If everything is entertainment, should politics follow suit?

In an essay originally published on Prism and reappeared a few days ago on his personal blog, journalist and essayist Flavio Pintarelli excellently describes the modern era traversed by politics through the concept of post-truth (first coined in 2004 by Ralph Kanyes). Pintarelli writes: «The political use of post-truth thus sanctions a predominance of subjectivity over objective data. Its assertion as one of the orders of contemporary discourse - perhaps the order of discourse par excellence of the era we are living through - opens up a further transcendence, that of facts precisely. The era of post-truth is corollary to a post-factual society, in which the traditional institutions responsible for ascertaining the truth progressively lose all authority and are forced to renegotiate it on a level that now appears completely changed». Pintarelli's discourse, as well as the constant presence of the term 'post-truth' itself, began to invade our feeds from the absurd two-year period that spawned first the Brexit and then the Trump administration, but since then, nothing has been the same.

In Italy, as recalled by so many media during the Trump era, we had learnt to talk about post-truth in the early 1990s, when the then telecommunications entrepreneur Silvio Berlusconi had started to slowly take over the Country, adding to the common narrative his own and the possibility of telling it how and when he liked through the construction of a media empire that over the years conditioned the entire Italian aesthetics of the 1990s and 2000s. In the Boston University journal, Wenyu Zeng writes that «The situation today "made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience (Postman, 2006).» But if this is true for all forms of representation of experience, is it also true for politics? By his own extraction, the mayor of Milan Beppe Sala has always presented himself to his electorate as a 'new' and 'different' face, capable of taking the concept of Milan as the city of business to the city of marketing to the point of Milan as the city of entertainment: the place where everything can be commodified and everything can be quoted. This mantra reached a point of difficult return when Beppe Sala decided to be part of the (epic) teaser trailer for Club Dogo's new album, due in 2024, which shows Milan as Gotham City, Claudio Santamaria and the Mayor of Milan as the modern backups of our superheroes in microphone and synth. Everything is entertainment, indeed.

Everyone in the creative industry is within this system. Sala is no stranger to initiatives of this kind, having even made it his signature style; if even in football - the only sacred thing in this country along with food - people have started talking about entertainment, the mantra that everything must become entertainment, in Milan, has become truer than ever. But is it really so? Can politics really fall under the same rules as everything else? In other times, perhaps, the discussion would have been articulate, we would have read essays and seen Reel explaining the pros and cons of the two positions. These, however, are not other times, nor is the current world and local political landscape of the city fertile ground for a storytelling that is really too complex to be readable. Milan is experiencing perhaps its worst period of media publicity in decades, the 'perception' of danger (in the words of the mayor himself) is widespread, beyond the objective data. It is talked about in every social media and among members of every generation, especially of the Z generation, which has other metres of judgement and evaluation and which is often harder to 'buy' than others, because it grew up on bread and adv. In the same week of the most serious escalation of one of the longest and most heartfelt wars of the modern era, in the one in which the Italian Premier's companion leaked situations that would be perfect for 'Dont' Look Up', was there really a need to make everything, inexorably, entertainment? The answer is no, especially just two weeks after the appointment of Sala's new delegate for security and social cohesion, Franco Gabrielli, and his declaration that «Milan is not Gotham City» (if it sounds absurd, it is because it is).

But what is the point, then, of this continuous reference to a pop imagery in a country that is historically devoid of any structure? The most immediate answer is that, in doing so, politics wants to get closer to the new generations, through quotations and associations with their favourite films, designers or singers. Directs on Instagram and the arrival on TikTok are all boomer modes adopted by politics to approach in a sterile and unpervasive way the needs of a Generation that would prefer not to risk their lives on a bike, to have spaces for gathering and culture instead of shopping centres and rents that allow them to live or do business under normal conditions. These are the prerequisites that allow entertainment to exist, not Commissioner Gordon's cosplayers. Picking up on Pintarelli's essay: «Post-truth is not a simple falsification of reality, but an order of discourse that appeals to emotionalism to overcome facts and thus give substance to a belief.» In this case, the emotionality is represented by the return of what was perhaps Italy's biggest rap group, but the belief fails to have any kind of substance because the truth at stake is too important.