Just watched The Godfather, Part II, having watched the first part some weeks ago. Having been told my whole adult life what “important films” these are, I realize I’ve been sloppy in viewing them over the years. I saw both in their entirety, long ago, but since then, I’ve been sucked into random screenings, in progress on TV. It is true that whenever I tune in to the saga, I’m hooked and must watch the broadcast to the end. But until tonight I had never gotten a clear impression of how the two movies fit together, of how the second part completes the first. This failing is doubly strange, because I read Puzo’s novel before I saw either movie. I’m coming to the conclusion that my memory just has never been very good.
This time, both installments were fresh in my mind. As the final reel played out with Michael Corleone sitting on his Lake Tahoe piazza, thinking back on innocent times, to a birthday party for his father, Vito, at which he would announce his enlistment in the Marines, I saw in the ghostly figures of his siblings the conundrum of the whole epic: One can hold the family to be all, only at the cost of the family. Everyone in the flashback, with the exception of Connie and Tom Hagen, has been brutally murdered. Several of them have been killed on orders from Michael himself.
One analysis I read made a lot of the American-ness of the story. Old-world family bonds get turned to poison by capitalism, said the critic, who also pointed out that Francis Ford Coppola himself had embraced the metaphor of Michael as America. To my mind, that reading is unnecessarily narrow, pace Mr. Coppola, since the cycle of family business, competition, and vendetta that Vito Corleone carries into the New World had been going on for eons in Mother Sicily.
Isn’t a larger theme (not the only one, by any means) the toxicity of tribalism in all its forms? Political, which is to say power-seeking, institutions ranging from Vito’s nuclear family to the cosa nostra to the governments of Cuba and the United States breed a self-destructive blindness in which loyalty becomes paranoia. Michael reminds Frank Pentangeli of Vito’s dictum to keep one’s friends close and one’s enemies closer. By this time, we must remember, Michael has left behind every trace of the idealistic young man who once defied the plans his father had for him. In his skewed vision as the hardened capo after his father’s heart, those closest to him, his own family members, must by definition be his enemies. And, to quote The Shining’s Jack Torrance, “They must be severely chastised.”
The paradox of tribal loyalty is in this way made explicit regarding the Corleone family, but it is left implicit for broader social and political contexts. There are hints. After the flashback in which the landlord bumbles back to visit the burgeoning Don Vito, scared witless and falling over himself, Charlie Chaplin-fashion, to apologize for his earlier arrogance, the very next scene features a similarly obsequious, if slicker, Nevada senator paying lip service to the Corleones and to Italian Americans, whom he has formerly reviled as loathesome and un-American to Michael’s face. The sequence suggests that Americans who see the melting-pot as having congealed into a bona fide nation come to view America as “their thing,” and to see outsiders (Italians, if you’re a WASP; Sicilian tenants, if you’re a Calabrese landlord) as unclean interlopers.
Cutting across these levels of filial piety is the power of individual fear and greed, which divide mankind into two types: the coward, who forsakes his loyalty for profit or to save his own skin, and the soldier, who follows his chosen code to the bitter end. Frankie Pentangeli has turned coat against the Corleones, but he falls on his own sword to protect the Pentangelis back in Sicily. Michael is ostensibly protecting Corleone business interests, but this pragmatic program gets mixed up with the metaphysical sanctity of the family, which he dutifully tries to preserve by exterminating anyone he considers an enemy. Michael’s sanitizing compulsion destroys even Fredo, who practically speaking cannot be considered a serious threat—Fredo, the pure fool, who alone among the Corleone brothers has (correctly) defied his father’s authority to the end.
Equally troubling for me was the treatment of women in both movies. Not troubling as a false representation of how things are in certain cultures—it’s right on the mark there—but in the way it shifts attention from the women’s stories to those of the men. This is unfortunate, because the women, Kay especially, have a great deal to say, in their plight and in their reaction or obliviousness to what their husbands are involved in. Hyman Roth’s wife is oblivious to what her husband does for a living. If she were not, she would not have turned down the volume on the television while Hyman and Michael were talking, although one still wonders whether she suspects something and is playing dumb.
Kay, on the other hand, comes to understand exactly what the Corleone way is all about, and it obliterates her tenaciously held belief that she and Michael and their children form a family. Kay, I want to say, represents a different sort of American, the ecumenical sort, or the original American, for whom the melting-pot never “sets,” this being the point of America. (This is perhaps going too far, although as I admit, this is what I want to say.) Kay won’t put up with the menfolk’s nasty habit of settling differences between “us’n and them’n” with gunplay. That would actually be un-American, on an enlightened interpretation of “American.” Families are by choice. They are not entities in their own right, which take on lives of their own. People are created equal—these are the sorts of ideas I want to put into Kay’s head. I hesitate to reduce all this to a blunt feminist reading, even though it comes across strongly that women are second-class citizens. As in the leap from families to ethnicities to governments, I think, the picture must be bigger than patriarchalism versus matriarchalism. I will say instead that the Godfather saga, read generously, cautions against “–archalism,” and leave it at that.
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