pizza
I agree with your point. How Spike gets away with it(depicting American Italians in a bad light consistently) is sort of a film trick.
In my opinion, there "acceptable" ethnic groups or types that can be broadly stereotyped in American films and media with no recourse.....rural poor White southerners and working class Northeast Italian Americans are two of those groups.
Jokes, slurs,caricatures of these groups are commonplace and until/unless any organization fights to change it...they will remain embedded in pop culture.
Spike knows this, so he uses working class Italian American characters as representatives of whatever "ism" he's trying to discuss in his films.
Mainstream audience doesn't identify with this working class ethnic White so Spike's storyline is more easily received and digested than if the same character were a middle class wasp.
Spike also gets away with it by using a hollywood cliche..."All of the members of a certain group are bad EXCEPT this one...so my film isn't racist" There are characters in Spike's films that exist for this reason only. The younger brother, in Do The Right Thing, for example.
The WW2 film that Spike made "Miracle at St. Anna"was set in Italy...and despite what I expected.....the Italian characters weren't stereotypes or just inserted to highlight racism. Film was ruined by bad acting by the leads and uneven directing but it showed Italians as human beings and not "types".The villagers in the film were so friendly with the Black soldiers that I saw the film as an olive branch by Spike to American Italians....or perhaps a commentary about how American color based racism is learned by immigrants when they arrive here.
At any rate, pizza you are right to call out Spike on this issue. I haven't seen Summer of Sam, but in the Spike films I've seen...he makes concerted effort to craft Italian American characters a certain way.
Until Americans of Italian background challenge Spike for this glaring contradiction..nothing will change. Spike sees that very little resistance is put up against the mainstream culture stereotyping members of this group, so he does it too.
He's wrong and a hypocrite.
But remember, the negative fictional depictions of Blacks in American media didn't go away because the media decision makers just decided to stop writing them. People and organizations had to call them out and protest against them.
"White" people aren't going to protest or call Spike out because he doesn't go after "white" people so hard in his films but specifically Italian Americans.
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I'm pretty sure that in Spike's new york stories and films that some characters were written as other white ethnic groups but that pressure from the studios made him change them to Italian.
Would be unacceptable for "jewish" characters to be so broadly stereotyped but studio will greenlight and finance Spike's films throwing Italian Americans under the bus.
