AFI Top 100: Goodfellas (#92 in 2007; #94 in 1998)

Goodfellas was a movie that I had seen long ago and rewatched. As I remembered, it's super good but it's really violent. This movie came out in 1990, four years before Pulp Fiction (and two years before Reservoir Dogs). It made me realize that it's difficult for me to imagine a cinematic world before Quentin Tarantino. Movies now are more violent (no more bright red

I actually read they cut out some of the bloody shots from one of the post-Lufthansa murders, which is hard to imagine when I watched the scene. It's hard to imagine more blood, and how much blood does one scene need anyway? And also, was that really a lot of blood? Who can even tell anymore? #thanksquentin


Roger Ebert pointed out in his original review of the film is that Goodfellas is largely about guilt. However, it is more complex than typical films about guilt "in which good is established and guilt is the appropriate reaction toward evil. No, the hero of this film feels guilty for not upholding the Mafia code - guilty of the sin of betrayal. And his punishment is banishment, into the witness protection program, where nobody has a name and the headwaiter certainly doesn't know it." In fact, "the real guilt, the guilt a Catholic like Scorsese understands intimately - is not that they did sinful things, but that they want to do them again" (source).

In a later review, Ebert explains the way that Scorsese uses the tools in his filmmaking tool chest to allow us to see from Henry Hill's perspective why the "Goodfella" life was so appealing and the break from it so difficult.

Three groundbreaking minutes of film.

In the most famous shot in the movie, [Henry] takes his future wife [Karen] to the Copacabana nightclub. There’s a line in front, but he escorts her across the street, down stairs and service corridors, through the kitchen area, and out into the showroom just as their table is being placed right in front of the stage. This unbroken shot, which lasts 184 seconds, is not simply a cameraman’s stunt, but an inspired way to show how the whole world seems to unfold effortlessly before young Henry Hill.

At first the mob seems like an opening-up of his life, but later, after he starts selling drugs, there is a claustrophobic closing-in. The camera style in the earlier scenes celebrates his power and influence with expansive ease. At the end, in a frantic sequence concentrated in a single day, the style becomes hurried and choppy as he races frantically around the neighborhood on family and criminal missions while a helicopter always seems to hover overhead.
...

A very different 3 minutes of film for a very different point in this goodfella's life.

It is an indictment of organized crime, but it doesn't stand outside in a superior moralistic position. It explains crime’s appeal for a hungry young man who has learned from childhood beatings not to hate power, but to envy it. When Henry Hill talks to us at the opening of the film, he sounds like a kid in love: “To me, it meant being somebody in a neighborhood that was full of nobodies. They weren't like anybody else. I mean, they did whatever they wanted. They double-parked in front of a hydrant and nobody ever gave them a ticket. In the summer when they played cards all night, nobody ever called the cops.”

The thing that concerns me about this and films like Pulp Fiction is the way they celebrate a zero-sum version of masculinity, and one that is relatively celebratory of violence.

Even when revealing the unfortunate brutality of the lifestyle, the violence is made to seem like, at best an unfortunate way to get what a man wants or is owed, and at worst a way to bond with fellow men and prove oneself worthy of respect.

Unfortunately I have to kill you because you owe me money.

See how it tears me up inside? 

See how we're bonding now that you picked a side and it was our side?
It alarms me that young men seem drawn to this version of masculinity, which is, ironically, a very weak and fragile masculinity, dependent as it is on the subjugation of others rather than the lifting up of oneself.

Nevertheless, this is part of the definition of masculinity inspiring and teaching our young men, and training and desensitising our young women.

Example one: GoodBros
The worst part is that apparently many of them won't grow out of it. What would our future look like with men like this in charge? Oh actually I know this one:

Example two: GoodPres