. See also the comment on Jude Dry’s review for IndieWire left by “Bo”, a self-identified “heterosexual male” viewer who argues that films like Call Me by Your Name are “too firmly enmeshed in the specific gay experience to carry universal themes.” 15 Those who mention, and thus promulgate, the film’s universality include critics Nora Shychuk, Tim Grierson, and Tim Gray; producer Peter Spears (in Kim, Catherine); editor Walter Fasano (in Laws, Zach); critic Peter Travers, who gushed that the film “wasn’t just a ‘gay love story’ but a universal ‘coming-of-age story’” at a Q&A with Chalamet, Hammer, and Guadagnino (in Abad-Santos, Alex, et al.); the Associated Press (“Sensual simplicity is Call Me by Your Name’s swooning secret.”); and “Jon”, a user who strongly identified with Elio’s coming of age and same-sex desire. “Jon” commented on Owen Gleiberman’s review for Variety, saying that Call Me by Your Name was “one of the best and most universal” films he has ever seen. 147

Though Call Me by Your Name’s highbrow address and its status as would have certainly garnered attention from the cultural elite, it would have likewise detracted from its general box office appeal and would have thus resulted in smaller audiences—especially of the adolescent population, as I have been suggesting—and lower financial returns. At the same time, however, I would suggest that it is precisely this distinction as art cinema which allows for the film’s depiction of queer futurity.

Any attempt to concretely discern the demographic composition of Call Me by Your

Name’s audiences, however, proves quite futile. While one could assume adolescents to make up a significant part of viewership, the fact that the film received an “R” rating in the United States would immediately diminish adolescent audiences. Though young people could certainly still view the film, attendance would require parental supervision. Rather than face the awkwardness, and perhaps embarrassment, of watching heterosexual and homosexual romance and intercourse alongside their parents, teens likely opted to postpone or even forego viewing the sexually-charged film in theaters. Though not entirely conclusive, a quick look at user ratings from IMDb seems to evidence the lack of adolescent viewership: of the nearly 119,000 user ratings, a mere 821 come from the “<18” demographic, or the equivalent of .006% of raters. Notably, Call Me by Your Name received a “T” (tutti) certification in Italy and, while this could theoretically allow for a higher adolescent viewership, even less is known about Italian audience demographics. Thus, though we might assume that teenagers comprised a noteworthy portion of viewership for the film, there is no way to back up such an assertion statistically.16 To reiterate, then, for my purposes, the focus

16 As of September 4, 2018, a total of 38 ratings and reviews of the film from “kids” ages 11-17 exists on Common Sense Media (www.commonsensemedia.org/movie-reviews/call-me-by-your-name/user- reviews/child?page=1), alongside 22 reviews from parents/adults. The reviews by the adolescent 148 on the teenaged Elio, his sexual awakening, and his transition to adulthood—that is, the coming- of-age narrative—suffices as reason for my designation of Call Me by Your Name as a teen film.

In spite of its ideal audience, Call Me by Your Name is a coming-of-age film for several reasons. Elio grapples with the difficulties of adolescence; he starts up a relationship with Marzia, even eventually having (heterosexual) sex with her; he struggles with his sexual identity and his same-sex attraction and desire for Oliver; he engages sexually with Oliver, having his first homosexual experience; and Elio is significantly changed by his erotic relationship with Oliver such that it is precisely their relationship that pushes Elio into adulthood. Because Call Me by Your

Name speaks to the adolescent condition and centralizes the adolescent Elio, it can be classified as a teen film. As I argue, the film’s inability to be easily denoted as “Italian” and as “teen”, that is, it’s inability to be compartmentalized, as it were, as only Italian or only directed at teens is precisely what situates Call Me by Your Name as the harbinger of the future of Italian teen film.

The queerness of Call Me by Your Name

Although Call Me by Your Name has been labeled as a queer film and has been readily adopted into the corpus of gay or queer cinema,17 many critics who write on the film remain puzzled at its reception as an inherently queer text. For example, Miz Cracker, a writer for Slate, poses the following questions: “Why has Call Me by Your Name attained such an iconic ‘gay’ status when it is anything but? When its main characters seem almost aggressively isolated from

population are extremely intriguing and overall rather positive; unfortunately, space does not allow here for any detailed analysis of those reviews. 17 As of this writing, the film holds the #1 spot of “Users’ most loved films” [“I film più amati (dagli utenti)”] on cinemagay.it. 149 gay culture or politics? When its precocious protagonist has to be reminded that it’s gauche to make fun of people who are openly gay?” She concludes that “[t]he straightness is everywhere once you clear the lust from your eyes,” pointing to extra-diegetic details such as the straightness of novelist André Aciman, as well as that of actors Chalamet and Hammer. D.A Miller represents another notable voice decrying the film’s lack of queerness. Citing the film’s somewhat graphic spectacle of Elio’s heterosexual intercourse with Marzia, and its apparent avoidance of the depiction of gay sex between Elio and Oliver, Miller argues that the film “is not homosexual”.

Although I recognize that such factors could certainly leave open the conclusions that Cracker and

Miller reach, I would argue that Call Me by Your Name offers a queer reading of a history in subtle, and perhaps less obvious ways. Using Elizabeth Freeman’s theorization of chrononormativity, I situate Call Me by Your Name as an example of queer Italian cinema. I contend that Call Me by

Your Name deftly subverts the structures of (hetero)normative time through its soundtrack and narrative and that, as a result, represents a positive future for the representation of queer desire and for the genre of Italian teen film.

Undermining Chrononormative Time

In this section, I demonstrate the variety of ways in which Call Me by Your Name embodies queerness, both at the textual and extra-textual levels. I draw attention to a number of seemingly insignificant details—the skipping of meals; the film’s soundtrack, including John Adams’

Hallelujah Junction and Sufjan Stevens’ original songs for the film; the obsessive focus on Elio’s watch—in order to show how these elements push against normative time and heteronormative practices. I end this section with a close analysis of the film’s final sequence, Elio’s longing and

150 mournful stare into the fireplace which accompanies the film’s closing credits. I argue that Call

Me by Your Name is a queer text and that the film’s acceptance of queerness may in fact be a potential future for (queer) Italian teen film. Whereas Miz Cracker offers a cultural critique of the film, I believe that a close textual examination of the film lays to bear its queer project.

Like with other Italian teen films, Call Me by Your Name concludes by heightening the male melodramatic mode. The viewer is transported from the bright and warm scenes which characterized the summer setting of the majority of the film to the cold and snowy weather typical of December in . We soon discover that Elio’s summer fling with Oliver is definitively over, as Oliver calls Elio’s family to wish them a happy Hanukkah and to report his pending nuptials to a young woman back home in the States. The change of seasons thus functions as a visual cue marking the change from the hot and steamy romance Elio and Oliver enjoyed, to the coldness and solitude that comes in the wake of a break up. The pushing of emotion onto mise- en-scéne is, as I have discussed in previous chapters, a trademark of melodrama.

In her book Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Elizabeth Freeman theorizes chrononormativity or chrononormative time as “the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity,” or, in the most basic sense, time as a guiding principal with regards to work and sexual reproduction through the heterosexual couple and/or marriage (3). Judith Halberstam likewise argues that queer time and queer spaces develop, in part,

“in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction” (In a Queer Time

1). Call Me by Your Name is particularly conscious of queer time and resists chrononormativity: for example, at several points Elio, Oliver, or both skip out on family meals. While this may not seem necessarily significant, the fact that they often skip dinner—the meal par excellence in Italian

151 culture and cuisine—signals a resistance to heteronormative practices based around family and mealtime on the part of Elio and Oliver. Oliver’s tendency to attend only part of meals, leaving the Perlmans with his signature “later”, likewise suggests a purposeful non-conformance to accepted cultural norms regarding meals and, at the same time, evokes the melodramatic mode— by constantly delaying his being together with Elio and by recalling the “too late” of melodrama.

Call Me by Your Name’s Queer Soundtrack

The film queers times in other ways as well: the at times dissonant, staccato soundtrack, for example, contributes to the feeling of time as disconnected and non-linear. In addition, a number of the songs—such as John Adams’ Hallelujah Junction—make use of syncopation, the displacement of accents from strong beats to weak ones. In this way, the music plays with time, and does not readily adhere to commonly acceptable and aurally pleasing organizations of rhythm and meter. Although Hallelujah Junction wasn’t composed for Call Me by Your Name, the way in which John Adams discusses the piece almost makes its feel as if it were. In an interview about the piece, Adams explains that composing for two pianos allows him to “write very similar material but interlock them slightly out of phase so it creates a kind of acoustical version of digital delay.”18

Thus, not only does Adams play with tempo and rhythm, but his transposition of the acoustic medium into a digital realm situates the piece as somehow queer in its own right. Indeed, by blurring the boundary between the “live” aspect of a piano performance and the “recorded” aspect of the digital delay, Hallelujah Junction pushes against established ideas and ideals relating to musical structure—beat, measure, rhythm—and aural pleasure. Like the pianos, Elio and Oliver’s

18 “John Adams on ‘Hallelujah Junction’”, Vimeo, vimeo.com/138363828. 152 relationship is characterized early on as being “slightly out of phase” in that they do not pick up on each other’s signals and sexual advances.

The language which Adams uses to describe the movement and melodies of the pianos is itself rather sexually charged and could be construed as speaking to, at least to some degree, same- sex desire and intimacy. He points out that the music “has its own resonance that only can happen when you have two instruments playing almost the exact same material” (“John Adams On

Hallelujah Junction”, emphasis mine). The homogeny of the instruments, or, in the case of Call

Me by Your Name, the same-sexed bodies of Elio and Oliver, are what allow for the resonance to come through. What was fun about composing Hallelujah Junction, Adams explains, was its

“sense of pulsation” achieved through the two pianos “working at the same tempo, with the same material and tossing … little motivic ideas back and forth” and then “riffing” where one piano

“will stay down low while another one goes up high and jabbing back and forth” (“John Adams

On Hallelujah Junction”, emphases mine). It is here where Adams’ description seems at its most erotic, with the two bodies—the harmonies on each piano—moving at the same speed or tempo, intertwining in an instrumental topping and bottoming, a thrusting back and forth, and an eventual climax in orgasmic pulsations. Again, Hallelujah Junction appears to foreground queerness, particularly through its (unintentional?) allusion to same-sex intercourse.

Adams’ Hallelujah Junction is the song that accompanies the opening credits of Call Me by Your Name. During this sequence, images of bronze statues emphasize the idea of beauty, a topos which runs throughout the film, particularly—as a number of critics point out—through the

153

Italian landscape that is an icon of Guadagnino’s cinematographic choices.19 The use of the titular

Hebrew word “hallelujah”, which functions as the song’s primary motif, helps to underline Elio’s

Jewish heritage, an identity he grapples with in the film. In its full form, the word signifies and entails a sense of joy and praise. However, Adams’ decision to open the song by using only the last three syllables of the word (“..llelujah”) represents another way in which Hallelujah Junction contributes to the project of queering the narrative of Call Me by Your Name, as this truncated version of the word somehow subverts its full meaning. In the song’s final section, the constant shift of pulse between the two pianos creates an “ambiguity [that] produces a kind of giddy uncertainty as the music pings back and forth in bright clusters” (emphasis mine).20 This giddy uncertainty exemplified in the soundtrack is made apparent within the narrative through Elio’s relationship with Oliver, as Elio takes pleasure in getting to know Oliver, be it sexually or otherwise. As I have stated, although Hallelujah Junction was not composed for the film, it is impossible to ignore how perfectly the song “fits” within the diegesis.

Disavowing chrononormative time: Elio's watch as Macguffin

Call Me by Your Name further refuses to be constrained by, citing Freeman, “[s]chedules, calendars, time zones, and even wristwatches,” instruments which perpetuate chrononormative time and reinforce the forward movement and linearity of time (3). When Elio receives a note from

19 Spencer Kornhaber point’s out the film’s “cinematic loveliness and emotional power”, while the title to Ty Burr’s review emphasizes Call Me by Your Name’s “unstoppable beauty”. Owen Gleiberman likewise refers to the film as a “swoony tale of a high-art summer fling”, Cara Buckley pronounces it “a visual feast of dappled light”, and David Sims notes how Call Me by Your Name is “crammed to the gills with gorgeous shots of the Italian countryside”. 20 “Hallelujah Junction.” www.earbox.com/hallelujah-junction-solo-piano/. 154

Oliver setting up a midnight rendez-vous, the narrative (re)turns obsessively to time checking: Elio immediately checks his watch after reading the note; Oliver grabs Elio’s wrist and inquires after the time during lunch; Elio checks his watch while swimming with Marzia and when he takes her to the musty attic; he looks at it when the gay couple arrives for dinner; and Elio’s father hands him the watch following his evening piano performance. While this obsession with the watch could be taken as evidence to support the insistence of normative time, with the watch reinforcing the structures of daily and family life—particularly meal times and routines like lunch, dinner, and the evening performance—I would argue that the timepiece functions as a Macguffin, an object which seems central—in the case of Call Me by Your Name, to the heterosexual storyline—yet has little narrative significance in this regard.

