jk reviews The Godfather

Don Vito (Marlon Brando) apologizes to his son, Michael (Al Pacino), for not being able to make the family legal before it made Michael a murdering monster too.

That was a fate threatening to befall his lead actors too. Al Pacino, for example, was considered so temporary in his pivotal role as Don Corleone’s son, Michael, that he endured laughter from the crew every time he went before the camera in early takes, so convinced were they that he’d soon be fired.

To make matters worse the book upon which the movie was based had become a terrific best-seller, daringly portraying mobsters like—well, folks—of course folks who shot, stabbed, and garroted their way through sometimes very short bloody lives. But the popularity of the book was just the problem, even Coppola was concerned that the book had become, since the time he had been hired, too big for him. Even he wasn’t sure he had the chops to do justice to the work. But he would convince himself and everybody else that he certainly did, just as Pacino would convince Paramount executives to not fire him by demonstrating his icy intensity in the famous restaurant scene where he assassinates two of the Corleone family’s enemies. People stopped laughing and started realizing they had the makings of something special.

Also contributing to the unlikely prospects for the success of The Godfather as a movie was the fact that Hollywood was notorious for botching adaptations, and hadn’t realistically (and certainly not favorably) presented the Mafia ever. How many audience-exasperating compromises might they make? Would they REALLY do the horse’s head scene? Were they going to have the guts, and the wrong stuff, to tell it like it was (in the book)? Of course, they still weren’t going to tell a realistic story of the rise of the greatest crime boss in history, they were going to mythologize the story of a very special Sicilian family. Vito Andolini (Don Corleone’s real name, changed at Ellis Island to the name of his home town in Sicily when impatient immigration officials couldn’t easily understand "Andolini") had survived a rotten childhood in Sicily, where his whole family was murdered by the local don, and he comes to New York mainly to escape a death sentence. Vito does what he has to in order to survive and to protect and provide for his family and he doesn’t let the big shots push him around while he does it. The question of whether one can lose his family while trying to save it is central to the Godfather myth, as is the question of whether there is truly any difference between Mafia dons and the supposedly more respectable masters who can merely hit humanity with a push of a button.

Don Vito Corleone’s story was the very stuff that made America great, an immigrant boy makes VERY—well, not exactly good—but VERY MUCH. And size is all that matters, right? If you’re big and powerful and corrupting to the core that’s better than good, or so the movie seemed to be saying in all kinds of ways, for example in the brief scene at the wedding party at the beginning where Sonny’s wife is bragging about the huge size of his penis just as she notices at a distance that her husband is making a date with his current girlfriend. That The Godfather came out shortly before America woke up to hear about some dolts getting caught breaking into the Watergate Hotel (which bust would in two years bring down another crime boss named Richard Nixon) seemed to resonate with the recognition occurring that year of a kind of moral breakup. American politics would finally be revealed for what everybody secretly knew it was, a con game, where dirty tricks and dirty money moved the silent majority of nitwits (always impressed by tales of the biggest prick) to pick one hamster brain after another as fearless leader while meanwhile cities were rotting from within, the racial divide was unbearably wide, and heroes had been done in by the reality of piles of dead-boy boxes bringing back the victims of a cretinous foreign policy known as the Vietnam War.

Into that normative ground zero came Marlon Brando making everyone an offer they couldn’t refuse—he was saying take care of your family first, and fuck the big shots before they fuck (or kill) you—and all you have to do is call Don Vito Godfather and he will protect you. What a great idea! Maybe Robert Stack had been speaking with forked tongue all those years on The Untouchables, maybe mobsters were just trying to give the people what they REALLY wanted!

The problem was, the movie had hardly begun before it became quite clear that Don Corleone couldn’t even protect himself, much less anybody else. And it was this point, this brilliant point—that what would really do in the Corleone family was the same thing that was going to do in a whole generation of families in America—drugs. Don Corleone just wanted to give people what they wanted. good honest corruption in the form of gambling and prostitution (as American as apple pie), but progress, in the form of The Turk (Al Lettieri), wanted to give America what it really needed—a deep dark fix of heroin. The Turk isn’t a Turk of course, he a mobster named Sollozzo who got his nickname because of the poppy fields he operated in Turkey. Sollozzo offers the Corleone family a large share in the drug profits in return for $1,000,000 in cash and political protection. All Don Vito had to do was say yes to a deal his sons would have to do anyway sooner or later and which he himself eventually did have to do to save himself and the remnants of his family. But, at the critical moment, when saying yes would have averted a bloody war, he says no, arguing that his political protection (particularly the judges he carries in his pocket "like so many nickels and dimes") wouldn’t be very friendly for very long if they thought he was pushing drugs. As he says, drugs is a dirty business and, understating the case, he notes that it is "a little dangerous."

