The Godfather Part II: Allegory Of The Patriarchy

Last night we watched The Godfather Part II on TV. i reflected on it overnight and looked it up on Wikipedia this morning. Wikipedia says it's one of the greatest films of all time. Yeah, and Joe Biden's Abraham Lincoln.

The film wasn't even into the final credits when I realized it was an allegoery of the Patriarchy, with various jabs thrown at the Catholic Church. Wikipedia's plot summary misses the point. The story arc involves the careers -- or more specifically, the inescapable, Patriarchical character flaws of Vito Corleone, the original Godfather of Part I, and his son Michael. Vito must leave Sicily as a boy of 14 when the local Mafia boss, Don Ciccio, kills his father and sets about to exterminate all the sons of the family from the justified fear that if they survive, they'll avenge their father and kill Don Ciccio.

Vito, basically a good guy, rises in the New York Mafia and is gradually corrupted. By the 1920s, he's prosperous enough to return to Sicily to avenge his father and brothers and murder Don Ciccio. This is a key element of the story that Wikipedia completely ignores.

By the 1950s, it's become plain that Vito's older son, Fredo, isn't smart enough to succeed Vito and take over the family. His younger son, Michael, becomes the head. The first scene in Part II covers a party at Lake Tahoe, where Michael lives, to celebrate his son's first communion. It's significnnt that the camera focuses on the way the sacrament is administered, the old-fashioned intinction, in Latin, on the tongue, with an acolyte holding a paten.

In a post-Conciliar world, this is a statement about the Church that's frequently repeated throughout the film -- quaint, supersitious, out of touch, obsolete, an enabler of every hypocrisy -- and Patriarchical.

The plot device that drives Part II is that Michael, young and in many ways progressive and forward-looking, must nevertheless revert to his Sicilian roots and avenge the betrayal of Hyman Roth, a putative ally of the Corleone family, when Michael correctly intuits that Roth is behind an attempted assassination of Michael and his family.

At this point, the film focuses on Michael's wife, Kay, who is played by Diane Keaton, herself Hollywood artsy royalty. Kay's character is someone we've come to recognize in subsequent decades, an upper-class woman with The Look, in total contrast to Michael's trashy-flashy sister, Connie. Indeed, Kay in the film is hard to distinguish in style and demeanor from Jen Psaki in real life. In the midst of Michael's plot to rub out Hyman Roth and a Senate invetigation of the Corleone family, Kay decides to abjure the mob life.

The question in my mind, which the film does nothing to answer, is what attracted the well-bred, tastefully dressed Kay to the mob life in the first place. There's a reference in one scene to a promise Michael made to Kay that the Corleones would be "legitimate" within five years of their marriage, which hasn't taken place after seven. But this is certainly an indication that Kay knew full well what she was marrying into, and there's no indication that she was ever disssatisfied with the lifestyle of royalty.

Instead, pregnant with what both she and Michael believe is a son at the time of the film's main action, she decides to abort the baby. The implication, not fully articulated, seems to be that she wants to end this Sicilian cycle of murder and revenge by killing off the Patriarchical lineage, except that they've already had a son and a daughter.

When she tells Michael that she plans to divorce him and take the surviving kids, Michel's reaction is predictably Sicilian, violent, and Patriarchical. Kay becomes the suffering victim and another icon of post-1970s conventional feminism, stigmatized by her assertions of freedom in divorce and abortion. In both instances, the unstated but clear message is that the Roman Catholic Church is a force of repression and an enabler of hypocrisy.

Again, the problem I have is the root of Kay's rebellion. Every indication is that what she wants is to take the children with her and maintain her lifestyle -- which of course has been and will always be financed by Mafia actitities -- but just leave behind the inconvenience of Michael, whom she apparently married in the full understanding of who he was and how he earned his living. In other words, her decision is frivolous.

It also amounts, in Catholic theology, to a substitution of private judgment. I think mature people, finding themselves in situations they'd pretty much chosen in full recognition of what they were choosing, would be driven to some type of serious self-reexamination, and this would certainly involve somthing more than selecting the best divorce attorney.

A big problem with the film is it doesn't go there. Not anywhere close.