Berlusconi Between Politics and Popular Culture By Brandon Blair Schneider A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Italian Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Professor Mia Fuller, Chair Professor Albert Ascoli Professor Abigail De Kosnik Spring 2014 Abstract Berlusconi Between Politics and Popular Culture by Brandon Blair Schneider Doctor of Philosophy in Italian Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Mia Fuller, Chair In this dissertation I contextualize the political protagonism of Silvio Berlusconi with respect to important heroes of contemporary Italian popular culture. Comparing Berlusconi to the protagonists of Italy’s dramatized television series and TV-movies, I consider the political and pop cultural significance of his behavior through Antonio Gramsci’s theories of hegemony and the national popular. I locate Berlusconi’s political connection to contemporary Italian popular culture by briefly contrasting it to past iterations of the politics-popular culture relationship in Italy and the United States, and to its likely future configurations in Italy. My research shows that while Berlusconi is often a potent and educative symbol of a hegemonic, conservative national popular culture, he is also often at odds with important components of said culture. This finding adds nuance to most contemporary considerations of Berlusconi’s power, which frequently posit his political and cultural influence as monolithic. Increasing social and cultural fragmentation in Italy suggests that the “Berlusconis” of the future will likewise embody a charismatic and spectacular form of politics, though they will be bereft of Berlusconi’s wider political-cultural syncing, which, while never perfect, has nevertheless been the historically most significant facet of his influence. 1 Table of Contents Preface ii Texts v Chapters vi Acknowledgements ix Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Narrative 1 Fiction 2 Protagonists and Problems 3 Gramsci 4 Berlusconi’s Biography 8 Berlusconi’s Narratives in the 1980s and 1990s 9 Televised Fiction 20 Chapter 2 Introduction 25 Texts 26 Protagonists 29 Problems 37 Politics, Popular Culture, Gramsci: Supermen and Common Sense 41 Italian Politics and Popular Culture in the Past: Protagonists and Problems 46 Chapter 3 Introduction 53 Texts 53 Protagonists 57 Problems 64 Italian Politics and Popular Culture in the Present 67 Politics, Popular Culture, Gramsci: “The Sexual Question” 73 Chapter 4 Introduction 78 Texts 79 Protagonists 81 Problems 88 Politics, Popular Culture, Gramsci: Education 88 Politics and Popular Culture in the United States: 2008 and Beyond 94 Hegemony and National-Popular Culture? Berlusconi’s Past, Present, and Future Positioning in Italian Politics and Popular Culture 98 “Berlusconi” and the Digital Future 105 Bibliography 108 i Preface In this dissertation I analyze the political protagonism of Silvio Berlusconi. I do so by contrasting the performances of contemporary Italy’s most powerful individual with those of the protagonists of Italy’s most-consumed form of popular culture, its dramatized television series and TV-movies.1 I contextualize the findings of my investigation with respect to Antonio Gramsci’s theories of political and cultural power, and his thoughts on the relation between these fields. While “hegemony” is likely the first Gramscian concept that will come to the reader’s mind in such a scenario, I have attempted to go beyond a strict examination and application of this term to my findings. While I discuss hegemony and its relationship to Berlusconi and contemporary Italian popular culture in the first and final chapters of this dissertation, I also dedicate substantial attention to other important aspects of Gramsci’s thoughts. These include his concept of the national-popular, his thoughts on the connection between sexuality and the economy, and his reflections on education, broadly considered. As I discuss in my conclusion, these latter facets are all part of a wider hegemonic picture; my goal between my initial discussion of hegemony, in Chapter 1 of the dissertation, and my subsequent application of the concept to my findings, in Chapter 4, is to flesh out how these “strands” of hegemony in contemporary Italy operate; I feel that breaking up hegemony into these parts allows for a greater understanding of Berlusconi as a nexus between politics and popular culture in contemporary Italy. Of course, such partitions are useful analytically, but potentially mystifying of the seamless operation of what has come to be described as “berlusconismo.”2 I accept this limitation, believing that some reflective distance, even if artificial, is useful to understand the Berlusconi