When Gods Visit the Sins of the Fathers upon their Children: Italian Crime Teen Drama as a Dark Coming-of-Age

Abstract

"Coming-of-age stories are linked to the concepts of rite of passage and boundary experience" (Driscoll 2011). Adolescence can be outlined as a developmental crisis, a fracture of the unconscious in which the search for one's identity necessarily passes through a collision with the parental imago. If contemporary teen dramas seem to have neutralized the conflict between parents and children, parental figures - and in particular the father figure - emerge as an instance to symbolize inherited guilt or a prescribed destiny in crime series starring young misfit anti-heroes. This paper aims to offer an investigation of two contemporary Italian coming-of-age crime dramas, Suburra. The series (Netflix, 2017-2020) and Bang Bang Baby (Prime Video, 2022), which explore the transition from adolescence to adulthood of young heirs of Italian criminal organizations, Darwinianically condemned to their own descent into the underworld due to the guilt inherited from their fathers. The investigation aims to combine interplaying methodologies: Murray Smith's (1995) three-level cognitive paradigm of engagement; the mechanism of engagement with antiheroes playing lead characters (Blanchet and Vaage 2012) as well as the developmental psychopathology approach to adolescence (Ammaniti 2010; Lingiardi and McWilliams 2008).