Sarah tells Mike about how America's favorite gangster movie is really its favorite killing-the-American-Dream movie. Digressions include the Mona Lisa, Bruce Springsteen and the tyranny of height-ism. The sound quality continues to worsen.
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Sarah tells Mike about how America's favorite gangster movie is really its favorite killing-the-American-Dream movie. Digressions include the Mona Lisa, Bruce Springsteen and the tyranny of height-ism. The sound quality continues to worsen.
Continue reading →
Support us:
Subscribe on Patreon
Donate on Paypal
Buy cute merch
Where to find us:
Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
The Godfather
Sarah: If I were to do a standard high-stakes American podcast presentation, and I interviewed you, what I would do is I'd be like, “Michael Hobbes tried to buy shoes”. And it'd be a quote and he'd be like, “I wanted brown brogues”. And I'd be like, “He only wanted brown brogues”. Like when someone is trying way too hard sexually and you're like, did you learn a routine and then memorize the order?
Mike: Welcome to You’re Wrong About, the podcast where we debunk political and historical myths. I came up with a new tagline this week.
Sarah: Oh, that's a good one.
Mike: I don't know if it's completely accurate, but taglines don't have to be accurate.
Sarah: It describes at least some of what we do. It's like saying you're an importer exporter when you also partake in other activities.
Mike: I am Michael Hobbes, I’m a reporter for the Huffington Post.
Sarah: I'm Sarah Marshall. I'm a writer for the New Republic and The Believer and Buzzfeed.
Mike: And this week we are talking about The Godfather, which is neither a political nor a historical myth, but we'll get there.
Sarah: I would argue that it is both, but. So I watched The Godfather last night to brush up, with my friend Cooper Bombardier, and who's cellar I'm currently recording this episode with you in Nova Scotia. And it was funny because he came down to watch it with me and he was like, “Oh, huh, I don't think I've ever actually seen all of The Godfather all at once.” And I was like, “Yeah, a lot of people haven’t really seen all of The Godfather.” It's just this thing that we absorb through cultural miasma.
Mike: I think there should be a word for that thing where you know the satire of the object far before you know the actual object. I heard, “I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore”, for like 10 years before I realized that was a reference to something. And I think The Godfather has a similar cultural place. I saw references to Godfather's stuff in the Simpsons for years, and then you watch the movie, and you watch the movie and you’re like, oh, that's where that comes from. I'm like, oh, that. But it's hard to experience a cultural object when it's like, you already know it through this weird cheesecloth version of it that you’ve already seen.
Sarah: And I think a lot of movies from that period had become like that. Jaws is another one. And we're really gonna also be talking about the seventies as a whole for cinema. I think it was a decade when the idea of what a movie could do culturally suddenly manifested in a new way. And one of those examples is that Jaws became the first summer blockbuster.
And so I'll start by asking you, what's your relationship to The Godfather? Or do you have a relationship to it?
Mike: I've seen the Godfather all the way through once. I was home sick. I was 16 or 17, and considered myself a film scholar, because I worked at a video store.
Sarah: I always wanted to work at a video store.
Mike: It was kind of fucked up because it was like the neighborhood video store. But then once I started working there, it turned out that it was mostly a porno video store, and I didn't know this because I was like 15 years old. And then once I started working there, it turned out that like 90% of the income of the store was from my friend's dads renting pornography.
Sarah: Were you checking out tapes, too?
Mike: Yeah. There was a room that I had never gone into because I was a child. It was twice as big as the actual store that I knew, and it was just pure pornography. And so that was what I ended up doing that summer, was having my friend's dads come out of that little room and look at me and want to die, and I also wanted to die at that moment.
Sarah: But anyway.
Mike: Anyway. When I was sick, I dispatched my mom to go to the video store that I worked at and to get all three Godfather movies. My impression of The Godfather was mostly just, I've seen all this before, the horse's head, the wedding, that shot at the very end where he closes the door, I knew all of that. It was like seeing the Mona Lisa for the first time or something where you're like, this is this thing that I kind of already know. And it dampens any of the emotional impact. I feel like for me, the Godfather has always just been this cultural artifact. It's never been a movie that I feel particularly strongly about. I don't even know if I think that it's good or bad. It's just this movie that everyone says is a classic, and I don't really know what to think. What is yours?
Sarah: So I grew up with the perception that the Godfather just was one of the great movies and that there were objectively great movies, and the Godfather was one of them. Did you have that perception?
Mike: Totally. Yeah. It was always the number one on those lists.
Sarah: And I have that same experience when I tried to watch the first Godfather when I was 13. And I just like, you know, I was a 13 year old girl. There wasn't a lot for me there. It's about the dynastic struggles of Italian guys in the forties. And one of the interesting things about that movie is that, what do you remember about, or do you remember anything about the presence of women in the Godfather movies?
Mike: I just remember them being like scolding harridans, that they were always what you had to work around so you could do the real business. They were objects, in that you're giving them away at a wedding. And then it's like these people that you have to hide your true self from, they’re never equal participants. And I could be misremembering this, but I don't remember there being any like evil women or, they were not on equal footing with the men in that movie at all. They were just obstacles.
Sarah: I cannot think of an instance where a woman has enough power or volition to pose any kind of a threat.
Mike: So you saw it when you were a kid, how old were you when you saw it?
Sarah: 13. I watched way too many things when I was too young for them.
Mike: Yes. This is an ongoing theme of the show.
