Sorting the Corleone Family
(using the @sortinghatchats system.)
BADGER ~ Loyal to the group.
SNAKE ~ Loyal to yourself and your Important People.
LION ~ Subconscious Idealist. Ideals are linked to feelings and instincts.
BIRD ~ Conscious Idealist. Ideals are linked to built systems and external facts.
BADGER ~ Connect with the group. Make allies, work steadily and well. Be whatever the situation calls for. If you find a locked door, knock.
SNAKE ~ Connect with the environment. Notice things. Tell people what they want to hear. If you find a locked door, get in through the window.
BIRD ~ Collect skills, tools, knowledge, personas, useful friends. If you find a locked door, track down the key or learn to pick the lock.
LION ~ Be honest, be direct, speak your truth. Either the obstacle is going down or you are. If you find a locked door, kick it in.
So the Godfather films take place in an insanely Loyalist universe. I want to say Snake more than Badger, because *community* isn’t everything. Family is. Family, children, children’s toys and children’s drawings, it's a pretty damn near constant visual motif through Godfather 1 & 2. It is THE POINT. (I’m not doing Godfather 3 - sorry any Godfather 3 fans out there. Also, spoilers.)
VITO CORLEONE makes this very literal text: “A man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.” He sets the tone for the universe that he presides over, and it is very very clear that family is literally everything to him… and he has a broad definition of family. He’s a Snake with a lot of people, and he got into the game to protect them.
Going from the first movie alone, you could maybe make the case that he’s a Badger, but then the sequel throws in a revenge narrative (very Snake) and starts off his crime career with stealing a rug for his wife (even more Snake honestly.) He comes down really hard on Sonny for not presenting a united front “never tell anyone outside the family what you’re thinking again.”
He’s also the loudest Badger secondary ever, a power fantasy Badger secondary. He is at the center of a gigantic community that respects him, adores him, and which he can call on for power. He also very explicitly requires friendship from the people who ask favors from him, and that makes sense too. He is not building a list of useful assets, he’s building a community. He makes the decision not to get involved in heroin, because he is afraid that it will mess with the community that is the source of his power. In the sequel when he tells the landlord he's shaking down to “Ask your friends in the neighborhood about me. They'll tell you I know how to return a favor”... and then this guy comes back the next scene, his mind completely changed? That's Badger superpower.
MICHAEL CORLEONE is completely different. For one thing, he’s an Idealist in a sea of Loyalists, but I want to come back to that. Let’s get the easiest thing out of the way first. Michael loves an elaborate plan, way more than his father did. So there’s definitely a Bird secondary model there. But, I do think that underneath that Michael is a Snake secondary. Like, it’s subtle but he’s absolutely a charmer. He charms Kay, he charms Sonny and then Connie, and he does it by either outright lying, or just giving them an edited version of the truth. The most desperate we ever see him is the moment when he arrives at the empty hospital, and has to find a way to protect his vulnerable bedridden father. We see him use his environment, the two people he’s got access to, the wheels turn as he thinks on the fly, and deliberately creates a threatening tableau (when he is 100% bluffing.) Deliberately seeming meek and mild to assassinate the police chief, and then spinning it into a story about a corrupt police chief… very snake secondary moves.
Now, we’re not in Michael‘s head for a lot of the runtime, so we have to infer why he does certain things. I have two possible reads on his secondary. One is that he is trying to model his father's very direct, very earnest, no-nonsense secondary, and it’s... not really working for him. Michael seems to have misinterpreted Vito as more of a Lion secondary, probably because Vito is more of a Bookkeeper Badger than a Courtier Badger, diligently building his community and doing his job extremely thoroughly. (Although he absolutely *can* do the courtier thing. Vito calling a meeting of the heads of the Five Families is in *total* Courtier Badger mode.) So Michael gets really direct and Lion-y, to the point of being brusque and unpleasant.
The SECOND way you could read him, is that rather than trying too hard to be his father, he’s kind of given up. This is probably the more sympathetic Michael, the one who (instead of transforming into a bloodthirsty ruthless mafia don) only became one because he had no choice, and is… kind of dead inside. If Michael Corleone is just letting his Snake secondary remain in neutral, not really bothering to act anymore, and using his Bird secondary model exclusively… that’s a Michael who is going through the motions, but has stopped caring.
