ABSTRACT
Mafia activity is a very specific subset of true-crime narratives wherein audiences are encouraged to indulge in either voyeuristic fascination or sympathetic lamentation. Images of death can be seen in several ways, including as dreadful, intriguing, or even artistic and appealing in nature and this chapter examines how audience responses are encouraged via two discourses sourced from documentaries available in the American media market, the sensational and the sober. The former discourse is dominant in “The Godfathers” episode of Inside the Mafia (National Geographic, 2005), whilst the latter dominates Excellent Cadavers (Marco Turco, 2005) and Shooting the Mafia (Kim Longinotto, 2019) which both address the effects of mafia violence. While the different production values of these examples may suggest they inevitably contrast, they focus on the same events, something which reveals intriguing similarities, especially in the use of photographs featuring death. We argue that the films’ surrounding narratives focus on moments in the twentieth century involving battles between the forces of good and evil, and that the intensity of the images of death helps in certain circumstances to elevate events to the level of classical tragedy. Further, these images may be presented as violent spectacles and/or as causing distress, but they also memorialize the criminal powers that were the cause of it. Thus, although some documentaries on the mafia wars may aim to memorialize victims and resistance, this chapter argues that the narrative contexts of violent images may also serve to reinforce mafia mythologies.
