MarcAnthony P. Solli
The Great Gatsby
The initial literary selection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s quintessential example of pre-World War II decadence among the nouveau riche class of society,
The Great Gatsby,
will serve as a discussion springboard and essential template from which the class may wrestle with fundamental questions regarding the definitions of American success. Guiding questions will include “What is the American Dream, as you understand it?” and “Is the American dream a dated, outmoded concept only accessible to certain segments of society, for example, those of European descent who are upper middle class and beyond in the social stratosphere?” These questions will be foundational to our investigation as we attempt to unravel the reasoning behind the American gangster’s need to operate beyond the realm of organized, legalized society.
Indeed, the gangster often thrives in a terrain that is at once roguish (villainous?) and liberating, an arena which can serve to inform society’s mechanisms while it undermines them from an alternate, though parallel world view. That is to say that the world of the rogue, whether he be Jay Gatsby or Frank Lucas (
American
Gangster
) is so compelling to readers because we find ourselves at once repulsed and envious of the hierarchies and codes of perversely honorable conduct as featured in these texts, and we seek to imitate and cheer the liberty and countercultural, anti-authoritarian image of the American gangster, although we may publicly acknowledge an aversion to his criminality and Macchiavellian assertions. Students will be challenged in the opening classes of this unit to explore their own tastes, attitudes, and behaviors as we read passages from Gatsby, Mario Puzo’s
The Godfather,
and Ridley Scott’s
American Gangster.
Learners will be expected to approach our readings and discussions thematically, while we listen poignantly to one another’s observations of text and our relationships/reactions to it. In so doing, we will have examined an element of ourselves which may be discovered in these texts, and will have gleaned universal aspects which cause the American hero to be much more countercultural and antithetical to societal norms than earlier, Classical heroes, to which learners will have already been exposed (i.e., Perseus, Heracles, Beowulf, Arthur).
Through our initial observances of Gatsby, our in-class, shared discussion periods and whole class debriefings (colloquially referred to as ‘think-pair-share’ techniques among educators) should serve to enlighten learners to discover that the American hero is more than flawed by pride or some other singular defect of character, and that unlike the literary examples which precede the 20
th
Century, the American gangster is at once representative of the plight of the underclass and immigrants in their quest for the American nirvana, as well as being symbolic of an indictable counterpoint against the achievement of the American Dream, since the gangster seeks to operate against the codes of hard work, fair play, and lawful citizenship which such a dream intrinsically infers.
Our initial discussion of
Gatsby
will include inquisitions pertaining to whether or not the American dream is contingent upon the achievement of a form of “contentment” or “happiness” for the individual (in Gatsby’s case traversing time to regain the lost love of Daisy Buchanan whom he left to pursue the “quest” incumbent upon his warrior stature and his growth through adventure in World War I); or whether or not the acquisition of wealth is the essential arbiter in determining one’s success at realizing the dream. Although Gatsby argues and, in fact, quarrels with apparently reliable narrator Nick Carraway that one can indeed return to the idealized past, it is Nick who, as a surrogate moral voice for the reader, reminds Gatsby that the past does not exist, and is therefore an unworthy dream to be sought as a representation of the American ideal. On the other hand, learners will explore Gatsby’s acquisition of enormous wealth and power, evidenced by his superfluously gaudy mansion on Long Island, his Rolls Royce, his nightly parties for the nouveau riche and his name change from James Gatz to Jay Gatsby, suggestive of the necessity for economic status and identity re-invention in order to attain heroic, “American” greatness.
Learners will focus specifically on the character of Meyer Wolfsheim, who, as Fitzgerald’s creation, best delineates a character who most clearly evinces Gatsby’s fundamental and necessary involvement in organized crime activity (bootlegging) as foundational to Gatsby’s “greatness”. As such a character (based on real-life underworld figures Meyer Lansky and Arnold Rothstein, who is credited with fixing the 1919 World Series), Wolfsheim represents the powerful nexus between the wilderness and civilization (as depicted in Anglo-Saxon texts including
Beowulf
) that is mandatory if Gatsby is to achieve a social status which makes him at once beloved and feared. As a springboard to other anti-heroic gangster texts, learners can view Gatsby as their initiation point, since Gatsby would seem not to require a connection to the criminal world as a Caucasian war hero with attachments to blue-blood money and Ivy-league prosperity. Nevertheless, students will have to wrestle with the tension caused by his tacit need for Meyer Wolfsheim in order to regain the past through his own money and power.