Sarah: Yeah. Of just doing everything like a little earlier than you should, and kind of knowing it, but being like, I'm ready. Just give it to me. And so, yeah, but I watched the first Godfather and it just left me completely cold. I also didn't understand what was happening. Yeah. I think another problem is that if you insist on being precocious, you consume all these texts before you really understand what's going on.
Mike: Totally. All that cultural content that you're kind of supposed to like, you just end up having this weird, distant relationship with it because it's a classic with a capital C. I always find that so many of the things that made that type of entertainment noteworthy have now become cliches.
Sarah: Like what?
Mike: A friend of mine who studied art history was telling me the other day that one of the reasons why the Mona Lisa is really famous is because it was one of the first paintings to depict a commoner rather than royalty. And it was one of the first paintings to do realistic three-dimensions. There were techniques in there that were interesting at the time. Both of those things are so common now that we don't immediately look and be like, “Ooh, a commoner, wow.”
Sarah: Right. We're not like, oh my stars, that painting depicts dimensions. Yeah.
Mike: We're not as impressed. And it's the same with something like the French Connection. That was like one of the first movies to do these chaotic chase scenes through a crowded city. But we've seen that a million times now.
Sarah: Most movies I feel are just chaotic chasing and punctuated by sexist jokes that were written by at least six people. That's what movies are.
Mike: So what's the core story of The Godfather. What's the narrative that it's actually telling?
Sarah: So in the Godfather part one, we start with the wedding of Connie Corleone, who is the youngest child of Don Corleone, played by Marlon Brando. And he's there with his family. Everyone's well. He and his men are doing their deals in the very dark, shadowy nucleus of the Corleone family compound. While outside, everyone is sun drenched and dancing. And Johnny Fontaine is there. From the beginning, there's a spatial idea that things can be bright and nice outside because men are here in the dark doing their dark things.
Mike: So Don Corleone is brokering deals behind the wedding. And Al Pacino is the youngest son, oldest son?
Sarah: Youngest.
Mike: Youngest son. And he's just returned from World War II.
Sarah: Yes. And he's there with his girlfriend, Kay, played by Diane Keaton. So we start off with seeing the status quo for the Corleone family. They're very powerful. World War II is over. It's a time of celebration. The escalation to our premise is that an assassination attempt is made on Don Corleone by Sollozzo, who's a guy who attempted to broker a deal with him to get them to start distributing heroin, which Don Corleon was not into because he's too decent to get involved in drugs.
So Sollozzo decides to take him out. He is unfortunately unable to kill him. And so while Don Corleone convalesces, Michael, who never wanted to take part in the family business before, is pulled up and he decides he has to avenge his father. So he goes, and he kills Sollozzo. After that, he has to go abroad where he marries a young lady who then gets killed in a car bomb meant for him, and of whom he never speaks again until The Godfather part three.
And after that he comes back to America, marries Kay, who seems to have no will of her own at this point, learns the family business, gets revenge on the people he needs to get revenge on. And at the end of the movie, we watch a vast series of hits on all of his rivals and potential rivals be carried out while he is holding his nephew during his christening and saying that he renounces Satan, as all of these murders that he's ordered are being carried out.
And then the final murder is that of his sister Connie's husband, his brother-in-law, which is crossing a line. And so the end of the movie is Connie saying, “How can you do it? How can you kill my husband? You didn't think about me.” And we end with Diane Keaton as Kay asking Michael if he was responsible. And he says, “Just this once you can ask me about my business, no.” And it's like, “There can only be lies now at this point.”
And The Godfather part two is about Don Corleone having to flee Sicily by himself as a child and come to America and raise his young family and have to start getting involved in neighborhood organized crime, because he and all his neighbors are being squeezed by a local boss named Don Vannucci. So he has to kill him and take his place and become a more ethical boss. And that takes place in Little Italy during the feast of San Gennaro. So if you’re going to do a gay Godfather, you can have a crucial hit take place during pride.
And so the Godfather Two is Don Corleone killing his first person and going back to Sicily to kill the man who killed his father, forcing him to flee as a child. And there's this sense in the movie of Don Corleone having been like, and now the score is settled, and I can raise my children to not have to do these terrible things that I had to do. Because the American dream is that your children don't have to do the terrible things that you did, so they wouldn't have to do terrible things. And that came out in 1964.
Mike: What's the third one about, I've never actually seen it.
Sarah: The third one is about, Michael is old, it takes place 20 years after the end of the second movie. And it's about Michael trying to get out of the family business and then basically having to, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in”, is the only salvageable quote from that movie. And it's also about Michelson wanting to be an opera singer and Michael ultimately being really into it because it's like, how do you escape a grinding cycle of eternal patriarchal abuse and numbness? The arts.
Mike: Sure. Make a collage.
Sarah: And also his actions leading to his beloved daughter, played by poor Sophia Coppola, being killed accidentally. And at the end of the movie, Michael is sitting in a courtyard, really wizened and old, and he just quietly dies. And I think men hate that movie so much, partly because it's bad, but also because it's a movie about Al Pacino getting old, getting infirm. You know, Michael, remember when you killed all of those people, you've really been brought low by the wages of loneliness. You're watching someone weakened by the way that they've destroyed their life. And you kind of lose plausible deniability when you watch the Godfather part three. When you watch the other two Godfather movies, they're mostly wheeling and dealing and power and killing people. And the Godfather three is like, what if you lose the ability to have relationships with other human beings? And you're lonely forever. That's what this movie is about. Yeah. The Godfather three is consequences, the movie.
Mike: This is one of the things I wanted to ask you, what is it aesthetically that made the Godfather so noteworthy, in that we're used to these complicated depictions of male antiheroes and good guys slash bad guys. What was it that the Godfather did that nobody was doing at the time? What made it so noteworthy?