Though the watch is omnipresent throughout the day, it is, nonetheless, always connected to the potential liaison with Oliver at the midnight hour. It anticipates, perhaps even facilitates, the homosexual encounter between Elio and Oliver even despite its apparent association with heteronormative moments. However, there is one instance in which the watch subtly undermines the reinforcement of chrononormative time and that is when Elio removes the watch before engaging in heterosexual intercourse with Marzia in the attic. This moment is significant precisely because of Elio’s obsession with the watch and what it ultimately stands in for, that is, the planned midnight meeting and the hoped for erotic encounter with Oliver. After Elio and Marzia share a passionate kiss, Elio checks his watch. He does so again upon turning the radio on, this time taking a moment to contemplate (its significance?) before setting it down beside the mattress on which the two will eventually make love. The watch’s placement in plain view beside the bed is important here as it allows Elio to look at it even while going down on Marzia. And, Elio’s desire to gaze

155 upon the watch whilst engaging in heterosexual intercourse undermines the significance and centrality of heterosexual sex. By drawing attention to this symbol of the queer relationship, particularly during this quintessentially heterosexual moment, Call Me by Your Name pushes against chrononormative time and instates queer time—represented by Elio’s obvious desire to be with Oliver—as central.

To further support this argument, it is equally important to note that, although the watch returns to the foreground over and over, only once—when Oliver asks Elio the time after lunch— do we actually know what time it really is. In all the other instances, the watch’s face is obscured from view. In this way, the watch acts as a foil to what is really important, that is, the actual coming together of Elio and Oliver and sharing their first sexual encounter with each other. Once that coming together takes place, the obsessive return to the watch stops and Elio and Oliver freely navigate their relationship. They soon embark on a sort of honeymoon retreat in Bergamo with the support, even encouragement, of Elio’s parents. This couples’ retreat is characterized by a sense of timelessness, with the flowering mountainsides becoming a veritable locus amoenus wherein time slows and the bond between the two flourishes. I would even argue that their relationship takes place outside of time: though their original appointment was set for midnight, as I have argued, there is no indication and no clear way to know that they indeed met at that hour. In addition, despite the passing of time, marked—as I have pointed out above—by the change of season from summer to winter in the film’s conclusion, Elio and Oliver revert to calling each other by their own names. The facility with which the two slide back into this habit, and Oliver’s remark that he “remember[s] everything” about their brief relationship, lends weight to this timeless feeling.

156

Call Me by Your Name foregrounds questions of memory and nostalgia, such as Oliver’s ability to “remember everything”, in two ways: first, at the extra-textual level, in that Call Me by

Your Name, as a contemporary film, casts a nostalgic gaze back to the 1980s. This time period is, we know, one defined by fear and uncertainty regarding the HIV/AIDs epidemic; at the same time,

1983 is, as Guadagnino explains “the year—in Italy at least—where the ’70s are killed, when everything that was great about the ’70s is definitely shut down” (Garrett). Thus, in his decision to set the film in that year, Guadagnino himself expresses a sense of nostalgia for, and hence a desire to return to, a previous era that was known for its sexual freedom and sentiments of “free love”. The second way in which the film plays with nostalgia is at the textual level, in that the narrative of Call Me by Your Name—the novel in particular but also, in some way, the film—is a nostalgic glance back at the period of Elio’s adolescence by an adult Elio.

Nostalgia is central to the queer fantasy which Call Me by Your Name proposes. In his book Queer Nostalgia in Cinema and Pop Culture, Gilad Padva draws attention to the word’s roots—nostos meaning “return home” and algia meaning “longing”—in order to then define nostalgia as primarily “a desire for a home that no longer exists or has never existed” (4). Such a definition highlights the role of fantasy and its intrinsic relation to nostalgia. Padva further argues that, due to their alienation in and exile from their childhood homes, queer people often have little desire to return to the literal space of the home; instead, those of the LGBTQ community have nostalgic memories about certain times, years, and happy days of their childhood (7). This leads

Padva to conclude that “most of the queer nostalgia is involved with temporal rather than [spatial] narratives” (7, emphasis in original). What is queer about nostalgia, then, to respond to the question Padva raises in the title of his introduction, is how it undermines linear and historical

157 perceptions of time by collapsing the distance between past and present and perhaps even the future.

The queerness of nostalgia is certainly evidenced in Call Me by Your Name: while the film constructs a utopic queer fantasy through the positive reception of same-sex desire on the part of

Elio’s parents and community, history has shown that such a reaction would have been the exception, not the rule. In fact, as I have suggested above, the outright acceptance on the part of

Elio’s father is a reality which likely never existed. The conversation between Elio and his father therefore functions as a nostalgic look back to what life should have been like during the period of intense crisis and fear about HIV/AIDs. At the same time, the interaction between father and son towards the end of the film casts a hopeful glance forward to what life could be like, a fantasy that could become a present or future reality. In this way, the temporality of Call Me by Your Name becomes rather non-linear and thus engages again in Freeman’s project of queer time.

Contemporary notions of nostalgia see a “drastic loss of engagement with historical time”

(Pickering and Keightley, 924). This temporal disconnect—reminiscent of the way queer time functions in Freeman’s formulation—makes nostalgia inherently queer, particularly in the way that it breaks down and subverts normative or historical time by collapsing the distance between the past and present, and, as is the case in Call Me by Your Name, by invoking the future. One means by which the film accomplishes this disengagement with historical time is through its elliptical structure, an extra-diegetic reflection of the way that memory works as often non- coherent moments or flashes of one’s personal history. This lack of trackable temporality likewise lends itself to the sense of timelessness constructed by the film. While the film unfolds in the

1980s, it also feels as though it could also be unfolding right before our eyes. What is more, the

158 film’s setting “somewhere in Northern Italy” and the lack of specificity regarding the location further contributes to the film’s implicit resistance against historical time, even in spite of some of the historical markers such as the monument to the Battle of Piave I discussed above.

This vagueness encompassing Call Me by Your Name contributes to my consideration of the film as a utopic vision of 1980s Italy, a nostalgic and at times deceiving fantasy of what those in the queer community—of the 1980s and of contemporary society—could only wish for.

Significantly, judgement about Elio’s same-sex relationship with Oliver and fear about the

“homosexual threat” of HIV and AIDS are entirely absent from Call Me by Your Name. Not only do Elio’s (heterosexual) parents support and encourage him to experiment with his same-sex attraction and his sexuality, but other members of the community, including his (ex-)girlfriend

Marzia, seem to encourage him as well.

A number of the film’s critics have pointed out how Elio’s parents—and above all, his father—are so openly accepting of his pursuit of Oliver.21 I would argue that this acceptance, characterized by an unrealistic optimism, pushes the limits of the believable and, in this way, foregrounds (queer) fantasy and nostalgia. In his discussion of Mr. Perlman’s heart-to-heart with his son near the end of the film, for example, Peter Debruge observes that “[n]o matter how intellectually progressive the Perlman family is, no father has ever said something so open-minded and eloquent to his son, and yet, the film offers this conversation as a gift to audiences who might have desperately needed to hear it in their own lives.” I would tend to agree with Debruge and I would add that the father’s acceptance of his son’s same-sex desire and his confession of having

21 Spencer Kornhaber notes that, through the father’s heartfelt monologue, “forbidden love is made okay, even encouraged.” Stephen Garrett likewise draws attention to how Elio’s parents “seem so effortlessly tolerant and open-minded as they shift between speaking French, Italian, and English”. 159 once had similar desires of his own, evidence the way the film functions as a queer fantasy. This fantasy arises not only from having sympathetic and supportive parents, but also from the implicit possibility of an apparently straight man having queer desire. In reality, and as Debruge’s comment suggests, no parent in 1980s Italy would encourage their child to meander outside the strict bounds of heteronormativity. Thus, the lack of cultural disdain for Elio and Oliver’s relationship, coupled with the absence of the threat of being infected with HIV, situates the film as a nostalgic contemplation of a type of melodramatic “if only”, a fantasy wish-fulfillment of what could have been: “if only” I had parents like Elio’s; “if only” Italy had been so accepting.

“Is it a video?”: Queer time and mourning

I now focus my analysis on the closing moments of the film, a sequence in which Elio’s emotions following his break up with Oliver are on raw display. The finale, which is composed of a single long take lasting three and a half minutes, centers on male suffering, but also offers a rather progressive outlook on same-sex desire. The resistance to chrononormative time is perhaps made most obvious when Elio gazes forlornly into the fireplace (figure 7). In these moments, we glimpse his reaction to Oliver’s marriage announcement which took place a short time earlier. As

Elio begins to cry, the scene unfolds in shallow focus, with Elio in the foreground in focus and the kitchen area behind him heavily out of focus. With Elio in sharp focus, the viewer is constrained to witness Elio’s reactions as he manifests a variety of emotions and facial expressions, ranging from sadness and tears, to a knowing smirk, to what looks like a nostalgic remembrance of the joyful ecstasy of the summer. His suffering, as I have mentioned, remains on display at all times.

160

Figure 7. Elio’s productive mourning in Call Me by Your Name

On the one hand, the use of shallow focus during this sequence emphasizes male melodrama through the centrality of Elio’s pain. On the other hand, the use of shallow focus also foregrounds queer time: while Elio’s emotional reactions to his same-sex relationship with Oliver remain clearly in focus (queer time), the domestic tasks of preparing dinner and setting the table, representative of heteronormative time, are carried out offscreen or in the background where they are obscured and heavily out of focus.

Once again, memory and queer affect are central to the final sequence and to the queer future of Italian teen film that I propose in the title to this chapter. The non-diegetic soundtrack during Elio’s mourning of love lost does much work in foregrounding the role of memory in the film and lends itself to the queer reading I have been furthering up to this point. The insistence in

Sufjan Stevens’ “Visions of Gideon” that “I have loved you/I have touched you/I have kissed you

161 for the last time” situates Elio’s gazing into the fire as a contemplation on the love that he once enjoyed but is now no longer available to him. The refrain “visions of Gideon” creates a sense of

(religious) ecstasy and, as a result, draws attention to the joy of being wrapped up in something beautiful—that is, in his relationship with Oliver. The repetition of the question “Is it a video?”, on the other hand, emphasizes the surreality of Elio’s summer fling and raises the question of whether it was all a dream. Each lyric likewise evidences the realm of fantasy, whether it be found in a moment of rapture or on a screen. The homophony of these two phrases—“Is it a video?” and

“Visions of Gideon”—can also be read as a linguistic marker of queerness, with the boundary between the two being blurred.

There is one final way in which Sufjan Stevens’ contribution lends itself to the queer project of Call Me by Your Name and that is through the way in which it blurs the boundaries of time. As a song written expressly for the film in 2017, “Visions of Gideon” is a contemporary piece of music; yet, the song’s style and overall feel—its folky, nostalgic melodies—fit perfectly with the 1980s setting of the film. One reviewer even characterizes Stevens’ singing as “a soft breeze”, an observation which calls to mind the summer setting of the film itself (Wheeler). Thus,

“Visions of Gideon” invokes the present through its contemporary composition while at the same time conjuring up the past through its wistful, dreamy, and warm refrains. In this way, the conflation of past and present in “Visions of Gideon” which accompanies Elio’s mourning his break up with Oliver centralizes queer time and, as we will see, helps code that mourning as productive, opening up a space for Elio’s queer desire and allowing for a queer future, one that, unlike many other queer films, does not end badly.

