GROSS/63 1972, part two - is The Godfather decadent?
Will I be kicked out of film club if I tell you of course it's decadent? It's immoral too.
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THE GODFATHER, director FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA; cast MARLON BRANDO, AL PACINO, JAMES CAAN, RICHARD CATELLANO, ROBERT DUVALL, DIANE KEATON; production PARAMOUNT, 1972, 175 MINUTES. Wikipedia, IMDb, Letterboxd.
This is part two of a three-part assessment of this monument to American crime and greed. Part one asks: Is The Godfather Shakespearean? Part three will ask: is The Godfather conservative? Although to some degree this post answers that question so maybe I’ll just change the question!
Would it be priggish of me to assert that The Godfather is amoral? A work of art that has no moral proposition, no morality at all? That Francis Ford Coppola and his collaborators actually relish the perfect absence of a moral stance? Is it a decadent film? The Godfather has been tormenting me. I set myself this stupid task, because I’ve got to this big moment in cinema history: to write about the biggest movie of 1972 - one of the most important films in the whole tradition - in three portentous parts. Is The Godfather Shakespearean? Is The Godfather decadent? Is The Godfather conservative?
And anyway, of course, all of cinema is decadent. The whole tradition belongs to the sensational, the spectacular. When you enter that darkened room and the credits roll you’ve entered a shallow realm of sensation, stimulation, emotion. There are no exceptions. You might - you often will - leave the cinema with more - with something much more profound, affecting, transformative - but you received it via a medium that’s one step up from a vaudeville balloon act. Flickering light, thumping sound, cheap scares, heart-rending cruelty and sadness. If there’s a non-decadent cinema it’s not worth looking at.
But is there something more specifically decadent about The Godfather, about this epic of filial duty and self-interest, something that connects with the decadence of the period? Is it decadent to dwell so lovingly, so obsessively, with these monsters - these murderers and torturers and conscienceless exploiters?
A moral spasm
When Bonnie and Clyde - the movie that detonated the New Hollywood hand grenade - was released, five years before The Godfather, it caused a kind of moral and aesthetic spasm in America because of what it seemed to want to say about being American. It reversed decades of Hollywood disapproval for transgression (all mandated by the code, of course) with a kind of wanton celebration of wickedness, amorality - even mayhem and murder.
By the time The Godfather came along even Bonnie and Clyde’s smirking, insoucient naughtiness seemed kind of innocent, though. Coppola takes it to the next level. Dialing up that movie’s cheeky gunplay, unhinged criminality - even the casual slaughter - to something much colder and darker. Something on another scale all together. He’s evacuated the narrative (Puzo’s narrative) of disapproval. It’s as if he’s completed the New Hollywood experiment, defying the whole history of the form to put before us a movie that’s entirely empty of pity, a glorious work of art that has no humanity at all.
The Godfather is a kind of ethical challenge to us all: it asks us to revel in violence to one end: the end of wealth and domination. Further, it asks everyone involved: the cast in particular, to take on the task, to apply their Actors’ Studio genius to bringing us the purest and most elevated wickedness in Hollywood to date.
Film school kids
When Coppola and the other film school kids arrived their art made some big claims. They weren’t just going to join the line and tack their creations onto the end of the unfolding tradition, like previous generations of filmmakers who’d mostly been concerned with continuity, with fitting in and finding a place in the entertainment economy. They were going to do something else, to shift it radically, to wake it up and shake it to its foundations.
The New Hollywood mavericks were going to take the opportunity offered them by the collapse of the studio system to tear things up and to rescue cinema, halt its decline, short-circuit the spiralling pointlessness of the studios and their increasingly lame, pedestrian and out-of-touch output. And their intervention was consequential: art movie values, trangressive counterculture morals, European modes of thought and production methods. It must have been a thrill to live through this period as an open-minded movie-goer. To watch Hollywood, one of capitalism’s most effective machines, grind its gears, come to a halt and grimly restart, shuddering with the shock of the new.
And if we’d told Coppola or Penn or Scorsese their movies from this period were in some way decadent, they’d have kicked us down the stairs (probably in slo-mo): they’d insist their creations were the opposite of decadent: that they were putting a knife through the obviously decadent mess of the dying system. A clean, authentic, youthful counter to the stuffiness, euphemism and evasion of the previous decades. They were putting the social, the sexual, the criminal - all the real, modern factors of late 20th Century life - right in the foreground: honest, open, radical, youthful, a challenge to the dead hand of the old school.
Where does it say you can’t celebrate murder and greed?
