The Godfather III as a Study of Long-Arc Ethical Understanding

It was in what is known as the Big Typescript that Ludwig Wittgenstein made the point that of a given sentence, he may well understand it in terms of knowing all the words, being able to imagine contexts in which he would use it, and so forth. But he said that if he reads or hears the sentence at the end of a long story, a story in which that sentence emerges in its long-form narrative place and plays a role there, he will understand it differently. We can and do use brief sentences and words to describe ethical actions and circumstances (where we know all the words as used, e.g. no legal Latin phrases with which we are unfamiliar), but that level of description and understanding is like Wittgenstein’s first case of meaning-recognition, not like the second. In this chapter, Hagberg suggests that one of the central conceptual or philosophical achievements of the third Godfather film is to show in detail how such long-form understanding arises. When Francis Ford Coppola returned to his Godfather project to complete the trilogy years after the first and second installments, he developed the film in two parts, not as separated parts but rather as parts interspersed that cut back and forth between the present life of an older Michael Corleone and his early life, family background, cultural inheritance, and formative experience. This, as Coppola’s delayed third installment of this great trilogy shows, is how we come to understand a person—their deeds, their words, their self-concept, and more broadly what one might call their mode, their way, of being in the ethically interactive world. The long-arc narrative context of ethical understanding is not a luxury—it is a necessity.