In their preface to the Italian translation of Jenkins’s Convergence Culture, in 2007, the collective of writers from Bologna known as Wu Ming stated, “In the best of all possible worlds, the publication of this book would shake the debate on Internet and new communication technologies in Italy like an earthquake.”1 Wu Ming’s prediction did not come true, although evidence that media convergence and transmedia storytelling are fundamentally influencing Italian culture via a global perspective has attracted some scholarly attention in the age of digital media. Among the few studies originating from Italy to consider Jenkins’s perspective, Giuliana Benvenuti’s analysis of what she calls “the brand Gomorrah” sheds light on the structures of media franchise in Italy as “a meta-text potentially infinite and open to creativity.”2 From the international bestselling book Gomorrah (2006) to Sky TV’s Gomorrah: La Serie (Gomorrah: The Series, 2014–) (available globally through Netflix), the stories of Italian organized crime across national borders (from the outskirts of Naples to Honduras) build a narrative world that is branded with the name Roberto Saviano, author of the literary text and creator of the series, as well as screenwriter for a movie drawn from his book (Gomorrah, dir. Matteo Garrone, 2008) and coauthor with Mario Gelardi of a theatrical production (Gomorrah, 2007). Further, Benvenuti cites as another example Wu Ming novelists, who experiment with “the strategies of active engagement of audiences from below, employed in cultural productions by big corporations.”3 According to Benvenuti, what Wu Ming members understand is that production and reception are now more than ever structurally synergistic, with regard to media objects that not only develop across platforms, but also exploit practices of participatory culture.
With this book, I demonstrated that the paradigm of convergence is not only relevant to the study of new technologies and contemporary Italian media culture, but also to its history, beginning with the changes in the media system that occurred in the immediate postwar period and throughout the following decades, culminating with the capillary spread of celebrity culture in the 1970s. By exploring the industry of the photoromance, we can expand our understanding of how different media industries function(ed) and are related to each other (not only at the economic level but also at the cultural and social levels). In particular, the illustrated magazine that works “in much the same way as the Internet in the contemporary media landscape” is a specific vehicle for film stardom, in the fifties, and then later for music and television celebrity.4 Furthermore, we discover that the persistent “glocal” aspect of today’s media franchises, like Gomorrah (representing a local reality while appealing to global audiences), is also not new. Born from the hybridization of comics, film, and photography, on the foundation of the tendency of Italian cultural industries to privilege imports, photoromances made in Italy not only were successfully exported to communities of the Italian diaspora, across the Alps and the Atlantic, but also translated and reproduced in many more countries through franchises, or appropriated and reinvented by other national publishers. At the dawn of convergence, Italian photoromances appealed to a growing audience of female fans, contributing locally to literacy and globally to the spread of consumer culture and, at the same time, of modern gender discourses.
In this respect, the case of the photoromance functions in this book as a prism through which to understand how shifting strategies in media industries reflect and are reflected in the flux of changing social structures, gender roles and hierarchies, economic demands, and political power relations. In particular, the rise of female fanship and fandom, riding the wave of consumer culture, determined the success of magazines like Bolero Film, cleverly exploited by publishers like Mondadori and, at the same time, by advertising companies. While thriving economically, the culture of the photoromance spread moral panic and provoked reactions of contempt among the established political class and the intelligentsia. Also in this sense, the new (for the time) media product was very much a frontrunner. Today, convergence “seems to pervade any media strategy for attracting audiences and business opportunities, thus also penetrating into academic research and curricula.”5 In Italy, however, the practices of convergence today face as much resistance from the cultural elites as they did in the past. According to Wu Ming, “The problem is that the Italian debate on pop culture, ninety times over a hundred, concerns the trash with which TV poisons us, as if the ‘popular’ were necessarily that, while qualitative distinctions exist and so do historical evolutions. Otherwise, we would think that Sandokan, Star Trek, Lost, TG4 News, and The Babe and the Nerd are all on the same level.”6 In fact, this book argues that the issue lies precisely in the hierarchical perspective with which Italian criticism, including that of Wu Ming, has approached mass culture and, more specifically, has dismissed the active role of audiences and the relevance of habits of consumption and fandom. While in their own work Wu Ming members appear to understand precisely the importance of how reader/users access, consume, and appropriate cultural products, by making a distinction between Sandokan and Lost, they reiterate an understanding of the “quality” of texts as inherent to their structures and interpretations (and their own interpretation, as a matter of fact); meanwhile, the very act of reading still has no value per se and neither does the collective experience of fandom. On the contrary, I claim that the cultural, social and political relevance of the photoromance resides in the economy of production and reception within which both parties at play (makers and users) negotiate both representation and participation.
Wu Ming’s critical judgment on the products with which “TV poisons us” ultimately aims to distinguish between technology and its uses, in order to argue for a positive account of new technologies and their potential for political participation. At the same time, the collective falls prey to the same attitude that demeaned photoromances and melodramas vis-à-vis art cinema and, in the seventies, other types of comics. This attitude, as I explain throughout the book, is also implicitly or explicitly gendered: the hierarchization of genres (melodrama, romance) is associated with the femininity of their readers/viewers with the purpose (or effect) of devaluing both. In the context of postwar Europe, the cult of the (male) film auteur and the binary opposition between art and commercial cinema define the cultural backdrop against which the irrational and morally unrestrained female fan of photoromances joins those of weepies and pulp romances. Represented in films, these fans respond to unspoken anxieties of an industry and an intellectual class that are fundamentally patriarchal. With the purpose of deconstructing this position, my analyses show that the longing for proximity (to the text, to the star, to the celebrity) and the wish of appropriation (against the moral rights of the authors and the economic rights of the industries) by which critics debased fans, are rather powerful tools of self-recognition and collective identification. My netnographic study of the Lancio fandom in contemporary digital platforms particularly addresses this shift in perspective, thus dismantling conceptions of the female fan that, in the words of Mary Ann Doane, “can only be seen as reinforcing her submission.”7 Lancette (female Lancio fans, as noted earlier) create meaning and context by sharing, discussing, and archiving both products (images of celebrities, digital copies of photoromances) and their own experiences of consumption. At the boundaries of legality, members of Facebook groups engage with and expand the narrative world of photoromances to the point that they cease to see themselves as simply consumers, but rather become part of the one and only “Lancio family.”
“At long last, we can read and watch television at the same time.” The ironic comment comes from American journalist Alan Kriegsman, whose 1979 article in the Washington Post I quoted at the very beginning of this book. Here at its end, going back to that article we can understand the underpinning critique of value that hierarchizes the products of mass culture to the detriment of Italian imports in the United States. Also, we can trace a tradition in which the same statement is gendered to label not only the products (romances), but also their readers (women) within a scale that places them both at the very bottom (soon it will be soap operas’ turn). At the same time, Kriegsman points out a demand that is far from extreme or unusual and to which the advent of the Italian photoromance in the United States appears as the perfect response, predicting what is in store for the future: multitasking users and multi-platform product franchises. In this continuum that links the past of the photoromance to the present of the Internet, The Photoromance had the goal of reversing the critical judgment of Kriegsman and others to discover the array of innovations brought forward by the Italian industries and the space for participation not only assigned to but also conquered by readers and viewers.
In a 2019 interview, photoromance maker Francesca Giombini confessed to me: “There is still so much to do!”8 Giombini has been looking for years for a publisher that would sponsor her work, aside from the market logic of weekly magazines. Burdened by a long tradition of mockery in the press and the dismissal of scholarship, the photoromance may have a future beyond its past. And the future might be brighter if, across national borders, more scholars were to expand, build out, and drill down into the story I have told in this book.