The fatal allure of Sicily in Francis Ford Coppola's The godfather trilogy

Abstract

The following study on the fatal allure of Sicily in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather trilogy takes its cue from Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious in which Jameson argues that a cultural artefact is to be apprehended not merely as an objective structure in its immanence, but rather as a symbolic practice whose function is to invent formal or imaginary solutions to unresolvable social contradictions. Jameson argues that '[i]t is in detecting the traces of that uninterrupted narrative, in restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history, that the doctrine of a political unconscious finds its function and its necessity.' This doctrine lies at the heart of Jameson's reading of the latent political signification underlying the manifest content of such American works of mass culture as Coppola's The Godfather I (1972) and The Godfather II (1974), whose function he describes as being simultaneously ideological and Utopian.