Interpreting Broderick's Poem in "The Freshman"

I can't resist analyzing the poem that Matthew Broderick recites to Marlon Brando in The Freshman.

Since The Freshman is about an elaborate con-game that plays off The Godfather, Broderick's poem is heavily symbolic and layered—a dream within a dream within a dream. So I have to ask: What does this poem mean?

In the scene in question, Don Sabatini (Brando) is visiting Clark Kellogg (Broderick) in his dorm room at NYU. After Clark tells him that his father was a poet and died when Clark was young, Sabatini asks Clark to recite one of his father's poems. This is the poem that Clark recites from memory:

A Doorway on Boylston Street

There's a certain doorway on Boylston Street
that I passed by on foot, suited and shod,
one of many each Tuesday,
toward lunch with a certain woman,
regarded each Tuesday by the perfect turning gaze of a white Persian,
regarding me, love-bound and sped by desire,
and returning to the certainty of his fur.

Sabatini not only guesses correctly that the poem was about "a cat in the doorway," but he repeats and savors the last line about "the certainty of his fur," and he admires Clark for remembering his father's poetry. It's one of the most touching father-son scenes ever filmed.

Here's my specific question: What does the cat in this poem stand for? I see at least a couple possible interpretations.

The Cat = Brando
The cat in the poem is regal, self-assured, and a careful observer of human social interactions—just like Don Sabatini in The Freshman and Don Corleone in The Godfather. In fact, when Clark gets to the part in the poem about being "regarded" by the cat's "turning gaze," the camera zooms in on Don Sabatini and shows his eyes focusing intensely on Clark and his head titling to the side, mirroring the cat in the poem.

Given that both Clark and his father took this poem about a cat into their hearts, and given that the cat stands symbolically for Sabatini, the poem creates a major turning point in the film: it gives Clark permission to accept Sabatini as a second father, a choice that even his own father would have approved of. The final obstacle to the father-son union of Sabatini and Clark has been removed, clinching the core emotional dimension of the con game. Sabatini pulls Clark even closer to him just when he was about to leave Sabatini, his family, and his business.

But there is at least one other way to interpret the cat.

The Cat = the Cat in The Godfather, as well as Clark and the Komodo Dragon.
It's hard to think of Brando without thinking of the iconic image of him holding a cat in the first scene of The Godfather:

This image of Don Corleone and the cat appears on posters and movie boxes of The Godfather.

Even while he's besieged with requests on his daughter's wedding day, Don Corleone is so masterful and nurturing that he keeps this cat purring, like his clients. It's fair to assume that the cat in Clark's father's poem plays off this famous image, but the difference is that the Don's regal, masterful nature is symbolized in The Godfather by the way he toyed with a cat, not by his identification with the cat itself.

But maybe that difference doesn't matter, and not just because distinctions between subject and object often blur in poetry. The cat in the father's poem, the cat in The Godfather, and the komodo dragon at the center of The Freshman have something in common: they're all animals manipulated by the Don.  The komodo dragon is what first lures Clark into Sabatini's orbit, but the cat in the poem closes the deal, as I said earlier.

Clark, too, like the komodo dragon and the cat in The Godfather, is being played with by the Don in the course of a pursuit that mixes love, family, and profit. Completing the father-son union, the cat could be both Broderick and Brando at the same time, in which case my two interpretations wouldn't be at odds.

These twin interpretations seem to work, but whenever I get this involved in analyzing a Hollywood film, I check myself by asking whether I'm turning into Professor Fleeber, the over-the-top Film Studies Professor in The Freshman who went so far as to compare Karl Marx's Das Kapital, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and the Lake Tahoe scene from The Godfather, II. I take Professor Fleeber as a funny cautionary tale, a reminder not to get too carried away with my interpretations, which is a danger in this business.

Professor Fleeber, unable to resist mouthing the dialogue to himself while his students watch The Godfather, II.

Unlike Fleeber but like most of the professors I know, I try not to be mean to my students, and rather than regurgitation, I always insist that my students develop original interpretations in their papers. But if somebody wants to see some of my film interpretations (including this one) as over-the-top in a Fleeberian way, that's fine. At least Fleeber understands that film analysis can be social and emotional at the same time. And if Fleeber goes a bit too far with some of his interpretations, he's erring on the right side. As I've said before, I'd rather risk over-stating the case than stating the obvious. If I'm going to live in a dream within a dream within a dream, I'm glad it's this one.

Further Reading:
My post about two songs ("I Wanna Be Around" and "Mona Lisa") in The Freshman

All my posts about The Godfather

Certainly Andrew Bergman, the screenwriter who created The Freshman and Professor Fleeber, understood the value of socially-informed film criticism. Bergman wrote a PhD dissertation in American history about how Hollywood films reflected social tensions during the Depression, later published as We're in the Money: Depression America and Its Films (1992). Bergman's book was well-received by scholars and published by NYU Press, Fleeber's old haunt.