Perhaps Wolfsheim is the reason that Gatsby becomes great, but of course, as in all heroic journeys, the fates will not be denied, and Gatsby is star-crossed and so must die as a victim to a lesser man’s revenge. Perhaps Gatsby’s demise is a reminder of the significance of the American lower middle-class and its importance as an underpinning, bolstering agent to society in general. Perhaps Gatsby is only made great by his bootlegging which feeds off of the misery and illegal quest for drugs (alcohol) of the desperate lower classes. His death may therefore be considered poetic justice. These notions of social relevance and criminal connection are in no way an accident as crafted by Fitzgerald, and Gatsby’s convenient use of criminal enterprise to achieve his American dream must be punished. Students will investigate the novel with a focus on the above perspectives so that as we approach Mario Puzo’s anti-hero, Michael Corleone, we may better understand his own drive to divest himself of all ethnic (Italian-American?) considerations in favor of a perceived, idealistic vision of all that is supposedly “American”, despite the warnings of Fitzgerald.
The Godfather
From the infamous opening line of Francis Coppola’s
The Godfather,
where we listen to the ironical musings of undertaker Amerigo Bonasera (whose name most emphatically and ironically suggests that the American Dream is unreal and who has come to Don Vito’s wedding to ask for the justice denied him by America’s flawed judicial system), to the final moments of the film, in which Don Vito’s favorite son Michael ascends to criminal emperor in a visual representation that highlights these ethnic and ancient symbolisms (submissive kissing of the hand by subordinate henchmen), Michael Corleone, as written by Mario Puzo for his pulp fiction rendering
The Godfather,
and as later portrayed by Al Pacino in the 1972 film of the same name, is an idealistic figure. He remains convinced that the pursuit of the American ideal requires his simultaneous attachment to forms of Old World Colonial/Puritanical Americana and his imperative detachment from the ethnic demands of his patriarchal, Italian ancestry. This perennial tension between ethnic loyalties and American considerations is best embodied in the aforementioned humiliated undertaker’s confused and ironic explanation to Don Vito, in the first and seminal line of the film, “I believe in America...America has made my fortune...I brought my daughter up in the American fashion...
but I taught her never to dishonor her family
. . .” [emphasis added]. This emergent tension between the ethnic past and the American future so succinctly expressed by Amerigo Bonasera ultimately becomes the narrative impetus of the pursuit of
The Godfather’s
anti-heroic figure, Michael Corleone.
Through close analysis of various passages of text, including this opening scene of the novel in Don Vito’s study, a scene which deftly portrays the ancient Sicilian codes of favors offered and gifts exchanged, and through examination of later passages featuring Michael’s Oedipal conflict with Don Vito and his ultimate and untimely atonement with and usurpation of his father’s role as head of the family (indicative of the usurpation of “Americanism” over ethnicity), students will address Michael Corleone’s anti-heroic pursuit for legitimacy in a criminal underworld. Simultaneously, students will juxtapose his pursuit with that of Jay Gatsby’s, in order to determine whether ethnicity is at all a consideration in the anticipation and quest for the illusory and elusive American ideal. Students may well discover through guided discussion and debate that Michael Corleone and Jay Gatsby, although separated by a span of twenty years in fictional American history, are actually composites representing the very same anti-heroic features: each character returns to his home with the badges of a war hero, each reluctantly immerses himself in the necessary evils of criminal enterprise (although outwardly appearing at once fashionable and ready for business while draped in the clothing of the American elite, including seersucker suits, ascots, and the embellishments of well-groomed, respectable gentlemen of society), and each character pursues an elusive female from his past who is rooted in the traditions of the American mythos. For Michael Corleone, Puzo actually causes him not only to pursue his feminine fantasy, as does Gatsby, but furthermore to pursue a mate whose very name, Kaye “Adams”, bespeaks the origins and traditions of a burgeoning “America”! Puzo insists that our speculations are correct by denoting that Michael’s wife is descended from the Adamses of American yore, thereby bolstering our reader’s perception that Michael’s desires for Americanization extend beyond his own personal drives to reject ethnicity for only himself and actually transcend to the level of ensuring that his immediate family and progeny will be cleansed of the pollution of his Italian ancestry. An interesting corollary to this notion is that for Michael Corleone, Americanization, which is commensurate with legitimate enterprise, can only occur once all remnants of original ethnicity are purged (in fact, a rather impossible and racist assertion).