162

In addition to the soundtrack, the long take foregrounds queer affect through Elio’s apparent melancholic attachment to Oliver and his refusal to let go of the past and move on. Earlier on in the film, after returning from the brief “honeymoon” in Bergamo with Oliver, Elio encounters his one-time girlfriend Marzia. Following a brief exchange between the two, Elio accepts Marzia’s proposal to stay friends, with the caveat that it be “for life”. This proviso closes off the possibility of a heterosexual future for Elio, at least one with Marzia. At the same time, their interaction again foregrounds the male melodrama: even though Marzia too is going through a break-up, from Elio nonetheless, her sadness and pain is pushed aside so that Elio’s melancholia can be validated.

Despite his tears, both in his interaction with Marzia and in the final scene of his melancholic grief,

Elio evinces no sign of wanting to pick up where he left off with Marzia and integrate into a

“normal” heterosexual economy. Indeed, his nostalgic smile in the closing moments expresses a sense of relishing in the pain and suffering he has experienced post-break up. Elio’s grief therefore evidences an attachment to the past that is productive in that it leaves open the potential for a queer future.

In fact, the conclusion of Call Me by Your Name varies significantly from two other Italian queer coming-of-age films namely Né Giulietta né Romeo and Un bacio. In these films, same-sex attraction and desire have no future, at least in Italy. In Né Giulietta né Romeo, Rocco Bordin’s

(Andrea Amato) love interest supposedly dies. When Rocco subsequently sees the object of his desire on the street, the young man appears ill, his face ghostly white, perhaps a visual allusion to the effects of the HIV/AIDS virus on the body. Although the two do seem to pair off at the end of the film, the final shot depicts them walking away from the camera, towards an arch, an image which suggests departure, marginalization, and haunting. That the love interest has faked his death

163 also insinuates that he is victim to a social death, having to leave his old self behind in order to attempt to move on. The outcome of Un bacio is equally bleak as Lorenzo (Rimau Ritzberger

Grillo) is eventually killed by his love interest, Antonio (Leonardo Pazzagli). One could argue that the film technically has two endings, one which ends with Lorenzo’s funeral and Blu’s (Valentina

Romani) voiceover recounting how things could have been different and the other, a more hopeful yet unlikely fantasy, which transports the viewer back to the moments leading up to the ill-fated kiss between Antonio and Lorenzo. In this alternative flashback ending, Antonio simply confesses that he is not ready for a same-sex relationship and Lorenzo easily accepts this confession.

Although the film ends with shots of Antonio, Lorenzo, and Blu giddily playing in the river and embracing each other, the fact that Blu passes by the fantasy-projected trio on her scooter, with tears streaming down her face, suggests that the funeral for Lorenzo is indeed the sad and bitter end to the film. Thus, in both films, the message is clear: same-sex desire and homoeroticism result only in death.

Miller reads the final image of Elio mourning by the fire as a kind of social death, referring to him as “a ghost” embodying what “gay coming of age … still amounts to.” However, as I would counter, by departing from the macabre and negative finale posed by death, Call Me by Your Name provides a hopeful outlook for a queer future of Italian teen film, moving beyond the inevitable death—social or physical—that has come to be expected in queer Italian films like Né Giuletta né

Romeo and Un bacio. I thus agree with Tim Gray’s statement that Call Me by Your Name is radical in subtle ways: whereas other LGBTQ films such as , Carol (Todd Haynes,

2015), or Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016) also have positive depictions of gay or same-sex oriented characters, they are all “tortured by their urges” (and, I would add, in the case of

164

Brokeback Mountain, even killed for them);22 Elio, on the other hand, is not. He is not condemned by his parents nor by his community but is instead encouraged by them, his same-sex desire validated, praised, and even envied by his father.

Elio’s positive relationship with his father marks a turning point in Italian teen film: as we have seen throughout the body of this dissertation, a hallmark of contemporary Italian teen film has been the absence of the father and the son’s attempts to reconcile with that absence. This is not the case in Call Me by Your Name, where Elio’s father is not only present and supportive of his son’s relationship with Oliver, but even a bit envious of him. On the one hand, the father’s presence is attributable to the fantasy aspect of Call Me by Your Name, that is, he is a projection of the ideal father of a son struggling with homosexual desires. On the other hand, the father’s being there for his son may be a consequence of his heritage, that is, he is not an Italian. Even in spite of this, the fact that he is indeed there for his son remains significant, especially for future iterations of Italian teen film. The same is true of the film’s positive representation of same-sex desire. While many of the other films I have discussed in this dissertation insist on the centrality of male-male bonds, none of them allow the homosocial to spill over into the homosexual but rather actively stave off the homoerotic threat. Critic Tim Gray points out that this positive representation of same-sex desire and queerness alone makes Call Me by Your Name an important text for gay cinema; he concludes, however, that “it’s more universal than that” in that “[a]udiences of all sexual persuasions and ages are relating to the film’s emotional honesty and heart.” Although I agree with

Gray’s observation to some extent, I also recognize that the film’s apparent universality has the

22 See “‘Call Me by Your Name’: A Global Effort to Create a Simple, Well-Told Tale.” variety.com/2017/film/awards/call-me-by-your-name-global-effort-1202607919/. 165 potential to detract from its radicalness. In other words, the act of labeling the film a universal love story effectively normalizes its queer narrative, reappropriating it for a heterosexual audience.

Indeed, it is precisely this universalism that has caused critics like Miz Cracker, cited above, to wonder whether the film is queer or not. In the end, though, the film is about a boy who finds real pleasure and happiness beneath another man, not on top of a woman.

166

Epilogue: Transnational Adolescence and the Female Future of Italian Teen Media

Introduction: Where We’ve Been and How We’ve Gotten Here

As we have seen throughout this dissertation, recent Italian teen film represents a site of negotiation for contemporary concerns regarding the family, masculinity, and adolescence. In the dissertation, I have discussed the recent history of Italian teen film, starting with its contemporary inception with Federico Moccia in 2004 and moving on to the 2017 release of Call Me by Your

Name. Perhaps the most important aspect of contemporary Italian teen film is its preponderance for a specific type of masculinity; with rare exception, that masculinity is both white and heterosexual. However, my analysis reveals that adolescent masculinity is not bound by the same strict gender prescriptions of the previous generation which privileged virility, violence, physical prowess, and the hard body. Instead, contemporary iterations of masculinity appropriate and incorporate certain feminine qualities, such as emotional availability and openness, caretaking, and vulnerability. Such traits are made evident in the films I have examined through moments of emotional excess turned spectacle—such as Step’s cry in the rain in Tre metri sopra il cielo [Three

Steps Over Heaven] and the motorcycle funeral in Ho voglia di te [I Desire You]; through physical defects—such as Matteo’s lisp in Che ne sarà di noi [What Will Become of Us], the boys disabilities in Niente può fermarci [Nothing Can Stop Us], and Carlo’s broken heart in Universitari

- Molto più che amici [Universitarians – Much More Than Friends]; or through the homosocial

167 bond—as is evidenced in films like Lezioni di volo [Flying Lessons], Last Minute Marocco [Last

Minute Morocco], and, to some extent, Call Me by Your Name.

Despite the importance of heterosexual relationships for the young men, they appear hesitant to commit to a heteronormative future. This tendency away from heteronormativity allows not only for the creation of innovative forms of masculinity, but also for new ways for men to be happy. As I have argued, Italian teen film alters the heterocentric happy ending of melodrama, leaving in its stead instances of homosocial utopias, surrogate families, and queer desire. This emphasis on non-heteronormative happy endings suggests a significant alteration of the melodramatic mode, and contributes to my project of regendering the teen film genre in Italy. Just as the young men depicted in the films I have analyzed are able to be recuperated back into normative society, teen film should be rescued from its relative ignominy, becoming a genre worthy of critical attention for what it can tell us about the historical context and society in which it is produced. My examination of teen film, then, has obvious implications for contemporary notions of masculinity, for the changes taking place regarding the role of fathers in society, for queer futurity, and for film and media studies in Italy.

In the previous chapter on Call Me by Your Name, I gestured toward the future of the genre and it is this forward-looking perspective to which I turn to make a few conclusory remarks. In the epilogue, then, I will briefly explore some recent developments in Italian teen film and other media, including television and Netflix series. Such a discussion will allow me to hypothesize what is on the horizon for the genre, in particular the possibility of a transnational adolescence that crosses national boundaries and a more nuanced and positive representation of female adolescence, one that recuperates young women from their apparent marginalization from Italian teen film.

168

No Country for [Young] Men: Italian Teen Culture Outside Italy

In addition to Call Me by Your Name, 2017 saw the release of another film centering on adolescence, that is Giovanni Veronesi’s Non è un paese per giovani [No Country for Young Folk].

The film’s title represents a telling commentary on the adolescent crisis in Italy which is in line with arguments presented throughout the dissertation. The film follows two young friends, Sandro

(Filippo Scicchitano) and Luciano (Giovanni Anzaldo), as they travel to Cuba in hopes of finding better employment opportunities than those available in their home country. On the one hand, their journey abroad recalls those present in the films discussed in my second chapter, where young men move away from the motherland to a liminal space wherein they can develop and play with their male identities and their emerging sexualities. On the other, in that in Veronesi’s film they do not return to Italy suggests a significant deviation from previous iterations of the travel trope and confirms that Italy indeed is no longer a country for young people. The mass exodus of young people from Italy evinces, I believe, a connection with the dominance of teen film in Italy: as more youth have left the peninsula, less teen films have been produced, and those that have been produced have been significantly less financially successful. Indeed, this migration seems to have changed the landscape of contemporary Italian teen film, which has begun to explore new themes, including teenage pregnancy (Piuma [Feather], Roan Johnson, 2016), special education students

(Classe Z [Class Z], Guido Chiesa, 2017), and the pitfalls of modern technologies (Non c’è campo

[No Signal], Federico Moccia, 2017).

The narrative of Non è un paese per giovani reflects, I would argue, a broader trend in Italy regarding the rising rate of unemployed young people, a tendency which deserves increased attention, particularly from a sociological perspective. Over the last 5 years, an increasing number

169 of articles have appeared in the media spotlight with foreboding titles such as “Italy’s Lost

Generation: Youth Unemployment Hits Nearly 50 Percent”, “Italy has EU’s highest level of youth unemployment, study shows”, “Ever More Unemployed Italian Youth: So Says the Italian

National Institute of Statistics” [“Sempre più giovani italiani disoccupati: li dice l’Istat”], and, most appropriately, “Italy isn’t a country for young people: the Over 60 surpass the Under 30”

[“L’Italia non è un Paese per giovani: gli Over 60 superano gli Under 30”].1 This downward trend continues even now: as Valentina Romei notes in an article dated March 1, 2019, “Italy’s youth unemployment rate has climbed to above Spain’s for the first time in more than a decade”.2 As a result of these high rates of unemployment, a collaborative report on the job market in Italy in

2018 affirms that the number of young people who have left the country in search of a job, and a viable future, has tripled over the last decade, from around 40,000 in 2008 to 115,000 in 2017.3

Non è un paese per giovani grapples with this systemic problem, and seems to confirm the

1 See Barbie Latza Nadeau, “Italy’s Lost Generation: Youth Unemployment Hits Nearly 50 Percent”, The Daily Beast, www.thedailybeast.com/italys-lost-generation-youth-unemployment-hits-nearly-50-percent; Cigna Global, “Italy has EU's highest level of youth unemployment, study shows”, The Local, www.thelocal.it/20170718/italy-european-union-most-highest-percentage-neet-unemployed-young- people-millennials; “Sempre più giovani italiani disoccupati: li dice l’Istat”, l’Adige, www.ladige.it/news/business/2018/11/01/sempre-pi-giovani-disoccupati-italia; Alessandro Cipolla, “L’Italia non è un Paese per giovani: gli Over 60 superano gli Under 30”, Money, www.money.it/Italia- giovani-over-60-under-30. See also “Youth Unemployment Rate” which contains data compiled by the Organisation for Economoic Co-operation and Development (OECD) at data.oecd.org/unemp/youth- unemployment-rate.htm. 2 Valentina Romei, “Youth unemployment in Italy rises to second highest in eurozone”, Financial Times, www.ft.com/content/49ebe172-3c0e-11e9-b72b-2c7f526ca5d0. 3 The report, titled “Il mercato del lavoro 2018” [“The Job Market 2018”] was a joint collaboration between the Ministry of Labor, the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT), the National Instutitute of Social Security (INPS - Istituto Nazionale della Prevedenza Sociale), the National Intitute for Insurance against Workplace Accidents (INAIL - Istituto Nazionale per l’Assicurazione contro gli Infortuni sul Lavoro), and the National Agency for Active Labor Policies (ANPAL - Agenzia Nazionale Politiche Attive del Lavoro). 170 tendency of teen film—and genre film more generally—to “inadvertently [tell] us something about the time and place of its creation” (Sobchak 121).

