The Godfather - Mario Puzo [2]
The whole myth of America was up for grabs. Old-fashioned Westerns like Gunsmoke and Bonanza were still among the five highest-rated shows on network television, but the countercultural Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In was number one. The Western, in fact, was looking pretty long in the tooth. New cultural, social, and political movements were questioning the interpretations of American history, so many of which were embodied in the Western genre. The civil rights movement introduced the idea that manifest destiny was a holocaust inflicted by European settlers on Native Americans. The women’s movement made the macho ethic of the West seem grossly archaic. The war in Vietnam challenged the validity of the militaristic methods by which the West was won. American leaders like President Nixon were being openly challenged, and lawmen, like the Chicago police at the 1968 Democratic Convention, were no longer always considered the good guys.
Four popular movies of 1969 revealed the degree to which the great American narrative was being contested. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the biggest hit of the year, celebrated a pair of charming Western outlaws. Sam Peckinpah’s artsy The Wild Bunch also featured outlaws in a story, set in 1913, that essentially pronounced dead the myth of the West. Midnight Cowboy, which won the Oscar for best picture that year and was third in box office receipts, appropriated the name and the hat of the cowboy in an X-rated film set in New York City about a male prostitute. And the protagonists in Easy Rider were a couple of counterculture cowboys who rode hogs instead of horses and did drugs instead of driving dogies. Even True Grit, a more traditional Western, featured John Wayne as an over-the-hill marshal. The Western form was still very much alive in 1969, but it was being transformed almost beyond recognition.
It was into this contested cultural environment that The Godfather introduced another myth.
THOSE FILMS OF 1969 reflected a shift in the role of the hero in American popular culture. The events of the late 1960s challenged the unambiguous nature of good and bad. Besides the authority of the military, the police, and the established order of race and gender roles, even parental authority was quivering in the face of more casual sexual mores and the power of rock ’n’ roll. To many citizens, things seemed out of control. Popular culture had retained a grip on its respect for authority for years, ignoring the cold war and civil rights in most of its entertainment, but that grip was loosening. America seemed ready for a new type of protagonist, one who embodied the ambiguities of the times.
The Godfather provided not only a new set of protagonists but also a whole new code of living. Like Butch and Sundance, they were on the other side of the law. As the effectiveness of the traditional models of authority were proving vulnerable in the public eye, the Corleone family offered up a different model. Based on an unbreakable code, a solid sense of family, and an ability to bypass bureaucratic loopholes and inefficiencies, the Mafia of The Godfather presented a seductive alternative world. These people could get things done, and while some of those things were horrible, most of their victims deserved what they got and were usually