And in terms of primary, he’s definitely an Idealist. The final scene of the movie has him going to war instead of staying with his family, and when Sonny says “your country’s not your blood,” Michael replies “I don’t see it that way.” Hard to get more directly Idealist than that. Michael is the only character not constantly surrounded by and defined by kids. His loyalty is not to his *family* - although there are weird little bursts. He seems to be motivated by his father, and his first wife (but not his second.) He sometimes seems to be motivated by his kids (sort of. Or at least he thinks he ought to be motivated by his kids.)
I think he does want to make the family legitimate. (And that’s why he married Kay.) There is a disconnect between the morals which we know he does have “that’s my family Kay, it’s not me,” and the rather horrible things he does as Don Corleone. I think if you take just the first film I’d lean towards Bird: his priority shifts are very quiet and very mellow, and he doesn’t make snap decisions. However, once we hit movie two, and we meet a Michael doesn’t listen to anyone, doesn’t even have a consigliere, who is paranoid and sees threats in the shadows, and feels betrayed whenever anyone doesn’t follow his rather draconian rules… I think we have an Exploded Lion on our hands. And depending how you read the final shot of the second film, he’s just starting to realize that.
SONNY CORLEONE is obviously a Lion secondary. His planning is that he doesn’t plan, and he gets annoyed at Tom Hagen for making him plan. He’s also a Loyalist (this is so well known that it’s actively used against him, to facilitate his assassination.) I want to say he is a Badger rather than a Snake, and that’s where he runs into difficulty with his father. His father has a list of people he wants to protect, Sonny is more expansive and more community minded. We always see him in groups: he’s with his family, he’s with his soldiers, he’s with his kids.
TOM HAGEN is mysterious. I *thought* he was Badger secondary, which was why he had such an easy working relationship with Vito. He’s deliberate, he’s pleasant, he knows exactly what his job is and he does it very well. But now I think he’s an Actor Bird. He plays things very, very close to the chest, and when you talk to him you get the impression that this is a perfect, professional mask - not the real man. He doesn’t feel like he’s really able to relax around the rest of the Corleones and that's because he's a Badger primary. The closest we get to him taking about his motivation is “I always wanted to thought of as a brother by you, Mikey -- a real brother.” Since he’s not ethnically Italian, he’s always a little bit in the outgroup, and this bothers him.
CONNIE CORLEONE … I’m not sure about, we never really see baseline Connie, only different types of trauma!Connie. My instinct tells me she’s probably a Snake who makes unhealthy attachments (including, at the end, to Michael.) And possibly a Badger secondary? She seems to function as the family go-between, and is the one who actually ends up caretaking Michael’s kids in the end. She definitely grew up kind of being Daddy’s Little Princess, and if she house-matched Vito, I could see him kind of spoiling her.
KAY CORLEONE neé ADAMS is a Snake, who was once loyal to Michael and then falls out of love with him, switching her loyalty completely to her kids. She’s another one who’s secondary is kind of hidden under trauma. She is literally not permitted to do that much, even being effectively under house arrest for most of the second film. But she might be a Lion secondary, she desperately wants Michael to be truthful to her, to see her, and to listen to her.
FREDO CORLEONE is a very loud Badger primary, always falling into new groups, and always adapting to the new group a little bit too much, in a way that effectively splits his loyalty (at least in the eyes of Michael.) Drop Fredo in any environment, and that’s who he’s going to become. He loves being part of the group and it kills him when Michael officially un-brothers him. He’s also probably a Badger secondary. He’s always trying to caretake people, he takes his position as older brother very seriously, but tragically... is really bad at reading a room.
Vito Corleone - Snake primary / Badger secondary
Michael Corelone - Lion primary that Explodes / Snake secondary (Bird Model)
Sonny Corleone - Badger primary / Lion secondary
Tom Hagen - Badger primary / Bird secondary
Connie Corleone - Snake primary / Badger secondary
Kay Corleone - Snake primary / Lion secondary
Fredo Corleone - Badger primary / Badger secondary
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