Since I started writing movies and television series on organised crime, the question I’m most often asked is: why do the stories of crimes committed by men such as El Chapo command such passion across generations and across continents?

When I tried to answer the question for myself, I was persuaded that watching stories about the mafia registers reality as it is, without mediation.

Mafia films and mafia series show life stripped of pretence. Within their world, you behold the entire syntax of human behaviour: loyalty, ambition, betrayal, violence and death.

The mediation provided by morals, by education, by the structures of society, often hides the truths that we know exist, but which we lose sight of in our daily lives.

All that quick money made by George Jung in Blow or Nicky Santoro in Casino, speaks to our desires. In identifying with the protagonist of a film, you sense how much there is of you in their choices – to the point of wanting to be him during the film, then happy not to be like him when it ends. It’s a cycle of catharsis.

In short, crime dramas contain profound truths, precisely because they reach down to the root of things. They force us to see life as it really is, and make us reflect on dimensions where we may often graze, but dare not choose.

We appreciate Tony Montana in Scarface, not because we want to be like him, but because we measure ourselves against what he does and the way he does it; measure our own desire for affirmation and yearning to change our destiny.

Over the years I have followed the public’s fascination with another thing: the lure of criminal codes. Audiences are compelled by people who disregard the laws of the state but obey a deeper code – rules that are sanctioned on the road and shaped in the blood of feuds.

That is to say, men who respond to a chosen code, rather than one imposed from outside.

Marlon Brando is Don Vito Corleone in 1972 film The Godfather. He lived by a chosen code, rather than one imposed from outside. Photograph: Allstar/PARAMOUNT PICTURES

As happens in The Godfather, when Michael Corleone is guided by Peter Clemenza for the murder he will have to commit, of the man – Virgil Sollozzo – who attempted to take the life of Don Vito, his father. The family wanted to protect Michael from the mafia way – he himself had not been raised to be a mobster – but the rules are stronger than the lives of men. All this seduces us, it takes us back to the age of chivalry.

The epic propulsion of films about organised crime feeds on a fundamental ingredient: the risk of death.

Every choice could be the last one you make. Tony Soprano and Henry Hill of Goodfellas, even in their most heinous or ridiculous acts, show the viewer what it means to live in a state of never-ending calculation and perennial risk. Everything is always a matter of life or death.

I have always had a problem with the objections of those who see in the story of the bosses and capos an exaltation of crime. The heroes of literature, even when they are just, commit brutal violence and their stories erupt into bloody tempests.

Achilles or Ivanhoe have no courts of law to turn to, no right of appeal, nor are they judged by public opinion. Criminals in the cinema, paradoxically, inherit these constraints.

Through the criminal profile of the protagonists, viewers can try to measure how far we would go to get where they arrive.

Walter White of Breaking Bad does things that clearly none of us would do, but he does it to fulfil desires we share with him.

And thus, just as they deal with human feelings, films about the mafia also deal with the story of law, the economy and police: they say nothing moral or universal, but tell only of clans fighting one another to make money and increase their power.

I often think that had Karl Marx written Capital today, he would have done so by writing a series on crime. Because surplus value, questions of production and the means of production, would have been best described in the dynamics of conflict between mafia families.

And the relationships between merchandise, money and goods would have been perfectly synthesised in the story of the global market for cocaine.

Translated from the Italian by Ed Vulliamy