California Italian Studies

The article explores the representation of contemporary organized crime through waste management in Matteo Garrone’s film Gomorra. While the reduction of human life to waste is indisputable and receives visual confirmation in the film finale, the value of refuse for camorra is rendered more subtly through narrative and stylistic choices that effectively remove waste from the screen. Dematerialized and displaced, garbage becomes a powerful metaphor for the invisible ties connecting the mafia to regular business. Rather than insisting on the irreducibility of waste as a visible sign of the persistently violent presence of camorra in southern Italy, Garrone’s film highlights its commoditization and trains the viewer to look at waste through contemporary camorra’s eyes. In this perspective, mafia ceases to be the irreducible other, a localized phenomenon residing at the margins of “law abiding” Italy, and is presented as an intrinsic constituent of global capitalism. In addition to demonstrating the displacement of refuse from the screen and the blurring of distinctions between legal and illegal business transactions, the article suggests that Garrone’s specific representation of waste management also offers a space of resistance in a film that implicates spectators in contemporary organized crime. By applying the relational notion of waste introduced by Guy Hawkins in The Ethics of Waste to an analysis of the garbage “stakeholders” in Gomorra, the author demonstrates how the unethical behavior of the protagonist is an example of the self-determination typical of late modernity, further exemplified in the film by the boys who model their actions after Scarface. The analysis also shows how an ethical choice is presented as possible and offered to the implicated viewers as the only space of resistance in the movie.