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

 

Lévi-Strauss Joins Don Corleone

If Claude Lévi-Strauss, the famous anthropologist, met Don Corleone, the Godfather, what do you think they would talk about?

For starters, they would agree that writing has been intimately connected to power. Lévi-Strauss might recall the time he met an illiterate Amazonian chief who, rather than answer questions verbally, asked for a writing pad, drew wavy lines on it, and insisted that Lévi-Strauss pretend to understand the meaning of his scrawled "answers." This illiterate chief immediately grasped that writing can be used to enforce power. Lévi-Strauss concluded, "Writing...seems to have favoured the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment."

That's quite a condemnation of writing, yet Don Corleone shared the same view. Don Corleone got his godson Johnny out of a bandleader's legal contract by making him "an offer he couldn't refuse." Eschewing the whole legalistic, government system symbolized by written contracts, Don Corleone based his power on personal relationships and the exchange of food and drink ("you look terrible, I want you to eat more"). When Don Corleone says he refused to be "a fool, dancing on a string held by all those big shots," he's rejecting what Lévi-Strauss called writing's "exploitation of human beings." So Lévi-Strauss and Don Corleone could agree on the power of writing.

And they'd probably bond by drinking wine together. Lévi-Strauss appreciated the "science of the concrete," and he wrote at one point about the poignant custom in certain French restaurants of pouring the table wine for the person next to you, even if he or she is a stranger. 

Don Corleone also had a taste for wine. Toward the end of The Godfather, he told his son Michael, “I like to drink wine more than I used to." But this isn't table wine; it's wine that invokes a Last Confession.  Notice how Michael faces away from his father while he reviews his life—like a penitent and a priest in a confession booth. 

And of course Don Corleone's wine resonates with the wine so central to the Catholic mass. On the other hand, Don Corleone isn't necessarily being absolved of his sins. When he says he's drinking more wine than he used to, Michael says,  “It’s good for you, Pop.” And though Don Corleone hints at having regrets, he quickly adds, "I don't apologize—that's my life." So this is a confession...but not really.

Either way, this sacrament prepares Don Corleone for what most people would call "a good death." Shortly after drinking that last glass of wine, Don Corleone died while playing with his grandson in the tomato garden, with a sun sheet flying overhead as if it were the canopy on a bed ready to float gently to the heavens. 

Lévi-Strauss also died a “good death,” even though the empire he'd built, like Don Corleone's, was on the wane. He died on October 30, 2009 at exactly 100 years of age, still admired by the French public, dignitaries, and intellectuals around the world. Sure, many people thought that, like Don Corleone, he had committed sins, and they wanted to push him out of the game. But Lévi-Strauss didn't have to apologize to anyone—that was his life.

I hope Lévi-Strauss and Don Corleone are together now, sipping wine and reflecting on their lives.