Camera And Action, page 33
Yet not all violence is equal and The Godfather narrative qualifies the Corleones within that context. Violence operates as the form of justice in a corrupt world and creates an aura of glamour around the family. All the rough edges have been smoothed over in the appearances of Brando, Pacino, and Caan compared to the other Mafiosi, those via vecchia men. Their masculine appeal allows the narrative to submerge Corleone gangsterism in contrast. They are gangsters who happen to be Italian. The Mafia characters are Italian gangsters. Differentiating between the Corleones and the Mafia "others," the story defines Vito's family as the modern Italian Americans. Rival syndicate heads, Barzini (Richard Conte) and Tataglia (Tony Giorgio), for instance, have stronger features - bushy eyebrows, scarred faces, large noses - and the hit men are overweight, dumb fools and extremely violent. The Corleone henchmen also contrast to Michael and Vito, who exude control, patience, planning, and a Hollywood machismo. Similarly, Connie's husband Carlo is the Italian American "outsider" opportunist who abuses his wife and betrays the honor of the code protected by Vito early in Part L56 "You played with my sister; do you think you could fool a Corleone?" Michael mocks Carlo just before the latter's ordered strangulation.
The split between the glamorous Corleones and the Mafia "others" represents the American system ("I believe in America") that ignores its own corruption. Michael's struggle to exude "masculinity and power" but maintain control in a seemingly fair and virtuous way explains why he orders violence. At the same time, as one writer puts it, "aggression against and assimilation within the system proceed together in redefining the culture of the organization." If adding Italianness from an insider's point of view subverts "cultural prejudice," building an anticapitalist argument by othering the Mafia was also essential to set up the contrast. The separation between the Mafia and the Corleones makes a generic Brotherhood the point of departure for ethnic identity. It allows The Godfather's family to appear legitimate within the logic of anticapitalism. The differentiation enables Vito's family to perform violent acts symbolically on long-held derisive attitudes and beliefs about Italians. The Corleones sit somewhere between the brutes of the old-world Mafia and the generic rendering of a Kirk Douglas type of casting.
The Corleones, not the Mafia "others," are America. They represent the process of Americanization, shifting from the paradigm of defacing names, disavowing ethnicity, and appropriating the whiteness of popular culture. In the assimilation model, as writer Mannino explained, immigrants were "accustomed to seeing themselves through the lens of the dominant culture." Skin color and other physical features defined social location and distinguished Southern from Northern Europeans. As the third-generation writer observed: "Italian/Americans ... [were] barred ... from certain churches, schools, neighborhoods, and clubs before the Civil Rights Act of 1964." The dominant culture's fixation with skin color spilled over to distaste of custom. Italians were "identified ... as coming from an inferior race." Thus, Mannino continued, "A specific Italian /American may find herself treated as a white American by some and as a black American by others." A derogatory term such as "black dago" reflected the contrasting image of Italians to the prevailing Anglo celebration of blondness and whiteness.17 The likeness was both absorbed and resisted by the descendants of immigrants. As sociologist Michael Novak observed, "Many still carry the marks of changing the names, of `killing' their mother tongue and renouncing their former identity, in order to become `new men' and `new women."'S8 Exaggerating Italianness through the Mafia characters functions as an avowal of the history of ethnic derision. Affirming that history is a necessary first step to de-stigmatizing ethnic identity and creating a sense of renewal.
On the one hand, the Mafia as the "others" offers a way for the Corleones to construct themselves as powerful, ethnic, and glamorous. At the same time, the Mafia as an allegory of violence in America recalls the days of "dago" derision and justification for revenge.59 The film's treatment of Italianicity and Michael's nightmare fifties affluence confront both the perception of Italians that Hollywood helped create and the role of assimilation in repressing cultural identity in the larger society. In short, "othering" works both ways. The Mafia allows Italianicity to escape its derisive days by dividing the group into the good and bad. This division allows for a positive rendition of ethnic identity if seen in the context of a cautionary tale about the meaning of Michael's success.
