Unfinished Business

"Renga has already firmly established herself as a leading expert on Italian Mafia film narratives and documentaries with the foundational Mafia Movies: A Reader. Her latest, Unfinished Business is an innovative, expertly conceived and executed study that will surely generate new debates in various fields of study." -- Robin Pickering-Iazzi, Professor, Department of French, Italian, and Comparative Literature, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee "Written in a lively and engaging tone, this provocative and highly original work makes an important contribution to Italian film studies." -- Aine O'Healy, Department of Humanities, Loyola Marymount University

Unfinished Business is the first book to examine Italian mafia cinema of the past decade.

Unfinished Business is the first book to examine Italian mafia cinema of the past decade. It provides insightful analyses of popular films that sensationalize violence, scapegoat women, or repress the homosexuality of male protagonists. Dana Renga examines these works through the lens of gender and trauma theory to show how the films engage with the process of mourning and healing mafia-related trauma in Italy.

Unfinished Business argues that trauma that has yet to be worked through on the national level is displaced onto the characters in the films under consideration. In a mafia context, female characters are sacrificed and non-normative sexual identities are suppressed in order to solidify traditional modes of viewer identification and to assure narrative closure, all so that the image of the nation is left unblemished.