The Godfather and Sicily

The Godfather is one of the most important texts in American culture produced in the past fifty years. No matter how you feel about it—whether you are hooked to the story or triggered by its depiction of Italian Americans as gangsters—Mario Puzo's novel and Francis Ford Coppola's films will help you better understand this country with all its complexities, promises, and shortcomings. Raymond Belliotti's philosophical reading of The Godfather is a fresh approach to a classic text and a welcome addition to its interpretive frameworks.In its author's words, The Godfather and Sicily is “an interdisciplinary examination that wields philosophical analyses of concepts such as honor, power, will to power, respect, atonement, repentance, forgiveness, and leading a meaningful human life in service of a distinctive interpretation of The Godfather as a novel and film sequence” (81). In the preface, Belliotti establishes the inspiration behind his study: an invitation to submit an essay on The Godfather to an anthology on pop culture as philosophy. The book is divided into four chapters, followed by three appendixes summarizing each of the three Godfather films. In the introduction, the author frames his arguments theoretically by placing Puzo's novel and Coppola's film sequence in dialogue with his own previous work. (It is worth mentioning at the outset that Belliotti does not read the novel and the film adaptations as separate texts but conflates them while, at times, addressing differences between them.) Belliotti also presents his own hermeneutical stance on the larger Godfather narrative—novel + film sequence—which he reads as the irresolvable paradigm of the conflict between a nineteenth-century Sicilian ethos and twentieth-century American individualism and industrialism.In chapter 1, the author presents a close reading of some of the most iconic scenes of The Godfather: the opening of the first film, when Don Corleone receives supplicants on the day of his daughter's wedding; and the dialogue between consigliere Tom Hagen and movie mogul Jack Woltz, which famously ends with the studio executive waking up in his bed with the head of his prized horse between his sheets. This is the most successful and engaging chapter in the book. In these scenes, the conflicting worldviews of Amerigo Bonasera—the supplicant undertaker who famously believes in America and the rule of law until they both fail to deliver justice—and the Don, who staunchly persists in employing the Sicilian “old ways,” as well as Woltz's overt defiance of the Don's request to feature the Don's godson in a movie, are thoroughly examined by Belliotti through a philosophical reading of the meaning of honor and respect in traditional Sicilian culture. To his own reflections Belliotti adds other interpretations of the concept of honor as it relates to the nineteenth-century Sicilian criminal-enterprise mentality, drawing on work by such Mafia scholars as John Dickie, Jerry Capeci, and Salvatore Lupo.Chapter 2 analyzes the Sicilian nineteenth-century ethos through concepts with which scholars of Italian Americana are very familiar—l'ordine della famiglia, la via vecchia, and l'uomo di pazienza—as they were developed by Richard Gambino in his 1974 book Blood of My Blood. This chapter comes across as a bit disjointed. Following a philosophical discussion on what makes a meaningful human life, the focus shifts to a historical investigation of several real-life gangsters who could have inspired the character of Don Vito Corleone. Was it Frank Costello or Carlo Gambino? Could Vito Andolini's life be based on that of Don Vito Cascio Ferro or Don Calogero Vizzini? Ultimately, this section of the chapter as well as the following one (a very brief attempt at a “nonexhaustive inventory” [63] of accounts of the origins of the Mafia from the second century BCE) are tangential and add little to the main scope of the chapter.Chapter 3 is an engaging analysis of the concepts of power and the will to power as they apply to The Godfather saga. The philosophical musings on the interplay between destiny and personal choices are especially poignant when one considers the different trajectories of the lives of Don Vito and his youngest son and heir to the criminal throne, Michael Corleone. After a philosophical reading of power, of an entity having power over another entity, and a Nietzsche-inspired discussion of Don Vito's “staunch” will to power, Belliotti discusses the tragic parable of Michael and his “personal degeneration, from idealistic second-generation Sicilian American to money- and power-grubbing renegade who loses his family, orders the murder of his brother, and inadvertently causes the death of his daughter” (104).Of the four chapters in this book, the final one, which focuses on “Repentance, Atonement, and Redemption,” contributes the least, in this reader's view, to the overall value of the study. Of particular merit, however, is its discussion of Michael's descending path in The Godfather III through philosophical dissections of the concepts named in its title. Still, the chapter loses cohesiveness as it wanders through other topics and digressions.Overall, The Godfather and Sicily succeeds in its main goal of reading the novel and films through a distinctly philosophical lens. It should be noted that while this critical approach offers new insights into how The Godfather engages with two competing sets of values—nineteenth-century Sicilian and twentieth-century American visions of the world—much of what we read has already appeared in other works by the author. Specifically, Belliotti's philosophical reflections on topics such as honor, power, and individualism vs. community in this book have already been explored in some of his previously published works. As for his reading of Italian American and, more specifically, Sicilian and Sicilian American cultures, Belliotti draws heavily from scholars and writers such as Richard Gambino, Luigi Barzini, Richard Alba, and Fred Gardaphé, while his close readings and interpretation of Puzo's novel and Coppola's cinematic trilogy frequently rehash earlier work by critics such as Christian Messenger, George De Stefano, and John Paul Russo. Although this book is limited by its reliance on the existing literature in the field, its distinctive focus on the philosophical themes that connect, and complicate, Puzo's and Coppola's Sicilian and American narratives, along with its clear, accessible writing, makes it a worthwhile resource for undergraduate and graduate students as well as general readers interested in a fresh point of entry to the Corleone family saga

Art · Depiction · Forgiveness · Honor · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Repentance · Theology · Computer Science · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Philosophy · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism