Interpreting Broderick's Poem in "The Freshman"

"A Doorway on Boylston Street" is a poem worth analyzing, a doorway worth entering. In particular, I'll focus on the cat symbolism in this poem in the movie The Freshman, as well as the komodo dragon and Curious George.

Brando visiting Broderick in his college dorm room

In a touching dorm-room scene in The Freshman, Clark Kellogg (Matthew Broderick) faithfully recites from memory the following lines after Don Sabatini (Marlon Brando) asks Clark to tell him one of his deceased father's poems:

"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.

Don Sabatini immediately understands that the "turning gaze of a white Persian" refers to a cat, but what is the symbolic meaning of this cat? 

The Cat as Don Sabatini
The cat in the poem is regal, self-assured, and a careful observer of human social interactions—just like Don Sabatini. In fact, exactly when Clark recites the line about the "perfect turning gaze of a white Persian," the camera zooms in on Don Sabatini, showing his eyes focusing intensely on Clark and his head turning to the side. We see that the cat and Don Sabatini are one and the same.

Given that the cat stands symbolically for Sabatini, the poem facilitates a major turning point in the film: it gives Clark permission to accept Don Sabatini as a new father figure, since it shows that Clark's biological father would have admired and approved of Sabatini, just as his father admired the cat in his poem. This tender scene lays bare the emotional core of The Freshman: the son's longing for more emotional connection with his father. 

As if that were not enough, there's even more cat symbolism at play here...


The Cat in The Godfather
It's hard to think of Brando without thinking of this famous 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 that he keeps this cat purring, like his clients. As many fans know, director Francis Ford Coppola found this stray cat wandering around the studio while shooting this scene and then put it in Marlon Brando's hands, knowing how much he loved both animals and theatrical improvising. This well-known fact— Brando delivered one of the greatest scenes in film history while effortlessly petting an untrained, stray cat—has only added to Don Corleone's luster and association with cats.

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, as opposed to Don Sabatini's identification with the cat himself in The Freshman. That's because the cat in The Freshman has more control and independence than the cat in The Godfather. The cat in the poem doesn't need these infatuated humans: he just returns to the "certainty of his fur." Similarly, Don Sabatini tells Clark in this scene that it's OK if wants to stop working for him. Sabatini doesn't need Clark: he can simply return to the metaphorical equivalent of his own fur, i.e., his usual business operations. In fact, the one line from the poem that Sabatini repeats and savors is "the certainty of his fur." So, unlike the cat in The Godfather, the cat in The Freshman emphasizes the Don's independence, yet in both cases cats are directly associated with power and the Don.

Curious George and the Man with the Yellow Hat: In this dorm scene, Sabatini also says his daughter Tina used to love hearing Curious George books at bedtime, and Clark says he thinks his father used to read him those stories, too.

Once again, there's deep animal symbolism at work here. With both the FBI and mafia out to get him, Clark has just spent the afternoon trying to secretly follow Sabatini through the streets of Little Italy. So Clark is like Curious George: a monkey who starts off innocently, but quickly gets in over his head, tangled up in messes that spin out of control. 

Broderick following Brando through Little Italy

And Sabatini is the Man with the Yellow Hat: a kindly, powerful surrogate father, always forgiving of the little monkey's transgressions. In the dorm room, Sabatini gets Clark to confess he followed him in the streets, but then let's it go when Clark starts to apologize ("No, you don't have to explain," Sabatini says, as he pulls a chair toward the bed), the same way that Curious George's messes always get discovered and then quickly forgiven. Like the Man with the Yellow Hat, Sabatini is even wearing a wide-brimmed hat when Clark follows him through Little Italy, and he's alternately wearing and holding that hat throughout the entire dorm scene (see first photo). 

Don Sabatini outlining the large Yellow Hat

Just as Clark recalls his "real father" reading him Curious George stories as a young kid, Don Sabatini now sits at the foot of his bed talking about Curious George. This poignant interchange clinches the father-son union that the film has been driving toward all along.

