All our recent talk of Francis Ford Coppala and Apocalypse Now reminded me of Francis’, in my opinion, true masterpiece.  Apocalypse Now isn’t bad or anything, but it’s no The Godfather.  Hell, it’s no The Godfather part II.

That’s not to say Apocalypse Now isn’t a great film–it is–far better than most released.  I’ve just always felt it was a little heavy handed in some respects.  Using The Doors’ The End during its opening and closing, for example, is something I could have done without (not that I didn’t enjoy Thomas’ rendition as much as the next).  Its like when Watchmen used Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ during it’s montage of the 1960s–really, how long do you think it took the producers to thing of that pairing?  As much as a minute?

The Godfather, on the other hand, is brilliant, top to bottom.  While Apocalypse Now had high expectations (it was based on Heart of Darkness and featured Brando, how would it not be good?) and failed to meet them, The Godfather was widely expected to be terrible and instead blew everyone out of the water.  Part of this, I think, was due to its many displacements of Ovidian myths.

This was the blog post that got me thinking about The Godfather and its mythic origins.  As I thought about it some I realized it was probably enough material for my final paper, so here you go:

 

I have long felt that the modern education system should be overhauled and redone, destroyed and rebuilt. I think the first time I had this thought was in Algebra in 10th grade when I missed points on a test for leaving my answer as 100,000,000 instead of changing it to 10 to the 8th, or something along those lines.  I thought ‘why would I do that?  Scientific notation is for science class, not math,’ and immediately afterward I realized how strange the system had to be that it felt weird to simplify large numbers with scientific notation in my Algebra class.  I had a similarly jarring experience once in Biology when the teacher asked why some discoveries were all happening around the same time and no one connected it to the Renaissance (that was the province of History class).  These eye-opening occurences and their ilk convinced me fairly early that our entire system of education was too compartmentalized and failed to convey the true interconnectedness of the real world.  Outside the school’s walls people never deal with Math for an hour, then shelve it entirely to deal with English for an hour, and so on.  The real world is a spiderweb of relationships, each crossroads splintering into a myriad other connections.  Given that this was in the back of my mind before I started at MSU, I was not terribly surprised when talk of myths being all around us started coming into the classroom.  Even I was surprised, however, by the number of myths I started to see around me and their connection to today.

The first place I started looking for myths was in my old favorite movies, and it didn’t take long to see some displacements.  The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppala’s true masterpiece, has a number of myths wrapped in it.  The entire movie could be seen as a drawn out retelling of Ovid’s story of Phaethon and Helios.  In that myth Phaethon wishes to be like his father and drive the sun chariot across the sky, something his father tries to talk him out.  Helios is eventually unsuccessful in his attempt and Phaethon assumes his father’s role, to disasterous results. The Godfather begins with Michael Corleone assuring his girlfriend “that’s my father, Kay.  That’s not me,” but ends with him stepping fully into his father’s shoes as Kay looks on in horror.  Michael has not died, as Phaethon did, but he has been transformed into a monster by attempting to take his father’s role in the Family–something the father tried to prevent.  Vito Corleone (Michael’s father) sent Michael to college in an attempt to keep him from the family business and even tells Michael “I never wanted this for you,” but is finally unnable to keep him from being pulled in.

The Godfather also contains a loose rendition of Procne.  In Ovid’s Metamorphoses Procne kills her son to spite her husband Tereus after he rapes and mutilates her sister Philomela. The Godfather recasts the story as an early commentary on family and the right to choose (it predated Roe v Wade by a year) when Kay gets an abortion to stop any more of Michael’s children from entering the world, something she considers abominable.  Kay had no sister and there is no rape, but the boil-down in both cases is the same–the woman kills the child to spite the husband.

The myth of Eurydice is also wrapped up in Coppala’s masterpiece, though it has a significant twist, as do all the myths in The Godfather. In the original myth Orpheus descends into the underworld, attempting to bring his wife Eurydice back with him.  He succeeds in talking Hades into releasing her, on the condition that he not look back on her until they are both above ground again.  This myth is displaced in the film when Michael agrees to assassinate two enemies of the family, the corrupt police officer McClusky and the Tattaglia’s advisor Sollozzo.  He meets the two at a seedy diner, supposedly to negotiate the terms of a cease-fire.  After a bit of talk he excuses himself to the bathroom, where a gun has been hidden ahead of time for him (he couldn’t just bring one because McClusky and Sollozzo’s goons searched him before the meeting), and comes out blazing.  While the diner may not have been representative of the Underworld before the meeting, Michael has clearly transformed it into the Underworld by the time he leaves.  Clemenza’s word of advice to Michael before the meeting, to shoot them down and “never look back, just keep going, don’t look back at all” never stuck me as out of place before.  Now I realize they were a clue to the mythic origins of this amazing film.

Michael is not the only one of Vito’s sons to be surrounded by myth.  The oldest son, Sonny, represents the myth of Icarus.  According to myth, Icarus flew too close to the sun with borrowed wings and fell to his death when the heat melted the wax holding his feathers together.  It is fitting that someone named Sonny be the symbol of Icarus, who was done in by the sun.  In the retelling, Sonny is famous for his uncontrollable temper.  When he hears his sister has been beaten by her husband he becomes enraged and dashes off to deliver punishment without his bodyguards, but it is a trap and he is gunned down in a tollbooth.  Sonny, like Icarus, is unable to conform to the Greek idea of the Golden Mean, which leads to his downfall.  Icarus literally flies too high, a direct connection to the Golden Mean, which leads to a literal fall.  Sonny’s flight and fall are more metaphorical, but they are the same story.

Even Fredo, the ever-useless middle brother, is a mythological displacement.  He is a retelling of Narcissus.  Narcissus, according to Ovid, saw a reflection of himself and fell in love, eventually dying because he refused to move the poolside where he could see his own face.  In The Godfather Fredo is constantly obsessed with his own standing in the Family.  After Sonny dies and Vito starts thinking about passing down the reins he believes he is going to become the next Don, only to be passed over in favor of the youngest son, Michael.  He is unnable to make peace with this and remains filled with impotent rage towards Michael until his (Fredo’s) death.  Fredo is not a beautiful man like Narcissus and does not spend any time studying mirrors, but he fulfills the Narcissus role through his unending self-obsession, which leads to his death.  Fredo eventually dies in a boat, looking into the water like Narcissus, when he is shot as punishment for betraying Michael to raise his own standing.  His defense, when confronted?  “They said there was something in it for me!”

I am sure someone more well versed than myself in the many myths could find more displacements in The Godfather, but these were the ones that stuck out to me–and I haven’t watched the film in years.  The fact it is so densely packed with mythology that I, a mere novice, was able to think of five displacements from memory just goes to show how richly entwined our world is.  Myths truly do surround us, influencing our daily lives in ways we can only begin to comprehend.