Answered>Order 26134

Need an argumentative essay on Spirituality: How the belief in God or Gods plays a pivotal role in The Odyssey and The Godfather epics. Needs to be 8 pages. Please no plagiarism.

Download file to see previous pages…

In the film The Godfather (1972), the Corleone family becomes the embodiment of godlike powers, their spiritual life enhancing the nature of their own power through events of violence. The nature of myth and the way in which it defines powers within the supernatural experience can be seen in the nature of both epics, their respective contemporary cultures reflected through the defined powers that are beyond that of the human world. The Greek mythologies are designed with the expression of god embodying exaggerated human failures of character. The gods of the Greeks were petty, selfish, and full of hubris, even though they looked down on humans and punished them for the same kinds of characteristics. The stories of the gods created a framework in which the nature of mankind was discussed, the challenges that they presented part of the explanation that helped ancient man to understand his world. Both the internal world of men and the external world of nature, its power and imposing destruction, was explained through the mythologies. Myth was the way in which the unknown was approached, mankind needing answers to questions that were often beyond the scope of any technology that could be defined. The nature of The Godfather films is similar in that a larger, mysterious organization was given context and explanation through the vision and myths created by Mario Puzo, the writer of the novel. The novel was then translated into film by Francis Ford Coppola in which not only the myth of the Corleone family was brought into the public consciousness, but the film, itself, gained mythic status. According to Horrocks, The Godfather (1972) “peels away the veneer of civilization, revealing to us a culture steeped in blood and death” (79). The myth of the masculinity of the ‘male corporation’, also found extensively in Western genre films, becomes more organized and brought into the modern context through the ‘mafia’ films as “the shrinking from domesticity and the emphasis on violence and death” creates a resource in which power is shifted to something that is more mythic and grandiose (Horrocks 70). The nature of life is explained in a more visceral plane of existence in which power is placed into a larger than life figure who has the capacity to impose his will as he sees fit. According to Joseph Campbell “It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into the human cultural manifestation” (1). The nature of myth is that it approaches the issues of life through explanations that are defined by the human experience, then expanded to explain that which is beyond explanation into god-like power. The epic mythologies of The Godfather (1972) provides context for explaining the nature of organized crime, spirituality through the Catholic religion giving context to the nature of the violence as it is expressed within the film. The violence of life can seem a wave of climatic terror that creates dangers outside of the home, a world in which a gun or a physical threat lays lurking in the darkness, waiting to shatter the calm of the domestic sphere. In the same way that the Greeks explained tidal waves and storms through the powers of their gods, modern culture explains the terrors of criminality through organized crime with the power of the ’Don’, or the head of the organization seeming to take on godlike limitless control over the organization and those the organization touches.

 
"Not answered?"
Get the Answer