Author: Phoebe M. Yates

Kubrick once said that the inspiration for 2001: A Space Odyssey came from a RAND Corporation report that deemed the universe as “crawling with life.” And so life comes to its first crawl in the outset of the film, these missing-link early hominids (often mistaken, somewhat erroneously, as apes) crouching, scrabbling, and, yes, crawling, around each other. In a letter to the film’s future co-screenwriter Arthur C. Clarke about his desire to create 2001, Kubrick outlined the two key strains of his interest in the project:

1. The reasons for believing in the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life.
2. The impact (and perhaps even lack of impact in some quarters) such discovery would have on Earth in the near future.

If Malick’s film was an exercise in what life is not (Death? No life? After-life?), then perhaps Kubrick’s film is as well, though here it is unbound from the sort of “tree” imagery that tethered Malick’s film so closely to the terrestrial confines of this earth. For 2001 is about life beyond this planet, beyond even the globular space-structures the film has imagined for itself, space-structures cobbled together by the machines of men.

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Clarke wrote to Kubrick that the image of Bowman, ejected from the escape pod, was “crawling with Freudian symbols, as you are doubtless aware.” It is clear from this turn of phrase that the embryonic imagery suffused throughout 2001 was intentional on the parts of both screenwriters. Watch as Bowman is forcibly thrust from the escape pod, thrust through an open air lock, and expelled into the void — Kubrick’s version of the Tree of Life scene in which a young Jack swims through a wooden-frame door, penetrating the softly rippling surface that separates Being from non-Being.

What does it mean to emerge from a state of pure maternal incorporation, to lift the corner of the veil, to float, become oneself? Malick frames birth as the emergence from the ocean, a firmly terrestrial (if altogether murky) depth — we already know, from his letters to Clarke, that Kubrick favors instead the image of extra-terrestriality, of a distinctly “human” life expelled from the site of technological enunciation (the space station). Bowman, called back into the void, this unsurvivable nothing/everything that we have only ever thought to call “space,” a word that can only invoke for us the idea of total absence. What does it mean to abandon the sum total of what we have deemed, ontologically speaking, the comprehensive framework of human knowledge?

Both Tree of Life and 2001 seek to frame the micro within the macrocosm, every birth and death a humble book-end to the much larger sprawl of universal being. There was a time before time, a time before the universe, before we had equipped ourselves with a comprehensive organizational framework (in which we developed the precise levels of hubristic — or possibly Kubristic — ambition, the technology to make a film in which we simply imagine what the advent of this universe might have looked like), and there will be a time after time, a time after the universe ceases to exist. Will that look like? Nothingness? Everythingness?

Perhaps it will look like a rectangular void that absences light, the monolithic conceit that so neatly bores a hole in the cinema screen.

The terror of death is existential, possibly blissful. Death is the “end.” But the end of what? The end of what we know? Of what we can imagine? Of what we can see? (That necessary sensation on which most all cinema is predicated) But then we have “been” through non-life before — before we were born, when we, like Jack in Malick’s Tree of Life, were swimming in the watery depths, bobbing ever closer to the surface.

So it stands that Kubrick, working in the paradigm of (what he would like to deem) “really good” science fiction, uses a piercing white light to paint the Star-Child, starlight being the provider of life in our universe, just as the projector-light is the life-blood of cinematic enunciation — and so this sublime (dare I say monolithic?) everything/nothingness must be represented as something beyond life itself — in fact, as something alien.

“The Tree of Life” sweeps and swoons like a mirror-laden funhouse, the memories of Sean Penn’s Jack warped across a sea of reflective surfaces. Through the eyes of Malick, no perspective is impartial, no scrap of dialogue objective truth. What does it mean to filter our understanding of the world through metaphor, for a “Tree” to represent “Life”? For everything is filtered in this film — behind every window, every mirror, is something “beyond.” Mrs. O’Brien often appears to us this way, saturated with sunlight, obscured by her own reflection, cloaked in the gauzy veil of memory. Everything is seen through aperture, everything through a frame.

