The bad boy attitude has always been attractive. Spectators and readers used to project themselves by living experience that they would never embody. This ban is alluring, and makes money. Thanks to the cinema, people can be a supervillain for a time and travel around different periods. To my mind, this kind of stories can explain why these gangs or criminal organizations worked and still work. 

Humanizes that can’t be

If you watched series like The Picky Blinders or Gomorra, you will paradoxically develop an attachment feeling for the characters. Through their love stories, their disillusion and their inside demons, you will see that behind mobsters, there are humans with failures and wounds. It doesn’t erase their crimes, however it allows us to understand a little of their state of mind. For example, The Joker, which is a character often depict as an antihero. In the eponymous film released this year ; we discovered a new face of him. A man, destroyed by his mental illness and ununderstood by his relatives. This situation pushes him to reveal his horrendous sides. 

For The Picky Blinders, the Netflix series grabs you in the old Birmingham where the gypsy gangs’ laws were above the justice’s one. Even if their actions or way of life aren’t our, this series tells us how they lived, why they used to kill or decided to make their justice. Their wounds from the past and their failures humanized them and make them closer to us. This distance who disappears over the episodes and we almost take part of the family.

This distinction between films, series and real life is due to the art of cinema. In real life, no one would accept these crimes but when we know it’s not real and jut fiction, we can feel compassion and empathy for people who don’t deserve it. And this is the power of fiction.

Mafia against state

Mostly, the Mafia’s stories related real facts and events that happened by the past. Part of Italy’s history, the Mafia’s shadow still be part of the Italian memory. More than just criminals, the Mafia organization and some gangs represented a kind of opposition against the state. With their laws and their own functioning which questioning the government or the power in place. In this case, series and films about gangsters’ stories represent another way to fight the systemic violence from state, by enforcing their violence. Violence that’s make money by the way. Mafia are not do-gooder either. They still have their interests and finally seems closer than a state that they wanted to show.