Anti-defamation, a Punch Line

Joey Skee (January 31, 2011)

Something Funny about Somewhere.

I saw Sofia Coppola’s film Somewhere last night and while I was underwhelmed (it’s no Lost in Translation), I was struck by a line of dialogue. During a press junket with foreign reporters hurling questions at the film’s main character, Johnny Marco, an anomic actor of second-rate movies, the disembodied voice of an “Italian journalist” asks, “How do you think this role represents Italian Americans?”

Online reviews [2] reference this query as illustrating “the staggering inanity of film journalists.” This throwaway line is also curious because it points to the various ways anti-defamation efforts are perceived as a punch line for TV and film directors, comedians, bloggers, and others.

“The Sopranos” was particularly adept at critiquing anti-defamation protests by the national organizations, often before they had time to do so.

The agita du jour [3] is about the fourth season of “Jersey Shore” being filmed in Italy, a country whose lecherous 74-year-old Prime Minister could easily serve as the MTV reality show’s thematic godfather. (The self-proclaimed, Italian-American spokespeople are silent about the embarrassment that is Berlusconi [4].) In a nanosecond comes a hilarious take from Taiwan, a video animation with the increasingly de rigueur joke that is anti-defamation outrage.

Instead of bemoaning the latest shenanigans of a bunch of Jersey guidos, we should unite and raise our collective voices to condemn Sofia Coppola’s outrageous denigration of Italian American heritage-culture-tradition-legacy-patrimony in her depiction of Johnny Marco’s culinary habits. In one revealing scene, the Italian-American actor is seen eating pasta like a gavon, slurping the dangling strands of spaghetti that stretch from his mouth to the plate below.

Italian Americans know how to twirl spaghetti! Che vergogna, Sofia!