The film's warnings work through Vito's parallel story of immigration. Sicily is juxtaposed with Lake Tahoe. These contrasting places construct an American narrative at a time when Americans argued that identity recovery was an important process of ethnic regeneration. Where baby boomers likely grew up with parents concealing ethnic affiliation, they now found cultural uniqueness empowering. As Novak contended, "The new ethnicity ... is a movement of self-knowledge on the part of members of the third and fourth generation. 1560 The 1970s afforded Euro-ethnics an opportunity for self-definition, no longer expected to "melt" themselves into Americanness, as something disembodied and detached. Ethnic Americans began wearing pins and buttons, displaying bumper stickers and nationalistic flags, or otherwise negotiating new terms of cultural identity. "Italian Power," "Kiss Me, I'm Greek," "Polish is Beautiful," and "For Italians Only" were forms of marketing ethnic legitimacy and ways of expanding the meaning and range of Americanness. One's ancestral affiliation and non-American inheritance appeared not only normal but symbolic of Americanism. Southern and Eastern European immigrants (Jews, Poles, Italians, Greeks, Slavs, Armenians, Croatians, Serbs, Czechs, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Estonians, Portuguese, and others) helped engender social and cultural changes during these years with the reinvention of what was called "ethnic pride." Popular culture embraced instead of denied ethnic food, dress, jewelry, and other identifying features.
To claim this ancestry without embarrassment meant taking a clear step toward understanding "the inner history of this migration" and "the aspirations and fears of some seventy million Americans."" By bringing the "peasant" family into view on location in Sicily, Part II dramatizes a way of life once disparaged in America. The return to the past through the film's narrative of Vito as a young boy recasts the importance of the immigrant experience. The ancient society became part of the newly desired balance for many descendants. The challenge for many, once in American society, was to ensure regeneration and reproduction of ethnic culture in such diversity and also to retain personal authority on American terms. A new tradition began in the 1970s where Americans emphasized reconnecting rather than breaking with the past. Michael's return to the immigrant country reconciles for the third and fourth generations what the primary part of Italian (hence ethnic) recovery is. From ethnic denial to ethnic ideal, identity is not something to "get over."
Both films add to ethnic regeneration by filling in the past through a nostalgic rendition of the Sicilian village. As a way to imagine a journey into the world of grandparents' homelands, the Sicily sequences make the immigrant country beautiful and necessary. In the slow pace, the bright daylight, and the country lifestyle, the films create a standard of taste for the expansive space of Sicily in contrast to the claustrophobic streets of Little Italy and dark interiors of the Tahoe estate. Descendants return to the premodern village to seek roots and enjoy leisurely travel. In the book, the Sicilian scenes informed readers of the origins of Vito's Mafia connection and the motivation for revenge. In the film, the peasant past operates as what historian Joan Scott calls an "originary" moment.62 In the narrative of family history, Sicily functions as an aesthetic magnet, a form of roots assertiveness, a way of reimagining Hollywood Italians as Italian authentics.
For the immigrant generation, the ethnic neighborhood manifested a sense of belonging. As sociologist Richard Alba pointed out, it had the "capacity to concentrate the institutions and cultures of an ethnic group, thereby keeping alive the sentiments and loyalties associated with ethnicity in adult residents and socializing a new generation to ethnic ways." By the third generation, however, after the flight to suburbs, identity construction depended less on living in concentrated neighborhoods. Identification for those in more assimilated areas had to flow from other sources - going to ethnic restaurants, festivals, churches, or to the "old country." These "undeniable embodiments of ethnicity," Alba continues, serve the purpose of "rekindl[ing] some of the memories and feelings of those whose identities have weakened or lapsed." The Godfather provided a similar kind of travel and allowed viewers a glimpse at, as if passing through, an ethnic neighborhood, thus encouraging an emotional attachment.63 The neighborhood tour provided essential details from Southern European experience in America, imagined on screen as the way it was for immigrants.
