Americanization and Individuation Seen Through Godfather I & II

Francis Ford Coppola's film, "The Godfather", provides a great opportunity to examine the relationship between Americanization and individuation.

Essentially Michael is on his way to Americanization and would have had the possibility of a real individuation had he avoided assuming the role of his father as godfather.

The film begins with the Corleone family wedding. Kay is there as the girlfriend-fiancé of Michael Corleone. She's actually pulled into the family portrait at the wedding, harbinger of her future relationship both with Michael Corleone and the family.

Michael Corleone makes a big deal to Kay of not being the man his father was. He tells the story of a young Italian-American singer who could not escape from a bad contract with a bandleader. He introduces the phrase "make an offer you can't refuse" to describe the way that, when the Godfather was unsuccessful the first day in getting his godson released from the contract, his father went back with Luca Brazzi, and told the bandleader that "either your brains or your signature is going to be on that contract"- and got the singer released.

N.B.: Many think it's a story about Frank Sinatra. Based on a similar incident, but, actually, Frank Sinatra got out of his contract with the help of a musician union leader. Sinatra's story was plagiarized and re-written, as it were, but too many have assumed it was the truth.

Michael had made that first break with the family line. By having an American fiancé in the aftermath of having fought as a hero in World War II, in spite of the fact that his father had pulled strings to get him out of having to go to war, something his brother Sonny objects to strongly in a scene that you see the end of the movie, you really see the portrait of an Americanized Michael on his way to escaping tradition, a Michael who would not have been owned by tradition...

He gets sucked into the role of the Godfather through the emotional attachment to his father during the duress of the aftermath of the attempted assassination, and all of that "Americanization" and potential individuation is put aside.

The beginning of the shift is well symbolized by Michael Corleone in a telephone booth with Kay Adams shut out, on the outside, feeling helpless as he calls home to find out if his father is still alive, having seen the newspaper headline about the assassination attempt on his father.

Without real ambition, but merely as an extension of things he felt and closely held, i.e. the love of family, he becomes a potential heir to his father. While sitting in what is essentially a throne, as the camera focuses in on him, he proposes the assassination of Solozzo and his police captain bodyguard., which he then carries out with his brother's and Mafia captains' blessings.

Escaping to Sicily, Michael Corleone renounces, in essence, his engagement to Kay Adams and marries a young Sicilian woman.

At this point, you'd have to say that Michael Corleone had reconstituted the energy of his family line, what is called in 19th century racial theory, the "Kultur", of the Sicilian Mafia family.

Michael Corleone's new Sicilian wife is killed, in a car-bombing, and he returns to America and eventually goes back with Kay Adams who still loves him.

While promising to escape his role as the Godfather, subsequent events, his own emotional life, his own lack of insight as to what his father really was, keep him in that role far longer and therefore in a more damaging way than he ever could have imagined.

At the end of the Godfather II, he has a telling conversation with his mother, played by Morgana King, where he expresses fear of losing his family in Italian. (Really a conversation with his Unconscious, with a great collective mother-figure, a kind of seeress, at that moment, which is why the conversation is in Italian, something that evokes a sense of being outside of parochial time)...

She assures him that he cannot lose his family. If that were only the truth....

As the truth about his role as the Godfather comes out near the end of Godfather II, Kay Adams realizes what kind of man she's been married to, the degree of the promises not kept, that he is truly the very man that Michael's sister condemned with harsh words for the murder of her husband and others at the end of Godfather I. 

Ah, yes…the great scene where Michael Corleone lies to Kay, giving her the opportunity to just ask one question "just this once" regarding his business. He assures her that he had nothing to do with the death of his brother-in-law, a complete lie. She beams back at him, totally content.

But, with all of the information that Kay now has, she leaves him, and Michael Corleone ends up all alone, his soul shattered and betrayed, without his wife, the American, even without his own brother that he had had killed.

Kay represents that loss of soul, the loss of relationship to conscience and real values, the kind he was on the verge of adopting as he broke away from his family in an act of rebellion, signing up for the US military to fight in World War II.

In fact, Michael Corleone had used Kay Adams for comfort, to assuage his conscience, and exploited her as he has exploited the American way of life. Yes, Michael cared for her, but entirely on his own terms. Returning from Sicily, he's essentially an emissary of death, surrounded in his dark cave with the plutocrats of the underworld. She doesn't see this...he doesn't see it, either.

The art direction in this masterpiece of cinema is full of indications, a message system in itself as to what is really going on.

I am not sure to what extent Coppola did all of this consciously. Would be a great interview....

Individuation is never that easy. That is, becoming a true individual is counter to nature, evolution that goes upstream, wrenching from inside you every bit of available energy and then some. You are taken up, possessed, with a total examination of what you're actually about, what your values are and why you do things.

That is the self-overcoming of Nietzsche. 

The thing that Michael Corleone couldn't do was see that the man who loved him and that he loved dearly was essentially evil outside of the family. Because the evil happened outside of the family, they couldn't see it and they couldn't feel it and this permitted him to move into the role that he should've avoided as if it were the plague, a plague of the soul.

More on this to come.