Sarah: Okay. So let's talk about the history of The Godfather. And I would say that going into this, we would agree that our perception of it as teens growing up in the nineties was that it was like this great classic, this thing that you were supposed to like and get the greatness of, and the Godfather, I think always has, has come to fall within that really tiresome way that people talk about the canon things that people are supposed to recognize the greatness of, but maybe have lost the ability to actually enjoy. And what I find interesting about all this is that nobody thought the Godfather was going to be great. And all of the people who were involved in it from the very beginning only wanted to make money. Everyone involved seems to have this kind of startle reflex when it became so critically adored. Everyone was just like, what really?
And so Mario Puzo, who according to some sources that he disputes, I think Robert Evans, the studio head who financed the movie, talked about Puzo being like, all right, I'll adapt my book and do a screenplay for you because I have gambling debts. So, meh. And Puzo had written the book because he wanted to make money. He was a novelist and he had attempted to go Hollywood and had hated it and been chewed up by it, much as Francis Ford Coppola already had been being chewed up by Hollywood for a few years, by the time he made the Godfather.
So one of the big themes of it is men who are very furious with the power structures that they are attempting to work with, which I think is relevant. But Mario Puzo, who's an Italian guy, has never really had contact with the mob. Although he is a big time gambler. And he actually blurped this book that I bought this week called, Casino gambling for the Winner. So he's at least a prolific enough gambler that he's blurping how to beat the casino books in the seventies.
Mike: What a qualification.
Sarah: But he's never really had firsthand contact with the mob. But he goes and he decides to write a mob story. So he goes and reads all these chronicles because at this point, this is post all of these federal investigations that have led to thousands of pages of testimony given by people important to mobster power structures over the years. The seventies are a time when it seems like Italian American and Jewish organized crime in America is losing power. And so we can afford to be kind of nostalgic about it. Because in the seventies, Americans were more afraid of South America and the black power movement. I was not there, but I would guess that in 1972, people were a lot less scared of Italians than they were in 1942. And it's kind of like, there's a book called, How the Irish Became White, about how Irish immigrants when they first started arriving in America in the mid-19th century were seen as unambiguously, ethnically, other, and then gradually stopped being so ethnically other, because other immigrants who were even more identifiable ethnically other, like people from Southern Italy, started coming over.
Something I also learned because the Godfather is so much about the Italian American immigrant experience, and this is just something that it never occurred to me to even wonder about, because we only have so much time for wondering in a day. But one of the things they talked about was that there were different rates of return for different immigrant populations. So for example, Russian Jews who immigrated to America stayed in America at a rate of 85% to 90%, because they were fleeing pogroms and they had no reason or ability to go back.
But Italians, I think, had a return rate of like 50%, because they were much more likely to come to America and get high paying, by the standards of the Italian economy, jobs for a few years, and then to go back. And then maybe come over again. But there was a much more porous relationship that America had with Italy than it had with, for example, most Eastern European countries.
And there was also the sense, I think, that Italians would never be good immigrants because they didn't come over and assimilate. They came over and they were like, “I am going to be Catholic. I am maybe going to be an anarchist. I'm going to have my own systems of power and of taking care of my community, and of government, and of policing. And you, the American government, are not going to take care of me. So fine, we will go our separate ways”, essentially. Which is a very intelligent response to discrimination.
Mike: My understanding is that a lot of the current panic over immigrants parallels exactly the same panic over Italian immigrants. That it was like the Sicilians came over, they're committing crime, they're living in ghettos, their kids don't speak English. It's impossible to socialize them. They're never going to grow up. We're going to have this permanent underclass in the country. All of the ugly stuff that you hear about immigrants now, it was word for word, the same stuff about Sicilian.
Sarah: And all the stuff we talked about in crack babies, too.
Mike: Totally. Just dehumanization. By now, we barely even think of Italian people as any different than any other white person. We don't think of them as ethnically different from white. They've just become white people.
Sarah: And also this thing that we get very concerned about when, you know, immigrants or some otherized class with people are in America, and mainstream America does not allow them to assimilate, and so they're like fine. And then they'd turn around and they're able to make their own money. And we're like, no, no, no. If we don’t let you assimilate, your job is to be ground down.
Mike: Right? So the book, The Godfather comes out of Mario Puzo, is he cashing in his own Italian heritage? Does he have any firsthand knowledge of the mob, or is he just reading these cases and kind of extrapolating?
Sarah: He said he has no firsthand knowledge of the mob. I'll read you, actually, this is his obituary in the New York times. “When Mr. Puzo wrote the Godfather in the late 1960s, he did it reluctantly. His first two novels had received favorable reviews, but had earned him a total of $6,500. At 45 and in debt, he thought he was going downhill fast as a writer, but he had some favorite stories to tell about the mafia. And for the money, he decided to write a book about Italian-Americans and organized crime. From the author’s account, he had scant encouragement from publishers and received an advance of only $5,000. But when the book was published in 1969, it became one of the most phenomenal successes in literary and cinematic history. The book was the number one bestseller in the United States and was on the New York Times bestseller list for 67 weeks. As he wrote in 1972, ‘I'm ashamed to admit that I wrote the Godfather entirely from research. I never met a real, honest to God gangster. I knew the gambling world pretty good, but that's all.’”
