Contains spoilers for the entire series, please note
After reading the third part, I feel the difference between the two generations of godfathers. In addition to the differences in personal characters, as well as the differences in external times and situations, it is also an organization and a city-state, from small to large, from small countries to a standardized modern empire. The change is inevitable The spiritual mourning encountered, a kind of nostalgia under the incomprehensible modernity.
Both generations of godfathers regard "loving and protecting family" as their primary creed. But the old godfather protects not only family members in the sense of kinship, but also specific Italians who have declared friendship to him with a clear kissing ceremony and who take him as godfather. Like Mike said, Dad likes "man to man" helping people. A very specific, face-to-face community he established. This personalized "help-giving" with pre-modern genes brought him full satisfaction and fulfillment. He spent his entire life living the values he believed in and getting what he wanted.
And for Mike, the second-generation godfather, he really loves his family. But with the expansion of the industry, his "family" has also moved towards internationalization, standardization and abstraction while seeking legalization step by step. Although there are ten or a hundred times more people in this industry circle than the previous generation, everyone can replace each other and is an abstract number. Just like at the beginning of the second part, old man Frank complained, "There is no Italian here." At the beginning of the third, the 100 million he donated to Sicily may help more than a thousand times more than the old godfather, but to Mike himself, it is just a number, an abstract concept of "doing good". There is no sense of reality.
The concept of "protecting family members" has also regressed to a very limited concept of a very "small" individual within a small family of three generations. The small family is a modern concept, the result of the family being no longer the primary pillar of a person. Moreover, this "small" concept is closed and difficult to grow. With the special circumstances of gangsters, misfortune, struggle, betrayal, different choices of children, etc., can only be subtracted in most cases. What Mike really faced was indeed this unfortunate subtraction.
Therefore, the strong psychological pillar supporting the old godfather Vito has become very weak for Mike. In his decades, the business of the Corleone family has grown by orders of magnitude, but at the same time, it has also reached an extremely lonely and unsolved road. This kind of incomprehension has appeared again and again in human history. It appeared in the Hellenistic era, from a city-state where every citizen actually participated in politics and shared sustenance, to a great empire that had no obvious relationship with every subject and was an abstract concept for the king; it also appeared today from a few friends. From a hands-on workshop, to a multinational enterprise where every employee is blurred.
Are modernization, standardization, and internationalization necessarily a bad thing? Not really. Almost every one of us was born in a post-modern world, and there is no obstacle for us to accept such an age. But it is different for the Corleone family. From the organization of the family (enterprise) to the godfather of each generation, it is built on the kind of pre-modern emotion that supports the old godfather, individual and irreplaceable between people. over value. Mike, who most wanted to become an American citizen, still couldn't cut the deep cultural umbilical cord.
This irreconcilable contradiction between nostalgia for the ancient values symbolized by Sicily and modernity is the reason why Mike lived in a last resort, loneliness and loneliness all his life, until he retired to the courtyard of his old house in Sicily and died silently. The failure of the final whitewashing effort also means that the road to modernization will eventually fail.
The end of this dead end was retreated by the third-generation godfather Vincent. Vincent, who resembles the appearance and demeanor of the old godfather when he was young in the second film, is symbolized by the resurrection of the title of "Don Corleone" (this title has been sealed for decades under Mike's legalization efforts), and also returns to the family. starting point. Abandon modernization, and abandon the separation of modern organizations and their own values, and return to unity.
And this seemingly optimistic return is not the hope left by the director's kindness. After all, the Corleone family, which is already so large and modern, how to shrink back to its original small scale and style, and how to return to the value of the ancient times after the change of time, is still unknown.
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