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ing man. Sonny actually does no work in his vest, but
anxieties about the presentation of his body as an object
of desire (for both male and female, gay and straight
audiences) are dealt with through the heterosexualising,
‘masculine’ violence of Sonny’s body.
Sonny is the wild card philanderer, always mouthing
off, complete with ‘Italian’ theatrical gestures. He
is placed in opposition to Michael’s/Pacino’s strong
silence. Sonny contains too much libido and ethnic
crudeness to take the Don’s place; Michael broods
smoulderingly, Sonny just explodes. However, whilst
Coppola appears to reject Sonny’s passionate Italian-
American machismo in narrative terms (he is killed
off in the most explosive manner), he actually fills the
screen with images of Sonny’s exuberance and impressive
physicality.
In fact, the eroticism involved in the film’s presentation
of Sonny is negotiated through his screen climax:
his death on the highway. Always the swaggering
sex object, Sonny’s bodily excesses are ultimately
displayed and punished by being blown to bits. This
way, Coppola can save the virile ethnic masculinity he
represents without actually endorsing it. Sonny is martyred
by this gruesome death on a lonely highway; his
masculinity has to be torn apart in order to be re-made
in our imaginations, so that we can mourn the Don’s/
Brando’s/our loss.
His violent death also saves Sonny-as-sex-object
from the too self-conscious passivity of another Italian
‘godson’ swaggerer of the film, Johnny Fontaine.
Like Sonny, Johnny is a ladies man, but his blatant
narcissism places him perilously close to a cliché of
queerness. Fontaine is an oily wop crooner, complete
with greased hair, white suit and frilled blouse; he is
a sop who has to be ordered by the Don to “act like
a man”. It is interesting that, by the time of Saturday
Night Fever, these opposed representations of Italian-
American masculinity can become enmeshed (and
can remain heroic) in the figure of Tony Manero/John
Travolta, who can wear a frilly blouse and still “act
like a man”.
And so the burden of The Godfather’s position falls
on Michael’s shoulders. Although Michael’s macho
Godfather act is revealed as a sham which eats away
his insides, this is less a matter of Coppola subverting
gender roles by illustrating that they are a matter
of social construction, than it is of him lamenting the
passing of a time when such macho masculinities really
existed. We may dislike Michael as Godfather because
he is not the benign and noble Brando, and because he
is not what the film shows he could have been in an
earlier time and place – in Sicilian ‘history’, within an
ethnic narrative. The Godfather locates its ideal masculinities
in Sicily, in a fantasy narrative of nostalgia for
the phallic wholeness of the homeland. Enter Pacino as
Sicilian shepherd, walking back to his father’s home/
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