I love that he says I'm ashamed to admit. It's also interesting that in the Sopranos in the nineties, the characters are always watching and talking about the Godfather. And we started in the nineties to talk about this sort of self-reflexive model of the way that structures of power see themselves. And I feel like being a gangster and watching the Godfather or being an American man and watching the Godfather is a movie about power. It's like the story that Oliver Stone tells about he makes Wall Street, which ends with its main characters being indicted. And then this generation of young guys watch it and decide based on that, that they're going to become Wall Street stockbrokers. And so Oliver Stone meets these guys and they’re like, “Your movie inspired me to go work on Wall Street”. And he's like, what?
Mike: It's interesting. Why do you think it caught fire? Why do you think this random book by this random dude went so viral, back before we had that term.
Sarah: So, okay. I have some thoughts about this. I ran the book of the Godfather. You can tell that it was written in haste. It also contains a lot of really graphic and weird sex stuff.
Mike: Oh, maybe I should read.
Sarah: Okay. So we’re introduced to Sonny Corleone, who's played by James Khan in the movie. When his character is introduced, one of the salient- you know what? I'm just going to read it for you cause it's really great. “Sonny Corleone had strength. He had courage. He was generous and his heart was admitted to be as big as his organ.”
Mike: Oh my God. Subtle. Very Subtle. How do you write this and not just giggle to yourself?
Sarah: Oh I’m sure he did. Okay. So in the movie of The Godfather, we see Sonny Corleone running off from his sister Connie's wedding in the opening scene with one of the bridesmaids, Lucy Manzini. So here's the description of that in the book. “Lucy Manzini lifted her pink gown off the floor and ran up the steps. Sonny Corleone’s heavy cupid face, readily obscene with whiny lust, frightened her.”
It's also offensive to Italians for having been written by an Italian guy.
“But she had teased him for the past week to just this end. In her two colleagues love affairs. She had felt nothing and neither of them lasted more than a week. Quarrelling her second lover had mumbled something about him ‘being quote too big down there’. Lucy had understood and for the rest of the school term had refused to go out on any dates. But then, during the summer, preparing for the wedding of her best friend, Connie Corleone, Lucy heard whispered stories about Sonny. One Sunday afternoon in the Corleone kitchen, Sonny's wife, Sandra, gossiped freely. Sandra was of course a good-natured woman who had been born in Italy but brought to America as a small child. She was strongly built with great breasts and had already borne three children in five years of marriage. Sandra and the other women tease Connie about the terrors of the nuptial bed. ‘My God’, Sandra had giggled. ‘When I saw that poll of Sonny's for the first time and realized he was going to stick it into me, I yelled bloody murder. After the first year, my insides felt as mushy as macaroni boiled for an hour. When I heard he was doing the job on other girls, I went to church and lit a candle’.”
Mike: Why do straight men write like this? There's something so weird about this straight guy thing about penis size. It's so weird.
Sarah: But then, and then what happens though is that Lucy Manzini has a big enough vagina. So this book comes out in 1969. It stays a best seller for months and months and months. And Robert Evans of the studio had bought the rights to the screenplay, had Mario Puzo write it for them for about $12,000. And they didn't really want to write a gangster movie. There have been a Kirk Douglas gangster movies that had bombed, and there was a sense at the time that gangster movies were kind of finished. And they kind of were, right? Because the gangster movies that had come before The Godfather were like Little Caesar and the original Scarface. And these movies were wise guys who were not leading men, not supposed to have sex appeal, not to be these complex antiheroes they were just villains. They weren't supposed to be interesting. And they existed to be gunned down.
Mike: It was the era of, “look see, hey coppa, what are ya’ doing here?” Like Dick Tracy style gangsters, they all have Tommy guns and they're just caricatures.
Sarah: They have no personalities, they're not human beings. And so there is a sense in the studios, like we don't really want to make a movie like the Godfather. And then it stayed on the bestseller list for months. And then it became a bestseller in Europe and they're like, Okay. And no one wanted to make it.
When I think about why I Imagine it being a bestseller in 1969 America, I'll read you a passage actually and I'll ask you what you think of it, because to me, this relates to why it was successful. So this is from a scene in Puzo's The Godfather, where Michael has come back to America and is asking his former girlfriend Kay, who he hasn't seen in two years, to marry him. And so here's a scene of this is something Michael says to Kay as he's trying to explain the philosophy behind his father's work in organized crime. And he says “He doesn't accept the rules of the society we live in because those rules would have condemned him to a life not suitable to a man like himself, a man of extraordinary force and character. What you have to understand is that he considered himself the equal of all those great men, like presidents and prime ministers and Supreme court justices, and governors of the state. He refuses to live by rules set up by others, rules which condemn him to a defeated life. But his ultimate aim is to enter that society with a certain power since society doesn't really protect its members who do not have their own individual power. In the meantime, he operates on a code of ethics he considers far superior to the legal structures of society.”
So what do you think about that?
Mike: I guess it's all about American individualism or it's this idea of the American dream where you're building a fortress around yourself. That's the definition of making it, is that you're creating all these structures built around you rather than participating in any larger structure.
Sarah: Much like how Jim Jones made it.
Mike: That's what it sounds like to me, kind of like building your own society. I guess that's kind of what the mafia is, is a parallel society within a larger society that has its own rules and its own mores and its own enforcement mechanisms and it's kind of a quasi-society. And it's like a Russian nesting doll of a society in another one. It's also an interesting simulacrum of the immigrant experience, right. You're building the middle world unto yourself. And so it makes sense within an immigrant community because you're participating in this bigger society, but you're also distrusted by that society and rejected by that society. You have to create this separate structure for yourself. And so it makes sense that people would adopt this ideology to go along with what they have to do, that necessity creates an ideology around it.
