The Godfather and American Culture: How the Corleones Became "Our Gang", and: Class, Language, and American Film Comedy (review)

These two studies take essentially literary approaches to popular culture. Messenger's reading of The Godfather treats Puzo's novel, Coppola's movies, and their many sequels and by-blows as one composite text, and he tends to concentrate on plot, character, theme, and language. Beach analyzes resonances of class difference and conflict in the language and plots of film comedies from the Marx Brothers to the Coen brothers. To authorize and enable their inquiries, both authors look to Bakhtin, Bourdieu, and other Men of Respect among critics of culture, with only an occasional mention of editing, cinematography, and other distinctive formal qualities that make movies more than just novels-in-motion.

While their studies do not always take full advantage of the range of evidence that film provides, Messenger and Beach offer valuable insights into particular genres and, more generally, into the ways in which popular narrative can mean. And they model two very different ways to deliver the critical goods: Messenger is allusive, recursive, purposefully meandering, always self-interrogating; Beach, who stays crisply on task, offers close readings of individual movies framed by no-nonsense introductions.

Messenger works mostly by juxtaposition. He reads his composite text, which he calls "Godfather narrative," with and against a variety of thinkers about culture (Hume, Kant, and Barthes, among others) and analogous texts: naturalist melodramas like The Call of the Wild and The Octopus, Doctorow's Ragtime (which crosses some of the Godfather's turf), and The Sopranos. The analysis roams freely, from a consideration of writing about bad writing to an excursus on epic in popular fiction to an incisive note on Sicilians' traditional antipathy to American-style civil contract.

The impulse to account for the proliferation and influence of Godfather narrative in American culture gives this richly digressive book its through-line. Messenger positions Godfather narrative, which has the demotic power of sentimental formula and the literary gravitas of epic, in a shifting ground of overlaps between popular and elite, art and commerce, American and immigrant-ethnic, family and business. If Godfather narrative has the ideological charge of New World capitalist mythmaking, broadly Protestant in understanding history as progressively lonelier stages of development toward self-realization, it also has the broadly Catholic immigrant-ethnic charge of Old World tribalism, peasant skepticism, and familial blood-obsession. Some of Messenger's most compelling analysis comes in his discussion of Puzo's struggles with artistic in-betweenness. Puzo tried for many years to live up to a conventional ideal of literary art, but he finally he gave up and wrote The Godfather as an act of commerce. In Messenger's layered analogy, Puzo "went bad," just as Vito and then Michael Corleone do, and just as the critic supposedly does by taking seriously a hack like Puzo. Of course, as the Corleones' story reminds us, going bad can have exciting results. Like Chester Himes, another uninspired "serious" realist who initially regarded his own turn to money-making genre fiction as an aesthetic defeat, Puzo wrote his most inspired and influential fiction after he went bad. And because The Godfather was so plot- and atmosphere-intensive and so "free of exposition, character reflection, and subjectivizing" (8), it readily offered itself for adaptation and cultural repurposing by Coppola and others.

Beach's study of film comedy traces the representation of class as expressed in the speech of characters. Beach proposes that the introduction of sound allowed comedies to move beyond "slapstick caricatures" of class difference and "to reflect more nuanced social distinctions" via "highly specific codes involving speech" (2). It's a straight line from there to the moment in Ball of Fire (1941) when...