The view of the neighborhood from a theater seat resonated as part of what the new ethnicity sanctioned for third and fourth generations in comparison to what second generations often experienced. As Alba contended, "The reassessment of ethnicity ... produced not simply a rediscovery of significant existing aspects of American society, but a different image of what American society should be." Ethnic agency, seventies style, became "a valid form of selfexpression under the threat of obliteration by the cultural hegemony implicit in the melting pot." Many saw, as Alba continued, "hold[ing] on to their particular traditions and differences" as a right.64 Set in a seventies milieu of diversity rather than previous ones of assimilation, understanding ethnicity as a right also implied identity was a choice rather than an evolutionary flow of inheritance and ancestry. This shift changed the source of cultural knowledge. Ethnicity could be consumed and identity acquired. In this fashion, ethnic consumption easily became subject to the trappings of what Philip Deloria described for Native Americans as "cosmopolitan multiculturalism," that is, "a license for anyone to choose an ethnic identity ... regardless of family, history, or tribal recognition" [Deloria's italics].65
The Godfather: Part II participates in the play between ethnic self-expression and cultural consumption, that is, wearing the mask of stereotypes, in a similar way. On the one hand, the Mafia as "other" extricates Italianness from its Hollywood background because those who play these characters exude traditional practices closer to the ethnic family of ancestry than "cosmopolitan" multiculturalism. They are the ancien regime. Their characters have entered the discourse of multiculturalism by reviving traditional identity. At the same time, the Mafia "authentics," the via vecchia men, recycle a persona. Tattaglia, Clemenza, Pentangeli, and others performed Italianness for viewers' consumption. What they produced is both the recognition of the value of old ways and a new category for Hollywood use. They represent both the true identity and the mask of Italianness.
Michael, on the other hand, signifies Americanness and mediates Italianness. Expressing ethnicity for Michael means returning to the cultural source of knowledge that filled in heritage and ancestry, a key component to the seventies multiculturalism. This new awareness helps him fulfill his role as family patriarch and his duty to create stability. Michael also defines essential Americanness - Ivy League schools, marriage outside Italian boundaries, making money. The story of American success is the sequel to Vito's struggle. Wealth, not family or culture, has given the young Corleone his power and mobility, but wealth also overshadows the "ancien" system of succession. Both family identity and monetary stability depended on a patriarchal system for regeneration in conventional cultures. Passing on lineage in the family, like passing on the organization of crime through service and loyalty, gave Italianness and the Mafia their social structure. Both the ethnic family and the Mafia ethic of honor and loyalty centered on reproducing the "hereditary status." Passed through the bond especially of father and son, this "patriarchal foundation," as one critic explained, "and the associated paradigm of masculinity - of silence, honor, and protection - governed the relations of men and women in the family."66
The masculine ethic of protection so motivates Michael in Part II that he orders the murder of his brother, Fredo, upon discovering his betrayal. "You're nothing to me now," Michael shouts at Fredo. "You're not a brother. You're not a friend. I don't want to know you or what you do. I don't want to see you at the hotels. I don't want you near my house. When you see our mother, I wanna know a day in advance so I won't be there. You understand?" It is raining. Michael is inside his Lake Tahoe mansion and looks out onto the lake where Fredo is slain in a rowboat.
It was necessary to sacrifice Fredo for the good of Michael's position and protection of the honor code, but by the end of the film, Michael "fires" his Irish step-brother, Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall). Tom is the faithful family consigliere and Vito's adopted son. Steadfast and loyal in his legal protection of the family during the reign of both father and son, Tom resists the young don's next request. "You're gonna come along with me in these things I have to do or what?" Michael asks Tom. "I'm staying," Tom replies. Michael casts him aside and severs all ties that bind. Unlike Fredo, whose death does not destroy his identity, Michael's dismissal of Tom obliterates the faithful consigliere's legitimacy as a Corleone. In a sense, Michael denies Tom his past, his identity, by becoming his employer at the end of the film instead of his brother.
Michael kills Fredo and dismisses Tom, but he has to face a larger problem. For ethnicity and therefore the code to be collective, passing tradition on through stable processes is key. The ancient code assured succession because it predetermined who belonged. The American tradition of choice and independence, however, spoiled the conditions of lineage. Michael's form of Italianicity by the end of Part II is nothing like his father's. Compared to Vito's paternal benevolence, Michael is the calculating professional, intent on absolute power, exploiting even his brothers. Vito's family resembled the norm for many ethnics in America where the father was the "head" of the household. Michael's American rendition complicates that model by suggesting male power can also be abusive. Similar to Puzo's memories of male violence in the larger Italian community, the film deromanticizes Vito's "immigrant" America by showing the result of the Corleone rise to power. Michael has forsaken the possibility of regeneration of the family by destroying its cohesive unit.
