The Godfather Part II — Francis Ford Coppola

Who’s a Fredo? The Godfather Part II Against the New Right

1. In what amounts to the coda of The Godfather Part II, the final flashback scene to Michael’s (Al Pacino) past, we see Sonny (James Caan) swagger into the family home. They have gathered for their father’s birthday, and Fredo (John Cazale) and Connie (Talia Shire) are also seated at the table, along with their stepbrother Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall). Upon Sonny’s arrival, the family begins discussing the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. After upbraiding Tom for saying that such an action could have been anticipated (“What are you, a J*p lover?”), Sonny remarks that the enlisted men who died at Pearl Harbor, and in fact all enlisted men, are “saps.” Loyalty is not given to the nation, he says, but to family. It’s at this point that Michael reveals that he himself has joined the military.

It’s interesting that this moment in Godfather II hasn’t come up in the discussions around Donald Trump’s disgraceful behavior at military cemeteries, particularly his remark, corroborated by multiple sources, that he referred to the American war dead as “losers.” “What was in it for them?” he asked. He seems to share Sonny’s disdain for the men and women in uniform, and for all we know Trump’s attitude was directly influenced by the film itself. We can always discern Trump’s bizarre private obsessions by paying attention to the accusations he levels at his enemies, and the former president has made a habit of referring to the “Clinton crime family” and the “Biden crime family,” as if U.S. politics were a logical extension of the principles of the Cosa Nostra.

But what this reveals is that Trump fancies himself a Mafia boss, building an empire that his family will eventually take over. (I’ll spare the reader any direct mapping of Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka onto the Corleones.) If we consider the way that a real mob boss like John Gotti became a folk hero in some circles, we can perhaps get a sense of why Trump’s popularity among his shrinking base only strengthens in the face of hard evidence of his criminality. He appeals to that segment of the population — mostly but not exclusively white men — who themselves dream of being above the law. Where right-wing ideology in the U.S. has long tried to defuse class resentment by promulgating the fiction of the “self-made man” — the idea that you, poor person, could one day achieve wealth — Trump represents a slight shift in this mythos, by promising American white men a kind of return to the Wild West, where outlaws ruled by dint of the fear they inspired.

2. It has been endlessly discussed that The Godfather is Coppola’s ‘60s-leftist analysis of the rise of gangster capitalism, the sense that most of the world but the U.S. in particular had abandoned, even in theory, the economic model set forth by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. During the 1970s, when Coppola made the first two Godfather films, we witness the erosion of consensus among liberal democracies in favor of a Keynesian management model (laissez-faire capitalism with established guardrails and periodic governmental intervention). The Chicago School economists were starting to attract greater attention at this moment, with conservatives coalescing around the radicalism of the so-called Austrian model. In this context, The Godfather films, and perhaps Godfather II most acutely, became retroactive foundational texts that implicitly argued in favor of a “strong chief executive” in the form of a crime boss.

The fact that Coppola’s artistic intent was practically the opposite of this mythmaking is beside the point. As much as one can attempt to disentangle depiction from endorsement, there remain those who are insistent that the two are equivalent. One of the underlying premises behind this conflation is that almost any facet of life is inherently glamorized by appearing on screen. That is, the power of cinema tends to overpower any attempt at irony or critique. While this is a reductive argument based on a sketchy interpretation of psychoanalytic film theory, it’s not hard to find examples that seem to shore up this fallacy. There are so many characters in the cinema whose actions are not just reprehensible but nauseating. Michael Corleone is a mostly calm, reserved criminal who plays the role of the respectable businessman and civic leader. He only occasionally engages in direct violence. If anything, this reserve has diminished Michael as an icon, as popular culture has largely supplanted him in the cultural imaginary with the figure of Tony Montana (Pacino again) in Scarface. (That Scarface is a remake of a Hawks classic, or that the Montana character is a kind of “remake” of Michael Corleone for a new wave of immigration, are perhaps worth noting.)

To put it bluntly, Coppola’s own reading of Puzo was that post-Keynesian capitalism and organized crime are isomorphic, if not essentially the same. It’s clear that his depiction of Michael Corleone as an essentially autocratic CEO was meant to reflect badly on CEOs, rather than confer legitimacy (if not outright glamor) onto the Mafia. But perhaps Coppola, the “movie brat” whose worldview was formed in the crucible of the 1960s, was unable to see just how powerful the self-made man mythos had become. If anything, The Godfather Part II implies that if one is sufficiently ruthless and intelligent, one can move up through the ranks of the organization in ways that have little to do with one’s people skills or the imprimatur of an MBA. The Mafia, as depicted by Coppola, appears to be the last genuine meritocracy, provided one could overlook the royal-dynastic nepotism that was the primary determiner of successful movement. In certain regards Martin Scorsese’s films, which are far more analytical than Coppola’s, foreground the ideologies that Godfather II largely assumes. (In Goodfellas, the Henry Hill character acknowledges that, as an Irish-American, he will only go so far in the Cosa Nostra, because “made men” were required to trace their ancestry directly back to Italy.)