The Godfather’s narrative pivot is the moment Michael (Al Pacino) returns to the family from his attempt at a life beyond it - pulled back in - and decides to take the business on, accelerate it, take it up a gear - there’s a shiver in a roomful of hardened crims as he asks: “where does it say that you can't kill a cop?”, as if it had never occurred to anyone there. Coppola’s intervention is equivalent to this escalation.
The director lifts his crime family’s decadence from opportunist behaviour in a hard-pressed immigrant community to something more cynical, more systematic, more American.
Twenty dead (including the horse). Nothing these days. But it’s not a spree, it’s not a spontaneous crimewave. It’s strategic mayhem, wrought by an organisation on the scale of a corporation, across all of its territories and business units, cross-country. In those darkened rooms, deadened by fine fabrics and cigar smoke, secured by a floating army of enforcers, men circulate, setting out a business strategy that’s essentially a perfect parody of America’s condition, of the condition of capitalism in the pre-eminent superpower.
No room for disapproval
In the decades since the first gangster movies even the residual morality of the form has been drained away: there’s no lone hero here, no ethical conflict, no one struggles against the deceit, coercion, murderous cruelty. The police, the politicians, the press, everyone is drawn in, corrupted and malign. And we can’t help it: we love this. We love Michael’s chilly disengagement, the ghastly contingency and expedience of his every decision. We thrill first to Luca Brasi’s (Lenny Montana) superhuman brutality and then to the way he’s despatched, by even crueler men, in an even crueler setting. The cruelty, of course, as cruelty does, escalates, justifying itself (by the second movie, Michael can watch his own brother’s murder, out on the lake. Pacino gives us an anaesthetised, dehumanised, almost unwatchably wicked portrayal).
The Godfather’s decadence is an American decadence. It mirrors the decadence of an Empire in its mid-period pomp - the striking moral vacuity of Nixon/Agnew, the cynicism of the country’s dark and secretive foreign policy, its retreat from social consensus (which will bring us, as night follows day, to the present conjuncture). Coppola would surely not identify with the dominant ethical regime of the period but he reproduces it faithfully in his movie, putting on for us a kind of involuted restaging of the American political and social scene in the early seventies. He can’t do otherwise.
And as an audience we’re on side, we’re gang members, indulgence-seekers, marvelling at the perfection of Coppola’s monsters, their fastidious reproduction of this murderous crime clan. We’re given one character who stands for something else, though - Kay (Diane Keaton), the waspy wife who accidentally marries in but is then rejected, ejected. But she can do no more than wring her hands, mither at the fringes. What is she? Is she meant to hold up a mirror? Is she a Cordelia, standing for goodness or doubt or hesitance? If so she’s ineffective. She glances off the central narrative, bouncing out into the sunlight of the sane world. She returns in the sequels, contributing nothing, neutered. We long for her to actually defy the Corleone regime but she’s not allowed to. She can only confirm the murderous hegemony of the made men and their goons.
The established critics fell on Bonnie & Clyde with ferocity. It was immoral, in love with violence and death, “a squalid shoot-’em-up for the moron trade…”, “…a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy…” The critics of the old school were uptight, they were po-faced and self-important, some were just conservative and hated novelty but could they have been right? Have we been blinded to the nastiness of the New Hollywood by the fact that it was all so cool and cynical and of our age?
By the time The Godfather came along these disapproving voices had mostly gone quiet. Even Pauline Kael, who could often be relied upon to provide a contrarian line, fell in with the others. She loved The Godfather but she did notice how it was different from the gangster movies of earlier eras: “In The Godfather we see organized crime as an obscene symbolic extension of free enterprise and government policy, an extension of the worst in America—its feudal ruthlessness. Organized crime is not a rejection of Americanism, it’s what we fear Americanism to be. It’s our nightmare of the American system.”
I half wanted to tack on a couple of paragraphs here about charisma, obviously a vital element of the Godfather’s charm. Charisma was always present in the gangster form, of course but under the code, it could meet only with punishment or death. Charisma in the Hollywood since the seventies is a reward in itself, something we celebrate as sufficient.
The definitive book about the period is Mark Harris’s excellent Scenes From A Revolution: The Birth of the New Hollywood but don’t expect any disapproval from him - he’s full on team transgression - you’ll find no doubts about the form’s moral vacuity.
The present moment resembles the New Hollywood moment to some extent. The crisis of the pandemic might have produced a reset on the aesthetic and moral scale of the New Hollywood but it didn’t. Instead we’ve seen a retreat into IP and a renewed obsession with big, speculative releases on big holidays and with opening weekends and stars and deals and awards. It’s hollow and weak.