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Deleuze wrote of time-images; “Tree of Life” trades in mirror-images, these (often quite literal) windows to what is unknowable, what is Beyond. For all that “Tree of Life” is heralded as a movie about “Life” (underscored by much of its imagery; the sweeping meditations on birth, on death), it is also a movie about Life’s opposite, its reflection. What is the opposite of Life, if not Death? We know life — we are living it — but by the same coin we cannot know what Life is not. What makes up the shadow? The reflection? What is shrouded by the veil?

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Which brings us to the image of Jessica Chastain — a Snow White of sorts, entombed in her glass coffin. The translucent panes, veined through with slivers of refracted light, are teasingly exhibitionist: like a museum display, or a small beetle trapped inside a jar. Malick has at times resisted the labeling of “Tree of Life” as purely autobiographical; but still there is a sense of preservation in the film. This is the exercise: can you embalm a memory? Filmmaking, at its core, is the capture of ephemera, of taking light — that tricky, tricky thing — and committing it to celluloid. Pinning the delicately fluttering moth to the cork-board. Memories, too, are gossamer threads, fraying and fading with each passing second — can they be woven together? Can they endure?

For that is all storytelling is, says the film. That is all religion is, all myth is, all architecture is. To net something fleeting, to set it in stone.

Much can be — and has been — written about “Taxi Driver,” a film not much interested in the particular ins and outs of taxi driving. No, for Scorsese, the checkered cab, when not idling on street corners spying very shamelessly on Cybil Shepherd-as-political-canvasser, is somewhat more akin to a mobile movie theater. The windshield a projector screen, flashing discordant street scenes set to the soundtrack of a singular, mewling saxophone. New York City, laid bare in all its foul glory, an “open sewer … full of filth and scum.“

Slouched in his seat, passive as they come, Travis Bickle says this of his cab: “Each night, when I return the cab to the garage, I have to clean the cum off the back seat. Some nights, I clean off the blood” — and it is as though the taxi is interchangeable with the theater, indistinguishable in their viscerality, in their voyeurism. Bickle goes to the theater and watches a porno just as just as he parks outside Palantine’s campaign headquarters and watches Cybil Shepherd’s Betsy just as he sits in the front of his cab and watches the silhouette of his passenger’s wife flit across an impossibly greenish window.

In an unblushing cameo, Scorsese apprises his star of the fact that in just a moment, he’s going to take a gun up there and kill his wife. “You should see what a 44 Magnum can do to a woman’s pussy,” he says, and then repeats it, a bit neurotically. He repeats it again: “you should see,” “you should see,” “you should see that.”

You should see, instructs the director of his star, and under his enunciative hand it follows that we, too, should see. We must bear witness as, following this scene, our protagonist appears to undergo some sort of transformation, purchasing several briefcases worth of weaponry and preparing his mind and body, in a somewhat farcical montage sequence, to kill — a transformation that will eventually culminate in Bickle’s rather ill-advised haircut, which itself calls to mind the film Scorsese will make nine years from now, “After Hours,” with the mohawk an emblem of a new subculture — punk — and so perhaps in this way Bickle’s cosmetic conversion signals a slippage of sorts, the 80’s subsuming the 70’s whole.

Bickle’s desire to kill, or at least to fire off one of his many guns-as-phalli, seems mimetic at best. The director, as Passenger Watching Silhouette, has outlined a clear shooting plan — both the film’s and his own. Bickle — in porno cinemas, on street corners — has spent so long watching, but now he has finally figured out how to become the watched — the one who is photographed, written about, clipped out of newspapers and taped up on walls.

We are back at war this week, this time with the Terrence Malick-helmed epic “The Thin Red Line.” The film, Malick’s first after a twenty-year hiatus and released in 1998, offers the director’s version of World War II’s Guadalcanal campaign. There is nothing current, nothing contemporary about this subject matter. It is not Coppola’s “rock ‘n’ roll war,” drenched in psychedelic phasmagoria, nor is it the drone-powered video-game violence of “The Hurt Locker.” But where other films of this ilk (“Saving Private Ryan,” released the same year, or maybe something more recently released, say, “Dunkirk”) might slather themselves in the patina of nostalgia, Malick’s film often seems estranged from the very idea of time itself.