We will examine moments in
The Godfather
narratives where a compromised blending of ethnicity and Americanism is portrayed, suggesting that the American ideal can only be realistically or pragmatically grasped through a mélange of ancestry that recedes toward the past and simultaneously thrusts toward what is considered to be “American”. This feature is best seen as the immigrant anti-hero is viewed to reject the homeland while he propels toward the future of an invented new ethnicity and identity. In a related parallel, Fitzgerald posits Gatsby’s failed quest to regain his past relationship with Daisy as a model for this type of hopeless mire pitting past against future, a dilemma in which Michael Corleone finds himself torn (best embodied by the narrative’s literal destruction of his Sicilian first wife in favor of a second WASP wife, just as he ascends to the role of criminal kingpin). The celebrated closing line from
The Great Gatsby
(“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”)
is then reinterpreted by Puzo and his successors as an incessant, hopeless recession toward our original ethnicities, all the while pursuing an elusive American ideal that remains idyllic and attainable only in ours and Michael Corleone’s anti-Italian, anti-heroic dreams.
The great irony, perhaps, is that the original ethnicity of one’s homeland or ancestry and the future ancestry or identity to which one aspires can both be viewed as inventions whose purpose is to serve the narrative by allowing anti-heroes to cross from the threshold of an early perception to a more refined perception. This is to say that the movement from Old World (ethnic origin) to New World (America) is actually an internal shift from lesser enlightenment to greater wisdom, clearly an imperative moment of growth in the consciousness of any tragic hero.
Michael Corleone may well be the character that solidified Al Pacino’s career in the pantheon of exceptionally gifted “Method” actors whose portrayal of the reluctant mafia boss who envisions himself as the equivalent of a corporate CEO lent itself to myriad re-readings by those in the business, educational, political, entertainment, and ,indeed, criminal spheres of society. Indeed, many sought to emulate the truisms of its musings, rhetoric and economical dialogue on hierarchy, loyalty, power, and family; however, it can be argued that Pacino’s most durable delineation to date remains that of
Scarface’s
Tony Montana. Montana’s defiant, ethnically-charged, post-modem interpretation of Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
continues even twenty-five years after its theatrical release to taunt and tease the imagination of young and old who are drawn to understand the ethnic American anti-hero and the engines that compel him.
Scarface
Students need only to shop at their local malls or cursorily scan their peers’ choice in clothing to note the exceptionally profound interest that Americans of diverse ethnic backgrounds have exhibited for Brian DePalma’s 1983 film
Scarface.
As a class, we will examine the seemingly interwoven connection between immigrant ethnicity and the designation of “outsider” to the American experience of opportunity. Of particular interest to us will be the notion of whether or not every immigrant culture that lands on America’s shores is subject to a form of ostracizing by those who are already indigenous, full-fledged citizens, regardless of such citizens’ original, ancestral status as immigrants.
Are the latest immigrants to America’s shores perennially the most disadvantaged in terms of opportunity, thereby resorting to violent criminal methods in order to participate in the already established opportunities of America which precede their arrival and to which they are legitimately denied? Tony Montana, a character of Cuban descent, who is ironically portrayed by a Sicilian-American, and whose compatriots are played by actors from a variety of ethnicities, including Jewish, German, Italian, Bolivian, and Puerto Rican to name a few, is often seen by audiences to be an esteemed model for Spanish-speaking immigrants, regardless of country of origin. For others who feel a sense of disenfranchisement from the established, authoritarian, legal and bureaucratic infrastructures of contemporary American society, Tony Montana’s countercultural actions and attitudes are deemed heroic. Our unit will examine the motivations of ethnic populations who relish attaching themselves to the fictitious Tony Montana, especially when such fascinations with the character squarely position such populations beyond the law-abiding, hard work ethos and Puritanical precepts associated with what is traditionally American.
