about the specifics of the situation in Southeast Asia. However, as stories and images of atrocities in Vietnam entered the American consciousness, questions emerged and support waned.1 Supporters of American involvement blamed the media for lowering American morale with startling and now-famous images such as that of crying, napalm-burnt children, and another of the execution by a pistol shot to the head of a Viet Cong prisoner (Claire). Protestors increasingly questioned the legitimacy of U.S. involvement and cried out against American complicity in such atrocities. By the late 1960s they often directed their anger at returning military personnel. My father was spared much of this treatment in Texas, but talks about the struggles of his friends that returned to California. As I understand The Godfather, it explores questions arising out of this dynamic. Its central protagonist, Michael Corleone, is a military veteran of the Second World War. He first appears on screen in uniform – conspicuously so for audiences in 1972, when uniforms were political lightning rods. He is, in other words, a representative of American foreign policy (albeit in a war that is, by common consensus, just). He is part of an organization, the military, that kills people in the national interest. But he was born into the Corleone crime family. As a soldier and a law school graduate, Michael wants to maintain a distance. The film depicts how he is drawn into the “Family Business,” and unexpectedly becomes the Don when his hot-headed brother, Sonny, the first in line, is killed, and the second in line, Fredo, proves incapable. The film thematically blurs the relationship between the “legitimate” violence in the service of nation (as a soldier) and the “illegitimate” violence in the service of a crime family (as an assassin). As Pauline Kael argues in her film review, organized crime in The Godfather is “an obscene symbolic extension of free enterprise and government policy, an extension of the worst in America – its feudal ruthlessness. Organized crime is not a rejection of Americanism, it’s what we fear Americanism to be. It’s our nightmare of the American system.” In my article, I want to suggest that the film’s commentary extends to America’s foreign war efforts. Coppola would go on to direct perhaps the most famous film about the War in Vietnam, Apocalypse Now (1976), a film that Marsha Kinder argues addresses “the powerful impact the war had on American consciousness” (13). In my analysis, Coppola's work in this regard had already begun in The Godfather. 1 Lunch cites polls that illustrate waning support and growing opposition. In 1969 that 80% of Americans believed entering the conflict in Vietnam had been a mistake. Still, in a separate 1969 poll, only 36% of Americans supported immediate withdrawal (24). By 1972, however, “popular opinion had taken a clear position in opposition to administration policy on further aid to [Vietnam] and this opposition did not later change” (29). Americans opposed U.S. involvement on the grounds of expense, mounting American casualties, excessive violence, and loss of faith that any worthwhile objectives could be achieved (Lutz). 63
64 Publizr Home