The Godfather Effect

The argument

The argument is that a serious study of the trilogy found it doing the opposite of glamourising crime. Tom Santopietro's The Godfather Effect examines the films and concludes that their significance lay in how they portrayed Italian characters: as real human beings rather than as the stereotypical caricatures, speaking with heavy accents, that had stood in for Italians in American popular culture until then. The distinction matters to the question of glamourisation, because caricature and glamour work in the same way. Both substitute a flattened image for a person — one making the criminal ridiculous, the other making him enviable — and neither requires the audience to reckon with him as somebody comparable to themselves. Characters written as full human beings resist both treatments. A figure whose motives, obligations, fears and self-deceptions are shown in detail is harder to admire uncritically than a figure reduced to style, because the detail includes the costs. The cultural effect the study identifies follows from that. American culture had regarded the Italian immigrant as the other: a presence understood through accent and type rather than through interiority. Films that rendered Italian characters as people had a positive effect on how that population was seen, and this is not an effect that glamourised crime could produce. Glamour attaches to a role, not to a population; it invites imitation of a posture while leaving the underlying prejudice untouched. What the study points to, then, is that the trilogy's actual reception was about recognition rather than aspiration. Audiences came away having seen a family, an immigrant experience and a set of human compromises rendered seriously. If the most celebrated crime films in American cinema are better described as having humanised a marginalised community than as having made crime attractive, the general charge that films and series glamourise crime is not well founded.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The film and its sequels are most famously remembered for romanticizing a mafia family and their crimes to stay in power. Even though the characters are realistic, the trilogy still reinforced the stereotype about Italians being likely involved in mafia affairs.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The trilogy reinforced the stereotype about Italians being often involved in mafia affairs. The first film was boycotted by the mafia in NYC until the producer made an economic agreement.

Further reading

John Patterson explains how the mafia tried to shut down the filming of The Godfather 'The Godfather Effect' by Tom Santopietro By Daniel Bubbeo The Godfather Effect: Changing Hollywood, America, and Me