phenomenon, though I do not believe an excessive cataloguing of what Berlusconi does is necessarily useful. Such is the overlap among the different aspects of Berlusconi, or 1 I have not performed a detailed quantitative analysis to verify this claim. Still, with the most watched of these programs regularly reaching audiences of more than 10 million viewers, I believe the only comparable cultural items, in terms of quantitative consumption, might be Internet videos that can similarly receive tens of millions of “hits.” The television programs I analyze still have more widespread cultural resonance in Italy, given their subsequent and partial “rielaboration” or other “recycling” (of their stories and/or of their stars) in affiliated media programs or platforms, such as reality or variety television programs and tabloid magazines. While this situation may gradually be changing, and Internet- or pay-TV-related material may come to eclipse the power of broadcast television programs such as those discussed here, in the period I analyze, 2000-2008, mainstream broadcast television was the most powerful media instrument in Italy, and the fictional programs that I analyze were no exception. 2 As of late April 2014, a search in Google Scholar for “berlusconismo” yields approximately 1,100 results. It has not been possible to review the vast majority of this material. The most significant discussion of berlusconismo, for this dissertation, has been Paul Ginsborg and Enrica Asquer’s edited volume Berlusconismo: Analisi di un sistema di potere (Rome: Laterza, 2011), discussed below. I have also benefited from reading, even if often in disagreement, Giovanni Orsina’s apologist Il berlusconismo nella storia d’Italia (Venice: Marsilio, 2013). I have also examined Diego Giachetti’s Berlusconi e il berlusconismo (Varese: Arterigere, 2010), though this text has not had a significant impact on my thoughts, even if I agree with its central premise that to understand the last thirty years in Italy it is important to focus not just on Berlusconi, but the wider aspects of Italian culture that have contributed to his success. The reader of this dissertation will note that several times I offer the quantitative data of a given search term in a database. This operation is meant neither as a nod to “digital humanities” nor as a substitute for qualitative examination of material; it serves, rather, to underline, very simply, the vast, and I would argue, unwieldy and ultimately unmasterable (at least in a total sense) nature of the scholarship on both Berlusconi and Gramsci. ii “berlusconismo” (I discuss the latter in a moment), that ultimately a concentration on several fundamental aspects that seem to be useful abstractions of his various activities appears to be the most efficient way of understanding the power and potential systematicity of Berlusconi’s influence in Italy. Ironically, the best “synthesis” of “berlusconismo,” in the sense just indicated, is to be found in what might be considered a “cataloguing” operation, though this was clearly not the intent of the publication. Paul Ginsborg and Enrica Asquer’s edited volume, Berlusconismo: analisi di un sistema di potere, offers a fine survey of Berlusconi’s influence in various sectors of Italian society; its most useful contributions to the understanding of Berlusconi’s model of power (what they have in mind when the speak of berlusconismo), however, can be found in its fairly succinct outline of the central elements of berlusconismo, and particularly in its specific treatment of Berlusconi’s cultural operations, an important aspect of my consideration of the politician and media magnate. Ginsborg and Asquer identify the key, constitutive aspects of berlusconismo in its patrimonial nature, particular cultural discourse (discussed below) ultimately misogynous framing of gender relations, cynical relationship with the Catholic Church, repeated discrediting of public insitutions such as the Italian legal system, and its divisive mode of operation (along class, national, sexual lines). These facets are all useful for understanding Berlusconi and his model of power, but I feel Ginsborg and Asquer’s treatment of Berlusconi’s cultural operations most accurately, and efficiently, captures the spirit of both his political performances and wider cultural influence. The authors describe Berlusconi’s “populismo culturale” as a “rappresentazione della realtà che seleziona aspetta parziali di essa, e li amplifica, li manipola, e li volgarizza.”3 While this description is applicable to numerous examples of political populism and perhaps many examples of popular culture, I find it particularly apt to describe Berlusconi because it also underwrites two other