Writes Bersani: “There are several battle scenes, but they don’t make much for a story.” This feels apt; though Malick had written a script (with, apparently, Adrien Brody’s character as the lead), this was only ever to satisfy the studio — he had always planned to ditch any carefully-laid plans in favor of whatever inspiration struck on location. With “The Thin Red Line,” Malick, like Bigelow, has opted to de-narrativize the course of conflict. By all narrative conventions, the film’s middle chunk, in which the a ragtag gang of soldiers volunteer to attempt to “take the hill” and advance on a Japanese encampment, should function as climax, should provide a (however carefully conceited) window into the psychological states of each character. But Malick had abandoned narrative convention long ago — the characters barely have names, and if they do, there is very little onus on the viewer to remember them. Untethered from any particular perspective, there is something entirely unorthodox about the film’s pivotal battle scenes — which Malick, disinterested in action sequences of any sort, reportedly did not want to film. Recalls actor Ben Chaplin: “He never expected it to be this big thing with loads of men and machines. He had written this film about people and nature, and he got here and there was this war going on.”

This war is going on! Each soldier collapses into one another, a million Adrian Brodies, these brown-haired, dust-caked young men crawling towards the Japanese encampment like a swarming colony of nameless, faceless, hopeless ants, our only sense of narrative propulsion a constant, wraithlike voiceover, dipping in and out of temporal logic until we feel less like we’ve just watched a major Hollywood production — and more like we’ve read a very long poem.

War — it isn’t like it used to be, huh? Such is the sentiment of Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker,” a thoroughly modern film about a thoroughly modern combat zone. Even in a canon no stranger to unconventional war films (say, “Apocalypse Now”), “The Hurt Locker,” with a chopped-up, faux-verité editing style that induces a panoramic litany of discontinuous perspectives, stands alone.

Very alone, because — like its main character, Will James — never before has a war film felt quite so divorced from heroism, purpose, even its fellow soldiers or the wife back home. At war in “Apocalypse Now,” Martin Sheen’s Willard might have been family-less and fantasy-less, but he was never purpose-less, his route upriver charted by one goal: to find and kill Kurtz. Of course, perhaps it is misleading to deny James a purpose, for it is true that he is the new team leader of an EOD unit. His job is deceptively simple: locate and defuse IEDs across Iraq. Like Willard, he is a pawn in a hazily-justified game of neocolonialist chess. But never mind all that — “The Hurt Locker” is not a film about Iraq. This much should be clear from mise-en-scene alone, Jordan standing in for the besieged nation. Iraqi characters (barring the character of Beckham, his name a jarring signifier of Western pop cultural spectacle; the very English David Beckham a faint reminder of the British colonialist ordeal that kicked off this whole mess in the first place) appear to the EOD team as faceless and interchangeable; James mistaking the desecrated corpse of an unknown Iraqi child for the one kid he bothered to learn the name of. But while Bigelow’s cinematic approach may communicate some core truth of the Iraq War — invasion is to alienation as technology is to paranoia — does the rendering of this specific story, with camo-clad renegade Will James at the Humvee wheel, as an IMAX-worthy spectacle, as something approaching “verité,” not underwrite the very exploitative practices it might otherwise critique?

This film is indubitably polysemic (just look at my reaction versus that of Jordan Claman!) “Hurt Locker,” however portrays an event that mass-media war coverage (still, at that time, relatively new) had a heavy hand in massaging. There were never any weapons of mass destruction, or even evidence thereof. Saddam Hussein was not a global puppet master of sleeper-cell terrorist networks — in short, this war had no narrative, beyond what could be trumpeted at White House press conferences, fabricated between the margins of a newspaper editorial, constituted within a camera frame. Bigelow’s film, in its total rejection of narrative arc as we traditionally understand it, begins to interrogate this fact. But, then, what to make of James?

