Some little boys want to be athletes, some want to fly to the moon, some want to study dinosaurs. If you asked Henry Hill what he wanted to be, he would tell you, “As far back as I could remember, I always wanted to be a gangster”. Well, at least he fulfilled his boyhood dream.
I’ve seen Goodfellas a couple of times by now—it’s a favorite of both my 41 year-old and 17 year-old brothers. Nothing brings the Jennings family together quite like a good gangster movie. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen it several times before that I initially had a hard time with the prompt. “What do you mean? Of course Henry’s white!” I thought. Then I had an epiphany while drying my hands in the Honors Hall bathroom earlier today. Yes, Henry’s clearly white, but his sense of displacement also makes him not white at the same time!
One of the most pivotal scenes of the movie is when Tommy thinks he’s going to get made. As Henry notes, he and Jimmy would never be able to get made because they were both half-Irish, half-Italian. When you see names like Henry Hill and Jimmy Conway, you would initially think that they’re nowhere near Italian, let alone two of the most famous and feared gangsters in modern history. Perhaps Henry wanted to repress his Irish blood because of his tumultuous relationship with his father. I would say that Henry is “most white” when he is in the gang, because he feels an intense sense of belonging. Karen maybe puts it best when she says that the gang’s strange relationship never felt strange because that was where they all came together and felt like they belonged.
Henry goes back to feeling displaced once he enters the Witness Protection Program. Not only has he handed over the only people he’s ever called friends to the US government, his new neighbors have no idea that he was ever a feared gangster. Maybe my favorite line in the whole movie is when Henry says bitterly, “Right after I got here I ordered some spaghetti with marinara sauce and I got egg noodles and ketchup. I’m an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.” Being in the Mafia made Henry feel important and like he belonged—like he was special. Giving up the lifestyle was an extreme wakeup call for the man who was used to getting everything he wanted. Now nobody even bothers to get his pasta order right.
In term of other films we’ve watched this semester, I couldn’t help but compare the voiceovers in Goodfellas to the voiceovers we looked at last week in film noir. There was a debate last week on whether they were necessary in film noir; in the case of Goodfellas, I don’t think the movie would be nearly as effective without them. They put us directly into the minds of Henry and Karen as they reflect on their lives and clue us into their feelings both at the moment and in hindsight. Plus they’re often accompanied by flashy Scorsese freeze-frames, and who doesn’t love a flashy Scorsese freeze-frame? We also get some of the movie’s most famous quotes from the voiceovers, like the aforementioned egg noodles and ketchup discourse and when Henry chillingly says that “Your murderers come with smiles”. And on a completely unrelated note, I had forgotten how disgusting they make Ray Liotta’s skin by the end of the movie. Stay off the coke, kids.
