Francesca Pierini

The Docu-bonkbuster, a Contradiction in Terms? Reading Sara Gay Forden’s House of Gucci in Light of Scholarship on the Genre

This paper reads Sara Gay Forden’s chronicle House of Gucci (2000) in light of Amy Burge, Jodi McAlister and Charlotte Ireland’s article “Prince Charming with an Erection: The Sensational Pleasures of the Bonkbuster” (2023), the first detailed scholarly examination of a recently revived popular literary form that pins down some of its characteristics in a comparison with the romance genre. It also looks at Ien Ang’s classic scholarly work Watching Dallas (1982) in order to establish several connections between the bonkbuster, the 1980s prime-time soap opera, and Forden’s work.

The bonkbuster, recently rediscovered in fictional practice as well as scholarship, is a literary form that spans approximately a couple of decades, from the 1970s to the 1990s, going through a peak in the 1980s. Jilly Cooper, Jackie Collins, and Shirley Conran are some of its best known representatives. Forden’s weighty book, however, is dated 2000, about a decade since the fading away of the genre. Forden’s work, an absorbing description of the world customarily depicted in bonkbusters – prominent families with much wealth and status, rivalries, conspiracies, promiscuity, betrayals, murder and luxury homes – is not a bonkbuster itself, but a detailed journalistic report.lk

In most soap operas, as Ang observes: “the conflicts forming the foundation of dramatic development of the narrative always have to do with difficult family situations: it is the conflictual relations between family members – husband/wife, parents/children, brothers/sisters – which again and again give rise to tensions, crises and emotional outbursts” (Ang 1982: 68). Only half of Forden’s work, however, being centred on family feuds, should have carried its  actual subtitle ‘a true story of murder, madness, glamour, and greed.’ The other half, as an anonymous reviewer observed, is a report in which Forden “presents the decades of poor business decisions made by the family—as one lawyer put it, "We have to save Gucci from the Guccis!"—in meticulous detail” (anonymous reviewer, Kirkus Review, 2021).

Perhaps, one of the most striking similarities with Dallas, the supremely popular American prime-time soap opera of the 1980s, is that, for a long time, the story of the Gucci family spun around the battles between two brothers, fighting each other to secure control over the business: Aldo and Rodolfo, sons of founder Guccio.[i] Forden accurately describes their relationship, different personalities, and rivalry. Dallas too, famously revolves around the rivalry between two brothers, the second generation of the Ewing family, described as polar opposites to one another: J.R. is evil; Bobby is good. As in soap operas nuances are not allowed, J.R. is exceedingly evil; Bobby remarkably good.[ii]

In Dallas, just as in the real-life Gucci story, the family members of the third generation have to deal with a larger than life figure – J.R. and Aldo respectively –, a dominating and controlling leader who leaves them very little space to affirm themselves. From the point of view of storytelling, this is good news, as there is space for generational conflict, frustration, squabbles, minor and major vendettas, the very subject material of a bonkbuster.

I would like to make the suggestion that Forden’s House of Gucci significantly contributed not so much to the genre of the bonkbuster itself, but to the revival of interest in it we are currently witnessing. Forden’s account – and the film Ridley Scott based on it: House  of Gucci (2021) – brought to life, for a younger readership/audience, perhaps not familiar with the popular imagination of the 1980s, a world of glittering luxury, conflicting relationships, reckless ambition, financial and personal ruin that constituted the exact subject matter of both bonkbusters and prime-time soap operas such as Dallas and Dynasty.

With regard to form, Forden’s book specific appeal relies on an astute combination of documentary evidence presented in dramatized storytelling, combining, in one single story, high fashion and family drama ‘in Italian sauce,’ the city of Florence, murder, and a police investigation.