Clark as the Komodo Dragon

Of course there's another crucial animal in this film: the komodo dragon. Just as the Don plays with the cat in the opening scene of The Godfather, he manipulates the komodo dragon—and Clark—throughout The Freshman. Clark himself notes this correspondence. He says that Don Sabatini's risky escape plan "involved using me and the lizard as bait" at the Gourmet Club. Then, just before the lizard is supposed to be killed by chef Larry London, Clark adds, "The lizard looked even more nervous than I was. We were in the same boat." Like the komodo dragon here and the cat in The Godfather, Clark is played with by the Don in the course of a business that mixes love, family, profit, and deception.

The Fleeber Factor
All these interpretations make sense to me, but whenever I get this deeply immersed in analysis of a Hollywood movie, I have to ask myself whether I'm turning into Professor Fleeber, who is so enthralled with mafia movies that he goes so far as to ask his students 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 hilarious cautionary tale, a reminder not to get too carried away with my interpretations.

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

Nonetheless, if somebody wants to see my film interpretations as over-the-top in a Fleeberian way, that's fine. At least Fleeber tried to understand the social and emotional meaning of mafia movies without recycling cliches, and at least he actually loved the films he studied. So if anybody says that, like Fleeber, I'm losing myself within a mafia movie, I won't mind. I'm just glad that this one has Brando, Curious George, and a dragon in it.

Broderick and Brando walking the komodo dragon together, just before the final credits roll.

All posts about The Freshman and The Godfather

 

In Defense of Professor Fleeber

Fleeber, the college professor in the movie "The Freshman," is obviously narcissistic and insensitive, but, in a strange way, he also seems like a rather wise Shakespearean character. 

Fleeber reminds me of Polonius, the babbling father in “Hamlet.”  Both Fleeber and Polonius are self-absorbed, older male characters in father-son dramas—and both provide surprising insight.

Polonius (right), King and Queen (left), Flckr ThemeFund

Although Polonius was a windbag, he uttered some of Shakespeare’s wisest, most enduring phrases, including “Brevity is the soul of wit,” “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” and most famously, “To thine own self be true.” It’s not a coincidence that these pearls of wisdom came from Polonius, an apparent fool. When audiences get disarmed and distracted by comic antics, the fool can slip in some fine insights.

Likewise, after Professor Fleeber shows his class the "Godfather II" scene where Michael Corleone confronts his brother Fredo for betraying him, Fleeber astutely says: “A moment of epiphany. Michael Corleone kisses his brother full on the lips. An astonishing image, at once suggestive of love, inversion, power.” Professor Fleeber offers a great point here. That kiss is, as Fleeber intriguingly suggests, an "inversion," a strange paradox: an embrace that both repels and pulls inward at the same time, a mixture of sex and death, a certain sort of creative power based on the violation of taboo, like the transgressions of kings, twins, and other founding figures in creation myths around the world. I feel like Fleeber was really onto something here.

Fleeber (Paul Benedict) mimicking Michael Corleone on screen grabbing Fredo, saying, "You broke my heart."

My feeling partly comes from knowing that the screenwriter, Andrew Bergman, has excellent insights into film and society. Bergman wrote a PhD dissertation on 1930s American society and Hollywood films, which he later published as a book (We're in the Money: Depression America and Its Films) before going on to write Hollywood comedies like "The Freshman." I can't be sure what Bergman had in mind, but I also can't help wondering if he was allowing Fleeber to voice some of his own film insights.

 

... Uh, oh, I'm pulling a Fleeber again. I just realized that comparing "The Freshman" to “Hamlet” and PhD dissertations might be as outrageous as the Fleeber treatise, Guns and Provolone, in which Fleeber compares Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and the Lake Tahoe scene from "Godfather, II." The only justification for my outlandish, Fleeberesque comparison is that Shakespeare’s plays were the pop culture of his day, and "Hamlet" was his most popular play. The line between high and low culture—like the line between the fool and the wise one—is sometimes blurrier than we imagine.

Don't worry: I still think it's funny to compare Kant and the Lake Tahoe scene, and I still dislike Professor Fleeber’s autocratic manner. I’m just saying that if you appreciate Polonius, you should give it up for Fleeber, too.

Related Post:

Interpreting Broderick's Poem in The Freshman