The gangster as “divine trickster”. Pathways to an archetypal analysis of male imaginary in mass culture
Our intention is to show the sociological potentialities of the concept of archetype through the figure of the “divine trickster” in order to analyze the icon of the gangster in the global cultural industry. The proposition is that the figure of the gangster owes its persistence, significance, and p...
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| Formatua: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Hizkuntza: | Français |
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2025
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| Sarrera elektronikoa: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Gaia: | Our intention is to show the sociological potentialities of the concept of archetype through the figure of the “divine trickster” in order to analyze the icon of the gangster in the global cultural industry. The proposition is that the figure of the gangster owes its persistence, significance, and power to the fact that, in the wake of the thought of Carl Gustav Jung, it is a specific psychological content that fills a pre-existing form of the collective unconscious. We will try to clarify the concepts of archetype, collective unconscious, and imaginary, as well as attempt to understand why mass culture is more willing to accommodate archetypal representations. In fact, archetypal analysis has the undoubted advantage of posing the problem of the symbolic in a manner that is not exclusively linguistic, as would be the prevailing insight of the semiotic and structuralist paradigm dominating the human sciences since the Second World War. Then, we will delve into the figure of the “divine trickster” as an archetype that can illuminate the stereotype of the North American gangster through the analysis of a number of scenes from the film The Godfather in order to show how the symbolic daytime and nighttime order intersect in this representation. We also discuss the deconstruction of this symbolic order through the TV series The Sopranos. The aim is to show how the “divine trickster” populates the contemporary iconosphere and its usefulness for the study of the imaginary dimension of mass culture. |
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