Burge et al. argue that the fact that the bonkbuster displays a “tendency towards soap operatic expansiveness means identifying a central plot can be difficult, and while it generally ends with some form of closure, there is no guarantee it will be happy” (2023: 139). This characteristic perfectly applies to House of Gucci, in which personal relationships, as already noted, intricately intersect with corporate history, as well as with the history of the fashion industry, and the social and cultural history of the last century.[iii] As for the ending, Forden’s report is not the end of the story. She compares the end of her work to the future of Gucci itself: open, uncertain, hopeful, but definitely ongoing.

Burge et al. continue their analysis by singling out a further characteristic of bonkbusters: genre hybridity. A bonkbuster often contains elements borrowed from other popular genres, such as mystery, for instance, or thriller. This is also a requirement openly met by House of Gucci, which develops one of its main strands of inquiry around the assassination of Maurizio Gucci, all the way to the incarceration of the culprits and their lives after prison.

Of course, an important difference is that, being a report of factual events, the reader already knows the outcome of the investigation. Forden, however, plays with the conventions of  the mystery murder genre. The opening, for instance, is a tense account of Maurizio’s killing witnessed by the doorman, Giuseppe Onorato, who gets shot by mistake:

‘At least I didn’t fall,’ he [Onorato] thought, preparing mentally to die. He thought of his wife, of his days in the army, of the view of the sea and the mountains from Casteldaccia. Then he realized he was only wounded: he had been shot twice in the arm, but he was not going to die. A wave of happiness washed over him. He turned to see the lifeless body of Maurizio Gucci lying at the top of the stairs in a spreading pool of blood.” (Forden 2000: 7)

Forden’s writing adopts a classic realistic perspective on events, but her style is undoubtedly literary at times, indulging in a dramatic novelization of her material, sometimes relaying the intimate thoughts of those involved in the murder – as in the passage above – sometimes admitting observations of a philosophical/existential nature: “what is the spark that lights the fire  of ambition, the fire that burns out reason, moral principles, respect, and attentiveness, in the pursuit of unchecked riches?” (2001: 469)

Three important elements, as Burge et al. suggest, characterize a bonkbuster: sex, popularity and melodrama (2023: 139) In House of Gucci, the melodrama, in excess, makes up for the sex, which, perhaps unsurprisingly for a journalistic chronicle, is thoroughly absent from the text. There is a love story at its centre, but, in this specific regard, the text’s distance from the romance genre is even  wider than usual. Not only because it famously ends in murder; In Forden’s chronicle of Maurizio and Patrizia’s encounter and subsequent relationship, romanticism is, to say the least, sparse.

There is a young man, Maurizio, who has lived most of his life in the shadow of his father, who meets a lively and assertive young woman, Patrizia, who helps him out of his insecurities. The encounter between the two is engaging, and in order to be with  Patrizia, Maurizio disobeys his father for the first time in his life, but romanticism ends here. Forden’s writing, engaging and limpid, does not lose itself in descriptions of their falling in love, attraction, recognition, or declaration.

In Forden’s narration of events, Patrizia, hardly a romantic heroine, falls in love with Maurizio for who she can be with him at her side. Not for him beyond his name, but precisely because of it, the wealth and prestige attached to it, the clothes, the Swiss chalet, the St. Moritz villa, and the yacht furnished with priceless artworks and sofas upholstered with real sharkskin. When Maurizio leaves her, she experiences a complete loss of status and, more importantly, identity. The reader feels Patrizia not only does not know who she is beyond her being Maurizio Gucci’s wife, but she does not want to know.

There is simply too much, therefore, that  goes against the conventions of  the romance novel. To my mind, the bonkbuster – journalistic or fictional – has very little in common with the romance novel beyond being, just like the romance, a “gender-marked” (Holland 2002: 216) literary genre. The bonkbuster’s plurality of characters, the focus on dramatic relationships and conflicts, affiliates the genre more to the melodrama, and the soap opera.

