YOUR LYIN’ EYES

The late, great African American comedian Richard Pryor had a bit where he related that one of his ex-wives once caught him in flagrante delicto with another woman. Unfazed, Pryor looked at his enraged wife and said, “Now who you gonna believe? Me or your lyin’ eyes?” 

In his 1982 concert film Richard Pryor: Live at the Sunset Strip, Pryor also talks about working for “the mafia” in an Ohio nightclub during his struggling early days. (Note: The mafia is a criminal gang in Sicily, but the American media has corroded the term to mean any Italian surnamed criminal, even two-bit gamblers. One-stop-shop defamation!) In a skit which is both hilarious and horrific, Pryor imitates the guttural voice of one of his employers, a man who “jokes” about stabbing a victim with an icepick—”and then the effin’ icepick broke off!!” 

The mobster laughs uproariously, like a husky-voiced hyena. Funny?  Well, not to the victim. And certainly not to Italian Americans who, even in a comedy routine, are once again associated with depravity.

What I’m getting at here is how, despite the brutality of real-life Italian American thugs, Hollywood’s “lyin’ eyes” (lyin’ lenses?) has conned everyone—Italian Americans included—into treating them as folk heroes or figures of fun. “Funny? How? Like a clown, do I amuse you?” 

Fans of Goodfellas love quoting that scene. It does amuse them. What’s lost are two important ideas:  a) the scene reiterates the Joe Pesci character’s psychopathic nature and b) it reinforces the idea that Italian Americans are clowns. We are America’s unofficial village idiots. 

Even the so-called “dignified” portrayals of Don Vito and Michael Corleone are a con job. In real-life, Italian mobsters were no gentlemen. In fact, the “dignified” Don Vito was spoofed in a sketch on Saturday Night Live back in the mid-1970s. It featured John Belushi as Don Vito Corleone, attending group therapy. Sounds familiar. Did David Chase see this?  If so, that makes him a plagiarist as well as an asshole. 

Cut to 2026. Our media image massacre continues. Yet no one but our Institute seems to see it. Why this blind spot among our leaders?  In the past six months, three films have been released promoting the usual Italian-male-as-psychopath characters: In the Hand of Dante, Father Joe, and By Any Means. Another one with John Travolta, November 1963, is scheduled for release in (clever!) November. 

Typical Hollywood blurring-of-the-lines: Two of the films are fictionalized (Dante and Joe) and two are based on real-life sleazes (By Any Means and November 1963). The first two films wildly over-exaggerate the brutality of the characters (a familiar tactic); the second two films do the same yet are shielded behind that old stand-by: “Based on a True Story.” Translation: Anything goes. (Indeed, the torture techniques which Gregory Scarpa uses on Ku Klux Klan members in By Any Means have never been verified by anyone, including the FBI.) 

Can you name four Hollywood films released during the past six months which counter-balance these images? No. There are none. You likely have to go back to 2014 for a film featuring a relentlessly positive Italian American lead character: Unbroken. And that’s just one movie. 

Meanwhile, as our media image continues to burn, Italian American actors, writers, directors and producers—some even honored by Italian American organizations, past and present—continue to blithely defame the reputations of our hard-working ancestors. That’s no lie! 

We do owe Richard Pryor a small shout-out: He told the truth about these strangers among us. They’re cruel, vicious, and not-so-funny. They do not deserve to be lionized on podcasts, in books, or on TV and movies screens. In mythological terms, they are monsters, not heroes. 

Allowing Hollywood to continue to lie about us has merely emboldened the original Big Lie to get even bigger. Every new mob movie is a nail in our ethnic coffin, burying our true history. Ignoring institutionalized Hollywood bigotry is not an effective weapon. We must “see the evil.”

It is only a matter of time before young children begin wearing Joe Pesci masks on Halloween to scare their neighbors. Boo! –BDC