Sarah: Yeah. And this also makes me think of just how you and I are always talking about wanting to ultimately do an episode on some aspect of HIV or aids and how I feel like one of the interesting things about what happened in America when Aids started appearing and spreading in the early eighties was the way that the gay community had to figure out how to relate to a larger society that had resources that they needed, but also didn't care and had a history of treacherous behavior. And the fears when the first HIV test was invented, that it would be used to sort people into quarantine and internment camps. Yeah. That is exactly the kind of shit that the American government has always been pulling. Why would you not think that that would happen?
Mike: Right. And also, I guess the same thing with a parallel structure to, that there's vocabulary that the gay community has, there's different aesthetic preferences that the gay community has. All these adaptations, things like drag Queens are a form of adaptation, chosen families, a form of adaptation. You can see the same sorts of things, there's kind of this parallel structure, and you have to interact with the dominant structure because you need it’s shit basically, but you're going to kind of create your own family within that.
What's interesting though, is that society is profoundly uninterested in these parallel structures when they are, for example, El Salvadorian communities living in the Bronx, 10 to an apartment who are working as delivery people, right? When it's low-income communities or marginalized communities that are forming their own parallel structures, we do not care. Whereas with mafia movies, I think part of it is also that we can participate in the money and the power that they have, that some of it is the fact that these people are not necessarily downtrodden or not downtrodden in economic ways that we can vicariously participate in the fantasy of going your own way, but going your own way with the resources to match. Right? You're not scraping together the scraps that you have, like the gay community was in the seventies and eighties. You're scraping together what you have, but you're creating a fiefdom. You're creating a kingdom and a power structure with real power and real resources behind it. And that's what's appealing about it.
Sarah: Yeah. And it's so interesting how mobster movies have become this aspirational thing. And what's funny to me is that, so when I think about that passage that I read to you, I see that same thing you said, that idea of like a powerful individual. But also this fantasy of dropping out of society because it sucks. And there's so much stuff in the Godfather, so much stuff in the Godfather movies about how the legitimate people are the real criminals. So the first gangster thing we see happening in, not in the book of the Godfather within the movie is the classic, too cliche to be shocking at this point, horse head in the bed scene. And that happens because a guy who is clearly Frank Sinatra, Johnny Fontane, needs this Hollywood executive guy to cast him in a movie. And he won't because he's been blackballed because he seduced this girl that the Hollywood producer Woltz had his eye on.
And so Robert Duvall playing the conciliary Tom Hagan goes to Hollywood and tries to talk Woltz into giving Johnny Fontane the role. And basically comes to him with this approach of Don Corleone would very much like you to give Johnny Fontane this role, and he can give you all of this nice stuff and end all of your union troubles and offer you protection. Because one of the things that gets talked about a lot in Puzo's The Godfather is the Don Corleone model of power. Which is that you establish friendship with everybody, everybody's your friend, you do favors for them and then they have to do things for you. And you do the iron fist and development glove.
And so he comes to Woltz saying, will you please do this? And Woltz has a speech during which he makes the Cardinal error that you should never make in one of the Godfather books or movies, which has to call someone a guinea, anyone who calls an Italian a guinea will be killed or something terrible will happen.
Mike: That's a racial slur, right?
Sarah: Yeah. That's a pejorative term for an Italian. So of course, then we see the scene where the next morning Woltz wakes up and his racehorse Khartoum has had his head cut off and put in his bed. And there's a famous scene where he takes the covers back and there's all this blood and he screams. What's fascinating about this, by the way is that, that's what it feels like when you get your period for the first time.
Mike: This is such an Oberlin PhD.
Sarah: I am at my best and worst in Oberlin PhD type of a person. That is an interesting scene, genitally though. The implication is emasculated at this point, he has no power.
Mike: I should have known you would go there with this.
Sarah: That everything is just about dicks?
Mike: You're probably right?
Sarah: That's what they teach you to do in grad school for the humanities. That's why STEM is making more money. To me, what that scene demonstrates is this guy is a fucking slime, and there's also all this other stuff in the book about how terrible he is. And he is molesting one of his child stars. And he's just this overdetermined villain, which I'm sure has to do with the fact that Mario Puzo did not like the kind of characters he had to deal with in Hollywood. There's so much attention in the book to the struggles of Italian guys in Hollywood and how everyone's a jerk to them and the women are all sluts.
And there's this line about how Johnny Fontane ruined his voice on cigarettes, booze, and broads. And I was like, how did he lose his voice on broads? How do women destroy a man's singing career? But yeah, I think the first thing that we see is this parallel structure coming up against something that's recognized as a legitimate power structure in mainstream America. And this guy is a horrible sleaze ball who deserves to be emasculated by the Corleone family. And then you watch that happen.
And the exact same thing happens in the Godfather Two with the Nevada Senator, except worse because they kill a prostitute that he was cavorting with and then make him think that he had a blackout and killed her. And that's how they get him in their pocket. These people who represent legitimate society come in and are jerks and they're like, you're an Italian, so you can't do anything to me. And then they got reassured that that is in fact not the case.
Mike: That must be part of it too, that you can cast it as an underdog story. The way that it's done deliberately, there's no moral ambiguity in this. You want something from this guy, he's an asshole to you, he calls you a racial slur, and he's like a pedophile sleazeball. Then it's like you’re the just one for being, we're going to threaten you and damage you and make you do what we want. It still allows you to retain the moral high ground, right, because he's disrespected you and he's an asshole anyway. So maybe it plays on this idea that the justice system, the formal justice system, is taken over by the establishment. And here's an informal justice mechanism where the little guy sticks it to the big powerful guy. Those stories always resonate.
