Why seeing men be men on screen makes me so incredibly sad.
I wish I had watched The Godfather before I turned 18, before my liberal Marxist university turned me into a man-hating social justice warrior. I wish could have watched the credits roll and sit back, sigh, look over at my family and say, wow, what a fantastic film, I feel so happy about what I just saw on screen, I understand what everyone is talking about, I am content. But no, like the miserable, narcissistic feminist that I am, I just had to have a problem with it. And it all stems from seeing men be happy on screen.
There’s a reason why I will never watch Stand by Me, The Goonies, or even The Little Rascals, a childhood favorite of mine, ever, ever again. When I watch a coming of age story that revolves around young boys, I am overcome by an overwhelming, guttural sense of sadness and longing for the experience that is juvenile male companionship. Whenever I hear a man recount a simple childhood story of him playing basketball or something with his friends in middle school I am filled with this same sense of dread, of anger, of jealousy, the feeling that I was robbed of something that belongs to me. My childhood innocence.
Oh please, you say. Stop being so melodramatic! You can’t expect me to believe you were robbed of this so-called “childhood innocence” you’re whining on about. So you got your period when you were 11 years old, so what! Were you a child slave or something? I’m sure you ran around at recess just like everyone else, training bra or not.
This may be true, reader, but I can’t expect you to understand what I’m talking about unless you experienced middle school as a tween girl. There is nothing quite like it. In fact, the song “Creep,” by Radiohead is actually from the perspective of a 7th grade girl,* if that sheds any light on the situation. There is something innately different about growing up a girl that makes it nearly impossible to achieve this true, innocent childhood bliss that is so glorified by coming of age stories surrounding little boys, unless you have super socially aware parents that are into restorative justice or something. Girls are robbed of something by the age they hit puberty. It’s an intensely subtle attack, so subtle for most that we are often told it doesn’t exist at all. The perfect plot for a psychological thriller if I’ve ever heard one. “Girls just mature faster,” parents say, “cover your shoulders so you don’t distract the boys,” teachers say, “can you touch your elbows together?” the boys in the back of the classroom say. The way people look at you changes. The way people talk about you changes. You become aware of yourself in a way you never have before, in a way only a girl can know. I will always wonder when I first down looked at the dimples on my thighs and scowled. What I’m trying to say here is, at the end of the day, Kayla from Eighth Grade gets pressured into oral sex by the older kid in the back of his car, and Squints from The Sandlot gets to sexually assault kiss the lifeguard.
To examine a more recent example, in Stranger Things (mild spoilers incoming), the audience experiences the raw, unadulterated childhood friendship of four middle school boys. I re-watched the first episode of the series after finishing the latest season, and watching the foursome (trio, mostly) interact made me so incredibly happy. It filled my heart with joy. I thought back to my own childhood, when I would get together with my friends and sit around discussing board games and… oh wait, that’s not how my childhood went. I was probably laying in my bed with my eyes open trying to decipher whether the comment a boy made about me at school that day was suggestive or not. Do you think he like likes me? Probably not. Here comes the dread again! In Stranger Things, the boys’ relationship deeply contrasts that of the two female protagonists of the later seasons. Eleven and Max’s relationship is christened by their simultaneous “boy problems,” because, you know, boys is like the only thing girls that age can think to talk about with each other, even if one of them is an escaped government experiment with superhuman abilities. Oh, and shopping, don’t forget shopping. I couldn’t help but sigh when, in season 4, when recounting their memories together, Eleven can only view clips from their singular “there’s more to life than stupid boys” mall montage. I could be forgetting a scene, but I’m almost positive we never get a meaningful heart to heart conversation between the two that could pass the Bechtel test.
Now what on Earth does all of this have to do with The Godfather!? you may be asking. Well, this feeling does not go away when I watch the companionship of grown men on screen either. The difference is that the longing and sadness I feel for the coming of age story is replaced by anger and fear of the crime film, the action film, the western, the detective story, any film where the assumed protagonist, the default protagonist, must be a man. Why so? Well, it’s simply not realistic to have a woman be a mafia boss, a genius chemist turned drug dealer, a psychopathic grandparent who accompanies their grandchild in inter-dimensional travel (wink, wink, hint, hint). Okay, fair enough, so there weren’t any “Donnas” running the New York mafia scene in the 1940s. But why, oh why, does the “realistic” portrayal of women in The Godfather have to surround sex and abuse? Is that all we can be granted? I couldn’t tell you who Vito Corleone’s wife is. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see a scene of the Mafia Don and his wife? To see the complex dynamic of their relationship? Why does Connie have to be the battered, pregnant wife of a cheating husband? Why does Apollina have to show her boobs have to be sexualized when she was undoubtedly the most virtuous character in the film? Why does Kate take Michael back? Because… because… it’s realistic? Men were allowed to be incredibly shitty back then and women were expected to, required to, put up with it, no matter what. Right?
I tried to hold back. I tried to stop thinking critically about the women in the movie. I tried to just enjoy the movie for what it was: a film about guys being dudestm. I really, really did. But each scene with a woman just took me right out. Why couldn’t they just be normal, uninteresting characters the way most male-centered films do it? Of course, this isn’t a Godfather issue, but for some reason it got to me more than other films of the same nature usually do. I got about halfway through the film (about the time when Michael goes to Italy) before I suddenly regained consciousness about who I am and what I stand for and started twitching in my seat. They almost made me forget I’m a girl.
A reason I can enjoy a film like Reservoir Dogs for what it was is because there were next to no women in the movie, so I could enter the little fantasyland of the film where I am one of the characters, I am gangster criminal, I am a man. With The Godfather, I was reminded that I will never be a man. This story is not about me. It can never and will never be about me. I get represented by the silent background characters (who conveniently are around to have sex with the leading men), the battered wife who will defend her abusive husband until the end, or the childlike hypersexualized virgin. And until the day I either
a) get a lobotomy
b) get reincarnated as a little boy from the suburbs
c) die
I don’t think I can ever just sit back, shut up, and thoroughly enjoy a film like The Godfather without feeling sad or angry for the women (or lack of women) on screen. And I envy the people of the world who can watch such films and focus on the cinematography and the score before they think about how sex and gender is subversively portrayed in the film.
Anyway, it’s the fucking Godfather, so, good movie. 4.5/5 (points off for the aforementioned reasons)
*This is, in fact, untrue. I don’t know who “Creep” is from the perspective of. Probably an incel or something.