In this case, melodramatic elements are further enhanced by the Italian settings and characters, who get described, by Forden, following the conventions of long-established tropes and stereotypes concerning the Anglo-American cultural construction of Southern Europe, and of Italy in particular. The cultural otherness of her subject material comes through in Forden’s introduction to the story, for instance, when she writes, in a  pseudo-ethnographic style, an account of “the Tuscan character:”

Different from the affable Emilians, the austere Lombardians, and the chaotic Romans, Tuscans tend to be individualistic and haughty. They feel they represent the wellspring of culture and art in Italy, and they are especially proud of their role in originating the modern Italian language, thanks in large part to Dante Alighieri. (2001: 10-11)

In this tableau of Italian regional characters – which assumes the objective perspective of a neutral observer typical of ethnographic accounts of circa two hundred years ago – Italian people have already lost much of their reality to become timeless characters in a comedy, or a melodrama.

Forden continues, following another long-standing stereotype of Anglo-American representations of Southern Europeans, by tracing an unbroken history of commercial and artistic enterprises that makes of Gucci the direct descendant of medieval traders. Forden, otherwise a thorough and documented reporter, falls pray of a fantasy of unbroken historical continuity:

To the Florentine merchant, wealth was honorable and carried with it certain obligations, such as financing public buildings, living in a gran palazzo with gorgeous gardens, and sponsoring painters, sculptors, poets, and musicians. This love of beauty and pride in creating beauty has never died despite war, plague, floods, and  politics. From Giotto and Michelangelo to the craftsmen in their workshops today, the fruits and flowers of the arts, propagated by merchants, have flourished there. (2001: 11-12)

The Italian setting allows Forden the distance, and consequently the freedom, to include in her report dramatic elements clearly derived from an established perception of traits traditionally attributed to the Southern European character: an inclination to theatricality (Italians gesticulate, of course), disinhibition in expressing feelings and indulging in passions, an innate sense of beauty, and a taste for life.

This set of traits happens to be highly compatible with the hedonistic tone of the bonkbuster, and Forden is very good at describing it, so that a meticulous journalistic account gets very much coloured by its content, becoming as enjoyable as one of those novels. The film – which cannot be analysed here in any depth – elaborating on this material, “exaggerates  the melodramatic appeal to emotionality and sentimentality to the point of ridicule” (Ang 1982: 98).

In concluding my essay I would like to return to the bonkbuster as a gender-marked genre. It has already been pointed out that the bonkbuster often follows different stories, without necessarily focusing on one protagonist (Burge et al. 2023: 140). I wish to suggest that, if the form typically presents a plurality of characters and situations, it does so to explore, not in a realistic but melodramatic key, different paths available to women who want to advance and affirm themselves in the personal as well as the professional sphere.

It could be pointed out that whereas romance novels mainly recognize “the emotional work which women undertake in the personal sphere” (Geraghty 1995: 224), the bonkbuster characteristically depicts women in the corporate workplace, their struggles and strategies to find their space in the male-centred world of business. This especially made sense in the 1970s/1980s, when women increasingly took on positions of leadership, emancipating themselves from clerical jobs. In other words, the bonkbuster sets up a world of exaggerated (?) wealth and unbridled capitalism, within which men and women move constantly clashing with each other.

In this context, some of the crucial questions the bonkbuster elaborates upon is: can a  capable and qualified woman only be successful if supported by a man? Can she be as ambitious, focused, ruthless even, as a man? What is she ready to sacrifice for success? As reported by Burge et al., Rita Felski points out that a bonkbuster’s plot characteristically “features a glamorous, ambitious heroine who fights her way to the top of a corporate empire while engaging in conspicuous consumption of men and designer labels” (2023: 141). Forden’s Patrizia could be perhaps seen as an oddly monogamous version of such a heroine, if it was not for the fundamental fact that her fight is completely regressive, as she does not want her own career; she wants to be the wife of a wealthy man.