Kay holds the key to Michael's irrevocable exchange of power for family. Unlike Vito's wife, Kay refuses to subject her children to the violence of the Mafia and divorces her husband. Michael forbids Kay to see their young children and he again shuts the door in her face when she unexpectedly appears in Tahoe. Divorce and estrangement are clear enough, but the question of how to ensure the life of the family in view of Michael's power, wealth, and impersonalized existence persists. He sits alone in the Tahoe winter, centered in the narrative, a gangster, and the credits role. Undoubtedly, he has achieved financial success, the American necessity for mobility. Michael Corleone controls the syndicate but the history and turn of events qualify that triumph. A decorated soldier, an underdog ethnic, has also become a ruthless murderer.
Identifying with Michael encourages recognizing the inherent tragedy of the American struggle, balancing personal success with ties that bind. By contrast, the Pentangelis and the Tattaglias help shape the Corleone Americanness but also expose an underlying truth about what the film's critique of American society accomplishes. Michael has become America. He is the capitalist, a corporate executive whose power works best single-handedly. Both films shroud the narrative of American immigration with a cautionary gloom. Protecting the unit that guarantees succession - the family - is extremely important to organized crime. The Mafia are also there to remind Michael that old ethnicity, family belonging, is not a choice. It is different from a "cosmopolitan multiculturalism." It is rooted in ancestry, loyalty, and collective agreement, not voluntary consent. Michael Corleone's world has become a spectacle of contemporary desolation. It is a frozen landscape of mansions in forests overlooking winter lakes. Part II represents both the secularization and objectification of Vito's hope. Michael represents loss, not gain. It is an exemplary "death of the subject."67 Michael is denied an inner life.
The film critiques capitalism by showing that its highly individualistic competitiveness destroys the individual and therefore the family. At the same time, from the vantage point of multicultural discourse, autonomy destroys the individual if the culture is lost. Thus, the death of the subject as the final objectification must be positioned within American tradition that has privileged the individual's freedom as the central subject and the governing claim to triumph over outside forces. American film has been mostly a cinema of the individual, promoting the value of autonomy and individualism. These films do something different if seen through ethnic perspectives. Obliquely they encourage identification with the collective ideal through the downfall of Michael, Connie, and Sonny. Despite and because of their fall, the family, as a "mediating structure for society" and a "guarantee" for passing heritage on, is rein- forced.68 Ambition and success cost Vito's children their family but not their identity born into Italianness. Two primary Corleones remain at the end of Godfather II, Connie and Michael. Kay, Tom, and other "disloyal" and "unfit" members have been banished. "Michael," Connie tells him, "I'd like to stay close to home now if that's all right." The Mafia "others" constantly remind viewers of the cultural identity lost with the second generation. They serve as the "authentic" by contrast and offer the romantic viewer a way back to heritage. They also serve as a reminder that the past can teach.
When Paramount's 1969 The Brotherhood found no audience waiting in line, it was not the genre, the plot, or even the interest in Italian gangsters that failed to bring in millions. Clearly by 1972 the "ethnic inflections" of Pacino and Talia Shire in The Godfather films contrasted deeply with the "whiteness" of a Kirk Douglas (even in a black mustache) and the "Brotherhood." 69 That several powerful directors turned the first project down speaks even more highly for the assumptions of the time. Not only could many of them not envision Italians playing the parts, they also skipped over the ethnic imagination to which Coppola spoke so well with his final product. The Godfathers were vibrant, urban, and romantic. They brought the "unmeltable ethnics" into the kaleidoscopic, multidimensional seventies, offering an alternative to the assimilation process that leads to denial of cultural identity. Ethnic eyes could immerse themselves into recovery and American success symbols of power and wealth at the same time. If seen as a caution against that fate, the films allowed the subject to be not destroyed but reborn.
