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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
From Michael Corleone to Tony Soprano, mob dads have been increasingly embattled -- and our national obsession with their fall reflects our culture's crisis of fatherhood.
Mar 8, 2005 | I am a Mafia junkie. I've watched it all, read it all, and while I wait for the final act of "The Sopranos," I'm not above keeping an eye on "Growing Up Gotti." It's hardly a compelling show. Yet at some point in this new season, I began to suspect that this perfectly banal, oddly flat, wit-free slice of "reality TV" might be a zeitgeist-defining artifact.
The Mafia genre has been a pop-culture staple for the past several decades. Its relevance can hardly be overestimated. Ask people about their favorite movies, and you will get all kinds of answers -- from "Top Gun" to "8 1/2," from Adam Sandler to Lars Van Trier. One of the very few titles that will recur across age, race, gender, income or education lines is "The Godfather." The reasons for the genre's success are readily identified. The Mafia movie offers all the exhilaration and wish-fulfillment of the classic gangster genre, without necessarily dampening it with the violent death of the protagonist (more or less obligatory before the dissolution of the Hays code in the '60s). It also presents a powerful mythology of immigration, and a provocative commentary on "the business of America."
Most important, though, it was an emotional laboratory where we could find, try on, pine over, old-fashioned notions of family and masculinity. The critical one is, of course, the notion of "father." It's not excessive to say that the history of the Mafia -- both in society and in pop culture -- is a history of fathers (or father figures), which starts with biblically powerful models and ends in crisis and extinction.
"The Godfather" -- Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 masterwork -- is the foundational myth of the genre. Establishing the template that would last for decades, it was, on the surface, a sweeping tale of illegal empire building, but at its heart it was a story of fathers and sons. Fatherhood was all-important: It was the source of authority, the reason for loyalty, the call of responsibility. It was the crucible where hard choices are made, and character tested. The word itself -- "godfather" - evoked not so much "the man who sponsors a child" as "the father who is godlike." It described a patriarchal archetype filtered through romantic idealization and made even more irresistible by the casting of such iconic actors as Brando, Pacino and (in "The Godfather: Part II") De Niro.
Michael Corleone remains one of the most powerful role models that popular culture has produced in the last 50 years. The measure of his appeal is that we all look at him as a hero, despite the fact that he deals in blackmail and violence, has his own brother assassinated, and boldly lies to his wife. All this we justify because we buy into his rationale: We believe he does it for the greater good of the family. Family, in Mafia parlance, is both the group related by marriage and blood ties, and the larger group related by ethnicity and partnership in crime. What's good for the first is, ideologically, the ultimate goal; but what's good for the second is, pragmatically, the immediate priority. Context clarifies which of the two types of family one may be talking about in any conversation; yet a certain amount of overlap and ambiguity is there by design, as a constant reminder of their mutual necessity.
The climax of "The Godfather" is the montage going back and forth between the baptism of Michael's nephew and the extermination of his enemies. This is not just a striking juxtaposition. It conveys the deeper point that Michael's power to kill is rooted in his commitment to family (the immediate kind). He has the authority to shed other people's blood because he's ensuring the future of his own bloodline. In other words, family values justify violence against those who threaten us. The subversive reading of this embedded statement is that family values, sooner or later, will require that we commit such violence. As long as you believe that family justifies it, you are bound to kill your enemy (conversely, as long as you kill your enemy, you're bound to justify it in the name of family). For Michael, the enemy is rival gangsters; for most of us it's the criminal, the stranger, the infidel, the suspicious "other."
To be sure, this radical social critique was not necessarily the filmmaker's intention, and one can only read it against the grain of the film, with its seemingly incessant parade of dinners, weddings, masses, funerals, pregnancies, bedside visits and family reunions. The prevailing mood of the film is nostalgia, a sense that the past contains lessons worth remembering and traditions worth honoring.
That nostalgia was made more poignant by the Mafia's real state of affairs at the time. As "The Godfather" was being made, the mythic "code" of the Mafia and its extreme version of family values were beginning to fall apart on the street in an orgy of betrayal. "The Godfather" itself had a significant effect on the Mafia -- and although it was castigated by many critics at the time as a whitewash, it hurt the Mafia more than it helped it. While restoring its veneer of "nobility," the movie also made it into a fashionable, highly commercial product. Mobsters became more and more obsessed with image; inspired by their on-screen counterparts, they pursued flash and celebrity. The Gambino family (sort of the Ivy League of the mob), started by the low-profile, dressed-down, laconic Carlo Gambino, was taken over by the flamboyant, nattily attired, boisterous John Gotti. With the help of the media, Gotti fashioned himself into a Hollywood star at large; not surprisingly, his stardom spurred his enemies and exposed his vulnerability. At the end, he was too big not to go down. Ratted out by his trusted lieutenant Sammy Gravano, Gotti finished his life in prison, fighting a losing battle with cancer. Ever since the "dapper don" put on the orange jumpsuit, the mob hasn't been able to recover its luster.
Gotti had been behind bars for nearly a decade when "The Sopranos" stripped the mob myth of any residual romanticism. Coppola's undeclared critique of patriarchy was suddenly in-your-face. The family was now fractious, dysfunctional, constantly threatening to disintegrate. Tony Soprano's father was a painful memory; his mother was a fearsome harpy, laying massive guilt on him with methodical madness. Tony's own marriage sustained itself on denial (before becoming a slow-motion train wreck and finally the most cynical of deals); his children seemed left with no apparent choice but acting out, or getting out. Tony was an anti-romantic: a creature of unrestrained appetites, eating, drinking, snorting, fucking ad nauseam to try to fill a massive hole, driven to panic and badly in need of a shrink. In sharp contrast to the godfather ethos, he lied for himself, not for his family; perhaps even more damning, he lied to himself.
Ultimately, Tony's character was compelling precisely because it took the godfather archetype and filled it with doubt, anxiety and moral inadequacy to the point of explosion. Tony's choices were harder than Michael Corleone's, and more ironic: Going to war or killing his own, spending time in a crumbling marriage or with an array of psycho mistresses, giving it all up or being stuck in endless therapy. We felt for him in ways we didn't feel for Michael: We didn't admire his solutions as much as we understood his problems. The role of all-knowing, all-powerful father, guarding his secrets with manly stoicism or sharing them with other men in solemn rituals, speaking in few words with great meaning, as if he could create meaning itself -- that role was never an available option. While lionizing family, and particularly fathers, had been the original effect of the Mafia genre, deconstructing the patriarchal model and exposing its every crack was now the genre's new mission.
