Popular Culture in Counseling, Psychotherapy, and Play-Based ...

xxvi FOREWORD
the mob fi gures so powerfully delineated that real-world mobsters started
behaving like characters from the movies after having become mesmerized
and immersed in the fi rst two fi lms.
The fi lms’ Corleone family members and their relationships are written
and acted with such unerring skill that most people watching the
fi lms fi nd themselves identifying with one or the other of the Corleone
brothers, or with adopted brother Tom Hagen, or with sister Connie.
Everyone has, at some time, been the wild and crazy child, the angry,
resentful child, the good child with, we fear, the capacity for evil beneath
the socially acceptable façade.
Interestingly, the Godfather fi lms have become some of the most
powerful family dramas of our age, bringing the mob families’ drama
to the level of Shakespeare or opera (both of which, though considered
highbrow now, were, at the time of their original presentation, considered
TV-like popular culture). The Godfather movies take the extreme
highs and lows of family life and extend them to a worldview that, in the
case of even the “noble” Corleones, is essentially a justifi cation for cynical,
violent, criminal activity.
Still, a fi ctional world that is so well known and so moving to so
many must surely have a therapeutic use, even as a cautionary tale. Has
there ever been so moving a father-son scene as when Marlon Brando’s
Don Vito Corleone warns son Michael (Al Pacino) about who he can
and can’t trust in upcoming intermob negotiations? Vito expresses tearful
regret that his son has to engage in the ugly business of organized crime,
that Michael has inherited his mantle of leadership. “I never wanted
this for you, Michael. It should have been ‘Senator Corleone,’ ‘Governor
Corleone.’ There just wasn’t enough time.” And what does Michael
reply? Why, what every father would want his son to say after a confession
of failure: “We’ll get there, Pop.” And when Michael says, “We’ll get
there,” he doesn’t just mean the Corleone family, he means, by extension,
every immigrant group, and beyond that, every person who ever chased
a dream. “We’ll get there.” And, expressed beneath that is yet another
meaning, the idea that Michael’s children won’t have to be gangsters, that
they’ll “get there,” to a promised land where they can be just Americans,
just regular people, without the life-warping burden of the power and responsibility
of running a criminal empire. Perhaps “We’ll get there” can
even be taken to refer to arriving at a state of psychological health, where
one’s inner and outer life can fi nally be in some kind of balance.
Of course, without proper guidance—internal or external—the message
of The Godfather, like the message of Star Wars, could be interpreted
by a child or adolescent as: “Nobody messes with the toughest,
most ruthless kid on the block. So if you’re not going to be that kid,
you’re screwed.” These aren’t just issues for kids in therapy, but for our