In particular, we will explore whether or not hard work, or industry, is essential to the achievement of the American ideal of success, a success which is predicated upon monetary gain enforced by the tacit threat of violence, as evidenced by Gatsby and the Corleones. For, while Jay Gatsby and Michael Corleone each represent hard work at criminal enterprise and subsequent wealth which is Machiavellian in pursuit of an idealistic dream, Tony Montana represents the aggressive immigrant drive toward financial success that makes no apologies for the utility and necessity of violence required to join the ranks of the established wealthy. Students will study Montana’s rise to power in the criminal underbelly’s cocaine trade of the early 1980s, and will examine whether his perceived reputation as a no-nonsense, uneducated, assertive workhorse in pursuit of “the world and everything in it” and his hierarchical, patriarchal algorithm for its attainment (“first you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the woman”) can be considered a re-interpretation of the American dream, as it speaks to contemporary immigrants. We will also entertain the possibility, by contrast, that Montana is merely a hyperbolized, self-oriented gangster with no redeeming qualities who exemplifies a bastardization of immigrant ardor and industry in the achievement of only financial (American?) prosperity with no interest in the actual dream of fulfilling “American” promise.
We will also examine whether or not Brian Depalma is interested in portraying the lack of homogeneity in ethnic/immigrant groups as a fractious weakness against a dominant, unified American authority. This ethnocentrically “Hispanic” tension is demonstrated in the filmic text by several distinctive Spanish speaking groups and the rivalries among their ethnicities, rivalries which are either ignored or ignorantly perceived as homogeneous to the “American” outsiders of the text. Cubans compete against Colombians who compete against Bolivians who compete against Puerto-Ricans, who all collectively compete against the “American” establishment represented by a thoroughly WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) investment banker/money launderer and an equally white corrupt cop who favors handouts from criminal immigrants as a means to his own financial success.
Furthermore, in addition to such issues of ethnic homogeneity or stereotyping by outsiders, we will consider whether accented speech or language is a fundamental cause of the anti-hero’s relegation even farther to the fringes of legitimate society (Tony Montana has a heavy accent, whereas Michael Corleone and Jay Gatz have no perceived deficiency in acceptably “American” language which might cause them exclusion from the cultural establishment). We will also consider whether the gaudy trappings of Montana’s lifestyle (exemplified by an enormous built-in bathtub in the center of his bedroom!) satirize the achievements of Gatsby and Corleone, who at least evince the conservative tastes of their epochs, mirroring the dominant, conventional American culture in their respective fashion and stylistic choices. Montana’s drug addiction, ostentation in dress, mode of transport, and choice in decor, all conspire to indicate to the film’s viewer that he remains well outside the mainstream of acceptable, conventional American society, despite his industry, business acumen, and rapid acquisition of wealth and status within the gangster community.
For purposes of the unit, the Tony Montana example from
Scarface
will also encourage students to reflect critically on whether or not a hero’s outcome in the narrative is essential to his perception as “heroic”, or whether the means and choices of a character’s existence, in spite of tragic loss in the end, are the imperative ingredients in the determination of heroic stature. Pivotal to our discussion will be issues related to whether or not Tony Montana is a hero at all since he does not succeed, but is instead destroyed by his own pride and stupidity in crossing a Bolivian drug lord named Sosa. After all, just as we critique the violence inherent in Tony Montana’s choices, so too Gatsby ends up shot to death in his pool, and Michael Corleone survives to old age through his wily nature, only to lose his daughter to violence and to die alone in a Sicilian village as dogs scurry around his dead body.
It would seem that the end is not justified by the means, and yet for the American antihero, both financial and political power remain essential pursuits despite a known tragic outcome. In such a paradigm, the quest for the grail is more critical than the attainment of it. As with Shakespeare’s Macbeth, who may be considered an important inspiration for Depalma’s
Scarface,
the title character’s beheading by Macduff is not nearly as critical as the haunting cautionary narrative focus of the play to remain wary of prophecies, ambitious motives, and hasty, violent choices in the acquisition of respect and power that are unearned or acquired out of turn. Still, as with
Scarface,
we can applaud Macbeth’s resilience and heroism as he instinctively fights without hesitation for a cause that he knows is lost. Though Birnam Wood has miraculously come to Dunsinane and Macduff is surprisingly not of woman born, Macbeth will not yield. Tony Montana is willing to be assassinated by a hit squad from Bolivia while defiantly brandishing and capriciously firing an assault rifle in his own home; but he will not surrender without a fight. The anti-hero is heroic in his very defiance of inalterable outcomes.