While certainly not a direct consequence of this mass exodus of young people from Italy,

I believe that the success of Federico Moccia’s work outside of Italy’s borders is likewise indicative of a cultural shift in Italy’s approach to adolescence. As I noted in the introduction to the dissertation, the heyday of Italian teen film took place more or less within the span of about a decade following the 2004 debut of Tre metri sopra il cielo. With the exception of Call Me by

Your Name, all of the films I have analyzed at length in the dissertation were released between

2004 and 2013, and I would venture to say that the genre was already nearing its decline with the

2010 debut of Scusa ma ti voglio sposare, as it garnered significantly less—by around $11 million—than its 2008 predecessor, Scusa ma ti chiamo amore.4 In 2010, however, film and literature aimed at adolescents was on the rise in Spain, kicked off, unsurprisingly, by the debut of

Tres metros sobre el cielo [Three Steps Over Heaven] (Fernando González Molina), the Spanish version of Tre metri sopra il cielo. The sequel, Tengo ganas de ti, also directed by Molina, received the same treatment in 2012. In fact, Moccia’s most recent novel, Tres veces tu [Three Times You], the third—and presumed final—installment of the Tre metri sopra il cielo saga, was published first in Spanish, with the Italian version, Tre volte te arriving almost 4 months later. As final confirmation of Moccia’s “exportation” abroad, it is important to note that his social media—be it

Twitter (@FedericoMoccia), Facebook (@FedericoMocciaOficial), or Instagram

(@federico.moccia)—and his official website (federicomoccia.es) are all done almost exclusively

4 At $20,913,254, Scusa ma ti chiamo amore remains the highest grossing Italian teen film of the last 15 years. 171 in Spanish. Moccia’s success among the latinx community, both within the European Union and without, is clearly reminiscent of the transnational displacement of adolescents/adolescence depicted in Non è un paese per giovani. This post-Italian afterlife of Moccia’s production is another aspect of teen media which deserves attention.

Small Screens are for Girls: My Brilliant Friend and Baby

With the title of this section, I do not mean to suggest a gendered paradigm regarding the size of screens, that is, that the big screen of cinema is specifically coded as “male” while the small screen of television (or computers, tablets, or phones for that matter) is specifically coded

“female”. Instead, I consider the small screen as a locus in which innovative small screen productions directed at young people—and young women in particular—are carried out. In other words, I view television as a possible new frontier, a space wherein, as Jenny Bavidge’s analysis of Buffy the Vampire Slayer suggests, “an interrogation of the social and cultural construction of female adolescence” can take place (41).5 The rise in television series centering on female adolescents/adolescence suggests a renewed focus on adolescents as consumers and a new method of reaching those consumers. In this section I thus draw attention to two recent popular series with an international viewership, the HBO/Rai co-production My Brilliant Friend and Netflix’s Baby.

In a review of the adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend for The Guardian,

Lisa Allardice observes that, “[w]hile literature is hardly short of female characters scorched on to the page by the male gaze, what makes [My Brilliant Friend] so unusual is that the looking is done

5 For more on the subject of teens on TV, see Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom, edited by Sharon Marie Ross and Louisa Ellen Stein; and Teen TV: Genre, Consumption and Identity, edited by Glyn Davis and Kay Dickinson. 172 by another girl,” and this looking, she concludes, carries over into the HBO adaptation. Allardice’s remarks suggest, I believe, a possible new trend for Italian teen media that contrasts with the masculinized vision of the genre that I have foregrounded throughout the dissertation. As I have argued, teen film in the Italian context is not inherently gendered feminine—as it is theorized in other contexts—because it centralizes depictions of male adolescence, homosocial male bonding, and male melodrama. However, series such as HBO’s My Brilliant Friend and Netflix’s Baby suggest a shift in the gender paradigm, focusing instead on female coming-of-age and re- establishing the genre as a site of negotiation for questions of girlhood, female desire, and female adolescence.

My Brilliant Friend (2018), directed by and co-written by a cohort composed of Costanzo, Elena Ferrante, Laura Paolucci and Francesco Piccolo, has been hailed by critics as “an impressive effort, a translation of novel to screen that preserves certain of its literary qualities while transmuting others into moving and effective TV” and praised for being “strikingly faithful” to the novel upon which it is based.6 The series retraces the friendship between Elena

(played as a child by Elisa del Genio and by Margherita Mazzucco as a teenager) and Lila (played as a child by Ludovica Nasti and by Gaia Girace as a teenager), from childhood to adulthood. The story, which is recounted by an elderly Elena after hearing of Lila’s disappearance, takes place in a post-war laden with violence and corruption. Although this violence is often enacted by

6 See Daniel D’Addario’s “TV Review: ‘My Brilliant Friend’ on HBO” for Variety (variety.com/2018/tv/reviews/my-brilliant-friend--1202921018/) and Sophie Gilbert’s “The Gorgeous Savagery of My Brilliant Friend” for The Atlantic (www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/11/my-brilliant-friend-review-hbo-elena- ferrante/575953/). The focus on the series’ faithfulness is a common thread in reviews including those by James Poniewozik (), Brian Lowry (CNN), and Sarah Marshall (The Nation), who describes the series as “hauntingly faithful” to the original text. 173 men, and despite the fact that, generally speaking, the boys’ education often takes precedence over that of the girls, it is important to note, as Ben Travers does, that “[t]he girls are the leads and their friendship forms the journey; boys, men and their affairs are pushed to the periphery.”7 This decentralization of the male experience through the female-female, or what I will term the femmesocial, bond contrasts sharply with the traditional male focus of contemporary Italian teen film and thus represents a new direction for the genre, and scholarship on it.

While set in an entirely different place and time, that is, the Parioli district in a contemporary Rome, Netflix’s recent series Baby likewise foregrounds the femmesocial bond, namely that between Chiara (Benedetta Porcaroli) and Ludovica (Alice Pagani), two students in an elite high school in Rome. The program is loosely based on the now infamous “Baby Squillo” scandal which broke in Italy in 2014. The scandal concerned a sex-trafficking ring that was set up by two girls, referred to as Agnese and Angela, aged 14 and 15, who were inspired after searching

“easy money” on Google.8 As they tell it, the girls engaged in the sex trade in order to buy designer clothes, drugs, and expensive gadgets.9 The series is thus imbued at the outset with a postfeminist bend which situates girls as “consumers who can ‘have it all’” (Renga, “Italian Teen Film” 310).

At the same time, the tendency of some audiences to condemn Chiara and Ludovica’s promiscuous

7 See “‘My Brilliant Friend’ Review: HBO’s Intimate Adaptation Is a Rich Tale Made Drab.” IndieWire, 15 Nov. 2018, www.indiewire.com/2018/11/my-brilliant-friend-hbo-review-elena-ferrante-book- 1202020769/. 8 See Emily Tannenbaum’s article “The True Story Behind Netflix's 'Baby' Is Even More Disturbing Than the Show.” Cosmopolitan, 3 Dec. 2018, www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/tv/a25383982/netflix- baby-true-story/. 9 See Molli Mitchell’s article “Baby on Netflix: What is the Baby Squillo case?” Express, 29 Nov. 2018, www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/1052045/Baby-Netflix-plot-true-story-what-is-the-Baby-Squillo- case-scandal-Italy-Rome. 174 use of their sexuality—which I briefly discuss below—likewise evidences, at least to some extent, a postfeminist backlash.

As with My Brilliant Friend, the events surrounding Chiara and Ludovica and their entry into sex work take center stage. However, they are joined by a supporting cast of characters which bring depth to the series and evince concerns about adolescence, homosexuality, father/son relationships, dead mothers, sexual activity, and drug use. Male characters are depicted as particularly troubled by coming of age in contemporary society, which is in line with readings of male anxiety, melancholia, and masculinity addressed throughout the dissertation. Damiano

(Riccardo Mandolini), for example, is the illegitimate son of a diplomat who resides—rather unwillingly—with his father following his mother’s passing. A subplot to the series involves

Damiano’s coming to terms with the loss of his mother and includes a moment in which Damiano’s father, in an attempt to reconcile with his son, presents him with his mother’s old scooter that had gone missing. The presence of the vespa in this scene recalls Tre metri sopra il cielo, in particular the importance of the motorcycle as a mediation of the homosocial bond between Step and Pollo.

Another subplot centers around Fabio (Brando Pacitto), the son of the principal of the school, and his struggle with his sexuality and same-sex attraction. His narrative arch—which is marked by subtle acts of rebellion such as cutting school for what seems to be the first time and selling drugs at school to help Damiano—culminates with his eventual coming out to his inattentive father.

While such moments have a presence and purpose within the framework of the series, they are secondary to Chiara and Ludovica’s precipitous dive into prostitution.

Though the series has come under fire—particularly by the National Center on Sexual

Exploitation (NCSE)—for the depiction of active female sexuality and the apparent normalization

175 and glamorization of prostitution, I find the series rather progressive in that it does not condemn

Chiara and Ludovica for their use of sexuality. Indeed, though the NCSE places blame on the male perpetrators of prostitution, I believe that a side effect of such an approach is to take away the possibility of female agency, which I consider to be one of the series’ strengths.10 In fact, Baby goes to great lengths to provide a positive depiction of girlhood. For example, although the girls are initially enslaved to Saverio (Paolo Calabresi), who functions as their pimp, it is equally true that at the end of the season, Saverio has been killed off and the girls have possession of his cell phone and hence access to his clientele. In this way, the girls are no longer bound to their trafficker and have the potential not only to engage in sex work on their terms, but also to keep all of the profit from doing so. At the same time, the prostitution plotline does not begin episode 3, a surprising halfway through the six-episode run. The series likewise seems to distance itself from the “Baby Squillo” case by taking focus away from the girls’ consumption: although they clearly relish in the extravagant trappings they are afforded through their participation in sex work, moments of consumerism are undermined by tension or sentimentality between the girls and help to centralize their relationship.

The series thus sets itself apart from other films and televisual products that focus on sexually active female adolescents. With Chaira’s decision to remain in Italy rather than travel to

America, the femmesocial bond is shored up, and this bond staves off the threat of condemnation.

Their life of secrecy is not relegated to the margins, but instead given a space to continue. In the voiceover spoken by Chiara that opens and closes the first season, Chiara’s language seems to

10 NCSE President & Chief Executive Officer, Patrick Trueman, lays out the coalition’s issues with the series in a January 2018 letter, which is available in its entirety on the NCSE website: endsexualexploitation.org/wp-content/uploads/Netflix_Baby_Sign-On-Letter_FINAL_01-11-18-1-1.pdf. 176 suggest the possibility of a hopeful future: “If you’re 16 years old and live in Rome’s most beautiful neighborhood, you’re lucky. Ours is the best possible world. We’re immersed in a wonderful see-through fish tank, but we long for the sea. That’s why, to survive…we need a secret life.” Words like “most beautiful”, “lucky”, “best possible”, and “wonderful”—uttered with no hint of irony, sarcasm, or remorse—point to a positive outlook for the girls’ shared future. Whereas women like Carmen in Che ne sarà di noi, Babi in Tre metri sopra il cielo, or even Marzia in Call

Me by Your Name are so often marginalized after having sex with the young men in these films

(Matteo, Step, and Elio respectively), this is clearly not the case for the two female protagonists in

Baby. The centrality of female intimacy as depicted in My Brilliant Friend and Baby deconstructs, and subsequently alters, the gendered paradigm that I have identified in Italian teen film and it thus opens a space for female adolescence that does not, I think, threaten male adolescence.