He makes a business decision (a disastrously wrong one), but he makes the decision all fathers in America were making at that very moment too: would they do (or at least condone) drugs and be hip and cool and thus risk losing one kind of future, or say no and risk losing another future—risk being seen as square by their kids. In fact, Don Corleone has just exactly this kind of problem when he turns down The Turk’s offer. His son, Sonny (James Caan), betrays an interest in front of The Turk in the huge amounts of money that can be made in the drug trade, and appears to be contradicting his father’s cautious attitude. After all, they’re criminals, not priests, what difference should it make what kind of illegal activity they’re engaged in? Even Don Vito points out to The Turk that he has no problem with whatever a man does to make a living, but clearly we can tell he DOES have a problem with this, something more than just a concern about losing political protection. In fact, we see in this moment, when Don Vito says no to the Turk a poignant and classically tragic moment, a man making the last truly strong decision he will ever make in his life. Even though he shall ultimately survive the horrible consequences of the refusal, his power is forever broken. All decisions he makes after this time are born out of weakness, both as a man and a don. Indeed, events take control of his life, and the actors in it, all of whom have their own agendas and their own calculations of power and honor, will shatter Don Vito’s most cherished dream, that he would one day be able to see at least one of his sons, Michael (aptly named after the avenging angel), become one of the string-pulling (i.e., legitimate) bigshots, a governor or senator. In one of the best scenes in the movie he sadly tells Michael there wasn’t enough time to make the Corleone family legitimate. Michael, not really understanding the full meaning of his father’s apology, reassures him that "We'll get there, Pop." Of course they never do.

The Tarotic Godfather

The Tarotic aspects of this movie are plentiful, since it deals with so many Elemental motifs. While one could easily do one of those superficial "which Trump for which character" listings that always serve to exploit the duller aspects of Tarot AND the victim upon which it is being spread, I’ll confine my Tarot analysis to an examination of Don Corleone’s four sons, or as I will explain them, his four Tarot Princes.

The four sons are:

Santino (Sonny) Corleone—played by James Caan, his virile aggressiveness and passion for his family and his own sense of justice are pushed to the tragic limits of his type, exposing how they will came at you, always, as Michael Corleone points out in Godfather-III, at the things you love. He’s talking about the fatal flaw in Sonny’s character, that he loved too much and too quickly. Sonny loves life more than any other of the characters in the story, he is the antipathy of his youngest brother, Michael, whose brooding calculations seldom have any heat to their nevertheless deadly designs. Sonny loves and hates and acts thoughtlessly, immediately, as Hercules or Achilles, always sure in himself because he has the pure physical power to enforce his will upon the world. His one act of restraint, exercised again only out of love for his sister in (barely) sparing the life of her abusive husband, proves fatal to him. While he is recalled much later as having been a prince of the city, even his father has to admit his violently hairtrigger temper, no matter how courageously manifested, made Sonny a bad don.

Frederico (Fredo or Freddie) Corleone—played by John Cazale, he possesses neither the education, nor the wits, nor the physical power of the other brothers, and is really the person, which most families seem to have, who has to be looked after his entire life. Of course, it’s hard to live such a life and Freddie’s constant struggle is to accept existence as the omega-Corleone, and also to come to terms with the deep guilt he feels for having proven so incompetent at doing the one thing he wasn’t really supposed to have to do—protect the family. Whereas before the Turk starts making everyone’s life extremely dangerous Freddie could safely be the buffoon, and safely drink and womanize enough to take the edge off of not being a Corleone of the stature of Sonny or Michael or even Tom Hagen, the defining moment of his life comes when Freddie fails to protect his own father from assassins. In the end it wasn’t enough to love, to be well-intentioned, to be funny and entertaining, he needed to be able and willing to kill. And he simply wasn’t up to, or down for, the task. The question the Godfather story (in all three movies) explores with respect to Freddie is what kind of judgment must we make of a culture which so viciously and totally robs a man of the right to be weak and indecisive.

Michael ("perfectly ruthless") Corleone declares jihad on stale breadsticks.