If Bigelow’s film works to de-narrativize the invasion, the Hollywood publicity machine seems to have worked overtime to do the opposite. The poster, above, features each member of the three-person OED team, but it is only Jeremy Renner’s face we see uninhibited by helmet or goggles, rifle held aloft and brows knitted in a gritty, greenish caricature of masculine grotesquerie. This image could be entirely interchangeable with a first-person shooter video game of the same era. I’ve watched my two cousins sink hours of their lives into these kinds of games — in the past year, the younger of the two, a middle-schooler, has started to play them on his Oculus headset. In the contrived space of virtual reality, striking out at invisible enemies from the comfort of his living room, he can “be there.” Will James-styled characters serve as avatar for him to live out these pubescent fantasies, “toy soldiers” for the Oculus age. “I’m not here,” yells Chef, spooked by a tiger in “Apocalypse Now.” But what if “here” is the only place you want to be?

That is the dilemma for Will James, the explanation for his failed marriage, his lackluster parenting style, his errant spells of grocery store disassociation. He wants to “be here.” Not through a screen — in his very first IED-defusion mission, he very notably refuses to the assistance of the roving bomb-collecting robot we are introduced to at the film’s outset — but here. “Here,” for James, might be better summed up by an alternative poster for the film, as seen above. Alone, against powdery-gray nothingness and cocooned in his OED suit, James might as well be on the moon. Place is not important — only this tangle of thread-like red wiring, connecting James to seven IEDs like veins to an artery. Death in his hands, and with it … jouissance?

The pulsating whir of the chopper, descending from overhead, is that great signifier of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.” This is the image referenced time and time again as the measure of cinematic bluster, the kind of shot that takes (per Ethan Hawke, comparing Coppola’s grueling shoot to his experience shooting “The Northman”) “hubris,” “arrogance,” and — of course — “balls.” It follows that we are intimately familiar with Coppola’s famed helicopter shot, in which a quiet, cloistered jungle-scape is doused in flaxen smog. Consider, however, the film’s other helicopter shot: airlifting in, not napalm, but bunnies.

At the USO base, we are surely “in” the jungle, but still our surroundings seem mechanized, commercialized. Our crew’s first action is to purchase some fuel — our first sign that around here, it is capitalism as usual. Moments ago a tiger roamed free, now the only animal present (besides Lance’s puppy, a Golden Retrieving reminder of neatly mowed grass and picket fences far, far away) is the logoized Playboy Bunny, plastered brazenly across the prow of the descending aircraft. Referencing a kind of primordial sexuality (“fucking like bunnies”), the Playboy brand epitomizes the New Masculinity of the 1970’s. With the arrival of Women’s Lib, gender dynamics of yore were facing their greatest threat yet, and no one was better primed to shepherd the “New Man” through this imminent crisis of masculinity and towards a celebration of consummate bachelordom than one Hugh Hefner. The Playboy set opted to ditch the stodgy girlfriend, the nagging wife, and embrace the Bunny.

The Bunnies’ agent crows the arrival of the “centerfold,” and there she is, photographed against an inky-black background, a paper doll come to life. The Playmate of the Year, the pinup fantasy of a sweaty-handed boy playing at American adventurism, at “Cowboys and Indians.” And here, once again, the substance of Coppola’s film is bound up in its presentation: the “Cowgirl” playmate above, Cyndi Wood, was 1974’s real-life Playmate of the Year. Fact and fiction blurs: below Wood appears beside Coppola, a Playmate playing a Playmate. Coppola lounges in his director’s chair, clad in army fatigues and aviator frames, looking as much a G.I. as the throng of actors (extras, mainly gleaned from American military institutions in the Philippines) he has assembled before him.

