Essay On Archetypes In Gangster Movies

605 Words2 Pages

Gangster archetypes: the gangster, the best friend, the canarian, the moll, the mother are some of the key factors that make a gangster movie. This is, according to Hughes, something that any gangster film has to have in order to be a gangster film (215). All these archetypes are carefully defined and are rarely significantly changed. But the archetype of a gangster did get changed through history, and most significantly with the introduction of The Godfather (1972), which alongside many other changes, moved the only dominant figure above the gangster, from the mother, to the father.
This changed the way the gangster looked towards the macho style of gangster, it gave him a definitive male gaze. But this is not the way it has always been. The importance of the mother archetype was always existant and sometimes immense in the era before The Godfather in movies …show more content…

This is also very present in Scorsese's films Mean Streets (1973) and Goodfellas (1990) where their influence over their sons can be seen very nicely. Then we have another archetype, the moll which is again, unchanged until The Godfather II (1974) where the main female character, Kay Adams, leaves Vito Corleone, which arguably changes her role from the typical „image of woman as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man“ (Mulvey, 1975) to a character which is no longer subordinate to the male protagonist. The other molls never escape their archetype and are a typical romanticaly depicted female character which are there in a role of the

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