It's hard to know how many times the movie line "I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse" has been referenced in the media. According to the Internet Move Database, the words, so quietly recited by Marlon Brando as Don Vito Corleone in the1972 crime film "The Godfather," have been intoned 150 times in a wide range of TV shows, both for kids and adults, like "Duck Tales" and "The West Wing," respectively.
But when it comes to life off-screen, Jim Carrey's iteration of that renounced quote in his new Trump-mocking cartoon (reprinted in Yahoo and Huffington Post, among others) is particularly apt for our time.
The deal-maker
Carrey's drawing describes a bloated, bleach-haired and blithesome Trump asking the clearly intimidated Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, for a "favor" in return for military aid. Carrey captioned his drawing, "I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse," and that piece of dialogue has never seemed more relevant. The actor/artist has been spoofing Trump since the 2016 election.
The New Yorker counted some 100 sendups that he has posted on his Twitter page. This latest cartoon hits home the hardest because just as Don Corleone headed a crime family, Trump, as the Impeachment inquiry reveals, also functions outside the law.
By the book
The movie line came straight out of Mario Puzo's crime novel and Puzo got it straight from the crime novel "Le Pere Goriot." by Honore de Balzac, who famously said, "Behind every great fortune there is a crime." Carrey's cartoon relates to the Puzo novel another way. The book's cover design shows a hand manipulating the strings of a puppet - a mighty signifier of Trump manipulation of Zelensky if there ever was one. The Ukraine president, then, is a latter-day Johnny Fontana, Corleone's godson, who sought a role in a movie that studio head Jack Woltz wouldn't give him.
That's when Corleone says, "This Hollywood big shot is going to give you the role you want. I'm going to make him an offer he can't reuse."
No defense
The "offer" from the Godfather was the severed head of Woltz's prized thoroughbred. And while there's no decapitation in the Trump offer, slaughter of a second kind is implied - the slaying of Ukrainians by the Russians if they don't get defense weapons from the U.S. It's a deal that neither Woltz nor Zelensky could pass up. The parallels eerily align: It's "do or die." Except instead of calling Trump the Godfather, Carry labels him the "Fraudfather."
What's the difference?
Carrey's cartoons don't get enough credit from the art community. The Guardian classed his art-making "proof that movie actors should stick to acting." But what's the difference between the often-touted caricature of French king Luis Philippe by the 18th-century artist Honore Daumier.
He portrayed the French royal as Gargantuan eating his people whole and Trump pigging out on the power of his office amounts to the same thing. Come to think of it, what's the difference between Francisco Goya's celebrated smack-downs of the Spanish royals in the 19th-century for what he called their "vulgar prejudice and frauds." Carrey's case against Trump is a distinction without a difference.