The Gangster as Tragic Hero

reading notes to Warshow and Zoom invite for May 3, the first meeting of Gangster Capitalism

Paid subscribers to CLiuAnon get access to monthly Reading Group Meetings on Zoom. Invite below the PayWall. The CLiuAnon community is a safe space for Class Traitors, jilted lovers and recovering liberals who crave a long read, a good conversation and a refuge from the creeping authoritarianism of our times. We used to have a political horizon that we could look to with optimism. In the absence of such a possibility, we rebuild real solidarity and wage worker side hustler morale while trying to be hedonistic without being creeps and making it an agenda item on HR meetings, and finally ruthlessly and fruitfully negative about the political and cultural scene. We need better ideological critique and Warshow was a master of the genre.

May 3rd begins a cycle of seminars on Gangster Capitalism. Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah provides the background for our study of the globalization and gangster capitalism. Saviano’s study of the economy in his home city of Naples is a dramatic and devastating critique of early 2000s globalization. Saviano had to go into the witness protection program after the book was published. The Camorra or the criminal economic organization that Saviano says has penetrated into every aspect of Neapolitan life was able to profit from the flow of goods and people into the port of Naples. The violence of its employment conditions was a direct result the poverty in which southern Italy was enured.

The recommended screening I’ve asked everyone to do is Robert Warshow’s The Gangster as Tragic Hero, about which I make a few comments below.

“At a time when the normal condition of the citizen is a state of anxiety, euphoria spreads over our culture like the broad smile of an idiot.”

Warshow wrote this sentence in 1948, three years after the end of World War II, at the height of union power in the United States, but just at the very beginning of the Cold War. Anti-Communist sentiment would be whipped into a fever pitch and a generation of intellectuals, writers, filmmakers, union feminists and union leaders who had had any association with the Communist Party would be persecuted and driven into lives of misery and obscurity. In “The Gangster as Tragic Hero” he quotes Leila Rogers’ testimony to the House Un-American Committee about a film she found un-American because it was too gloomy. Warshow calls this attitude philistine. He wants to celebrate a popular genre that does not turn away from the feelings of “desperation and inevitable failure” that are byproducts of a culture obsessed with success and fake optimism.

Warshow died of a heart attack in 1955 at the age of thirty seven.

He wrote beautiful and simply about popular culture, but he wrote as an intellectual who very simply and without pretense took part in what we can call the folk culture of the 20th century. He loved going to the movies. He had ordinary enthusiasms, but didn’t wear them on his sleeve like badges of honor. This was part of his Leftism and like Adorno, he felt that the key to the puzzle of the present lay in taking popular or mass culture seriously.

His reading of gangster films of the 1930s is deceptively simple. The gangster film is the opposite of the Horatio Alger myth: Alger’s 19th century novels featured hardworking, honest heroes with nothing to their names who make their fortunes and find their happiness in rags to riches upward mobility sometimes helped on by the discovery of their secret identities as heirs to great fortunes. Ideologically reactionary, these stories appealed to popular readers who dreamt of hard work and honesty rewarded with social recognition and lives of ease and luxury.

The gangster movie is also about the rags to riches story. In Little Caesar (1931) and Scarface: the Shame of a Nation (1932) riches turn to rags, but the rise and fall of Rico and Tony are familiar, repeated, dread producing, in short mythical.

The protagonists of each film, Rico and Tony stand at the outside of the feast of American success and look into that world like half starved children. They hunger for bling, beautiful women, beautiful suits, big cars and big jewels because they think those things will bring them happiness. Happiness is promised by the American constitution itself: why should street smart Italian American working class heroes be excluded from a world of fragrant cigars smoked in velvet lined boudoirs?

Gangster films according to Warshow present “consistent and astonishingly complete presentation of the modern sense of tragedy.” Rico and Tony live by the gun and die by the gun. There is no escape for them. The Hays Code censors found the tragic identification with such heroes morally ambiguous and therefore unworthy of the American film industry.

The films do not glorify violence for Rico and Tony as much as demonstrate that there is no way to achieve success without it. Rico and Tony are also sick of being bossed around by their bosses. Who can’t identify with discontentment with their positions at work? They need to show the boss their worth. They want promotions. They want to be seen. They discover that they can get the recognition they crave by being more violent (more hard working?) than the bosses and their henchmen, but both protagonists want too much. Something is always missing — the promise of happiness is never fulfilled. Success is hollow, but Rico and Tony don’t know how to do self care either, and live in the moment. They never feel safe, but they can’t stop themselves from taking stupid risks.

In the case of Saviano’s book, which we will revisit throughout the seminar, work in Naples, is working for the Camorra. There are no other jobs. Working for the Camorra means accepting their way of doing business through violence and coercion. There are no functional institutions to which one might have recourse to find other kinds of work in an economically devastated world. What can an ambitious young person do once recruited to the order of violence? Organized crime destroys not only ambition, it destroys craft and work itself.