“Apocalypse Now” seeks to lay our capacity for horror bare, on every level possible, but — as Coppola readily admits — it can never be an anti-war film. The helicopter motors in, the G.I.’s drop from the heavens, and Lt. Kilgore bares his muscular frame: spectacle abounds. So it is no coincidence that t he Bunnies drop in via aircraft, as tempting and incendiary as a crate of napalm. They are scraped off the page, lifted from the centerfold, and dropped (as Coppola will tell it, 40-some years later in an interview with the real-life Playboy Magazine) into the “ancient, primeval jungle,” the Phillipines “playing” Vietnam just as Cyndi Wood “plays” Cyndi Wood. A “unlikely show-business show” within an “unlikely show-business show,” deposited “right there in the midst of antiquity” — “right there in the midst of antiquity.”

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The needle drops of Jeymes Samuel’s “The Harder They Fall” come fast and hard, with relish and with redundancy. A band of riders kick up dust across sprawling plains, en route to hijack a stagecoach, while the undulant vocalizations of a Samuel-remixed reggae track signify the obvious: “Whoa / Here I come”). “The Harder They Fall,” buoyed by an undercurrent of its filmmaker’s own recordings, is, tonally speaking, a bit operatic. The soundtrack — the “sound” that “tracks” the image — is no longer in service to the picture but assumes a place alongside it. On two separate occasions (in Mary’s tavern, and then again in Trudy’s) the film abandons dialogue, and with it diegetic reality as we understand it, in favor of the musical interlude — and it is with this that “The Harder They Fall” threads a fascinating line between film and visual album. Stuart Hall, in his investigation of “The Spectacle of the ‘Other,'” is interested in the “struggle around the image” — but might the “struggle” be transcended by sound?

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With “The Birth of a Nation,” writes Hall, filmmaker D.W. Griffith single-handedly fashioned the kind of film grammar that has so ingratiated itself in modern cinema. But along with close-ups, cross-cuts, split-screen shots and rapid-fire editing, Griffith too had effectively introduced the nation to an deeply derogatory “racial ‘grammar of representation,'” charting five generalized categories of the Black image onscreen. Griffith’s film reel unwound in silence, and though screenings of “Birth of a Nation” would be accompanied by an orchestra (in fact, it was the first American film released to have a musical score specifically written for this purpose), still sound remained secondary to the image of Blackness rooting furtively the American consciousness, where it would remain, in various manifestations, for the following century.

Which brings us to “The Harder They Fall,” touted even in its promotional cycle as a “revisionist Western.” Why “revise” the Western? Perhaps because it typifies Film in all of its tropic excess, its genius, its pitfalls. As Tarantino understood, cross-pollinating the genre with the Samurai flick or the Kung Fu movie in each installment of “Kill Bill,” the Western, with its ourboric revenge plot, has seeped like thick sludge into the DNA of modern cinema: revising, rethinking, referencing itself. But as Hall condemns cinema as a tradition that has sought to alternatively exclude and exploit the Black image, “The Harder They Fall,” with its quilted musical sampling of reggae, reggaeton, hip-hop, and older spirituals, offers a vessel of hope for the future of the medium — the liberation of Black sound.

There is so much — too much! — to say here that can’t be squeezed into this post, but Samuel’s film (if considered, as I think it could be, as an extended visual album) seems to transcend the confines of a Griffith-derived film grammar, revising it, as it does the Western, into a novel syntactical structure that levels sound with image. As Afrofuturism offers speculative representations of the African diasporic experience, Samuel uses music to expand on a new kind of Afrochronology, where past, present and future might compress and expand against one another, delicately threaded by aural motif.

As The Bride wanders Hattori Hanzō’s hideout, she eyes his katana collection like a kid in a candy shop. Here, she reaches out, tantalized by the weapon before her — before, in one fell swoop, it is taken away (“These are not for sale”). Alike begged Laura to buy her a strap-on in Dee Rees’ “Pariah;” here The Bride has traveled halfway around the world in pursuit of her very own katana-as-phallus.