This is important because self-love, or love for Maurizio divested of status and wealth is never a concern to Patrizia, who falls in love with a name. As her rise to prosperity and power is not earned, her revenge is not righteous, and in the end there is no catharsis. The point here is not that of formulating a moral judgement on Forden’s literary construction of Patrizia Gucci – even less the real person – it is to argue that, as an essential element of the bonkbuster is to allow women the same potential for greed, ambition, and corruption vis-à-vis capitalistic temptations – prerogatives traditionally recognized  to men – House of Gucci creates an anomaly that makes of Patrizia the undeniably negative pole of the narration, ‘the J.R.’ of this particular story: “the one who does not submit but resists” (Ang 1982: 77).

Lastly, the bonkbuster often deals with marriage failure, but it is often because women get mistreated, neglected, and cheated on (Burge et al.). In House of Gucci, Patrizia’s rage is hyperbolic and unjustified, her reaction unpardonable. Her sense of entitlement leads her to believe she has a right to staggering wealth by virtue of having married Maurizio and being the mother of his two daughters.

As Laura Mulvey puts it: “beyond or beneath  the dramatic mainspring of ideological contradiction that melodrama plays on, lies another contradiction: the impossibility of reconciling desire with reality” (Quoted in Ang 1982: 72). Here lies Patrizia’s psychosis, and the reason why her story perfectly lends itself to be told as melodrama.

As reality exceeds imagination, House of Gucci strikes an extremely unlikely balance between the journalistic report and the bonkbuster, as a world of shameless wealth and unapologetic capitalism is evoked and brought back to our collective imagination, dissected, as well as celebrated in a narrative that pays homage to one of its distinctive popular literary forms.

Works Cited

Ang, Ien (1983), Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. Methuen.

Burge, Amy, Jodi McAlister and Charlotte Ireland. “’Prince Charming  with an Erection:’ The Sensational Pleasures of the Bonkbuster”, Contemporary Women’s Writing. Volume 17, Issue  2, pp. 137-155.

House of Gucci (2021), dir. Ridley Scott.

Forden, Sara Gay (2021), House of Gucci: A True Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour and Greed, New York: Custom House.

Geraghty, Christine (1992), ‘A Woman’s Space: Women and Soap Opera’, in Frances Bonner, Lizbeth Goodman et al. (eds) Imagining Women: Cultural Representations and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Holland, Nancy J. (2002), ‘Genre Fiction and ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ Philosophy and Literature, Volume 26, Number 1, pp. 216-223.

Anonymous reviewer (2021),’The House of Gucci [Movie-Tie-In].’ Kirkus Review.

Mitchell, J. P. and Sophia Marriage (2003), Mediating Religion: Conversations in Media, Religion and Culture, London: Continuum.

[i] Forden peppers her gripping account of events across three generations of the Gucci family with frequent references to Dallas and Dynasty, demonstrating that comparisons between the real events taking place within and around the Gucci family and the soap opera genre have always been part of the narrative. Forden quotes Italian as well as international newspaper articles that used to refer to the Gucci family feuds in reference to the TV shows: “Move over, Dallas: Behind the Glittering Façade a Family Feud Rocks the House of Gucci (People magazine reported in Forden 2000: 118). The family drama was often referred to as a “Dallas on the Arno” (Forden 2000: 108), and American television news magazine 60 Minutes once interviewed Maurizio Gucci to the tune of the theme song from Dynasty.

[ii] The rivalry between  J.R. and Bobby Ewing has been read in reference to the biblical myth of Cain and Abel. See Mediating Religion: Conversations in Media, Religion and Culture, 2003, p.128.

[iii] This is also a characteristic affiliating House of Gucci to the 1980s prime-time soap operas. Ang explains that “as a prime time TV programme, Dallas is aimed at a widely heterogeneous, general TV audience, which cannot be defined in terms of a specific class, sex or age. On the contrary, from the perspective of the programme’s producers, it is necessary in order to draw as many viewers as possible to make sure that all members of the (American) family is aroused (1983: 117). The personal vicissitudes of the Ewing family had to go hand in hand with a storyline centred on their oil business and  modern Western setting in order to cater for a male as well as a female audience.