Tre metri dall’inizio, or Back Where It All Began

This dissertation ends where it began in chapter one, with Tre metri sopra il cielo. Netflix recently announced a reboot of Tre metri as a new television series, with a slightly altered setting

(the Adriatic coast vs. the Rome of the original), and protagonists (Sally and Ale vs. Babi and

Step). The series is labeled in the initial press release as a “new, modern take of a classic Italian story based on the novel by Federico Moccia”.11 This epithet about the series nods to its original roots, which have now become “classic”, while it also looks forward to the future in its “modern take” of the source material. The reboot thus suggests at once the timelessness and updatability of

11 See “Netflix Announces 3 New Italian Original Series: Curon Tre metri sopra il cielo Reboot Fedeltà.” media.netflix.com/en/press-releases/netflix-announces-3-new-italian-original-series-curon-tre-metri- sopra-il-cielo-reboot-fedelta. 177 the story told in Tre metri sopra il cielo. Considering the international reach of Netflix original series, the remake should have a wide international viewership, and contribute to the recent trend of a transnational Italian adolescence. Such a conclusion would suggest that shows like My

Brilliant Friend, Baby, and Tre metri sopra il cielo have accomplished what Italian teen film has so far been unable to do until recently, that is, cross Italy’s national borders and become accessible to non-Italian audiences. As the world grows more and more global, it is quite possible that such images will be increasingly diffused. Thus, like the final image of the film upon which this most recent series is based, that is, of Step and his brother riding off into the sunset, there is a bright future for the Italian teen genre, be it film, television or otherwise.

178

Bibliography

10 regole per fare innamorare [10 Rules for Falling in Love]. Directed by Cristiano Bortone,

performances by Guglielmo Scilla and Enrica Pintore, Medusa, 2012.

Abad-Santos, Alex, et al. “Call Me by Your Name probably won’t win Best Picture. Here’s

why.” Vox, 28. Feb. 2018, www.vox.com/2018/2/28/17029938/oscars-call-me-by-your-

name-best-picture-win-lose. Accessed 8 Aug. 2018.

Adams, John. “Hallelujah Junction - 1st Movement.” Call Me by Your Name: Original Motion

Picture Soundtrack, Sony Masterworks, 2017.

Allardice, Lisa. “Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend: How Does the Show Compare to the

Books?” The Guardian, 17 Nov. 2018, www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/17/can-

elena-ferrantes-my-brilliant-friend-be-as-brilliant-on-television-. Accessed 8 Apr. 2019.

American Pie. Directed by and Chris Weitz, , 1999.

Amore 14 [Love 14]. Directed by Federico Moccia, Medusa, 2009.

Andrews, Eleanor. “Family Life, Moretti Style.” Italy On Screen: National Identity and Italian

Imaginary, edited by Lucy Bolton and Christina Siggers Manson, Peter Lang, 2010, pp.

49-61.

Aroncyzk, Melissa. Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity. Oxford

University Press, 2013.

179

Barone, Pierangelo. Traiettorie impercettibili. Rappresentazioni dell’adolescenza e itinerari di

prevenzione. Guerini Studio, 2005.

Barounis, Cynthia. “Cripping Heterosexuality, Queering Able-Bodiedness: Murderball,

Brokeback Mountain, and the Contested Masculine Body.” The Disability Studies Reader,

edited by Lennard J. Davis, Routledge, 2010, pp. 443-459.

Bavidge, Jenny. “Chosen Ones: Reading the Contemporary Teen Heroine.” Teen TV: Genre,

Consumption and Identity, edited by Glyn Davis and Kay Dickinson, BFI Publishing,

2004, pp. 41-53.

Benvenuti al nord [Welcome to the North]. Directed by Luca Miniero. Medusa Film, 2012.

Benvenuti al sud [Welcome to the South]. Directed by Luca Miniero. Medusa Film, 2010.

Benzina [Gasoline]. Directed by Monica Stambrini, performances by and Regina

Orioli, Làntia Cinema & Audiovisivi, 2002.

Berger, Ronald J. Introducing Disability Studies. Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2013.

Berghahn, Daniela. “Coming of Age in ‘the Hood’: The Diasporic Youth Film and Questions of

Genre.” European Cinema in Motion: Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary

Europe, edited by Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010,

pp. 235-255.

Berghahn, Daniela, and Claudia Sternberg. “Introduction.” European Cinema in Motion:

Migrant and Diasporic Film in Contemporary Europe, edited by Daniela Berghahn and

Claudia Sternberg, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 1-11.

Beynon, John. Masculinities and Culture. Open University Press, 2002.

180

Bloomer, Jeffrey. “What Should We Make of Call Me by Your Name’s Age-Gap Relationship?”

Slate, 8 Nov. 2017,

www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2017/11/08/the_ethics_of_call_me_by_your_name_s_age

_gap_sexual_relationship_explored.html. Accessed 10 Aug. 2018.

Boero, Davide. Chitarre e lucchetti: Il cinema adolescente da Morandi a Moccia. Le Mani,

2009.

Bondanella, Peter. A History of Italian Cinema. Continuum, 2009.

Brennan, Christopher. “Crema, idyllic Italian city in ‘Call Me by Your Name,’ deals with

surprising boost in romantic tourists.” NY Daily News, 3 Mar. 2018,

www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/movies/city-call-sees-reluctant-boost-tourism-

article-1.3852308#. Accessed 14 Aug. 2018.

Brokeback Mountain. Directed by Ang Lee, performances by Jake Gyllenhaal, Heath Ledger,

and Michelle Williams, Focus Features, 2005.

Brunetta, Gian Piero. The History of Italian Cinema: A Guide to Italian Film from its Origins to

the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Jeremy Parzen, Princeton University Press,

2003.

Buckley, Cara. “‘Call Me by Your Name’: A Love Story Fueled by Strangers’ Chemistry.” The

New York Times, 17 Nov. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/11/17/movies/timothee-

chalamet-armie-hammer-call-me-by-your-name.html. Accessed 14 Aug. 2018.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Routledge, 1993.

—. “Critically Queer.” The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, edited by Donald E. Hall et al.,

Routledge, 2013, pp. 18-31.

181

---. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.

---. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist

Theory.” Theatre Journal, vol. 40, no. 4, 1988, pp. 519-531.

Burr, Ty. “‘Call Me by Your Name’ is full of light and landscape and unstoppable beauty.” The

Boston Globe, 20 Dec. 2017, www.bostonglobe.com/arts/movies/2017/12/20/call-your-

name-full-light-and-landscape-and-unstoppable-

beauty/7ja10O1izBhKOQrE0BuKoO/story.html. Accessed 25 July 2018.

Call Me by Your Name. Directed by Luca Guadagnino, performances by Armie Hammer,

Timothée Chalamet, and Michael Stuhlbarg, Sony Pictures Classics, 2017.

“Call Me by Your Name.” Common Sense Media, www.commonsensemedia.org/movie-

reviews/call-me-by-your-name. Accessed 4 Sept. 2018.

“Call Me by Your Name group tour inspired by the Oscar winning movie.” Michelangelo

International Travel, www.michelangelo.travel/us/our-group-tours/reise/tour-call-me-by-

your-name-in-the-footsteps-of-the-oscar-multi-nomined-masterpiece/. Accessed 18 Aug.

2018.

Can’t Hardly Wait. Directed by Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan, Columbia Pictures, 1998. carlotta.asti. “Universitari - Molto più che amici recensione del film di Federico Moccia.”

Cinefilos.it, 23 Sept. 2013, www.cinefilos.it/tutto-film/recensioni/universitari-molto-piu-

che-amici-recensione-del-film-federico-moccia-75632. Accessed 1 Aug. 2017.

Carnero, Roberto. Under 40: I giovani nella nuova narrativa italiana. Bruno Mondadori, 2010.

Carol. Directed by Todd Haynes, performances by and Rooney Mara, The

Weinstein Company, 2015.

182

Cartmell, Deborah and Imedla Whelehan. Screen Adaptation: Impure Cinema. Palgrave

Macmillan, 2010.

Champagne, John. Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama: Caravaggio, Puccini,

Contemporary Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Che ne sarà di noi [What Will Become of Us]. Directed by Giovanni Veronesi, Filmauro, 2004.

Cigna Global. “Italy Has EU’s Highest Level of Youth Unemployment, Study Shows.” The

Local, 18 July 2017, www.thelocal.it/20170718/italy-european-union-most-highest-

percentage-neet-unemployed-young-people-millennials. Accessed 4 Apr. 2019.

Cipolla, Alessandro. “L’Italia non è un Paese per giovani: gli Over 60 superano gli Under 30.”

Money, 23 Oct. 2018, www.money.it/Italia-giovani-over-60-under-30. Accessed 4 Apr.

2019.

Cohan, Steven, and Ina Rae Hark, editors. The Road Movie Book. Routledge, 1997.

Cohen, Cathy J. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare queens: The Radical Potential of Queer

Politics?” The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, edited by Donald E. Hall et al.,

Routledge, 2013, pp. 74-95.

Connell, R. W. Masculinities. 2nd ed., University of California Press, 2005.

Connell, R. W., and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the

Concept.” Gender & Society, vol. 19, no. 6, 2005, pp. 829-859.

Corrado, Andrea, and Igor Mariottini. Cinema e autori sulle tracce delle migrazioni. Rome:

Ediesse, 2013.

Costanzo, Saverio, creator. My Brilliant Friend. Wildside, Fandango, Rai Fiction, TIMvision,

and HBO, 2018.

183

Côté, James E., and Anton L. Allahar. Generation on Hold: Coming of Age in the Late Twentieth

Century. New York University Press, 1996.

Cracker, Miz. “Why Do Gays Keep Falling for Call Me by Your Name?” Slate, 28 Nov. 2017,

www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2017/11/28/call_me_by_your_name_is_not_a_gay_movie

.html. Accessed 5 Feb. 2018.

D’Addario, Daniel. “TV Review: ‘My Brilliant Friend’ on HBO.” Variety, 2 Sept. 2018,

variety.com/2018/tv/reviews/my-brilliant-friend-hbo-1202921018/. Accessed 8 Apr. 2019

Dal Bello, Mario. Inquieti: I giovani nel cinema italiano del Duemila. Effatà, 2009.

Davis, Glyn, and Kay Dickinson, editors. Teen TV: Genre, Consumption and Identity. BFI

Publishing, 2004.

Debruge, Peter. “Film Review: ‘Call Me by Your Name’.” Variety, 23 Jan. 2017,

variety.com/2017/film/reviews/call-me-by-your-name-review-1201966646/. Accessed 12

Aug. 2018.

De Lauretis, Teresa. “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities - An Introduction.”

Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, edited by Teresa De Lauretis, vol. 3,

no. 2, 1991, pp. iii-xvii.

De Leo, Carlotta. “Willwoosh, dal web al grande schermo.” Il Corriere della Sera, 15 March

2012, www.corriere.it/spettacoli/12_marzo_15/dieci-regole-willwoosh-de-leo_2b99a02c-

6e9a-11e1-850b-8beb09a51954.shtml. Accessed 12 July 2019.

Driscoll, Catherine. Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory.

Columbia University Press, 2002.

---. Teen Film: A Critical Introduction. Berg, 2011.

184

Dry, Jude. “Luca Guadagnino Had a Good Reason for Not Showing the Sex Scene in ‘Call Me

by Your Name’.” IndieWire, 22 Dec. 2017, www.indiewire.com/2017/12/call-me-by-

your-name-sex-scene-luca-guadagnino-1201910219/. Accessed 8 Aug. 2018.

Duncan, Derek. “‘Is It Because I’m a Wop?’: Queer Diaspora and Postcolonial Italy.” New

Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies: Volume 1: Definitions, Theory, and Accented

Practices, edited by Graziella Parati, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012, pp.

175-194.

---. “The Geopolitics of Spectatorship and Screen Identification: What's Queer About Italian

Cinema?” Italianist, vol. 33, no. 2, 2013, pp. 256-261.

---. “The Queerness of Italian Cinema.” A Companion to Italian Cinema, edited by Frank Burke,

John Wiley & Sons, 2017, pp. 467-83.

Dunks, Glenn. “‘Call Me By Your Name’ Is An Amazing Love Story, But Don’t Call It

“Universal”.” Junkee, 31 Aug. 2017, junkee.com/call-me-by-your-name-is-an-amazing-

love-story-but-please-dont-call-it-universal/121185. Accessed 8 Aug. 2018.

Edwards, Tim. Cultures of Masculinity. Routledge, 2006.

Elsaesser, Thomas. “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama.” Critical

Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings. Edited by Timothy

Corrigan, Patricia White, with Meta Mazaj. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011. pp. 498-511.

Ezra, Elizabeth, and Terry Rowden. “General Introduction: What is Transnational Cinema?”

Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, edited by Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden,

Routledge, 2006, pp. 1-12.