Sarah: Yeah. And I think that's a lot of the appeal of mobster movies. And I also think about this a lot with Scorsese movies. Because I think the shift from Godfather to the Scorsese gangster movie, which is Goodfellas in 1990, because the same year that Godfather three comes out and everyone hates it. And Casino, which came out in 1995 is that those movies are from the perspective of workers in big monster families. Godfather is a dynasty story. Scorsese movies are worker stories. And they're always about how the mob is really powerful and the structures that these people are working for get too powerful and too focused on their own power and don't remember to take care of the guys under them anymore. And everything falls apart. But at the end of the day, at least they're not the feds. This was a time when the federal government was running all of these surveillance operations on campuses, because they were so afraid of student protesting. And the government responded through, you know, all of these crazy attempts to surveillance young people and to take out revolutionary figures so that there wasn't too much racial unrest and things like that. And the Godfather is a story about people who have their own power structure with its own code of ethics who are being victimized by the feds. And I think there's just something about living in that time where you're like, I don’t know, where more people feel like criminals.
Mike: So the book is a runaway bestseller. The studios decide, hey, let's make a movie out of this thing.
Sarah: We might as well make some money, right? And so no one wants to direct it. And Francis Ford Coppola has attempted to start his own movie studio and he's taken out a loan from Warner brothers or from Warner to make some films. And one of them is George Lucas's movie THX, something, something. And Warner who has given Coppola $300,000 to finance his movie watches this cause they're like, oh, this is an example of the movies that Francis Ford Coppola is making. And they're like, oh no, we need our money back. And so Francis Ford Coppola essentially has the loan sharks coming for him. So he's like fine, I'll make the Godfather. And Robert Evans apparently was interested in hiring him because he was like, we've never had an Italian direct a gangster movie before. So let's do that. And he literally said, we're going to hire a coach so I can smell the spaghetti.
Mike: Oh my God.
Sarah: Yeah. So they hired Coppola, and it was one of those shoots where everything seemed to be going badly. They were behind schedule by the end of the first week. And also Puzo had written the screenplay, which means that it probably had too much Johnny Fontane in it, I'm guessing. And so Francis Ford Coppola was rewriting it by night as they were shooting. So there were people who would show up to film their scene because they were playing a character from the book and they would be like, oh, sorry. Actually last night we decided you're not in this movie anymore.
Mike: Oh, wow.
Sarah: And he did all these things that Hollywood didn't really do, like he had not the same hundred or so hired extras for the whole movie, but actual people, he filmed on location. He apparently hung out with Martin Scorsese's parents to learn about little Italy locations and study them. To me the most interesting thing about how unlikely it is that this all came together is that the studio was dead set against having Al Pacino in it. They were like, he’s too short. Yeah, that was their main objection. They were like, he is way too short.
Mike: That's weird because with movie magic, you don't have to know that anyone is short. Tom Cruise is the size of Stalin, and nobody has any idea because all of the actresses are shorter than him and they shoot him from below.
Sarah: Like Gandalf.
Mike: I am the same height as Tom Cruise. So I follow this very closely. I am all for five foot five men's rights, but yeah. There are all kinds of techniques that you can use. No one in the world knows that Tom Cruise is the same size as me.
Sarah: That’s just because you're not famous enough yet. So if you say, Hey, would you think that Tom Cruise is the same size as Michael Hobbes? The person you're talking to would say who the fuck are you talking about?
Mike: True. But it’s just a weird objection.
Sarah: And I think they also were like, wait, no, the star can't be an Italian guy. That's gross.
Mike: Oh, it's so funny growing up in the world that we have to think about all these groups that people were discriminatory against that I have never come across. Americans used to hate Irish people, Americans used to hate Italian people. John F. Kennedy had to give a whole speech about how he was a Catholic.
Sarah: Yeah. What it proves is that we're willing to hate anyone. We just don't care.
Mike: It’s also to some extent inspiring that now it would almost be cartoonish to be like, I can't believe you're dating an Irish guy. It would just be like, what? It would just be a weird thing to say. It would almost not be offensive because it would just be so weird. And so it's a great example of the way that tokenism works, and other forms of discrimination apply where we can't have an Italian playing in Italian, which seems so dumb, but that happens all the time. Non-trans actors play trans people and non-fat actors have to gain 60 pounds. There's a million ways that we still do this tokenism now.
Sarah: Yeah. And so the person who the studios wanted to cast as Michael Corleone was Robert Redford.
Mike: No way. I was just going to say, he's not going to be blonde is he. That’s terrible.
Sarah: He’s the most blonde person who ever lived. He's so freckly. So I was watching the Godfather with my friend Cooper last night and it got to Al Pacino appearing and Cooper went, oh my God, is that Dustin Hoffman?
Mike: Nice.
Sarah: Which I think that could have worked.
Mike: Also he's an inch taller than me. I don’t know how he compares to you, but I know the Heights of all the actors under like five, eight
Sarah: I don’t know how tall Al Pacino is.
Mike: I don't either.
Sarah: I don't think he's that short. He's not, he's just like a regular sized guy.
Mike: I feel triggered by the phrase regular size. So how dare you.
Sarah: Really.
Mike: I feel called out.
Sarah: I do think that the Godfather really rides on Al Pacino. Oh, I just put that interestingly.
Mike: But he's great in it.