Michael Corleone—played by Al Pacino, he is of course the central figure of this tragedy, the person whose whole life, and life plans, are irretrievably altered when his family, and particularly his father, are threatened by rival mobs. Whereas both Michael and his father wished that he would not be involved in the family business, fate has other ideas, propelling Michael into a situation where he is forced to decide what he would do to protect his father’s life. Unlike Freddie, who wasn’t given the chance to think about it before he was confronted with the demand that he put his life on the line to save his father’s, Michael has the luxury of a little more time, some time to think. And thinking and calculating and plotting are simply what he does better than anyone else. At a famous and defining scene at a hospital where he must act to save Don Corleone from assassins, Michael quickly devises a way to salvage a seemingly hopeless situation, and does so in the completely opposite manner of Santino—no one gets killed because it wasn’t necessary. He pledges to his father in this scene, "I'll take care of you now. I'm with you now. I'm with you." And by taking care of his father he means taking care as well of the family business which is to settle outstanding accounts with anything and anyone who threatens them. Just as coldly and efficiently as he uses a nonviolent ploy to ward off the assassins at the hospital he then uses murder to accomplish the task of permanently removing the two most immediate threats to his father’s life. As he says to Santino, who is amused at his brother’s sudden willingness to get "…their brains all over your nice Ivy League suit"—"It's not personal, Sonny. It's strictly business." Knowing when and how to act in each transaction is what makes Michael such a powerful, and dreadfully effective, don. It is also what strips his soul of any recognizable human characteristics. Michael lacks (and in a sense destroys) both the fatal flaws of his brothers, the hot-tempered passions of Santino, and the unquestioning but simple-minded affections of Freddie. But in this he also removes anything that anyone could honestly love in him, including ironically his family.

Tom Hagen—played by Robert Duvall, the lawyer of the family, whose purely civil and rule-based powers are spent doing a magic act, making the Corleone family and its business appear to be legitimate. But Tom’s weakness and fundamental flaw is that he isn’t REALLY Sicilian, nor even a real Corleone brother. He’s adopted (though never officially given the last name) and his personal search for legitimacy within the Corleone family mirrors that of his adoptive family in their search for the same recognition and respect in America. That is one reason he so earnestly and tirelessly pursues solving problems in the family business, even though he’s not on the muscle end of things. As with all the brothers, the tragic turn of events that follows Don Vito’s rejection of the Turk’s offer, changes everything for Tom, eventually casting him out of the family’s inner circle because, as becomes all too clear as events spiral out of his control or influence, he’s "not a wartime Consiglieri [counselor]." He can only advise Santino on how to make deals, on how to negotiate a truce, not how to win a war. As Santino complains to him, "No more advice on how to patch things up. Just help me win." The difference between Four of Swords (Truce) and Six of Wands (Victory) should explain a lot of the differences in point of view and objectives one sees between Tom and his brothers Santino and Michael. The tragedy and the truth for Tom is that, in these mythological terms, blood is much thicker than ink, and lead much denser and deadlier than any Air-based legalism.

Now, it’s clear from even these brief descriptions that forcing these characters neatly into four court-card archetypes won’t be easy or necessarily very accurate. For example, there are certainly Airy characteristics in both Michael and Tom, although Michael’s lack of any obvious passion is actually a sign of the deep repressive control he forces upon himself, and so his cold passion is much more emotionally based than Tom’s, who seems the purer Air (intellectual) expression. And while Santino seems clearly a Prince of Wands, perhaps of somewhat degraded or immature version, one is hard put to reasonably place Freddie as ANY Prince whatsoever. He is not an Airy character in any sense (remembering that Princes are Airy parts of the sequence), save perhaps as a particularly dim Foolish type, thus more an elemental (Gumpish) clown—without the lucky charm(s) of course.

But, as a Tarotic exercise, there is another way to look at making this comparison between the four Corleone brothers and the four Tarot Princes, which is that no reading of personality is ever pure and consistently recognizable. That’s what makes reading court cards so difficult in the first place, and the reason Aleister Crowley gives for following the mixed-sign Golden Dawn model. While some people fit one of the four, or one of the sixteen, basic types more consistently than others, if you’re given the job to read four distinct signifiers as four correspondingly distinct signifieds, how do you go about it?

Let’s see how it might work with making Prince choices for the four Corleone brothers:

Prince of Wands/Santino Corleone—As noted above this is probably the easiest and most obvious choice. Santino certainly displays what Crowley calls bare arms "on account of his vigour and activity" and he is certainly a warrior. The moral qualities of "swiftness and strength" certainly match as well, as do his impulsiveness and violence and his obvious assumption (one can’t reasonably suggest he’d bother with anything so confining as an actual belief) "that justice is not to be attained in the intellectual world." As the fanatically brave loner the mythic expectation is that he too will conquer his enemies in the "the very long" run. But the risk of Valor-ously going it alone against too many dangerous odds is precisely what Santino’s tragic end is all about.

Prince of Cups/Michael Corleone—Ultimately this is an easy choice to make, for if ever there was an example of a practitioner of "secret violence, and craft", it is Michael Corleone. And certainly he is "On the surface…calm and imperturbable"—but—"…this is a mask of the most intense passion." The next lines from Crowley’s Prince of Cups essay seem also almost a prophecy of the Michael character—"He is on the surface susceptible to external influences, but he accepts them only to transmute them to the advantage of his secret designs. He is thus completely without conscience in the ordinary sense of the word, and is therefore usually distrusted by his neighbours." Finally—"He is in fact perfectly ruthless. He cares intensely for power, wisdom, and his own aims."