185

Frayling, Christopher. “Per un pugno di dollari A Fistful of Dollars.” The Cinema of Italy, edited

by Giorgio Bertellini, Wallflower Press, 2004, pp. 162-71.

Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke University Press,

2010.

Fuchs, Cynthia J. “The Buddy Politic.” Screening the Male: Exploring masculinities in

Hollywood cinema, edited by Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, Routledge, 1993, pp. 194-

210.

Galt, Rosalind, and Karl Schoonover. “Untimely Desires, Historical Efflorescence, and Italy in

Call Me by Your Name.” Italian Culture, vol. 37, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1-18,

doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2019.1609220. Accessed 16 July 2019.

Gamble, Sarah. The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism. Routledge, 2001.

Garrett, Stephen. “Director Luca Guadagnino on Why ‘Call Me by Your Name’ Is Making

Everyone Cry.” Observer, 13 Oct. 2017, observer.com/2017/10/interview-luca-

guadagnino-on-why-call-me-by-your-name-makes-people-cry/. Accessed 25 July 2018.

Gilbert, Sophie. “The Gorgeous Savagery of My Brilliant Friend.” The Atlantic, 16 Nov. 2018,

www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/11/my-brilliant-friend-review-hbo-

elena-ferrante/575953/. Accessed 8 Apr. 2019.

Gill, Rosalind, and Christina Scharff. New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism, and

Subjectivity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Gledhill, Christine. “The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation.” Home is Where the Heart Is:

Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, edited by Christine Gledhill, BFI

Publishing, 1987, pp. 5-39.

186

---. “Women Reading Men.” Me Jane: Masculinity, Movies and Women, edited by Pat Kirkham

and Janet Thumim, Lawrence and Wishart, 1995, pp. 73-93.

Gleiberman, Owen. “‘Call Me by Your Name’: A Love Story — and a Meditation on the

Closet.” Variety, 3 Dec. 2017, variety.com/2017/film/columns/call-me-by-your-name-a-

meditation-on-the-closet-1202629039/. Accessed 25 July 2018.

Gori, Gigliola. “Model of Masculinity: Mussolini, the ‘New Italian’ of the Fascist Era.” The

International Journal of the History of Sport, vol. 16, no. 4, 1999, pp. 27-61.

---. “Supermanism and Culture of the Body in Italy: The Case of Futurism.” The International

Journal of the History of Sport, vol. 16, no. 1, 1999, pp. 159-165.

Gray, Tim. “‘Call Me by Your Name’: A Global Effort to Create a Simple, Well-Told Tale.”

Variety, 8 Nov. 2017. variety.com/2017/film/awards/call-me-by-your-name-global-effort-

1202607919/. Accessed 27 July 2018.

Grierson, Tim. “‘Call Me By Your Name’: The Story Behind the Most Romantic Movie of the

Year.” Rolling Stone, 22 Nov. 2017, www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-features/call-

me-by-your-name-the-story-behind-the-most-romantic-movie-of-the-year-115600/.

Accessed 8 Aug. 2018.

Grindon, Leger. The Hollywood Romantic Comedy: Conventions, History, Controversies. Wiley-

Blackwell, 2011.

Guglielmino, Andrea. “Moccia va all’università, nonostante la protesta.” Istituto Luce, 20 Sept.

2013, news.cinecitta.com/IT/it-it/news/55/4980/moccia-va-all-universita-nonostante-la-

protesta.aspx. Accessed 26 July 2017.

Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Duke University Press, 1998.

187

---. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York University

Press, 2005.

“Hallelujah Junction.” Earbox - John Adams, 2016-2018, www.earbox.com/hallelujah-junction-

solo-piano/. Accessed 3 Sept. 2018.

Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Routledge, 1979.

Higson, Andrew. “The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema.” Transnational Cinema: The

Film Reader, edited by Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, Routledge, 2006, pp. 15-25.

---. Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain. Clarendon Press, 1995.

Hipkins, Danielle. “‘Figlie di papà’?: Adolescent Girls Between the Incest Motif and Female

Friendship in Contemporary Italian Film Comedy.” The Italianist, vol. 35, no. 2, 2015,

pp. 248-271.

---. “The Showgirl Effect: Adolescent Girls and (Precarious) ‘Technologies of Sexiness’ in

Contemporary Italian Cinema.” International Cinema and the Girl: Local Issues,

Transnational Contexts, edited by Fiona Handyside and Kate E. Taylor-Jones, Palgrave

Macmillan, 2016, pp. 21-33.

---. “Who Wants to Be a TV Showgirl? Auditions, Talent and Taste in Contemporary Popular

Italian Cinema.” The Italianist, vol. 32, 2012, pp. 154-190.

Hjort, Mette, and Scott MacKenzie. “Introduction.” Cinema and Nation, edited by Mette Hjort

and Scott MacKenzie, Routledge, 2000, pp. 1-16.

Ho voglia di te [I Desire You]. Directed by Luis Prieto, performances by Riccardo Scamarcio,

Katy Louise Saunders, and Laura Chiatti, Warner Brothers, 2007.

188

Horrocks, Roger, and Jo Campling. Masculinity in Crisis: Myths, Fantasies, and Realities. St.

Martin's Press, 1994.

“I film più amati.” Cinemagay.it, www.cinemagay.it/film/ordinaper/i-piu-amati/desc/. Accessed

18 Aug. 2018.

“Il MiBACT torna MiBAC, il Turismo accorpato all'Agricoltura e guidato da Centinaio.”

Finestre sull’Arte, 3 July 2018, www.finestresullarte.info/flash-news/1894n_mibact-

torna-mibac-il-turismo-passa-all-agricoltura.php. Accessed 15 Aug. 2018.

Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York University Press, 1996.

Jeffords, Susan. Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. Rutgers University

Press, 1994.

“John Adams On Hallelujah Junction.” Vimeo, uploaded by John Adams, 4 Sept. 2015,

vimeo.com/138363828.

Kahn, Jack S. An Introduction to Masculinities. Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Kaveney, Roz. Teen Dreams: Reading Teen Film from Heathers to Veronica Mars. Palgrave

Macmillan, 2006.

Kim, Catherine. “Peter Spears, a producer on ‘Call Me By Your Name,’ reflects on film’s

universal impact.” The Daily Northwestern, 15 Feb. 2018,

dailynorthwestern.com/2018/02/15/ae/peter-spears-producer-call-name-reflects-films-

universal-impact/. Accessed 8 Aug. 2018.

Kimmel, Michael S. Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. Harper Collins,

2008.

189

---. “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender

Identity.” Privilege: A Reader, edited by Michael S. Kimmel and Abby L. Ferber,

Westview Press, 2003. 51-74

---. The Gender of Desire: Essays on Male Sexuality. Albany, NY: State University of New York

Press, 2005.

Kimmel, Michael S., and Amy Aronson. Men and Masculinities: A Social, Cultural, and

Historical Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO, 2004.

Kirkham, Pat. “Loving Men: Frank Borzage, Charles Farrell and the Reconstruction of

Masculinity in 1920s Hollywood Cinema.” Me Jane: Masculinity, Movies and Women,

edited by Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumim, Lawrence and Wishart, 1995, pp. 94-112.

Klinger, Barbara. Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk.

Indiana University Press, 1994.

Kohnen, Melanie. Queer Representation, Visibility, and Race in American Film and Television:

Screening the Closet. Routledge, 2016.

Kord, Susanne, and Elisabeth Krimmer. Contemporary Hollywood Masculinities: Gender,

Genre, and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Kornhaber, Spencer. “The Shadow Over Call Me by Your Name.” The Atlantic, 3 Jan. 2018,

www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/01/the-shadow-over-call-me-by-your-

name/549269/. Accessed 25 July 2018.

Kozma, Jan. “Grow Up! Grazia Deledda’s Adult-Adolescent Males of Arrested Maturation.”

Annali d’Italianistica, vol. 15, 1997, pp. 329-40.

190

go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA182336889&v=2.1&u=colu44332&it=r&p=A

ONE&sw=w&asid=788e92dcf593891c27cbd9a544892cf6.

Laderman, David. Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie. University of Texas Press, 2002.

Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic

Experience.” Ècrits, Translated by Bruce Fink, W. W. Norton & Company, 2006, pp. 75-

81.

Last Minute Marocco [Last Minute Morocco]. Directed by Francesco Falaschi, 01 Distribution,

2007.

Laws, Zach. “‘Call Me By Your Name’ interviews: Timothee Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg,

Luca Guadagnino, , Walter Fasano exclusive chats.” GoldDerby, 28 Dec.

2017, www.goldderby.com/article/2017/call-me-by-your-name-interviews-timothee-

chalamet-michael-stuhlbarg-luca-guadagnino-james-ivory-walter-fasano-exclusive-

videos-news/. Accessed 8 Aug. 2018.

Le Fosse, Antonio et al., creators. Baby. Fabula Pictures and Netflix, 2018.

Lee, Ashley. “Why Luca Guadagnino Didn't Include Gay Actors or Explicit Sex Scenes in ‘Call

Me by Your Name’ (Q&A).” The Hollywood Reporter, 8 Feb. 2017,

www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/call-me-by-your-name-why-luca-guadagnino-left-

gay-actors-explicit-sex-scenes-q-a-973256. Accessed 9 Aug. 2018.

Lezioni di volo [Flying Lessons]. Directed by Francesca Archibugi. Cattleya, 2007.

Lomuscio, Francesco. “Intervista 10 Regole per fare innamorare - Conferenza stampa.”

everyeye.it, 15 March 2012, cinema.everyeye.it/articoli/intervista-10-regole-per-fare-

innamorare-conferenza-stampa-16384.html. Accessed 8 June 2019.

191

Lowry, Brian. “‘My Brilliant Friend’ Lives up to its Name.” CNN, 18 Nov. 2018,

www.cnn.com/2018/11/18/entertainment/my-brilliant-friend-review/index.html.

Accessed 8 Apr. 2019.

Lucas, Lord. “Federico Moccia: ‘Scamarcio dovrebbe ricredersi su Tre metri sopra il cielo’.”

gossipblog, 20 May 2017, www.gossipblog.it/post/529211/federico-moccia-scamarcio-

dovrebbe-ricredersi-su-tre-metri-sopra-il-cielo. Accessed 21 Dec. 2018.

Lutz, Tom. “Men’s Tears and the Roles of Melodrama.” Boys Don’t Cry?: Rethinking Narratives

of Masculinity and Emotion in the U.S., edited by Milette Shamir and Jennifer Travis,

Columbia University Press, 2002, pp. 185-204.

MacInnes, John. “The Crisis of Masculinity and the Politics of Identity.” The Masculinities

Reader, edited by Stephen M. Whitehead and Frank J. Barrett, Polity, 2001, pp. 311-29.

MacKinnon, Kenneth. Love, Tears, and the Male Spectator. Fairleigh Dickinson University

Press, 2002.

Magaraggia, Sveva. “Tensions Between Fatherhood and the Social Construction of Masculinity

in Italy.” Current Sociology, vol. 61, no. 1, 2012, pp. 76-92.

Mainwaring, Doug. “Amid sex scandals, Hollywood releases gay ‘romance’ that normalizes

man-boy sex.” Life Site, 27 Nov. 2017, www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/call-me-by-your-

name-film-wants-to-normalize-sex-between-men-and-boys-forme. Accessed 18 Aug.

2018.

Mallan, Kerry, and Sharyn Pearce. “Introduction: Tales of Youth in Postmodern Culture.” Youth

Cultures: Texts, Images, and Identities, edited by Kerry Mallan and Sharyn Pearce,

Praeger Publishers, 2003, ix-xix.

192

Marcus, Millicent. Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism. Princeton University Press, 1986.

---. Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation. Johns Hopkins University

Press, 1993.

Marini-Maio, Nicoletta. A Very Seductive Body Politic: Silvio Berlusconi in Cinema. Mimesis

International, 2015.

“Marriages, Separations and Divorces.” Istat Press Release, 14 Nov. 2016,

www.istat.it/en/archive/192521. Accessed 23 May 2019.

Marshall, Sarah. “HBO’s Hauntingly Faithful Adaptation of ‘My Brilliant Friend’.” The Nation,

20 Nov. 2018, www.thenation.com/article/hbo-my-brilliant-friend-tv-adaptation-review-

elena-ferrante-novel/. Accessed 8 Apr. 2019.

Marritz, Ilya. “How can a straight man write so well about gay sex?” Out Magazine, Feb. 2007,

pp. 32-33.

