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Monday, June 20, 2005
Goodfellas and them screw-up Catholic boys.
Comics are all fine and good but I sometimes I like to write about movies, too. I've been on something of a Scorsese kick lately and was compelled to write this essay after purcahsing the two-disc edition of Goodfellas. I hope you dig it, maybe I should exapnd this site into all types of cultures and not just comics.
Consider Martin Scorsese for a second. This man is arguably the greatest living film director. So much so that while there are many great directors whose best films is relatively easy to determine (if any one doesn’t think Howard Hawks should have quit while he was ahead with I Was a Male War Bride they’re crazy!), looking over Scorsese’s oeuvre it’s hard to determine what his crown jewel is. Is it Taxi Driver, Scorsese and Paul Schrader on urban white boy angst pushed too far? Is it Raging Bull, where we see a man society views as an animal shoved into what should be normal domestic life? Is it King of Comedy, a sort of sequel to Taxi Driver where fame and show business replace a twisted idea of justice as the engine fuel for a madman’s mania?
Goodfellas may not be my favorite Scorsese film (that honor belong to King) but it is perhaps the greatest culmination of two subjects the director has found good use for in telling stories: organized crime and the Catholic experience. Looking at the plot of Goodfellas, it doesn’t seem to be much more than your usual “rise and fall of the gangster” or any other person making fortunes through crime. By 1990, the year of the film’s release, audiences had already seen it in countless movies, such as Scarface, but this film held something different. Usually it’s the rise that is the most striking; hedonism abounding in a way that only cinema can make look beautiful. Scorsese makes the audience remember the decline of small time mob soldier Henry Hill when the movie is over. That’s because, as Roger Ebert put it, “GoodFellas is about guilt more than anything else.” Hill’s whole desire to be a gangster was to get away from the dreariness of what the normal life of a lower-class, Irish-Italian man would have given him. Catholicism is never an explicit theme of the movie but of course that is the religion that Hill and the rest of his community was born into and raised around. His desire to fly away from the rest of “those goody-good people who worked shitty jobs for bum paychecks and took the subway to work every day” is as much a desire to get away from the dogma of the Catholic Church. Many have before him (including your humble author here) and as always there are the pangs of guilt whenever one is indulging in more than what is just plenary.
According to the audio commentary both Hill and former FBI agent Edward McDonald do for the Goodfellas DVD, Hill was trying to get out of the secular lifestyle of the mob even before things got bad. The film skips over Hill’s stint as a paratrooper but it does give us his conversion to Judaism upon marrying his wife Karen (not exactly a guilt-free religion). Still, the lifestyle afforded him a lot of nice things, the main one being comfort. The movie doesn’t have any scenes of Hill getting into threesomes with prostitutes or living in a mansion, all the good things these guys get, such as the nice tables at the club, are still strictly middle-class. The real hope for Hill is that he and his family will live with some real peace of mind and safety. That is too much to ask for with this lifestyle, as the “do you think I’m funny” scene makes clear, everything could fall apart at anytime.
The film hits on the idea of paying for your sins in its masterful last hour. We learn about Jimmy Conway and the boys pulling off the Lufthansa heist with Hill screaming happily in the shower. Yet there is only one time that any reward for this scheme is seen. Jimmy tells an underling not to be stupid for buying a nice car for him and his wife, even if it is in his mother-in-law’s name. From that point on the movie is just about whacking man after man solely for their participation in the crime. All they have to show for their indulgence is a severe version of trying to clean your hands because that dirt won’t come off.
The greatest sequence in the film is what the filmmakers referred to as “Last Day as a Wiseguy.” The title cards keep track of the minutes that roll past in Hill’s day as he has many errands to run, from getting Conway silencers to making sure the spaghetti sauce is just right, all the while he has paranoid thought of helicopters following him. Scorsese notes on the “making of” documentary on the DVD that Hill’s stress comes from everything, from helicopters to the sauce, being held with the utmost priority. This is scarily similar to the feeling of having the beliefs of Catholicism drilled into your head. George Meyer is responsible for a lot of the humor and popularity of The Simpsons and explained in a New Yorker article on him what growing up Catholic was like for him:
I did feel that I was made to shoulder a lot of burdens that shouldn't have been mine -- such as the frustrations of older women wearing nun costumes. People talk about how horrible it is to be brought up Catholic, and it's all true. The main thing was that there was no sense of proportion. I would chew a piece of gum at school, and the nun would say, 'Jesus is very angry with you about that,' and on the wall behind her would be a dying, bleeding guy on a cross. That's a horrifying image to throw at a little kid. You really could almost think that your talking in line, say, was on a par with killing Jesus. You just weren't sure, and there was never a moderating voice.
The scene ends with a lawman pointing a gun to Hill’s head and telling him not to move else he blows his brains out. The emotion in Hill’s eyes, more than anything, is relief. Hill tells you that if this was a Wiseguy you wouldn’t hear anybody talking, you would have just been killed. The law and the offer of the Witness Protection Program is a chance to enter back into God’s good graces. It’s restricting, no fun at all. But that’s the price for un-Godly indulgence.
The previous is just one interpretation of an excellent film. It’s certainly not a message the filmmakers seem to feel is the point of the film. Someone with no experience with the Mother Church would have no trouble absorbing so much from this movie. Still, the constant feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop is that of the Lapse Catholic’s, much in the same way that death hovers over every mob soldiers’ head. Scorsese, the former seminary student, depicts the Catholic experience better than any other filmmakers alive and Goodfellas is second only to The Last Temptation of Christ in that canon.
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