I used to do this thing in class where I asked students, as a way of practicing both argumentation and public speaking, to recommend a piece of media that they enjoy and think others would as well. Inevitably for a period, someone would pop up to recommend The Wolf of Wall Street. Equally inevitably, I would recommend Goodfellas to the student in question, explaining that Wolf of Wall Street was essentially the same film from the same director, only Goodfellas was much better. It was rare for a student to take me up on that suggestion–Watch a film older than they were? As if!–and at least one came by to tell me I was wrong and Wolf of Wall Street was a much better film.
Yeah, I think I can safely say I have used that anecdote before, more extensively when I wrote up Taxi Driver for the Stacker Challenge. But it is somewhere I want to explore a bit this time around with Goodfellas.
When I last wrote up about Goodfellas, I focused a bit on how the film was something of a cultural phenomena in the 90s while also pointing out how violent the life of a gangster was. This time, I was wondering why this sort of life is so darn appealing. With my Taxi Driver Stacker article, I spoke about Film Bros who get into certain films without quite getting that these films aren’t endorsements for the lifestyle that these films portray. It’s easy to see why people might not get it. The life just looks so glamorous or exciting as long as you ignore the negative repercussions. What 18 or 19 year old heterosexual guy wouldn’t want a life with all the money, booze, drugs, and naked Margot Robbie that they would ever want as seen with Wolf of Wall Street? It’s easy money and then the orgies on planes, well, gee, why wouldn’t that look attractive?
But as I watched Goodfellas again, I asked myself why would anyone want in on this life. There’s the obvious: money and power. But then there’s the violence and the possibility of going to prison or getting killed. Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) looks directly into the camera at the end of the film to talk about what he’s lost, and there’s this sense that he believes we should feel bad for him, but there’s an undercurrent there that says the life that we in the audience live, the law-abiding, tax-paying lives we lead, well, those are for suckers. But at this point, I feel like this is Henry at his most loathsome. He was a criminal for so long, then he got into drugs, dragged the whole family down with him, and he even broke the one rule the mob had: don’t be a rat. But that isn’t what makes me find him loathsome. Instead, it’s just the fact that he expects the audience to pity him after everything he’s done.
But again, I wanted to see how this life might look attractive to people. I can get why teenage boys, like the Italian-descended guys I knew in high school who thought the mafia was awesome, would want to be a gangster. It’s a very, for lack of a better word, juvenile life as portrayed in films like Goodfellas. Skip school, break things, and get lots of money, women, and power. Henry Hill grew up, watching the mob guys across the street from his house, and he wanted to be one of them. He may not have had a mobster in the family, but he did grow up watching it, and having a Sicilian mother probably helped that desire along. But what about Karen?
Yes, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), Henry’s wife. She’s the only other narrator in the film, getting some voiceover when appropriate, and having read the book Wiseguy, the inspiration for this film, that is faithful to the book, but there are a handful of section to the book narrated by Henry’s mistress. She doesn’t get that in the film. Why would director Martin Scorsese keep Karen’s narration?
As I see it, Karen serves two purposes. First, she’s even more of an outsider than Henry. She comes from a more upper class existence (as opposed to Henry’s self-described working class), she’s Jewish, and she still finds Henry’s request that he hide a gun he just used to assault a neighbor who manhandled her a turn-on. She likes the tables set up in good locations at nightclubs, she likes the money, and by the end of the film, she’s doing coke alongside Henry. She’s been completely corrupted by the same lifestyle that corrupted Henry, only Henry had that corruption as a lifelong goal. Karen just sort of fell into it. Yes, she doesn’t like that her husband cheats on her, but she also seems a bit more understanding than her mother on the subject of why Henry stays out all night “with his friends”.
But Karen serves another purpose as well. She’s the one to basically point out that the life of a gangster isn’t as cool and awesome as it seems in more subtle ways. Sitting in with other wives, Karen basically points out her company is made up of gaudy women who don’t really know how to dress right, wear too much make-up, and seem to do nothing but complain about their husbands or talk about physically disciplining their no-good children. The subtext to me is this: these gangster and their wives are no where near as classy and cool as they think they are.
That is reinforced by the fact that the men, even Henry’s closest friends Jimmy (Robert De Niro) and Tommy (Joe Pesci), are little better than thugs. They have a code, but that doesn’t stop the hairtrigger Tommy from killing a guy for mouthing off to him. For all their high talk, these guys are a bunch of lowlifes who don’t even really trust each other that much given how many accomplices Jimmy has whacked after the Lufthansa heist. Like with Wolf of Wall Street, the film may make it look like it is saying how awesome the life of the protagonist is, but in the end, it really isn’t.
But that sort of thing isn’t obvious to far too many people, and if the lifestyle wasn’t tempting in the first place, well, we wouldn’t have a Henry Hill or Jordan Belfort to act as warnings, would we?
NEXT: As violent as something like Goodfellas can be, I think the next one, the halfway point in the countdown, might actually be the most violent film on the list based just on the famous opening scene. Be back soon for 1998’s Saving Private Ryan.
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