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The next time we will see our heroine, having left Hattori Hanzō’s chambers (a cocoon, of sorts, primed for a certain metamorphosis), is motoring through the streets of Tokyo. She remains The Bride only from a purely semantic standpoint — long gone are the white dress, lace veil, and strikingly swollen belly, replaced by a yellow jumpsuit lifted clean off the celluloid from 1978’s “Game of Death.” She appears, you could say, in immaculate Bruce Lee drag.

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“It’s not about being realistic, it’s about being  theatrical,  operatic.  I tried to deal with  that in the  prose  of the  script: that this is not real, it’s a set” (Olsen, 14).

This is not a world, says Tarantino, but a “set.” These are not clothes, but a costume. A very famous costume, too, as pop culture (and the film’s own promotional materials) would have it: though “Kill Bill” (title aside) conceivably stars a Bride, the film’s most basic icon is not the dress but the jumpsuit — a sort of gendered armor for the kind of masculinized violence she must wreak at the House of the Blue Leaves.

But the film’s costume design is not so binaric as to associate pants with manhood. Violence, too, can be wrought by the hands of the redundantly feminine. Here comes the California Mountain Snake (alias Elle Driver), slithering towards the viewer in the kind of candy striper getup that would be more at home in Party City (or, let’s face it, an adult superstore) than the hallways of a hospital.

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She pulls out her weapon — a syringe, plumbed to its depths with a dark, murky fluid — and the association is as trenchant as the sharp edge of one of Hanzō’s katanas: Elle wields her phallus, ready to penetrate… as long as Bill gives the go-ahead, that is.

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Therein lies the problematic of the “Kill Bill” feminine. Plunged midway through a nonsensical cycle of meditated revenge; female agency is a foregone conclusion, tangled up in an endless stream of sororal violence.

It is not easy to be a son (or so I’ve heard), and it is especially difficult to be the son of a father, especially when that father is the Godfather, the God-Father, or at least the Father figured as God. If “Part II” is an extension of “Part I,” the son is the extension of the father. Superimposition, employed as significantly below as in the first film, neatly illustrates this idea: Pacino dissolves to De Niro, the latter housed quite literally inside the former’s head.

Shot on film stock, this shot could be constituted as a “double exposure,” Michael being his father’s double, printed atop the memory-Vito in a reference to the son’s extension of the father’s bloodline, which in turn dialectically references the nature of sequeldom. Sonhood compresses chronology; so too does cinema. And no character is as sick of this son-cycle as Kay, declaring defiantly to Michael that the child she was carrying was lost, not to miscarriage, but to an abortion.

Kay’s choice of words are never more significant here — she “had it killed” like a mafioso “has men killed” — a charge she levied pointedly at his “non-legitimate” father in the first film, when Michael was proposing marriage. She cuts off the father-son tether, a sort of biologically impossible umbilical cord, with — by her own characterization — an act of necessary violence. When Kay was with child, the Corleone heir resided within her, rendering her double just as the superimposition effect above delineated Vito as the double within the head of his son. It appears that Kay’s efforts to cleave off her double are momentarily successful, if only because she is isolated in frame (it is not until we are taken to a wide that Michael can move in to strike her). It is only in abortion that Kay can claim individual existence, estranged from the enunciative power of the father.

An individualism not unlike that of young Vito, himself expatriated from Sicily, trading in his father’s name for that of his town. But still Vito constructs the “father,” if only within himself, for that is what a mythology is for. He becomes the “Godfather,” the Father that will always be a God. For God, as figured by Catholicism, does not himself have a father — only a son, content to martyr himself in the name of the Father.

And it is as Anthony Corleone takes communion, in that very same Catholic faith, that we see him doubled against the father of his father, quarantined on Ellis Island at (we presume) the very same age. In this New World, the young Vito will don a new name, one that, to his son and to his son’s son, will come to represent the trappings of an Old World. So it is via superimposition, once again, that chronology is compressed: Anthony is Michael is Vito, just as the 50’s are the 40’s are the 10’s.