Masenga, Ilaria. “The ‘Delaying of Age’ Novel in Contemporary (1980-2011).”

Ph.D. thesis, University of Exeter, 2013. ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/12001.

McRuer, Robert. “Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence.” The Disability

Studies Reader, edited by Lennard J. Davis, Routledge, 2010, pp. 383-392.

Mercer, John, and Martin Shingler. Melodrama: Genre, Style, Sensibility. Wallflower Press,

2004.

Miller, D.A. “Elio’s Education.” Review of Books, 19 Feb. 2018,

lareviewofbooks.org/article/elios-education/. Accessed 12 July 2019.

193

Mitchell, Molli. “Baby on Netflix: What is the Baby Squillo case?” Express, 29 Nov. 2018,

www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/1052045/Baby-Netflix-plot-true-story-what-is-the-

Baby-Squillo-case-scandal-Italy-Rome. Accessed 9 Apr. 2019.

“Moccia ci riprova con Bova e ‘Scusa, ma ti voglio sposare’.” Quotidiano.net, 12 Feb. 2010,

www.quotidiano.net/spettacoli/cinema/2010/02/12/292188-moccia_riprova.shtml.

Accessed 24 June 2019.

Modleski, Tania. “An Affair to Forget: Melancholia in Bromantic Comedy.” Camera Obscura,

vol. 29, no. 2, 2014, pp. 119-147.

---. “Clint Eastwood and Male Weepies.” American Literary History, vol. 22, no. 1, 2009, pp.

136-58.

Moonlight. Directed by Barry Jenkins, performances by Mahershala Ali, Naomie Harris, and

Trevante Rhodes, A24, 2016.

Morison, Tracy, and Catriona Macleod. Men’s Pathways to Parenthood: Silence and

Heterosexual Gendered Norms. HSRC Press, 2015.

Mortimer, Claire. Romantic Comedy. Routledge, 2010.

Mullan, John. “The Invention of Popular Culture.” The Guardian, 28 Oct. 2000,

www.theguardian.com/dumb/story/0,7369,387444,00.html. Accessed 24 June 2019.

Mulvey, Laura. “Notes on Sirk and Melodrama.” Visual and Other Pleasures, edited by Laura

Mulvey, Indiana University Press, 1989, pp. 39-44.

---. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Visual and Other Pleasures, edited by Laura

Mulvey, Indiana University Press, 1989, pp. 14-26.

---. Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

194

Nadeau, Barbie Latza. “Italy’s Lost Generation: Youth Unemployment Hits Nearly 50 Percent.”

The Daily Beast, 6 June 2014, www.thedailybeast.com/italys-lost-generation-youth-

unemployment-hits-nearly-50-percent. Accessed 4 Apr. 2019.

Nardi, Peter M. Gay Masculinities. Sage Publications, 2000.

Né Giulietta né Romeo [A Little Lust]. Directed by Veronica Pivetti, performances by Andrea

Amato, Pia Engleberth, and Corrado Invernizzi, Pigra s.r.l., 2015.

Neale, Steve. “Melodrama and Tears.” Screen, vol. 27, no. 6, 1986, pp. 6-23.

“Netflix Announces 3 New Italian Original Series: Curon Tre metri sopra il cielo Reboot

Fedeltà.” Netflix Media Center, 29 March 2019, media.netflix.com/en/press-

releases/netflix-announces-3-new-italian-original-series-curon-tre-metri-sopra-il-cielo-

reboot-fedelta. Accessed 11 Apr. 2019.

Newman, Michael Z. “Everyday Italian: Cultivating Taste.” How to Watch Television, edited by

Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell, New York University Press, 2013, pp. 330-37.

Niente può fermarci [Nothing Can Stop Us]. Directed by Luigi Cecinelli. Rai Cinema, 2013.

Non c’è campo [No Signal]. Directed by Federico Moccia, Koch Media, 2017.

O’Rawe, Catherine. Stars and Masculinities in Contemporary Italian Cinema. Palgrave

Macmillan, 2014.

O’Shaughnessy, Michael and Jane Stadler. Media and Society: An Introduction. 3rd ed., Oxford

University Press, 2005.

Padva, Gilad. Queer Nostalgia in Cinema and Pop Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

195

Palma, Ester. “Federico Moccia: ‘I ragazzi? Cercano tutti il grande amore’.” Il Corriere della

Sera, 28 Nov. 2012, vociromane.corriere.it/2012/11/28/federico-moccia-i-ragazzi-

cercano-tutti-il-grande-amore/. Accessed 30 Jan. 2019.

“Patrocinio, Contributi e agevolazioni.” Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali,

www.beniculturali.it/mibac/export/MiBAC/sito-

MiBAC/MenuPrincipale/Ministero/Contributi-e-agevolazioni/index.html. Accessed 15

Aug. 2018.

Paul, Daniel. “Marking Their Territory: Male Adolescence Abroad in Recent Italian Teen Film.”

California Italian Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 1-18.

cloudfront.escholarship.org/dist/prd/content/qt6w37g1w9/qt6w37g1w9.pdf?t=p4pwzg

Per un pugno di dollari [Fistful of Dollars]. Directed by Sergio Leone, performances by Clint

Eastwood, Gian Maria Volontè, and Marianne Koch, Unidis, 1964.

Pickering, Michael, and Emily Keightley. “The Modalities of Nostalgia.” Current Sociology, vol.

54, no. 6, 2006, pp. 919-941.

Poniewozik, James. “Review: ‘My Brilliant Friend’ Is an Intimate Epic.” The New York Times,

14 Nov. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/arts/television/my-brilliant-friend-review-

hbo.html. Accessed 8 Apr 2019.

Powrie, Phil, et al. “Introduction: Turning the Male Inside Out.” The Trouble with Men:

Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema, edited by Phil Powrie et al.,

Wallflower Press, 2004, pp. 1-15.

Primeau, Ronald. Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway. Bowling

Green State University Popular Press, 1996. Print.

196

Proto, Carola. “10 regole per fare innamorare - Le nostre interviste.” ComingSoon.it, 14 Mar.

2012, www.comingsoon.it/cinema/interviste/10-regole-per-fare-innamorare-le-nostre-

interviste/n12416/. Accessed 10 June 2019.

---.“Universitari - molto più che amici: parla Federico Moccia.” Anicaflash, 20 Sept. 2013,

www.comingsoon.it/cinema/interviste/universitari-molto-piu-che-amici-parla-federico-

moccia/n26552/. Accessed 10 June 2019.

Prova a volare [Try To Fly]. Directed by Lorenzo Cicconi Massi, performances by Riccardo

Scamarcio and Alessandra Mastronardi, Flamingo Video, 2007.

Pullella, Philip. “‘Divorce Italian style’ becomes easier, faster with new law.” , 23 Apr.

2015, www.reuters.com/article/us-italy-divorce/divorce-italian-style-becomes-easier-

faster-with-new-law-idUSKBN0NE1JD20150423. Accessed 23 May 2019.

Pulver, Andrew. “A Bigger Splash director: ‘Italian cinema is mostly a bureau for tourism’.” The

Guardian, 4 Feb. 2016, www.theguardian.com/film/2016/feb/04/bigger-splash-director-

luca-guadagnino-italian-cinema-is-mostly-a-bureau-for-tourism. Accessed 30 July 2018.

Rawle, Steven. Transnational Cinema: An Introduction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

Rebel Without a Cause. Directed by Nicholas Ray, performances by James Dean and Natalie

Wood, Warner Brothers, 1955. redazione. “Arriva ‘Tre volte te’, il nuovo libro di Moccia.” The Roman Post, 14 March 2017,

www.theromanpost.com/2017/03/arriva-libro-moccia/. Accessed 13 June 2013.

Reeser, Todd W. Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010

Rehling, Nicola. Extra-Ordinary Men: White Heterosexual Masculinity in Contemporary

Popular Cinema. Lexington Books, 2009.

197

Reich, Jacqueline. Beyond the Latin Lover: Marcello Mastroianni, Masculinity, and Italian

Cinema. Indiana University Press, 2004.

Renga, Dana. “Pastapocalypse! End Times in Italian Trash Cinema.” The Italianist, vol. 31, no.

2, 2011, pp. 243-257.

---. “Italian Teen Film and the Female Auteur.” New Visions of the Child in Italian Cinema,

edited by Danielle Hipkins and Roger Pitt, Peter Lang, 2014, pp. 307-329.

Rigoletto, Sergio. “Against the Teleological Presumption: Notes on Queer Visibility in

Contemporary Italian Film.” The Italianist, vol. 37, no. 2, 2017, pp. 212-27.

---. Masculinity and Italian Cinema: Sexual Politics, Social Conflict and Male Crisis in the

1970s. Edinburgh University Press, 2014.

Robinson, Sally. Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis. Columbia University Press, 2000.

Romei, Valentina. “Youth unemployment in Italy rises to second highest in eurozone.” Financial

Times, 1 March 2019, www.ft.com/content/49ebe172-3c0e-11e9-b72b-2c7f526ca5d0.

Accessed 12 July 2019.

Ross, Sharon Marie, and Louisa Ellen Stein, editors. Teen Television: Essays on Programming

and Fandom. McFarland Publishers, 2008.

Ruspini, Elisabetta. “And Yet Something Is on the Move: Education and New Forms of

Masculinity and Paternity in Italy.” Men and Masculinities Around the World:

Transforming Men’s Practices, edited by Elisabetta Ruspini et al., Palgrave Macmillan,

2011, pp. 59-69.

Russo, Vito. The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies. Harper & Row, 1987.

198

Saturno contro (Saturn in Opposition). Directed by Ferzan Özpetek, performances by Stefano

Accorsi, , and , Medusa Film, 2007.

Schiesari, Juliana. The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics

of Loss in Renaissance Literature. Cornell University Press, 1992.

Schlichte, Garrett. “‘Call Me by Your Name’ is a gay love story. The film should have included

gay sex.” , 18 Dec. 2017,

www.washingtonpost.com/news/soloish/wp/2017/12/18/why-call-me-by-your-name-

should-have-included-gay-sex/?utm_term=.b0a2018a4cc5. Accessed 8 Aug. 2018.

Scusa ma ti chiamo amore [Sorry, If I Love You]. Directed by Federico Moccia, performances by

Raoul Bova and Michela Quattrociocche, Medusa, 2008.

Scusa ma ti voglio sposare [Sorry, If I Want to Marry You]. Directed by Federico Moccia,

performances by Raoul Bova and Michela Quattrociocche, Medusa, 2010.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire.

Columbia University Press, 2016.

---. “Queer and Now.” The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, edited by Donald E. Hall et al.,

Routledge, 2013, pp. 3-17.

“Sempre più giovani italiani disoccupati: li dice l’Istat.” l’Adige, 1 Nov. 2018,

www.ladige.it/news/business/2018/11/01/sempre-pi-giovani-disoccupati-italia. Accessed

4 Apr. 2019.

“Sensual simplicity is Call Me by Your Name’s swooning secret.” Channel24, 23 Feb. 2018,

www.channel24.co.za/Movies/News/sensual-simplicity-is-call-me-by-your-names-

swooning-secret-20180223. Accessed 8 Aug. 2018.

199

“Separations and Divorces in Italy.” Istat Press Release, 27 May 2013,

www.istat.it/en/archive/91141. Accessed 23 May 2019.

Shakespeare, Tom. “Power and Prejudice: Issues of Gender, Sexuality and Disability.” Disability

and Society: Emerging Issues and Insights, edited by Len Barton, Longman Publishing,

1996, pp. 191-214.

---. “The Sexual Politics of Disabled Masculinity.” Sexuality & Disability, vol. 17, no. 1, 1999,

pp. 53-64.

Sherry, Mark. “(Post)colonizing Disability.” The Disability Studies Reader, edited by Lennard J.

Davis, Routledge, 2010, pp. 94-106.

Shychuk, Nora. “For Your Consideration | Why Call Me By Your Name Is The Best Picture Of

The Year.” HeadStuff, 23 Feb. 2018, www.headstuff.org/entertainment/film/call-me-by-

your-name-best-picture-oscar/. Accessed 8 Aug. 2018.

Sims, David. “The Sumptuous Love Story of Call Me by Your Name.” The Atlantic, 29 Nov.

2017. www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/11/call-me-by-your-name-

review/546872/. Accessed 25 July 2018.

