The (Welcome?) End of an Era

Over at The Federalist, New Yorker and theater manager David Marcus muses on the death of the last "Golden Age" Mafia don, Carmine Persico. With Persico's death, Marcus says, the last of the so-called "Five Families" crimelords is gone, and so too may be the romanticized view of organized crime that's been part and parcel of American popular culture since the early 1970s.

Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather is an amazing movie, but the same pop culture that never digs deeply enough to see the real meaning of anything failed to appreciate what it actually showed. It picked up the swagger of lines like, "Leave the gun. Take the cannoli" or supposed crime family phrases such as "sleeps with the fishes" to represent the death and watery disposal of an unfortunate soldier.

But the pop references missed the way that Al Pacino's Michael Corleone slowly loses the humanity and life he began the movie with, as he becomes more and more involved in the illegal work of his father's organization. Animated and lively as the movie begins, his face and manner slowly ossify over its arc until he can stand in front of a priest and repeat the baptismal formula for his infant nephew while men acting on his command murder his enemies and at least one innocent bystander.

Though it's roundly criticized and definitely flawed, Godfather Part III shows the ultimate end of these choices: Michael howling as he holds his dead daughter in his arms, shot by an assassin sent for him, and then dying many years later, alone.

The romantic vision of daring outlaws and colorful characters penetrated entertainment culture until it became the preferred way of processing stories about these awful people. We bust out another Pacino line, "Say hello to my little frien'!" overlooking how Scarface's Tony Montana had just shot his new brother-in-law and best friend in a cocaine-soaked rage, and put his sister Gina in the path of men who want to kill him.

Marcus talks about how the diffusion of the Italian ethnic identity, both geographically and ethnically, has combined with crime bosses who like not being in the papers to leave no successors to the real life godfathers and made men from the Mafia's heyday. It wouldn't be the worst thing if we had one less reason to think better of the people who flaunt the law rather than those who tried to obey it.