Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Kristína Ozimaničová Martin Scorsese’s Little Italy: Varieties of Italian American Masculinity Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Dr. 2017 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Kristína Ozimaničová Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor for his valuable advice, guidance and comments. I would also like to thank my family, and especially my elder sisters, who stood by me and trusted me throughout these difficult times. You can get much further with a kind word and a gun then you can with a kind word alone. —Al Capone … Murders came with smiles, shooting people was no big deal for us Goodfellas. —Henry Hill Table of Contents 1. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 1 2. MARTIN SCORSESE .................................................................................................. 2 3. GANGTER MOVIE GENRE: THE ORIGINS OF ITALIAN MAFIA....................... 7 4. GOODFELLAS ........................................................................................................... 11 4.1. Overview .............................................................................................................. 11 4.2. Plot Summary ....................................................................................................... 15 4.3. Masculinity and Violence .................................................................................... 18 4.4. “Cosa Nostra” ....................................................................................................... 24 4.5. Greed and Lust ..................................................................................................... 28 4.6. Moral Code........................................................................................................... 33 4.7. Summary .............................................................................................................. 37 5. CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................... 38 6. WORKS CITED ......................................................................................................... 40 7. RESUMÉ IN ENGLISH ............................................................................................. 43 8. RESUMÉ V ČEŠTINĚ ............................................................................................... 44 1. INTRODUCTION “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster. To me being a gangster was better than being president of the United States. Even before I first wandered into the cabstand for an after-school job, I knew I wanted to be part of them. It was there that I knew I belonged. To me, it meant being somebody in a neighborhood that was full of nobodies” (Goodfellas). A working-class schoolboy escapes the dreadful life of his parents and joins the excitement and glamour of the mob by crossing the street and doing jobs for the local Mafiosi in the East of New York (Freedman 48). Goodfellas traces the steps of Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) whose only ambition is to attain the privilege of being a “wise guy”1 (Kolker 196). The voice-over of Henry in the opening scene of Goodfellas expresses what it feels like to be one of the tough guys in the neighborhood of Italian Americans. His dream of becoming a gangster somehow corresponds to a stereotypical representation of Italian American male immersed in the world of organized crime. The aim of this thesis is to analyze how the protagonists of gangster milieu are depicted in the film Goodfellas and to what extent their portrayal corresponds with a classic development of criminal characters. Goodfellas is not a stereotypical gangster picture. On the contrary, it gives an insight of the characters’ psychological condition, thus recreating a juxtaposition of violent acts and inner conflicts. Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Nicholas Pileggi’s epic book Wiseguy is a detailed documentation of the life in the mob, Scorsese captures both the exciting appeal and gruesome reality of it (Crewe 84). In Goodfellas, whether it is the scene of a gunshot on the street or of a simple talk between two fellows in a restaurant, the emphasis is primarily laid on the nature of 1 In Scorsese’s Goofellas the members of Mafia organizations call themselves the wise guys as they belong to the group of people who have things worked up and if they wanted something they would just take it.(Goodfellas) 1 an instinctive behaviour of the characters. Also, Martin Scorsese underlines the everyday routine that is somehow built into the culture of the mafia, “I was interested in the minutiae of how, too, lives a wise guy. I wanted to get into the frame of a mind of a guy that works that way every day.” (Getting Made: The Making of 'GoodFellas'). Everything that the director Martin Scorsese needed in order to make a film on “goodfellas” was Pileggi’s thorough documentation and sufficient proportion of details. Now, this introduction presents the main character of Henry Hill, and also Scorsese’s realistic and specified cinematic depiction of an Italian American male who feels attracted by the mob. Then, I dedicate the first pages of this study to the director Martin Scorsese, to the motives behind the making of Goodfellas, to the film production and to his vision of the mob life in Little Italy2. I also consider the note on the gangster movie genre has its place in the analysis of Scosrsese’s gangster picture, and so the third section deals with the evolution of film noir, or rather, of its subdivision which is the crime films. The thorough analysis of the film comes in the fourth section where I examine character development of three criminal individuals, aforementioned Henry Hill, James Conway (Robert De Niro) and Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci), within the milieu of New York and its suburbs. In this section, the viewer gets to encounter three varieties of masculinity within the extraordinary world of brutality and violence. 2. MARTIN SCORSESE Alejandro González Iñárritu, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Roman Polanski, Martin Scorsese, Alfonso Cuarón, Yorgos Lanthimos, Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee, Tom 2 Ethnic neighborhoods such as Little Italy were the result of massive immigration to the United States in the 19th century. Large settlements of Italian immigrants led to commercial gathering of their dwellings and businesses but also to social marginalization. Little Italy meant a captive market of eternal exiles, who could neither enter the order of English America nor return to Italy, [it] was not only little by definition, but it was always getting smaller (Viscusi 62) 2 Tykwer, Pedro Almodóvar, Steve McQueen–these are some of the ethnic film directors who attained tremendous success, respect, and recognition for their outstanding contributions in the film industry. A good proportion of these directors fought their way in motion picture companies, and their films excel in either superb cinematographic and technical attributes, or in a vivid and realistic interpretation of a topic touched upon, and sometimes they excel in both. There are those who learned their craft by attending university or others who discovered the wonder of filmmaking by watching movies and documentaries by recognized directors and producers. Whether these directors produce independent pictures or pictures under the major film studio, their uniqueness and personal vision are expressive enough to attract. Films directed by Martin Marcantonio Luciano Scorsese are for the most part described as rare, frank and peculiar depictions of a certain reality with an emphasis placed on artistry and technical perfection. Scorsese has gained his popular and critical success not by concealing or denying his ethnicity but by confronting and exploring it. (Casillo xi). The ethnic identification of Martin Scorsese is an inseparable part present in the predominant portion of director’s Italian American films and documentaries. As coming from the third generation of Italian American immigrants, Martin Scorsese was growing up as an “urban villager” in the enclosed neighborhood of Manhattan Little Italy, but with the knowledge gained from New York University, he could liberate himself from the limitations of Italian social ghetto and to inform himself about the possibilities of the outer world. (Crewe 59). Through broadcasting of movies and TV shows, the standard American cinema was brought also to Martin Scorsese, while “in 1940s and 1950s New York City, the Italian American population was so large that some television stations broadcast Italian films as regular programming” (Christie and Thompson 4). These were 3 works of either American or ethnic directors whose directorial skills of camera work and themes had a profound impact on Scorsese’s filmmaking. Furthermore, the classic American cinema motifs of constant struggle and distant success became the pillars for his movies. The experience with modern and dynamic rhythm of New York City resulted in Martin Scorsese acquiring new perspective and adopting the motifs of a mainstream cinema. When living in Manhattan, Scorsese could come across the American middle class and to know the character of an average metropolitan man. Similarly, features of an inner tension,