American Gangster
There exists perhaps no more defiant a figure in filmic gangster fiction than that of Denzel Washington’s Frank Lucas of Ridley Scott’s
American Gangster
(2007).
As an African-American crime lord who discovers his niche importing poppy from the Far East (resonances of the United States’ current inability to curtail the export of poppy from Afghanistan in the ‘“war on terror” of the early 2000s), Frank fashions his own criminal conspiracy to provide heroin to the urban underc1asses of his socioeconomic environment, while blatantly and riskily flouting the conventions of his criminality, dressed in business attire, adhering to the conventions of seeming “American” legitimacy. In sharp contrast to the earlier figures emanating from European descent (whether Italian, Jewish, Irish, etc.) who emerge as leaders of criminal enterprise, this text bolsters the unconventional concept of African-American leadership within the gangster community, a community which historically does not favor leadership beyond the parameters of European ancestry. Similarly, Frank Lucas represents, as does Tony Montana, an ethnic characterization of a “real-life” figure upon whom the disenfranchised, in this case African-Americans who sense their own relegation to the periphery of society, can heap the sum total of their social and economic frustrations towards an iconic figure of an epic story. Indeed, African-American audiences may at once find a scapegoat and a savior who is relevant and envy-inspiring in his audacity and success at thwarting the conventions of his day (circa mid-1970s).
As with
Scarface,
it is no matter that the outcome of the text finds our anti-hero betrayed by those closest to him (an almost cliché convention of the modern gangster mythology), since the crucial thematic element for African-American audiences and others is to depict the folk story rise and fall of this “American” gangster. Frank Lucas reigns heroic for some in his destruction of the false boundaries of criminal success, in his blatant disregard for perceived historical limitations of his ethnic ancestry in America (i.e., slavery, racism, prejudice, as well as antagonizing legal decisions such as Jim Crow, Plessy v. Ferguson, etc.). Alternatively, Lucas appears anti-heroic for others in his postmodern redefinition of the American gangster as a black man who defies not only authority of friend and foe alike (as does Tony Montana), but who also disintegrates the larger authority of history and actually usurps what is understood to be exclusively white “American” success (albeit criminal).
As an interesting counterpoint to Frank Lucas’ distinction as a successful African-American gangster, students will examine how his own clothing, style, physical bearing, gait, and grooming choices tend to mirror those of the Euro-centric mobster/leader/anti-heroes of the earlier films and texts (although
Scarface
is set approximately a decade later) to determine whether Lucas ironically embraces that which he desires to reject. They will investigate whether Frank Lucas is merely emulating rather than razing the stereotypes and subconscious power which Michael Corleone, Jay Gatsby, and Tony Montana possess in the American cultural consciousness. It may well be that Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone merely gives way to Denzel Washington’s Frank Lucas in a superficial way, for by forcing him to imitate the lifestyle and choices of earlier criminal figures, Ridley Scott enables Frank Lucas to appear as neither original nor powerful in usurping European patriarchy and the conventions of the earlier American gangster hero.
Students will ultimately inquire whether Lucas is only a dim reflection of our American literature’s and film’s seminal anti-heroic figures who is designed simply to capitalize on these successes in a financial fashion for movie studios, through storytelling which can do nothing but imitate the epic nature of such earlier works in both scope and style. On the other hand, Lucas may represent a genuine visionary expansion of the American anti-hero, who in the year when Barack Obama is a viable Democratic candidate for President of the United States, represents a fundamental uplifting of African-American image and voice to the most elite circles of public discourse and power, and in so succeeding, disavows that merely pragmatic American claim of capitalistic gain for film producers at the expense of artistic innovation.
