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The 50th Anniversary of the Social Imaginary of “THE GODFATHER”

March 13, 2022 – 7:41 am

March 13, 2022

Fifty years ago, Francis Ford Coppola’s film adaptation of Mario Puzo’s novel, “The Godfather,” premiered to admiring reviews and audiences eager to embrace an anti-hero. The audiences included gangsters themselves, very few of whom had read Puzo’s novel, but who couldn’t resist a chance to see their subculture portrayed in popular culture while knowing that the people sitting all around them were clueless about their presence. The film’s cumulative impact on the quotidian behavior of members of organized appears to have been substantial. One recent news article focused on how gangsters looked to the film as the contemporary equivalent of “conduct books” in the 18th century, which seems a perfectly believable explanation of a simulacrum having real world effects on a social imaginary.

It shouldn’t be forgotten, however, that it wasn’t just Italian-Americans immigrants and their offspring who saw the United States as a land of criminal opportunity. The Irish-Americans had their base for unreported income in Boston, and the Killeen-Mullen war was taking place even before “The Godfather” was released. In fact, it was less than two months after the film premiered that Donald Killeen was murdered outside his home. Whether Whitey Bulger was the hit man is not the relevant point of interest here. What I would love to know is whether Bulger saw the film during its first release and what his reaction to it was. My curiosity about Bulger largely derives from his long residence in Santa Monica less than three miles north of where I lived for 20 years. Even in closer proximity than that for a short time, in fact! The Getty Research Institute had its headquarters at the intersection of Fourth and Wilshire for many years, and it feels odd in retrospect to know that Mr. Bulger was a very short distance away from the seminar room at which scholars from across the United States focused on Los Angeles itself as a cultural trope during the fall of 1996 and the spring of 1997.

By now, most of the people who saw “The Godfather” in 1972 are either dead or collecting social security, but the appeal of gangster narratives has far from abated. “The Sopranos,” for instance, was a massive success. As with “The Godfather,” I ended up watching it long after its debut, but I found each instance more than worth my attention. What did surprise me, twenty years ago, was how young people did not know of “The Godfather” at all. I remember working as a teaching assistant in Revelle College at UCSD around 2003 and I made a reference to the scene with a horse’s head in a bed. Not a single student in the classroom knew what I was talking about. Mind you, these were mostly pre-med students whose social background were hardly that of deprivation and limited access to high or low culture. It’s in this context that I point to a very fine interview with Al Pacino and a comment that he makes about those whose cultural curiosity seems to have been stifled well before they entered high school. “”Have You Seen the Horse’s Head / Leaking All over the Bed?” Apparently not.

NY TIMES: Do you get self-conscious about watching your own films?
AL PACINO: No. I enjoy watching films I’ve been in. …. “The Godfather” plays no matter what. But you’re surprised when you realize how many people never saw it.

NY TIMES: You’re encountering people who are aware of “The Godfather” as a cultural phenomenon but haven’t actually watched it?
AL PACINO: They’ve heard about it. You get that. “Oh, I heard — were you in that? That was a film, wasn’t it?” Yes. So was “Citizen Kane,” by the way — I was in that, too. Why not? They don’t know.

Thank you, Mr. Pacino, for a good laugh.

************


With ‘The Godfather,’ Art Imitated Mafia Life. And Vice Versa.

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Books Contemporary Fiction Poetry

Book Review: THE SLEEP GARDEN by Jim Krusoe

January 31, 2016 – 12:04 pm

Sunday, January 31, 2016

BOOK REVIEW: The Sleep Garden — Jim Krusoe (Tin House, 2016)

It’s a rainy, blustery afternoon in Los Angeles County, but if you feel like stirring out of the house, ease on over to Diesel Books in Santa Monica, where Jim Krusoe will be reading from The Sleep Garden, his best novel yet, at 3 p.m. His first several published volumes of writing were poetry (History of the World; Small Pianos; Jungle Girl), and The Sleep Garden circles back to the scoured diction of that early work and brings his vision of life and afterlife to fruition. Given that an early meditation on the spondee of “rectum” adumbrates the irony of the characters’ exit, stage left, through the kitchen to their ultimate dissolution, it is a surprisingly and often humorous journey.

Krusoe’s control of tone in this existential fable is pitch-perfect. It begins with a mild echo of Beatrix Potter and Emily Dickinson all rolled into a delicate omelet of forestalled tragicomedy. The characters in The Sleep Garden have no doubt arrived at their current residence, The Burrow, with the same trepidation experienced by Dickinson’s anonymous narrator in “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” but the horses’ heads have been forgotten as they settled in, and life in this cloistered suburban complex has proved to be much the same as it was above ground. In fact, the characters seem to have picked up exactly where they might have left off in their previous condition, which is to say Viktor is just as obsessed with making money for the sake of playing that game, and Heather is still called upon and put upon by males who need a vocal prosthesis to accompany their masturbatory fantasies.

On one level, Krusoe has written an updated version of Sartre’s Huis Clos, except that the characters seems to be much more accommodating of each other. Well, most of them are accommodating. In a metatext that serves as the underside to the comic dalliances of the main cast, there is a set of “technicians” who keep the stage show afloat. They are the stage crew who are waiting for their own Godot to show up, and serve as a kind of slow-witted Brechtian chorus. No doubt there are operations manuals that the author had access to, but we as readers were spared that labor. That irony can work on the level of authorial excision is not the least tangy part of Krusoe’s jesting in the face of “Zero,” the sum of the game played mostly (if not entirely) in the minds of the novel’s characters.