Sarah: Yeah. And Pauline Kael has this description of him that I loved. She was one of the first voices that inspired people to really take those movies seriously because people knew that they loved them, they were immediately really successful. They are nominated for a bunch of Oscars, but like My Fair Lady got nominated for a bunch of Oscars. That doesn't mean it's deep. And one of the things that she talks about, how these are also stories about fathers and sons and about this universal human experience. And to me, it's universal because I am not part of the parallel society of masculinity, but my life is very affected by it.
I watched the Godfather for the first time in a long time, and I'm watching the Godfather Two, which I had never seen, which is the movie that depicts the childhood of the Godfather of Leo Corleone. And then what happens after the events of the Godfather when Michael, his son, Al Pacino, regular sized still, has killed all of these people in order to maintain the family empire and his father has died and he's moved operations to Nevada and it's how things progressed for him from there and how he ultimately completely loses his soul. And it’s so sad. I finished it and I was like, this is like writing a confession, like confessing to a crime. This is American masculinity confessing. They're like, listen, we know that even when we try to love each other and uphold our systems of power, they are so intrinsically damaging that we end up feeling the need to kill our own brothers. We know that we've created a worldview that doesn't allow us to express or accept love or to do anything but madly accrue power. And my personal Oberlin PhD of the Godfather movies too, in terms of how they think about the immigrant experiences that Michael is the American child he's born in America. He's supposed to be shielded from the business. He's supposed to be Senator Corleone, Governor Corleone. And then the Godfather and he's willing Kay, he says in five years, the Corleone family is going to be completely legitimate, which is a crazy thing to say. It's like, Michael, do you really think that crime is going away? That this is a game you can ever get out of it. And in the book, it plays it like he really does believe that that's possible. It's more ambiguous than the movie.
And what happens is that the first Godfather, the book and the film, and with this orgy of violence, where he has to take out all of his rivals and rise as the head of the Corleone family and establish his power now that his father has died and take over. And what I find interesting about that is that the way Don Corleone is introduced to us as a character, especially in both movies is as someone who cares about taking care of his community and someone who is actually able to be merciless and he has people killed, but he also takes care of the people in this big circle that he is the caretaker of, and someone has to do it because no one else is going to take care of the Italians. And the movies make the argument very persuasively that he's an honorable person stepping into a role that it's necessary for him to fill. And Michael is someone who doesn't have a community whose own family is completely alienated from him by the end and who isn't able to be merciful toward ambiguous allies and rivals.
And so Michael, by the end of The Godfather, and then certainly in The Godfather Two, distinguishes himself as someone who has to have all the power, all the marbles, has no sense of proportion, no sense of family, no sense of community is convinced that he's legitimate in some significant way. And doesn't feel safe until he annihilates everyone who poses a threat to him. It's just this to me, this huge indictment of the American dream. Because he watched someone do all of these things that destroy them emotionally so that their children don't have to do them. And then their children do them to a far greater degree as a way of honoring them and feeling like they're being the people that would make their fathers proud which is what we watch Michael do. He has become an American and that's why he lost his soul.
Mike: It is also interesting that these movies really are dark and kind of an indictment of this entire culture. And yet their actual cultural impact was to glorify this culture. Same with Goodfellas and Casino and everything else. It’s really about how toxic and horrible this bullshit you have to respect me thing is and getting entrenched in your position and going after your rivals to show your own family that you're not weak, how poisonous that is. And yet, none of the poison of that is what has been the cultural impact of these movies? The cultural impact of these movies has been, wow gangsters are cool. What an interesting glimpse. Same with Scarface where he fucking dies at the end, but what do people take away? Rappers sample Scarface in their songs, Cause it's like, oh, he's such a cool bad-ass guy. And somehow, it's like the bad-ass-ery that has traveled from these movies and not the actual content.
Sarah: And I'm so confused about that. And I'm someone who, I watch gangster movies partly so that I can learn how to be assertive, that I'm aware of that behavior. So I know that I’m doing some of the weird things that American men do when they relate to gangster movies. And I still don't understand. I have watched clips from the Godfather when I think about negotiation tactics and be like, Hey, just be like Michael Corleone, always be the calmest person in the room.
Mike: One of the things that always strikes me whenever there's mafia movies is how over-represented the mafia is in American pop culture. Everyone always makes these movies claiming that they're not glorifying it or claiming that they're condemning this culture. But if we didn't want to spend time with these people, why do they keep making these movies? There's an infinite number of subcultures in a country of 330 million people, and yet this one subculture is the one we keep hearing about and keep making movies about, and we keep getting fascinated by, and it's clearly not the consequences that we're fascinated by. It's the trappings. It's the clothes. It's the cars. It's the weird vocabulary. It's the mores, it's the, go to the mattresses and these other little phrases that people still use.
Sarah: And going to the mattresses is great because all men want is to all sleep in one big room and eat spaghetti.
Mike: That's my understanding of what that phrase means. Yes. But it's just weird that there's all these other cultures that we're just not interested in or not fascinated by. And this is the one that we keep coming back to. Maybe this is why I didn't find The Godfather all that resonant, all these gangster tropes I've seen a million fucking times.
Sarah: Yeah, you don't really see a lot of stories about someone who started off as a small, but humble drag queen, and then gradually became the biggest, most powerful drag queen in all the world and then became master of her domain.
Mike: Why not?
Sarah: I guess you could, I guess it's just a failure of imagination.
Mike: Every world has a way of rising to the top, right? That every world has a hierarchy and rules to enforce it and a king of the hill type competition for I'm at the top and I'm going to kick everybody else back down. The lack of creativity in returning again and again to this one, fucking subculture is just amazing to me that it's these depths have been plumbed. I don't need to see more men feeling ambivalent about their relationship to being made a guy. It’s just dumb. There are so many interesting stories to tell, and this one keeps getting told over and over again.
