The attacker’s mask becomes a movie element that captivates children. And it makes the fans dream
It’s the man in the mask, Victor Osimhen. He moves like Michael Jackson and advances between feints and moonwalks, stops and starts, in a witchy and absolutist dance. The strength of a rugby player and the agility of Florence Joyner Griffith: he looks like a Marvel hero, T’Challa / Black Panther, he scores not only on the pitch but in the imagination of all Neapolitans, big and small. The game of identification is not new: in the eighties there was the wig with Diego Maradona’s curls also filmed by Luciano De Crescenzo in “The mystery of Bellavista”, now there is the mask of Osimhen, the platinum blonde hair , adding his black face. Pino Daniele wanted to paint it for a process of claim and sensation and declared himself “half black”, the Almamegrettas reminded everyone that we are “children of Hannibal, the great black general” who crossed the Alps with a group of elephants; now you can be black like the football superhero who is bringing the Scudetto back to Naples after thirty years. And that’s still not enough, because capable of making dreams come true even in the Champions League and following in the footsteps of Erling Haaland, another Marvel superhero, he is the same as Thor designed by Jack Kirby. With all due respect to blackfacing, the Neapolitan imagination that throughout the 1980s was Indian and South American with Maradona, now returns to black and African with Osimhen: ignoring that the Neapolitan is a serial wearer of masks to counter death.
