Curriculum Vito

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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When worldviews collide

Just watched the 2009 documentary “Collision,” in which pastor Doug Wilson and pundit Christopher Hitchens duke it out on the question of whether Christianity is good or bad for the world.  The question sets up a sort of public-policy debate, as if some government agency might mandate either Christianity or atheism for all.  Not that this sort of thing hasn’t been attempted, but the focus of religious debates is usually more ontological than pragmatic:  Does God exist?

The existence of God does figure in this debate, but it doesn’t take center stage, and with good reason.  The question of existence doesn’t touch on the most interesting consequences of our belief in the God described by scripture.  Even if God exists, what could this possibly tell us about His nature?  What moral authority, apart from the self-certifying imprimatur of scripture, would He command?  What should be our relation to an omnipotent being, anyway?  Assuming He exists, why does God hide himself?  Why should God care whether we worship or believe in Him?  These are all questions asked in the philosophy of religion, and for many religious people they never get asked.  I had never considered many of them until I took a course in the subject.

The debate within “Collision” struck me as a near miss or at best a grazing blow, not the flush whomp of two conflicting worldviews that have come to understand each other deeply.  The film is worth watching mainly for its illumination of the two combatants.  Wilson comes across as an autodidact country parson, humble in self-portrait but clearly pleased with his range of knowledge.  In a voice-over, he terms the mastery of theology, scripture, and philosophy needed to face the mighty Hitchens “copiousness.”  There is something Victorian about him.  No less smug is Hitchens, who wields a databaseful of lectern-ready prose on his pet topic of why “God is not Great.”  Hitchens is slicker, more academic, better rehearsed.  He, too, possesses the copiousness the battle demands.

I must confess to having a soft spot for Hitchens, despite his retrograde politics, his ironic self-description as a “contrarian,” and his distinctly non-ironic righteousness in the crusade against religion.  I have known and sympathized before with the schoolyard prodigy who could fight his way out of any scrape using words alone.  To be such a person requires unfathomable fortitude and energy due perhaps to equal parts vanity and fear.  But Hitchens at least searches and makes his search public.  His written and spoken record seems a kind of vanity project, but the same could be said of any engaging body of published work.  His bears his stamp.

Unfortunately for the dialectic conveyed in the film, being smarter, better-spoken, and even right do not guarantee Hitchens a slam-dunk.  Perhaps the filmmakers were trying to keep the contest “close” in order to maintain tension or to focus on the amity between Wilson and Hitchens, which appears to be held together by a shared love of Wodehouse.  Maybe the aim was merely to whet the viewer’s appetite for the meat of the debate itself, toward other dramatic ends.  In any event, Hitchens is portrayed as losing some of his decisive edge about two-thirds through the film.

That’s when Wilson seems to draw Hitchens onto his turf by pressing the issue of how one is supposed to ground one’s morality if not by God’s authority.  Wilson hammers away at the assertion that Hitchens has “helped himself” to the Judeo-Christian ethic in order to wage a (self-defeating) war against Christianity.  The Judeo-Christian ethic is not the only source of moral conviction, of course, and to reason from its primacy is both obtuse and circular.  Wilson seems comfortable with the position this leaves him in.  His strikingly postmodern defense is that participants in such a fundamental debate can only ground their arguments on certain axioms, to which they must return again and again.  If one must argue in the round, best to start and end one’s circle with God’s word.

My preferred response at this point would have been for Hitchens to “go Socratic” (not a bad motto generally) and press the Euthyphro question:  Is the good loved by the gods because it is good, or is it good because it is loved by the gods?  Hitchens eschews this line, perhaps because he himself holds that morality is innate, and, if morality is merely instinctive (or the equivalent for rational beings), it has no independent theoretical foundation that would render the Euthyphro question rhetorical in the desired way.  But by hewing to the Euthyphro line without foundationalism (as I imagine Socrates would have preferred), Hitchens could have held that God’s moral authority can be only as well-founded as morality itself—however well-founded that may be—and that the difficult course of questioning and refining and coming to grips with moral theory is preferable to checking one’s conscience at the chapel doors.  One finds oneself arguing in circles only when one stops trying to improve one’s position.

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One P

I haven’t been in the habit of pulling all-nighters since college, aside from a couple of late-night vacation drives when no motel could be found. But since I returned to school after two decades off, I’ve gone far into the wee hours at least half a dozen times. Now I can go without sleep practically on demand, and sometimes without intending to. In a fit of insomnia a couple of weeks ago, I used Netflix’s instant viewing feature to screen “The Paper Chase,” the slightly self-important dramedy about “one Ls” (first-year law students) at Harvard.

Fiction about the Academy has always been a fringe genre best suited to the novel. Occasionally it becomes the theme of an author’s career (David Lodge), more often an indulgence that “serious writers” enjoy once or twice, their chance to imagine a cloister in which writing is the summum bonum (Saul Bellow and many others). I was going to suggest that this urge is a byway on the prep-school lad’s essentially masculine journey into donhood, but Iris Murdoch has written novels on academic themes (The Philosopher’s Pupil, The Book and the Brotherhood), and I’m sure she’s not alone.

There are a handful of academia-themed movies: Besides “Chase,” I can think of “A Beautiful Mind,” “Good Will Hunting,” “The Dead Poets Society,” “Little Man Tate,” and “Finding Forrester.” I don’t think “Breaking Away” and “Animal House” count, though we should probably include “True Genius.” I love watching films set on university campuses. Father Karras’s jog around the track (was it at Georgetown?) in “The Exorcist” struck a warm chord of comfort and normalcy for me, just before the projectile vomit hit the fan. (Not to get too far off topic, but college campuses make superb hunting grounds in teensploitation horror flicks. Now there’s an education you can’t get at any price.)

