Shark Tale—“Puzza da Cap’”

Abstract

“Puzza da cap, ’” an old Calabrian saying, was explained to me some years ago by then New York State Assemblyman and now New York Supreme Court Justice Frank Barbaro. “The fish stinks from the head,” is a comment about the hierarchy of societal corruption and it is an apt title for this essay on Shark Tale. As a visual sociologist and semiotician, I thought I had seen it all when it came to images of Italians in America. Then the animated film Shark Tale happened and a new vista opened up on the subject: ichthyology. As I have argued in a number of essays and studies, still and moving images are central to the idea of ethnic discrimination in that they are crucial to how large complex groups like Italian Americans are often inaccurately and negatively displayed.¹ Therefore, I was not surprised when, in September of 2004, I received a telephone call from Alexandra V. Preate, the chief executive officer of Political Capital LLC, a public relations firm that had been engaged to develop a campaign critical of the film, its actors, producers, and its distribution company DreamWorks. It seems that my response to a web discussion of the potentially damaging effect of Shark Tale, especially on young Italian Americans, had hit a nerve and had then, without my knowledge, been widely distributed. In my measured remarks I had reminded readers that such children’s stories as The Story of Little Black Sambo had been excised from children’s literature, as were the “n” words from Huckleberry Finn.