interventions: America
Pauline Kael on The Godfather - in The New Yorker March 18, 1972
These gangsters like their life style, while we - seeing it from the outside - are appalled. If the movie gangster once did represent, as Robert Warshow suggested in the late forties, "what we want to be and what we are afraid to become," if he expressed "that part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and the demands of modern life, which rejects 'Americanism' itself," that was the attitude of another era. In the Godfather we see organized crime as 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. When "Americanism" was a form of cheerful, bland official optimism, the gangsters used to be destroyed at the end of the movie and our feelings resolved. Now the mood of the whole country has darkened, guiltily; nothing is resolved at the end of The Godfather, because the family business goes on. Terry Malloy didn't clean up the docks at the end of On the Waterfront; that was a lie. The Godfather is popular melodrama, but it expresses a new tragic realism.
rogue intervention installed in NYC, 2021
materials: acrylic paint, acid-free ink, Fabriano paper (23 X15 inches)