3. This is perhaps a roundabout way to begin to address the question of antisemitism as an underlying theme in The Godfather Part II. The character of Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg) hovers around the periphery of the film, since he is geographically distant from the Corleones’ Nevada compound. Where the Italian mob created Las Vegas as their lucrative playground, the Jewish Mafia based their operations in Miami — the “new” new frontier from which the Cuban Tony Montana would emerge. Despite the explicitly antisemitic protests of old-school gasbag Frank Pentangeli (Michael V. Gazzo), Michael intends to invest in luxury hotels by partnering with Roth’s organization. For reasons that are never exactly explained, Roth’s team tries to assassinate Michael at his own home. This serves as the primary crime-related narrative driver of Godfather II.

Coppola and Puzo’s use of Roth within the plot creates a fundamental tension. At first, Michael adheres to a laissez-faire investment ideology, the Jewishness of Roth being unremarkable from a business standpoint. (As the saying goes, “their money spends as well as anyone else’s.”) But the double-cross appears to validate the concerns of Pentangeli and other less vocal figures in the organization, who found it ill-advised, if not offensive, for Michael to “get in bed” with the Jews. Nevertheless, I would argue that any latent antisemitism in The Godfather Part II is essentially incidental, a byproduct of Coppola’s actual ideological concerns.

Michael’s willingness to go into business with Roth is quite simple. As one advisor states, Roth makes money for his investors, and for Michael, at least initially, that is sufficient, full stop. This reflects the shift in corporate ethos that accompanies the waning of the Keynesian model, since blood and family, which for better or worse are tied to honor in the Mafia culture, are no longer as important as making money by any means possible. Within the bounds of Big Crime in the U.S., Michael investing with Roth is roughly equivalent to globalized capital, the Italians and the Jews setting aside any traditional animosities or suspicions in the name of the bottom line. It can be perceived as a free-money-circulation model of the sort that the Chicago School ultimately favored: the cash nexus observes no sovereign borders, and can make enemies into co-investors. But narrative events in Godfather II ultimately give the lie to this globalist perspective.

The attempted hit on Michael not only bears out, even if only as a sidenote, the antisemites’ suspicion of Jews as being untrustworthy; it also presages the backlash against the Chicago School monetary policies that served as the bedrock for the neoconservative GOP. From a Trumpian, pseudo-populist point of view, Michael gave away the store by placing financial interests above more traditional values such as family and national/cultural/religious heritage. If Michael’s conflicts lead to a crisis of confidence within the Corleone organization, it becomes possible from a pro-Mafia standpoint to look for a better, more successful model of leadership. And this perhaps explains why Scarface has remained a cultural touchstone both for actual criminals and criminal wannabes. Where Michael Corleone wants to ink deals and secure the future of the organization, Tony Montana is an unhinged egomaniac who has no qualms about killing every last motherfucker in the room. To say that Montana would rather burn his empire to the ground than to lose it is perhaps misleading, because that statement implies conscious choice. Rather, it’s a primitive, animalistic instinct, and one that Trump’s fans — little men who dream of one day hitting the big time — admire in the former president. The fact that the empire he means to destroy is the United States hardly matters to that crowd.

4. When I suggested that antisemitism in The Godfather Part II was an unintended consequence of Coppola’s larger agenda, I meant that it is indeed a byproduct of the tribalism at the heart of traditional Mafia ideology. The film depicts it without in any way endorsing it. This can be easy to miss, since Roth’s betrayal does form the narrative backbone of the story and of Michael’s partial downfall. But “the Jews” could just as easily have been any out-group at odds with the Italian mob, something Scorsese takes great pains to show in his depictions of Italian/Irish conflict in Goodfellas. A reading of The Godfather Part II that lines up with Pentangeli’s viewpoint, that Michael was foolish to trust the Jews, misses the complexity of Coppola’s film as well as the conundrum Michael Corleone finds himself in. It’s a simplistic conclusion that betrays certain prejudices in the viewer rather than the text.

