Here, I write about the first two films in The Godfather series by Francis Ford Coppola concerning its depiction of American capitalism and its dynamics concerning Italian American culture, particularly, Sicilian, culture. In doing this I cite from professors Fred Gardaphé and Thomas Ferraro.

My conclusion is that The Godfather shows us that American capitalism, at its most efficient (i.e., ruthless and ‘business-like’), and the prominent Sicilian virtue as championed by Vito Corleone, familial love, are ultimately irreconcilable (See footnote 1). In the post-war America depicted by Coppola, Michael Corleone can’t successfully be a ruthless businessman and a family man at the same time. He faces a catch-22; in order to save his family dynasty, he cannot trust or genuinely care and love them. This might be because he finds himself in a “post-immigration world in which the trickster [i.e., Michael] becomes accepted as an American businessman but loses his family” (Garaphé “A Class Act” 64). This disjunct is not as obvious at the end of the first film (although the final scene certainly benefits such an interpretation); however, in the second film, in its structure a distorted mirror of the first movie, and in it's two plots which end completely opposite from each other (Vito has established a future of prosperity for his family, while Michael has lost his), Coppola's juxtaposition makes this absolutely clear: Michael is now alone.Through a capitalist ruthlessness, he has gotten rid of his enemies and is once again head of the most powerful American crime family; however, in using that same ruthlessness he has effectively destroyed his family. He has killed his sister's husband, alienated (and then killed) his brother, distanced himself from another brother (Tom Hagen), and has closed the door on his wife (twice). His actions ironically fulfill his assertion at the beginning of the first movie when he tells Kay, his future wife, ‘that’s my family, not me.’

There is a counterargument to this. At the end of the first Godfather, it is possible that “in our heart of hearts we recognize that the Corleones are the first Italian family of American capitalism, and that being Italian, at least this kind of Italian, is just the better way to be(com)ing an American” (Ferraro, “Crime” 116):

"Not only did Puzo [and Coppola, might we add] produce Sicilian family values as the secret to truly effective organized crime, but he revealed a monomaniacal capitalist conspiracy as Southern Italy's dream destiny. [Furthermore], Sicilians were, all of a sudden, not part of an embarrassing blue-collar morass, an industrial underbelly losing its significance, but instead the capitalist nation's underground brain trust, and a potential mirror upon American corporate capitalism's requisite brutality" ("Crime" 109).

This is to say that at the end of the first film, Michael, through his ‘Italianess’ has become an American businessman, achieving for his family the American dream of rising to the top of society (i.e., class mobility), even if in the most vicious way. I would contest, however, that rather than saying that Sicilian values are consonant with and befitting of a capitalist ethos, and vice versa, that at least some of these values, especially the importance of family, are not only devalued, but eradicated.

In The Godfather Part II, Vito Corleone’s rise from poverty to riches is depicted romantically, having achieved success in a Robin Hood style manner. This is seen especially in the second film, where he steals from the rich and is protector of the marketplace vendors and the elderly. As an immediate juxtaposition, we see Michael, who, in order to maintain the Corleone syndicate, must undergo ‘a grand transposition-transformation in America of habits, expressions, and cultural components [...] of the Old World” (Marazzi, Voices of Italian America 20). For the sake of the family business, this transformation must make him invulnerable, not only to the outsiders and competing crooks Vito faces, but also to the ones who should be closest to him such as Tom Hagen (who he does not trust at the beginning of the movie when he kicks him out of a meeting), his wife (see the linked scenes), and his brother (who he kills). Thus, Coppola shows us that even if a 'virtuous,' romantic, ‘valorous’ gangster may have been able to thrive by sticking to his native, Sicilian, values at first for Vito Corleone, this ‘virtuous’ way of doing crime is not a sustainable ‘business model’ for Michael Corleone when competing with post-war American crime syndicates. The family business must become less 'family' and more 'business.' Ferraro senses this too:

In inheriting the second film, there is “scene by scene of pointed difference. The first communion celebration of Michael’s son, Anthony Corleone, at the new estate on Lake Tahoe, which opens The Godfather Part II, is a mere echo, grandiose but pathetic, of the marvelous garden wedding that opens The Godfather: the “hors d’oeuvres” are “crappy” (where’s the antipasto?), the band can’t play tarantella, and the dissolute Fredo has married a once-voluptuous actress who is falling all over the other men. On the business side, the Senator from Nevada deliberately mispronounces Corleone as a coded sign of disrespect and then tries to force a kickback on liquor licensing, Tom Hagen is cut out [...], Pantangele is being undermined [...], and an assassination attempt is made that night on Michael [...]. Ethnicity’s going to hell in a handbasket: what, in capitalism’s name, is going on here? (“Crime” 122)

In the second film, Michael embraces a sort of American businessman ideology, capitalism at its most efficient (i.e., without benevolence or care for people's actual concerns, even 'loved' ones). Thus, “from an Italian perspective [...], [the film] entails a direct assault on the mythos of the ethnicity in the original narrative” (Ferraro 122). This is seen especially in the closing sequence of the second film, where Michael, in a flashback is depicted as abandoned and sitting alone at the family dinner table. Coppola directly juxtaposes this with his loneliness in the present, showing us that the ‘old ways’ of Vito Corleone, which I would claim possess a (familial) vulnerability, have no place in the capitalist world and the American dream.

To this I might add that the ultimate consequence of his need for ‘invulnerability’ turns into psychological and social disaster as depicted in these closing sequences of Godfather Part II where Michael begins to grieve, contemplating his self-inflicted loneliness. This is amplified in the Godfather Part III, where Michael deals with the consequences of his actions. In both cases, we can see that this an example of what Butler says when she says that the fact that we go through grief and the processing of mourning means that ‘we are constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies; we are constituted as fields of desire and physical vulnerability, at once publicly assertive and vulnerable’ and that she ‘thinks it exposes the constitutive sociality of the self, a basis for thinking a political community of a complex order’ (18). Because of Michael’s need to rid himself of vulnerability to protect his ‘business,’ he harms himself by acting against his ‘political constitution.’ On the one hand, this means that is no one to take sides against the family, and the family is invulnerable from the inside, on the other hand, there is no more family to love.

 

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