Identifying Heroes: The Godfather and Pulp Fiction

Identifying Heroes: The Godfather and Pulp Fiction

The form of Classical Hollywood films is, first and foremost, invisible. In a Classical Hollywood film, the narrative is foremost, and style serves the narrative. Camera angles, lighting and editing patterns such as the shot/reverse-shot pattern aim to give us the best possible perspective on the unfolding events(1). These events are arranged in a strongly causality-oriented linear narrative, with one event causing the next. This narrative is arranged around a central, active protagonist, whose decisions and actions are the key to the pattern of cause and effect that drives the story(2). This pattern seems so logical, so natural, that the audience of the classical Hollywood film is supposed to feel that they are receiving the material without the mediating intervention of the filmmaker. The link between heroes and the spectator under this model is therefore one of relatively unproblematic identification. Even films that featured anti-social heroes, such as the thirties gangster genre, modified the pattern only through imposing the strongly moral, tragic sequence of rise and fall; the audience's identification remained firmly with the central protagonist(3). Such a situation, under these assumptions, puts the audience in an apparently perverse situation, and it is therefore hardly surprising that the infamous Hays code of the thirties moved to ensure that "the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin(4)."

The assumption of audience identity with the hero was never unproblematic, and of course the classical Hollywood model of filmmaking partially outlined above never existed entirely without challenge. Nevertheless, it is clear that up to the fifties the classical Hollywood model was relatively applicable and that challenges to it were largely ineffective. However, beyond the fifties, the model became increasingly irrelevant. The reasons for the downfall of the classical paradigm are complex, and related to economic changes within the industry (the forced dismantling of the vertically integrated studio system that placed production, distribution and exhibition roles under the one organisation) as well as wider cultural shifts that occurred during the sixties (the widespread social upheaval and increasing prominence of counter-cultural challenges ...

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...he coffee shop scene around the body of the film isolates one couple at the exact moment they make the wrong choice.

The cleverness of Tarantino's approach is in isolating the artificiality of his heroes' persona, and using that as an approach with which to undermine the audience's admiration of that hero. Just as Coppola's attempts to alienate the viewer from Michael Corleone were only partially successful, so Tarantino's approach is flawed: Tarantino was accused of glorifying his criminal heroes, and audiences do still see Vincent Vega as a modern day Fonze, the embodiment of coolness. A subtext is still, after all, a subtext, and not everybody can be in the ironic audience. Perhaps, though, the real reason that both Coppola and Tarantino still have problems in avoiding the audience identification with their heroes is the astonishing persuasiveness of classical Hollywood forms. The learned patterns of classical Hollywood narratives and the associated identification with a strong central protagonist are likely to take over if given even the slightest chance. This is the price Coppola and Tarantino must pay if they wish to harness this form of filmmaking for commercial advantage.