Sarah: And men don't realize that they're constantly looking at themselves because they don't see it as men looking at men, they see it as all human beings looking at all human beings. These are the choices of narratives and they're all about white, straight guys and their accrual of power.
Mike: But is that the world that Godfather built, do you think? Do you think that was the beginning of us kind of pretending not to have sympathy for monsters, but actually having sympathy for monsters.
Sarah: Yeah, I think so, culturally, because there really hadn't been anything like it before where we had the mobster antihero, and also this idea of being able to study dynastic power. And we love stories about dynastic power and power going from father to son. That's one of the most delightful treats if you're seeking the masculinity narrative.
Mike: What else did people love about the Godfather when it came out?
Sarah: I think it was seen as a really well acted movie, because it was, which was also something that Coppola really had to fight tooth and nail for. It took four months for them to agree on casting and he had to audition all of these people for the studio folks and finally got his way. And it's one of those examples of a director being able to make a good movie by systematically undermining everything that he was expected to do.
So obviously I love it because I'm inspired by tales of creative people being slightly jerky so they can do what they want. If I were called on to in one minute, defend the Godfather, I would say that it's about all of this cultural stuff that was happening at the time and that we continue to be obsessed with obsessed with, and that can become really tiresome because we have not figured out how to tell another story because we can't learn that it's assigned confession from masculinity saying I'm sorry, I ruined everything and made everyone incapable love forever. We read it and then we forget it and we have to tell ourselves again and we forget it and we can't learn it.
Mike: So what's the legacy of the Godfather? I guess some of that is obvious, but what do you see as the main legacy?
Sarah: I can see the legacy of it that it's gotten a little bit too acclaimed for its own good. Maybe we see it as this big, fancy, important, classic, partly as a way to shield ourselves against its brutalness also because it's really sad. They’re sad movies. Masculinity is terrible and it ruins everyone's life. So maybe talking about it as this great movie where everyone made very good choices and it's touched with greatness is a way of not talking about the fact that it's sad and dark and effecting. And it is this signed confession that we as a society made.
Mike: Right. So it's an indictment of something that it's legacy glorifies, kind of like the song Born in the USA. It's actually criticizing something, but then the legacy of it is like, yeah bitch, born in the USA. It's like no one actually gets into the specifics about what it means.
Sarah: Did you know that Reagan tried to choose Born in the USA as his campaign song in 1984.
Mike: Yeah, because he had never actually listened to it, clearly. So what do you think we're wrong about on the Godfather?
Sarah: I think we're wrong that it's this normal American movie.
Mike: What does that mean?
Sarah: Don’t you think that we have this sort of implicit idea about things that are culturally really big in that way of like, yeah, this is a regular story about heroism and the struggle, the hero's journey, whatever. If something becomes popular and takes Americans by storm and you're like, yeah, it's because it's so great. The Godfather captured our minds and hearts because it's so great. It's so amazingly great. And like, it is great, but it's not that great. There are lots of great movies, even Mrs. Miller is a great movie. Nashville is a great movie.
Mike: So you think the Godfather tapped into some, it's not necessarily its inherent greatness, it's that it tapped into a bunch of threads that were already around in American society.
Sarah: Yeah, I guess that's my ultimate You're wrong about, about the Godfather. We just all became obsessed with it and we're like, why are we obsessed with a story? And we're like, it's because it's so great. And it's like, maybe it's because we're all mentally ill, the culture that we're living in. And the Godfather for whatever reason, for all sorts of reasons, really enables us to do that, to look at the problem without feeling like we're looking at the problem or we're indicting ourselves with it and we're just so drawn to it. And I think we're often really compelled as audiences toward stories that tell us something really scary about the world that we're living in but make that fear accessible in some way.
And with this it's like, it's not about all of us Americans, it's about gangsters. It's not about us, it's about them. That's one of the comforting things. And how Michael becomes the most dangerous, violent, scary person in that whole story, because he's the all American assimilated child who fought in World War II and went to an Ivy league school.
Mike: Do you think they were deliberate? Do you think Francis Ford Coppola knew that? Or was he tapping into something in his own mind.
Sarah: I think both. I think every artist works both consciously and unconsciously. I think it's also a testament to how great of a creative process it can be when everyone is involved. You're just trying to get in and out as fast as they can. Mario Puzo was like, oh, just give me my money. Francis Ford Coppola's like, oh, just give me my money. But they're both also telling a story that they care about, but they're doing it fast and loose. And that means that some stuff gets into the creative process which I'm sure that some of the stuff that Mario Puzo wrote in the book was just like rogue ideas. But then there's also great stuff that makes it in.
Mike: He’s tapping into a vein of his Id, like whatever dark stuff is down there, he's just typing and like all this weird stuff comes out.
Sarah: Yeah. The best shitty writing and crappy bestsellers are the ones that involve some degree of like automatic writing, what people do at seances, where you just let the unconscious pour out. Crappy sanitized writing is the worst writing ever. Crappy writing with a lot of character though, that can be great.
Mike: I think the seventies were messed up, man.
Sarah: This has been our theme for the last while.
Mike: This is what I’ve learned in the last month, the seventies were just like, when it all started to go off the rails, man. Once the greatest generation wasn't in charge anymore. We should've listened when our grandparents said that Elvis shouldn't be shaking his hips on TV. That’s when it all went wrong.
Sarah: The seventies were bad. Don't let anyone tell you differently.