The Sopranos
Finally, in a cumulative fashion, prior to students’ presentations of their summative assessments which will be culminating projects of the unit, demonstrating understanding and evaluation, as well as offering original creations of the anti-heroic American journey, learners will then be exposed to the controversial final episode of the landmark cable television series
The Sopranos
as a coda to our analysis. Our examination of
The
Sopranos
will attempt to investigate precisely how David Chase’s creation simultaneously celebrates the earlier ethnic (Italian) anti-heroes of the gangster genre and undercuts the heroism of such a journey, all the while remaining ambiguous in the final moments of its narrative energy in order to leave all interpretation squarely in the hands of reflective audiences who may entertain variations of responses to the profound questions that remain on David Chase’s canvas once his authorial voice is pre-emptively silenced. In so doing, David Chase has reluctantly become collective America’s English teacher, especially when he noted recently in
The Sopranos: The Complete Book
, published in October, 2007, four months after the finale’s debut, “Most of us should have done this kind of thing in high school English class and didn’t.”
This pivotal episode entitled “Made in America” is at once a culmination of the American societal and cultural values that David Chase is placing under scrutiny and indictment, and a reminder of the intrinsic dualism that “being produced in America” implies with intimations both honorable and empty. The double entendre of the title’s reference suggests both official mafia membership and the colloquial expression of marketeers who heap value on the production of goods and services in the United States (it’s actually a slogan from a Ford automobile commercial of the 1990s). The phrase has implications of avarice, consumption, gluttony, sexual excess, and self-orientation which speak to Tony Soprano’s re-invention of the American gangster for contemporary, 21st Century audiences. Students will assess whether or not it remains a positive notion for a product to be “made in America”, or whether such a phrase suggests the paradoxical notion of being constructed efficiently, yet easily breakable, indicating the fragility of the culture as a whole, which appears unable to vanquish enemies (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan), to gain consensus in political matters, or to devise expeditious economic and immigrant policies that are both fair and equitable to all concerned, especially in the supposed “land of opportunity” which has long been seen as an oasis for immigrants seeking generational advancement and self-edification.
If Michael Corleone can be analogized to be an American-made Cadillac as juxtaposed to Tony Soprano’s Ford truck, then interesting discussions can occur which examine each character’s version of anti-heroic qualities. Ultimately, such a juxtaposition may indicate that Tony Soprano becomes a redux version of Michael Corleone, where Tony’s lumbering, cumbersome physical presence is the result of guilt, consumption, greed and sexual excess (as interpreted by actor James Gandolfini), whereas Michael’s hangdog, hunched posture is caused by a more honorable “weight of responsibility” as the reluctant hero who fulfills his father’s plans at the expense of his own. When we compare and contrast both of these Italian-American anti-heroes with the Cuban Tony Montana and the African-American Frank Lucas, we will more starkly see that the more gaudy, ostentatious, aggressive styles and upright gaits of the later anti-heroes betray the necessity of more recent immigrants to perform and behave aggressively in order to
compete with the slower, more established, less challenged earlier immigrants who possess a firm foothold in the American landscape and can, therefore, afford to be methodical, deliberate, and less forward in their course toward achieving acceptability as thoroughly “American” anti-heroes.
Indeed, students will come to realize that David Chase, in his final episode of
The Sopranos,
not only pays respect and homage to the Michael Corleone representation of the American hero, but more specifically references
The Godfather
in several dramatically cinematic ways, in part to highlight the distinctions between Michael Corleone and Tony Soprano. For example, not only have careful filmic readers learned through the course of
The Sopranos’
epic six seasons that its anti-hero is a fan of
The Godfather, Part II
(in which Michael succeeds in defeating his enemies, though alienating himself from all family and associates as a Nixonian character imprisoned by his own paranoia), but that, in fact, his favorite scene in all nine-hours of filmic text and Puzo’s novel is a moment when Michael Corleone evinces himself (in an anti-heroic apotheosis) as an assertive power and assassinates his father’s rivals and would-be murderers in an intimate Italian-American eatery, only after emerging from the restaurant’s bathroom with a previously planted revolver. Such detail is not without merit for David Chase and for the filmic reader, because the crucial final episode of his series offers enough reminders and references to
The Godfather
and Tony Soprano’s reverence for a fictional filmic figure, that their placement does not appear purely coincidental, except to the uninformed reader or audiences who have shallowly misread Chase’s text throughout the series’ run.
