Breakers

Buccino, Andrea (2025) Breakers. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

Organised crime appears in contexts in which a State of Law fails to meet a community’s needs, where it will claim and exercise the State’s power to meet the needs not of the community, but of itself. This project seeks to analyse, through creative practice and its critical contextualisation, how the realities of organised crime in a neoliberal capitalist society impact the fictional and non-fictional narratives within the audiovisual gangster genre, answering the question of how the Gramscian theory of Cultural Hegemony can be applied to the Gangster narrative. Partially drawing on autobiography, the feature-length screenplay comprising the creative element of the thesis will explore issues of class, ethnicity, sexuality and otherness in a generic gangster text, applying and subverting the tropes of the genre to tell what is ultimately a tragic gay love story set between Naples and Macclesfield. The contextual research argues, then, that the gangster figure, in keeping with Antonio Gramsci’s theory of Cultural Hegemony, is an “intellectual” one, furthering and upholding the hegemonic power of neoliberal capitalism, of whose tenets the gangster is one of the most successful examples. The research continues by analysing the origins and history of the gangster genre, subdividing it into three thematic, complementary branches. It will then argue that gangster narratives are often subject to what is dubbed a “Scarface Effect”, in which the realities of organised crime and their fictional depictions are found to be in continuous communication, influencing one another. The final chapters will analyse the creative process involved in the drafting of the screenplay, its varied influences, and the autobiographical element inherent in the text.