Smart, Carol, and Bren Neale. “‘I Hadn’t Really Thought About it’: New Identities/New

Fatherhoods.” Relating Intimacies: Power and Resistance, edited by Julie Seymour and

Paul Bagguley, St. Martin’s Press, 1999, pp. 118-141.

Sobchak, Thomas. “Genre Film: A Classical Experience.” Film Genre Reader IV, edited by

Barry Keith Grant, University of Texas Press, 2012, pp. 121-132.

Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation. Thames and Hudson,

1997.

200

Stephens, John. “‘I’ll Never Be the Same After That Summer’: From Abjection to Subjective

Agency in Teen Films.” Youth Cultures: Texts, Images, and Identities, edited by Kerry

Mallan and Sharyn Pearce, Praeger Publishers, 2003, pp. 123-137.

Stevens, Sufjan. “Visions of Gideon.” Call Me by Your Name: Original Motion Picture

Soundtrack, Sony Masterworks, 2017.

Superbad. Directed by Greg Mottola, Columbia Pictures, 2007.

Tannenbaum, Emily. “The True Story Behind Netflix's ‘Baby’ Is Even More Disturbing Than

the Show.” Cosmopolitan, 3 Dec. 2018,

www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/tv/a25383982/netflix-baby-true-story/. Accessed

9 Apr. 2019.

Tarullo, Maria Giovanna. “Federico Moccia: scusa… ma faccio una lezione all’università La

Sapienza.” Abitare a Roma, 6 March 2010, abitarearoma.it/federico-moccia-scusa-ma-

faccio-una-lezione-alluniversita-la-sapienza/. Accessed 24 June 2019.

Tasker, Yvonne. Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema. Routledge, 1993.

Tasker, Yvonne, and Diane Negra. Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of

Popular Culture. Duke University Press, 2007.

Travers, Ben. “‘My Brilliant Friend’ Review: HBO’s Intimate Adaptation Is a Rich Tale Made

Drab.” IndieWire, 15 Nov. 2018, www.indiewire.com/2018/11/my-brilliant-friend-hbo-

review-elena-ferrante-book-1202020769/. Accessed 9 Apr. 2019.

Tre metri sopra il cielo [Three Steps Over Heaven]. Directed by Luca Lucini, performances by

Riccardo Scamarcio and Katy Louise Saunders, Warner Brothers, 2004.

201

Tropiano, Stephen. Rebels and Chicks: A History of the Hollywood Teen Movie. Back Stage

Books, 2006.

Troyer, John, and Chani Marchiselli. “Slack, Slacker, Slackest: Homosocial Bonding Practices in

Contemporary Dude Cinema.” Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth,

edited by Murray Pomerance and Frances K. Gateward, Wayne State University Press,

2005, pp. 264-276.

Trueman, Patrick, et al. Received by Reed Hasting et al., National Center on Sexual

Exploitation, NCSE, 11 Jan. 2018, www.endsexualexploitation.org/wp-

content/uploads/Netflix_Baby_Sign-On-Letter_FINAL_01-11-18-1-1.pdf. Accessed 16

July 2019.

Un bacio [One Kiss]. Directed by Ivan Cotroneo. Indigo Film, 2016.

Universitari - Molto più che amici [Universitarians - Much More Than Friends]. Directed by

Federico Moccia, Medusa, 2013.

Van Fuqua, Joy. “‘Can you feel it, Joe?’: Male Melodrama and the Feeling Man.” Velvet Light

Trap, vol. 38, 1996, pp. 28-38.

Vassallo, Giuseppina. “Divorzio breve: la legge in Gazzetta Ufficiale.” Altalex, 18 May 2015,

www.altalex.com/documents/leggi/2015/04/23/divorzio-breve-ok-finale-camera-i-5-

punti-chiave. Accessed 23 May 2019.

Wall, Glenda, and Stephanie Arnold. “How Involved is Involved Fathering?: An Exploration of

the Contemporary Culture of Fatherhood.” Gender and Society, vol. 21, no. 4, 2007, pp.

508-527.

202

Walsh, Fintan. Male Trouble: Masculinity and the Performance of Crisis. Palgrave Macmillan,

2010

Ward, Jane. Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men. New York University Press, 2015.

Waters, Melanie. Women on Screen: Feminism and Femininity in Visual Culture. Palgrave

Macmillan, 2011.

Wheeler, André-Naquian. “ The ‘Call Me by Your Name’ Soundtrack is its own Queer Love

Story.” i-D, 18 Dec. 2017, i-d.vice.com/en_au/article/9knwzv/the-call-me-by-your-name-

soundtrack-is-its-own-queer-love-story. Accessed 26 July 2018.

White, Armond. “Call Me by Your Name: Idealized Sex between an Adult Man and a Nubile

Teen.” National Review, 1 Dec. 2017, www.nationalreview.com/2017/12/call-me-your-

name-hollywood-hypocrisy-teen-sex/. Accessed 18 July 2018.

Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, Excess.” Film Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 4, 1991,

pp. 2-13.

---. “Melodrama Revised.” Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, edited by

Nick Browne, University of California Press, 1998, pp. 42-88.

---. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

“Youth Unemployment Rate.” OECD, data.oecd.org/unemp/youth-unemployment-rate.htm.

Accessed 4 Apr. 2019.

Zhang, Gaoheng. “ and : Reading Masculinity, Hybridity, and

Satire in Lezioni di cioccolato (2007), Questa notte è ancora nostra (2008), and Into

Paradiso (2010).” The Cinemas of Italian Migration: European and Transatlantic

203

Narratives, edited by Sabine Schrader and Daniel Winkler, Cambridge Scholars

Publishing, 2013, pp. 263-279.

204

Appendix A. Italian Teen Films, 2003-2013

205

Table 1. The success of teen film in Italy, by Gross Domestic Earnings

Overall Rank in Gross Domestic Year Production Distribution Italy (for Earnings year) 6 2008 Scusa ma ti chiamo amore Federico Moccia $20,913,254 Medusa Medusa

11 2007 Ho voglia di te Luis Prieto $18,594,142 Cattleya Warner Bros. Italia Italian International Film, 12 2007 Notte prima degli esami - Oggi Fausto Brizzi $16,544,856 01 Distribution Rai Cinema Italian International Film, 8 2006 Notte prima degli esami Fausto Brizzi $15,905,030 01 Distribution Rai Cinema 18 2008 Parlami d'amore Silvio Muccino $11,537,025 Cattleya 01 Distribution

19 2010 Genitori & figli. Agitare bene prima dell'uso Giovanni Veronesi $11,455,266 Filmauro Filmauro 11 2003 Ricordati di me Gabriele Muccino $11,141,221 Fandango Medusa 20 20

2 6 19 2007 Come tu mi vuoi Volfango De Biasi $10,947,653 Medusa Medusa

28 2010 Scusa ma ti voglio sposare Federico Moccia $9,217,837 Medusa Medusa

26 2005 Melissa P. Luca Guadagnino $7,175,149 Bess Movie Sony

33 2004 Che ne sarà di noi Giovanni Veronesi $5,779,900 Filmauro Filmauro Italian International Film, 50 2008 Questa notte è ancora nostra Paolo Genovese, Luca Miniero $5,201,233 Buena Vista Buena Vista 11 Marzo, Medusa, 50 2009 Questo piccolo grande amore Riccardo Donna $4, 878,552 Medusa Aurora 52 2009 Amore 14 Federico Moccia $4,665,465 Lotus, Medusa Medusa

57 2013 Bianca come il latte, rossa come il sangue Giacomo Campiotti $4,191,786 Lux Vide, Rai Cinema 01 Distribution Frenesy Film, La 35 2018 Call Me by Your Name Luca Guadagnino $4,157,606 Cinéfacture, Water’s End, Warner Brothers RT Features

206

Overall Rank in Gross Domestic Year Film Director Production Distribution Italy (for Earnings year)

40 2003 Caterina va in città Paolo Virzì $3,816,755 Cattleya, Rai Cinema 01 Distribution

Pupkin, IBC Movie, Rai 74 2011 Scialla Francesco Bruni $3,264,563 01 Distribution Cinema Cattleya, Babe Films, Rai 86 2007 Lezioni di volo Francesca Archibugi $2,270,431 Cinema, Aquarius Film, 01 Distribution Khussro Films Fiction Cinematografica, 81 2012 Io e te $2,161,111 Medusa Wildside, Medusa Cattleya, Warner Brothers 82 2005 L'uomo perfetto Luca Lucini $1,881,273 Italia, Aquarius Film, Warner Brothers Italia Perfect Man Films Bianca Film, Rai Cinema, 87 2012 Il rosso e il blu Giuseppe Piccioni $1,720,151 Teodora Cinecittà Studioes Andrea Leone Films, Rai 20 101 2009 Generazione 1000 euro Massimo Venier $1,712,362 01 Distribution Cinema 7 Eagle Pictures, Film 114 2007 Scrivilo sui muri Giancarlo Scarchilli $1,349,071 Eagle Pictures Kairòs

136 2010 Tutto l'amore del mondo Riccardo Grandi $1,192,420 Medusa Medusa

Key Films, Orisa 125 2012 10 Regole per fare innamorare Cristiano Bortone $1,050,875 Produzioni, Orkestra Lucky Red Entertainment Paco Cinematografica, 128 2017 Non è un paese per giovani Giovanni Veronesi $957,136 Noe Art Producciones, Rai 01 Distribution Cinema Cattleya, Warner Brothers 120 2004 Tre metri sopra il cielo Luca Lucini $916,927 Warner Brothers Italia Italia Colorado Film, Medusa, 131 2017 Classe Z Guido Chiesa $912,713 Medusa ScuolaZoo

207

Overall Rank in Gross Domestic Year Film Director Production Distribution Italy (for Earnings year) Cattleya, Focus Features Universal Pictures 141 2009 Meno male che ci sei Luis Prieto $861,493 International International 146 2013 Universitari - Molto più che amici Federico Moccia $787,423 Lotus, Medusa Medusa

152 2017 Non c'è campo Federico Moccia $670,209 Fabula Pictures Koch Media DAP Italy, Mikado, Productions, 171 2008 Ti stramo Pino Insegno, Gianluca Sodaro $606,209 Mikado Fabrizio Politi Productions Italian Dream Factory, 172 2007 Last Minute Marocco Francesco Falaschi $553,065 01 Distribution Rai Cinema, SBS France 171 2009 Cosmonauta Susanna Nicchiarelli $476,246 Fandango, Rai Cinema Fandango

180 2013 Outing - Fidanzati per sbaglio Matteo Vicino $452,636 Camaleo, Red Carpet Ambi Pictures

20 188 2007 Prova a volare Lorenzo Cicconi Massi $452,529 Busy Film Istituto Luce 8 Universal Pictures 177 2010 Una canzone per te Herbert Simone Paragnani $413,920 Cattleya, MTV Italia International 192 2007 Cardiofitness Fabio Tagliavia $402,434 Palomar, Rai Cinema 01 Distribution Cattleya, Fastfilm, Rai 182 2012 Cosimo e Nicole Francesco Amato $389,907 Bolero Cinema 148 2003 Dillo con parole mie Daniele Luchetti $358,355 StudioCanal Urania Medusa

205 2016 Piuma Roan Johnson $341,602 Sky Italia, Palomar Lucky Red

152 2003 Ora o mai più Lucio Pellegrini $329,689 Fandango, Rai Cinema 01 Distribution

Amka Films, Jba Production, tempesta, Rai 212 2011 Corpo celeste Alice Rohrwacher $306,413 Cinema, ARTE France, Cinecittà Luce RSI Televisione Svizzera, SRG SSR idée suisse

208

Overall Rank in Gross Domestic Year Film Director Production Distribution Italy (for Earnings year) 207 2012 Un giorno speciale Francesca Comencini $272,238 Palomar Lucky red

191 2006 L'Estate del mio primo bacio Carlo Virzì $259,575 Cattleya, Rai Cinema 01 Distribution

Angelika Film, Rai 217 2013 Niente può fermarci Luigi Cecinelli $244,246 01 Distribution Cinema Universal Pictures 252 2017 Slam: Tutto per una ragazza Andrea Molaioli $163,771 Indigo Film, Rai Cinema International

241 2011 I baci mai dati $151,454 Nuvola Film, Rosetta Film Videa

Dania Film, , Rai 270 2011 Almeno tu nell'universo Andrea Biglione $76,708 Lucky Red Cinema 2 09

209