There is already trouble brewing within the family, to the extent that Michael tries to honor tradition and keep the organization under family control, but ends up destroying it through misplaced loyalty. Yes, placing economic interests above family ties — the Friedman/Mies approach — underestimates the underlying animosities that lay behind or underneath that money. Following the tribalist imperative of placing family first leads directly to the problem of Fredo (John Cazale), Michael’s weak older brother who is instrumental in Roth’s play against the Corleone organization. The shortsighted belief that family trumps all else, that blood will remain true to blood, is of course a racist canard that has gained much greater traction during the Trump era. I will spare the reader any rehash of this offensive rubbish. But I will say that Fredo’s betrayal of Michael and the family gives the lie to such supremacist claptrap.

Yes, Fredo betrayed his family. But it’s in the why and not the what that Coppola undermines the ideology of atavistic in-group bonds and loyalties. Such ideas, like so much of Trumpism and alt-right thinking, is anti-psychological, preferring to understand humans (especially men) as fundamentally animalistic and driven by instinct — in-group preference being a part of that atavism. But Fredo does not go against Michael for purely economic reasons (placing lucre above blood), nor does he see his act as an open rebellion against the family at large. His treason can be explained neither through neoliberal economics, nor with a theory of in-group betrayal or lack of honor (although it can be mistaken for such).

Throughout Godfather II, there are numerous flashbacks to Vito (Robert De Niro) as a young man, and they serve as a dialectical parallel to Michael’s story. They show what kind of father, husband, and gangster Vito was vs. what Michael is doing (or not doing) in the present. And one of the things we see very clearly in these flashbacks is that Vito favors his young son Michael over the older Fredo. We see Fredo as a young child fighting pneumonia, and perhaps the fear evident in Vito’s reactions led him to steel himself against any vulnerability toward the son he almost lost. But once Michael is born, he and his father are inseparable. In the flashbacks, young Michael is constantly carried in his father’s arms, as if this precious angel was too perfect to tread on the lowly ground.

We see that Vito’s favoritism of Michael over Fredo extends to Fredo’s being passed over in favor of Michael for controlling the family business. But the flashbacks demonstrate that this was not a purely tactical move on Vito’s part. It’s not just that Michael is smarter or a better manager, although those things appear to be true. Vito’s preference for Michael has always been. So when Fredo breaks down and explains to Michael that this is why he betrayed him and teamed with Roth, we would do well to believe him. Fredo was acting neither as a purely rational Homo oeconomicus nor as a cornered, instinct-driven mammal. Fredo was leading with his unconscious, trying and failing to process a primal wound.

5. So neither of the two dominant conservative ideologies, neoliberalism or alt-right primitivism, can explain the subjective rupture at the heart of The Godfather Part II. We need a third option, one that largely invalidates the other two. Freudianism presumes that trauma implants time-released ordnance within the unconscious, a minefield that can destroy others or oneself just as easily. Coppola doesn’t offer us enough background to know whether Hyman Roth served as an alternate father figure for Fredo, but from the beginning (his wife’s humiliating behavior at young Anthony’s birthday party) we clearly see that he is “weak,” which in this context implies castration. This weakness has become a popular and not altogether inaccurate way to describe those “incels” for whom that man-animal barbarism of the alt-right holds so much appeal. And if a Freudian theory of the subject explains precisely why one is weak, what better disavowal mechanism than to attempt to invalidate said theory in favor of kneejerk pseudo-biologism?

In 2019, CNN reporter Chris Cuomo was heckled on the street by someone calling him “Fredo.” Since this was tantamount to being called dickless, Cuomo lost his cool and was caught on camera cursing the guy out. In a sense, Cuomo’s reaction bears out the Freudian interpretation of Coppola’s film, since we know that the reporter wasn’t being called out as a traitor to his family, much less an economic self-maximizer. He was being compared to his brother, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo and found wanting, assailed as second-rate and being told that their late father, Gov. Mario Cuomo, liked Andrew best. It probably never occurred to Chris Cuomo that the insult, “Fredo,” could have antisemitic undertones, given that according to the shibboleths of extreme-right-wing ideology, Cuomo had indeed “made a deal with the Jews” (CNN, the media). In this instance, one must buy into the antisemitic slander to take offense at it, or even recognize it. As with the Hyman Roth situation in The Godfather Part II, antisemitism merely hovers in the penumbra of a deeper wound. This makes it no less offensive, mind you. But rather, it shows how right-wing ideology cleaves to racism and antisemitism as a means for disavowing their own castration. It also shows that much like the Wachowskis, Coppola has always been considerably smarter than his so-called fans on the right.

Published as part of Francis Ford Coppola: As Big As Possible.