Students will reflect upon a careful viewing of images and cinematography of “Made in America”, which will be juxtaposed with similar moments in Francis Coppola’s
Godfather,
so that the sepia tones and orange hues of Chase’s cinematography, as well as Tony Soprano’s devouring orange fruit in this final episode can be highlighted as essential motifs before the highly charged ambiguity of Tony’s final on-screen appearance. (Film critic Judith Vogelsgang and others have appropriately noted Coppola’s use of the orange color and fruit in Gordon Willis’ cinematography to be a consistent indication of foreboding doom or violence, often depicting enemies to the Corleone Family). It should therefore be no surprise to students that when David Chase’s final moment of “Made in America” is seen, audiences are left with a profound ambiguity as to the outcome of his anti-hero Tony Soprano, just as Chase mocks the American audience’s need in recent years for a sense of closure, whether psychological, spiritual, or cinematic. For the careful reader of his text, Chase has provided all the clues necessary for a satisfactory sense of closure to his narrative, despite the abrupt blackout and silence at the end of his culminating piece. As we witness Tony Soprano at a remarkably American diner, sharing a meal with his wife and family, and as we observe the orange colorations of the cinematography, and are drawn by Chase’s direction to a mercurial figure at the diner’s counter who is ominously eyeing Tony and his family, we, as critical readers are aware of the dramatic tension and the director’s desire to draw us back into the past of the
Godfather
narrative as a referent for this moment. So the past informs the present, as well as the future, and when the mercurial figure glares at Tony, who meets his eyes, and then retreats to the diner’s bathroom, only to emerge a few moments later (in the script), we know what actions will transpire without the gratuitous necessity of seeing them. We are “borne ceaselessly into the past”, as Fitzgerald’s Gatsby would have it, and our reminders of Michael Corleone’s turning point of assertion become our cues for Tony’s demise. As teachers and students, we do not require the graphic depiction of violence and gore which will accompany Tony Soprano’s death; we need only to “read” the film and its clues for details to determine that this anti-hero who has modeled his life on another fictional antihero receives his brand of poetic justice in being assassinated according to the form and content of his favorite movie scene. Perhaps David Chase is not only demonstrating the cliché that his own art
(The Sopranos
series) has imitated life for a suburban gangster imitating his favorite art
(The Godfather),
but that all art, and, in fact, all real life is informed by artistic representations which help to define not only what it means to be American, but most importantly for our unit, what it means to be heroic or anti-heroic.
Indeed, just as audiences must struggle with an ending unseen in
The Sopranos,
a satisfaction stripped away from their perceptions prior to closure, so too we as students and teachers must seek to define and redefine the heroic journey in our own wanderings, both real and imagined, while we attempt to create identity and purpose in our own fictitious and actual life journeys (in many cases, as in Tony Soprano’s, informed predominantly by fiction). It is the journey, therefore, of the American anti-hero, the outsider who forges a place and meaning for himself from his chaotic, often criminal freedom to explore beyond societal norms, which continues to inform and is reciprocally informed by the culture, so that this cyclical journey is generationally repeated, renewed, reinvented and so that the anti-hero’s adventure becomes our vicarious adventure, and the journey in itself finally triumphs over the outcome. Resolutions or denouements to stories (or lives) are merely circumstantial or irrelevant-where to be “made in America” is to wrestle with fashioning meaning from ambiguity and relying on past models to influence future re-inventions, while side-stepping the pitfalls of cliché, where, paradoxically, the journey becomes the end as we compose our own heroic adventures, replete with just enough criminality for our quests to remain mischievously, refreshingly original and, therefore, unabashedly “American”..
Students will creatively explore the aforementioned devices of foreshadow, allusion, pattern in texts, and characterization in order to synthesize these notions into a culminating activity in which their own invented heroes or anti-heroes may further develop the themes or motifs studied through this mythology unit. It is hoped that learners will be empowered by the clever craft of Fitzgerald, Coppola, DePalma, Scott, and Chase to become self-actualized, self-styled inventors of their own heroic stories. Whether through writing culminating projects, preparing Powerpoint presentations, artistic renderings (including music and dance), filmic or storyboard portrayals, students will come to appreciate the value of heroic storytelling’s potential to entertain, inspire, educate, comfort and compel humanity toward its best self as we, both teachers and students, continue to wrestle with the challenges and complexities of our own shared humanity while we pursue the real and imagined journeys that lie before us.