Prince of Swords/Tom Hagen—Again, as noted above, this is also an easy choice, because while Michael certainly depends on the veneer of cold calculation (an Airy aspect combined however in his Cups Prince position), it is Tom who truly typifies the strength and especially the weakness of the pure Air-ian Prince. He has plenty of ideas and calculates just as well and perhaps even better, on the surface, than Michael, but as Crowley notes about the purely intellectual power—"He is full of ideas and designs which tumble over each other. He is a mass of fine ideals unrelated to practical effort." One of the real problems Tom has is that his basic inclination is toward honesty and legality, and as a lawyer he is also motivated to try and bind (again, magically) opponents with mere words, as for example he does when he confronts Police Captain McCluskey (Sterling Hayden) outside the hospital where McCluskey had previously removed Don Corleone’s bodyguards. Whereas Michael had defended his father literally with his face and taken a pounding for it, Tom is able almost in an Obi-Wan act of directing the Force to confuse dimwits, to thwart the police by threatening McCluskey with legal consequences unless he allows the Corleone bodyguards to retake their positions. Unlike the usual mob goons, McCluskey is at least nominally subject to the daily demands of the legal system, and so Tom’s words of purely legal power work on him. They don’t work so well when it comes to stopping people, such as The Turk, who operate quite literally and ruthlessly beyond the pale. Tom is certainly a victim of what Crowley calls the Sword Prince’s "ideal world of ratiocination which is…out of relation to any facts." In an ideal world Tom would have been a Corleone, he would have helped Don Corleone legitimize the family’s operations and saved his brothers from their fate, he would have made a more persuasive case to Don Corleone in the meantime to accept The Turk’s offer, and he would have convinced Sonny to make peace, or a truce, to prevent more bloodshed. But Tom slowly realizes that the ideal world is simply not the one he factually inhabits.

Prince of Disks/Frederico Corleone—After three surprisingly easy choices we run into a real problem, because almost none of the details one associates with and Crowley describes for this card seem to match Freddie’s character. He is NOT "energetic and enduring, a capable manager, a steadfast and persevering worker." Neither is he "…competent, ingenious, thoughtful, cautious, trustworthy, imperturbable". He is in fact the absolute opposite of these things, and so one possible interpretation is that he is a very badly-dignified version of this particular Prince, but Crowley tells us "It is not very practicable to distinguish between the good and evil dignities in this card; one can merely say that, in case of his being ill-dignified, both the quality and quantity of his characteristics are somewhat degraded." Certainly these characteristics are more than somewhat degraded in Freddie. And while there is some resonance in the comments about this Prince appearing dull and stupid, and inclined toward resentment of "more spiritual types", in fact this lack of much obvious correspondence between Freddie and his supposed Prince position brings up an important point about dealing with court cards. In the Golden Dawn and Thoth systems only persons possessed of what Crowley calls "moral bite" actually rate an astrological court card (which are the Knights, Queens, and Princes). Most people in fact rate Princesses, whose elemental qualities are then subdivided according to planetary rulerships. Certainly Freddie as a degraded Princess of Disks ("general reputation will be of bewildering inconsistency") would be a lot easier to cast. But we don’t get to do that here, because the job we’ve got is to find the qualities of the card in the man, whether they’re obviously there or not. In the Yijing notes accompanying this card Crowley provides one possible clue to understanding Freddie’s character from a Prince of Disks perspective, although this is really made much clearer by the end of Godfather-II. The notes pertain to the hexagram representing the airy part of earth, Kien—"thus symbolizes slow, steady emancipation from repressive conditions." Freddie’s life is a painful emancipation from the repressive conditions of being a Corleone. While the same might also be said of Michael, Freddie’s liberation is complete in a way Michael’s never is, as Freddie’s last moments on earth are spent casting one last hopeless bit of fairy dust into the abyss he’s about to rejoin. He is completely happy, completely trusting that things will be OK. But his ability to simply ignore the horrible things which have happened, and which are about to happen to him, do in fact remind us of one of the key qualities of the pragmatic Prince of Disks—"…he makes no effort to understand ideas which are beyond his scope." Freddie certainly fits the description in this way, for he makes no effort to understand the horrible cycle of violence and vengeance which finally strike him down as well, for these acts and these emotions are simply "beyond his scope". In that way Freddie does become a symbol of a kind of Great Work accomplished, the most sacred indication of the Prince of Disks.