It helps, of course, to have done enough reading so that one catches the allusions. The Captain’s “memory breaks like low waves against a distant shore in search of an answer. Break break break … nothing.” Given the eventual revelation of the funerary nature of the Burrow, it helps the immediate accumulation of hints for one to hear the opening syllables in that passage of Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar.” One doesn’t have to know this to remain entranced with the narrative, but the subtle coloring is otherwise lost.

Other references will be caught by most people without too much of an effort. Raymond, for instance, has a photograph from a sports magazine tacked up on his wall. The model in the picture is a woman in a swimsuit, and it’s not hard to attribute this clipped image to Sports Illustrated and its famous annual display of swimming attire. However, what no reader can possibly anticipate is the model’s metamorphosis into a post-modern Diogenes. As with so many other instances throughout The Sleep Garden, the aftertaste of the laugh is just as delicious as the first bite.

The audience for this novel will primarily be those who have not watched much television during the past forty years, but I mention this bifurcation because a fictional short-lived television show has a major role in the novel’s droll commentary on contemporary life, and the relationship of the characters in the novel to the characters in “Mellow Valley” constitutes one of the major mordant temblors of The Sleep Garden. Let not your ignorance of popular culture trivia dismay you, and do not fret if a show such as “Friends” does not evoke any specific image more than “Welcome Back, Kotter.” The predominance of the culture industry gets its comeuppance in this novel, but not in a vindictive manner. In this case, the spoiled child of popular culture spanks itself. It could be said, in fact, Horkheimer and Adorno might enjoy The Sleep Garden, though they might grouse afterwards that it let the culture industry off too easily.

Those two aside, most other readers will look forward to reading this novel a second and a third time. Ballerina Mouse is one of the most heartbreaking aging ingénues to ever undertake an existential rehearsal. Even very minor characters, such as the Vietnam veteran, Sgt. Moody, leave the reader with a haunting layer of the untold as being more brutal than anything that could be told.

The Sleep Garden awaits us all, Krusoe hints, no matter what endeavors we commit ourselves to. Some commitments are easier than others, however. Rather than worrying about your own personal failures in whatever you might have tried to do in your life, I would recommend the best therapy session that you will ever attend. By the end of reading this novel, you will be able to accept much that seemed too difficult to bear just a short time ago.

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Ground Level Conditions Painting and Sculpture

The Temptation to Grip and Hold Closely

May 17, 2014 – 10:02 am

SPACE AND PERCEPTION

The morning began with an ordinary ritual of eating: I had just finished eating an initial repast of a slice of sourdough toast, one half of it slathered with peanut butter and the other with jelly, accompanied by about two-thirds of a cup of coffee. The remainder has been sipped at as I thought about and typed the following:

As I looked at one jar each of peanut butter and jelly on the kitchen counter, I considered leaving them out. It’s not as if they took up a lot of space and would hinder Linda from making her own breakfast. Yet as soon as I picked them up and turned towards the refrigerator, I noticed that the counter seemed disproportionately “empty,” which is to say that objects take up more perceptual than actual space. An art exhibit suggested itself: two rooms, one with a table and a peanut-butter jar atop it, perhaps in the lower left-hand corner, and another with only the same model of table. (It should be a table and not a desk, since a desk would have drawers and would suggest that other objects are present, but hidden.) In the room with only a table, a photograph of the cup should be projected, off-center, on each of three walls. A print version of the photograph should be on the inside of the door leading to the second room. The door should remain closed, except to allow visitors to enter and exit.

Title: The Temptation to Grip and Hold Closely

Something like this has probably already been done, more than once.

I am certain that I am not alone in recording the sensory displacement noted in the second paragraph.

*****

Last night, I dreamed once again that I was in my old apartment in Ocean Park. The dream was as palpably real as the feel of these buttons on the keyboard as I type. I touched the walls. The apartment was in a state of transition. I was being allowed to live there for a few weeks. I felt very happy. I walked both up and downstairs. The old green rug was still on the downstairs floor. This is the second time that I have had a dream about this apartment in the past month or so.

Yesterday evening, Linda and I went to a party on Roycroft Street at a house owned by a woman named Barbara. Apostrophe Books was having a private celebration for Suzanne Greenberg’s new novel, “Lesson Plans.” Linda and I spent time with Lisa Glatt and David Hernandez, who were talking with Anna Mavromati when we first arrived. After Lisa and David left, we had a chance to talk with Anna, who is one of the most promising young fiction writers I know of. It may be ten or fifteen years before she writes the novel or collection of stories that makes her work well known, but she will surprise future readers with her quiet mastery of tone and droll notations.

She is not alone in displaying this potential. Just as a generation born after World War II had to rise to the contingent occasions of its youthful turbulence, so too is a generation born since the first economic collapse of the late 1980s (the so-called Savings and Loan debacle) beginning to describe a new density of cultural regurgitation. This new generation may be slower to ripen than the baby boomers, but its resilience should never be doubted: it has already been challenged by a global economic collapse, and I admire how it is still willing to undertake the perils of an imaginative life.

For each generation still present, however, the lessons from that collapse should be closely held to, especially as we can see how it has played out locally. Santa Monica, for instance, seems to have become the domain of people who have only begun to live there in the past decade, but who feel that the city is theirs to saunter about in by right of privileged economic status, as if somehow they had built it all themselves, or that all along it had been built with just them in mind. The spatial squeeze on Fourth Street, for instance, in recent years has had a genuine impact on the ability of those who are aging to use the bus system. There is no longer a bus route on Fourth Street between Ocean Park and northern Santa Monica. One must trek to Lincoln Boulevard or to Main Street, both of which involve hills that will be challenges for those who are aging in apartments abutting Fourth Street. This kind of alteration in public transportation is symbolic of the slow eviction of the generation that transformed the culture of this beach-front city between 1960 and 1980.

An absent bus is idling at the corner of Fourth and Hill….

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