I saw “Chase” when it first came out. I was 13, and it made me want to become a lawyer. That was before I learned that being a lawyer is what unscrupulous philosophers do to make money. After I learned that, I learned that philosophers who stay philosophers don’t make money, so maybe lawyers have chosen the lesser of two evils. At any rate, the intellectual skill-sets are similar, at least if you’re comparing the law to analytic philosophy. The curricula and tone of presentation appear to differ greatly, however. First-year law courses aren’t seminars, from what I can make out. They’re attended by hordes of students in amphitheater classrooms otherwise used for undergraduate chemistry and psychology. The one Ls sit at tiny desk-chairs or benches, waiting to be called on by the professor. The atmosphere of competition is electric. The very best jobs will be waiting for the students who run this gauntlet with the greatest aplomb.

In philosophy, on the other hand, you would think the competition would be even keener, since getting any job at all will be a coup, but in a way it takes the pressure off. Philosophers tend not to be all that convinced that they must be philosophy instructors, although some do feel called to teach. Graduate philosophy courses generally are seminars, or they end up being more like seminars than lecture classes. At CUNY,  courses tend to carry about a dozen enrolled students and three or four audits and sit-ins. Not as intimate a kaffeeklatsch as one might wish for, but hardly impersonal.

In “Chase,” apart from the rather wooden central character, the prime mover is Professor Kingsfield, the impassive blowhard who employs the “Socratic method” in his contracts course. There is indeed question and answer in his classroom, but in spirit nothing could be further from the elenchus of Socrates. The aim of Kingsfield’s technique is not engagement of sundry interlocutors in an endlessly rewarding discourse fit for any citizen of Athens—and even for a slave—but rather the motivation of legal thinking through fear. In fairness to the fictionalized Harvard Law (never mind the real thing), I should add that “Chase” portrays Kingsfield as a bigger SOB than anyone else on the faculty. I still got the feeling that the instructors of torts and Constitutional law, etc. would not be far behind him in their unwillingness to suffer fools gladly.

Philosophy programs do have characters like these around, but, like autocratic orchestra conductors, their day in the sun has probably passed. No doubt the same is true in law schools, which are no more immune to student grievances than any other department of corporate academia. I’ve taken philosophy courses with professors who confront students “Socratically.” At my school, the one who makes the biggest show of this turns out to be the opposite of Kingsfield: intently concerned with students as individuals, humorous beneath the gruff mask, willing to befriend.

I for one am glad to live now, in the age of student consumerism and political correctness, if it means avoiding the old-school pedagogy of pressure and shame. It’s hard enough being a One P, without the extra agita.

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Trilogy of error

In honor of Halloween, I rescreened the famed “Amelia” segment from the 1975 ABC special “Trilogy of Terror.” This is the one that pits Karen Black against a voracious Zuni warrior fetish doll. Having completely misremembered important details from the first viewing–I was probably scared out of my wits at the time—I feel obliged to point out three infelicities in the depiction of the doll. Amelia’s boyfriend, an anthropologist, might have been pleased:

1. The Zunis were a peaceful, agricultural people. Although they may at times have fought for what was theirs, it’s highly doubtful they glorified a thirst for blood.
2. The Zunis were Native Americans and so not nearly as dark-skinned as the doll.
3. Real Zuni fetishes are totemistic stone carvings a few inches in length at most. They are supposed to confer certain natural powers upon the bearer by analogy with the animals they represent. They’re not supposed to spring to life if handled incorrectly.

But this is just me being pedantic. What I was most struck by was the story’s subtext, which renders the doll a fetish after all. At the outset, Amelia is having an argument with her mother about their weekly visit that evening. Amelia is going out with this anthropologist at City College, it’s his birthday, and she’s trying circumspectly to let her mother know about the impending booty call. Mom accuses Amelia of preferring this feller to her, because God forbid Amelia’s bio-wants should supersede filial piety toward a mother who brought Amelia into the world after succumbing to her own bio-wants some 25 years earlier. This we may call the Paradox of Libidinal Emancipation.

Amelia succeeds in dismissing her mother, but only temporarily. Guilt gets the better of her, and she instead calls off her rendezvous with homo anthropologicus. Before she can tell Mom the good news, however, the warrior doll attacks. Named “He Who Kills,” the action figure has come packed in what appears to be a shoebox, with very clear instructions not to remove the attached chain under any circumstances. Amelia promptly unchains him—by accident, yes, but in tales like this, nothing is deeply accidental. Does she think the Zuni artifact purveyors were kidding, or does the submissive daughter unconsciously wish to tap into He Who Kills’s warrior spirit?

Whatever the case, Amelia must first save her own skin by defeating the fetish. This proves surprisingly difficult, considering the weight differential, but in the end the doll is stuffed into a 450°F oven with a salted and peppered flank steak. Amelia opens the oven door when she thinks he’s “done.” She screams, shocked, and we next see her on the phone, asking her mother to come over for that visit. Amelia then squats in front of the door, playing mumbledy-peg with an enormous blade. She flashes a mouthful of jagged teeth to show the audience that Amelia has been replaced, through the miracle of occult cookery, by She Who Kills.

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