Epic of Normality and Media Nostalgia in Hanno ucciso l'uomo ragno (2024-): Forms of Audiovisual, Transmedia and Serial Visibility of the Italian Pop Music Biopic

Abstract

Within the renaissance of the pop music biopic, a phenomenon that has been manifesting itself in Italy for over a decade, the recent highlight has been Hanno ucciso l'uomo ragno (S. Sibilla, 2024-), a series produced by Sky and dedicated to the pop duo of 883 (Max Pezzali and Mauro Repetto). This product is characterized by offering a specific form of reconfiguration of the Sky model and the biopic genre through different narrative elements, like the recourse to a totalizing internal focus of Pezzali's point of view, the use of the song not as a performative or musical element, but as a cultural and unveiling narrative device, and the link with a broader transmedial ecosystem. In this way, it contributes to 883's great transmedial history by feeding on a shared memory in the cognitive heritage of the spectators, and at the same time helping to create it from scratch in nostalgic-media terms. The result is the construction of a specific epic of normality in which the two performers place themselves at the crossroads of individual and collective instances that allowed them to firmly imprint themselves in the Italian cultural and medial panorama of the 1990s and 2000s.