Below Tom Hagen and Frank Pentangeli lose sense of temporality once again, but it makes sense: though it tests credibility that two sons of Mars might have actually founded the city of Roma, the twins Romulus and Remus (themselves doubles, borne of the Gods) loomed large over the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. So of course it does not matter that the name “Corleone” was fabricated by bureaucracy, by luck, or even by chance. The mythology maketh the man.

“The Godfather” is a film about many things: violence, Italian-American identity, the perpetual anxiety of Oedipal cyclicity — but dare I say it might also be a film about the controlled pleasure of culinary delights?

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Here comes Clemenza, fresh off an ordered hit, carrying a small white rectangle, neatly done up in twine. This is a visual gag, sure: the hulking mafioso and the twee box of powdered pastry. But it gets at something baser in “The Godfather’s” DNA: for a film about systemic, unrelenting murder, these men sure don’t have any blood on their hands. Here the framing is never more important: Blood trickles down his victim’s face, but the streams are thin, controlled, and moreover confined completely to the metal cage of the vehicle. Clemenza, set against the isolation of an open field, can literally compartmentalize the scene of the crime, controlling the violence he commits so meticulously that it cannot be connected to his own “impulse” at all. He displaces any potential desire to succumb to this “impulse” onto the pastry-as-fetish, enjoying (we assume) the gluttonous nature of the pastry as a socially-acceptable form of jouissance.

If the pastry shot exemplified compartmentalized enjoyment, the “Sicilian Message” is an uncouth intrusion in the civilized sanctum of the Don’s study. The fish is unwrapped, unprepared, uncooked — a flopping reminder of the real barbarism at play here. See Sonny’s face of disgust; he doesn’t want this blood on his hands, piscine or otherwise.

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The lighting underscores the incongruity between the “Sicilian Message” and its environment; the tenuous interplay of the natural and unnatural — the animal cannot live in this world of carefully-constrained darkness. We will not understand the extent of this tension until we ourselves have seen Sicily, accompanying Michael during his interlude of exile. It is in Italy that the light has become radiant, natural, and wholly unpredictable — so too, has Michael himself, struck dumb by the sight of Appollonia.

She carries a basket, brimming with vegetation of indeterminable origin, functioning semiotically as “gatherer” to Michael’s shotgun-strapped “hunter.” It is no coincidence that it is in the “Motherland” that Michael first experiences love (or shall we say lust?), that indescribable, primal, and — according to his bodyguard — “dangerous” sensation, and Appollonia is an ontological substitution for that homeland, pure maternal incorporation, always and already-lost. And of course the bodyguard is right: Michael’s primal “hunger” for Appollonia will quite literally blow up in his face, and, upon his return to the United States in the latter half of the film, he will pursue his more antiseptic desire for Kay, never better epitomized by this perfectly civilized (and perfectly claustrophobic) meal they shared earlier in the film.

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Coppola: I had the use of space in that scene, that they would be sitting in the middle of it. So there is plenty of space and it would be a well-lighted restaurant. Again, an old idea of taking the violence into the lights. The killings are always in the dark corner, and to take it into the middle of a well-lighted family restaurant, which they would have selected anyway, to get away from — it would be very well-lighted in a way.

In the excerpt above, Coppola lays out a pivotal scene, in which Michael is going to make his first kill, his first step towards subsuming the Don role and supplanting the father. The effectiveness of Willis and Coppola’s “well-lighted family restaurant” tableau cannot be understated, containing brutality to the confines of a well-trafficked urbane eatery.

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Here again the site of eating is associated with control. As Michael asks to use the bathroom (spectator fully complicit in what this will entail) the lighting is low-contrast, the shadows not overblown, all in the service of the measured contemplation of an irredeemable act. Sonny had worried about Michale’s potential performance (“Whaddya think, this is the army, where you shoot ’em half a mile away?”), but he had underestimated his brother, who learned the unflinching power of compartmentalized, industrialized violence from the best teacher around: the United States military.