Cheerfully Chopping up the World

Name______Date______Film & Lit. Mr. Corbo

Cheerfully Chopping up the World Michael Wood (review) The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium by Gilberto Perez (excerpt) The names of the actors appear briefly on a dark screen. We hear the sound of a car on a road. A title reads: ‘This film is based on a true story.’ Then we see a large American car from the back, driving at night on the wrong, that is, on the left side of the road. The car swerves into the right lane, the camera stays in the left, catches up, comes alongside the car. The screen goes dark again and a title says, ‘New York, 1970’. Now we get a view of the moving car from the front, outside the windscreen, the camera slightly off to the driver’s left. Ray Liotta, looking young and spruce but tired, is at the wheel, his face well lit. Robert de Niro, in the passenger seat, is asleep. Joe Pesci, in the back seat, is nodding off. A thumping noise is heard, and Liotta says, ‘Jimmy.’ De Niro wakes up. Liotta continues: ‘Did I hear somethin’?’

Cut to a side view of the rear of the car, now stationary, lights on, trees in the background. The thumping noise continues. The three men appear from the right of the screen, go round to the back of the car. Cut to a view of the boot of the car, followed by a short, slow tracking movement to bring us closer to it. A reverse angle shot shows the three men. De Niro nods to Liotta, Pesci takes a broad butcher’s knife from his belt, the camera pans slightly towards the car. We see Liotta, from the back, cautiously opening the boot. A man is in there, wrapped in a bloodstained sheet, moving his head. He says: ‘No, no, no.’ Cut to Pesci who, indignant, drives his knife into the man six or seven times. Cut to de Niro who has drawn a gun, and shoots the man four times. Cut to Liotta, who glances offscreen at (presumably) de Niro, and steps forward to close the boot. Liotta’s voice is heard on the soundtrack, saying, ‘As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster.’ He slams the boot shut, the frame freezes on his slightly startled face, and the music begins, a hefty big band swing sound. Just before the title of the film flashes across the screen, the vocalist makes his entry. It’s Tony Bennett singing ‘From Rags to Riches’. The film is Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990).

All kinds of things are going on here, artful, intelligent, violent and ironic. The broadest effect is that of the song, with its implication of a sarcasm as old as gangster movies themselves. Organised crime is a paradigm for success in America, business and fortune are crime by other means. But the bounce and orchestration of the tune, which we hear before we hear any of the lyrics, tell another story, suggest dance and pleasure, the good life, loud and unapologetic. Or they would suggest this if they were not

1 Name______Date______Film & Lit. Mr. Corbo synchronised with the slamming of the boot on the corpse and the freeze-frame on Liotta’s dazed face. This is a film metaphor of the kind usually associated with Eisenstein, a clash of apparently conflicting associations, but the argument seems to be one of shock, not moralising. Not: this is where the good life gets you. But: who’d have thought the good life could bring you to this?

There are at least three times in this sequence – the time of what we are seeing, the time of Liotta’s narration and the extended time of his remembrance – and at least two perspectives: that of the prowling camera and that of Liotta himself, so that our consciousness becomes split, as if we were watching with him, and also watching him watching. Our curious intimacy with what’s going on accounts for the harsh, clean feel of the scene – there’s no Tarantino-style amiability here, no relaxed acceptance of the realm of nasty accident. In a couple of movements I left out of the description above, Scorsese cuts from de Niro stepping forward to shoot the man in the boot, to Liotta standing watching, and from there to a close-up of the figure in the bloodsoaked sheet, with de Niro’s arm and hand and gun in the front of the frame, so that we are looking directly along the line of the shot. The shift to Liotta and away from him, which we could think of as a reaction shot if it lingered a little, is so fast that we scarcely see it, as if it were one of those flashes so dear to supposedly subliminal advertising in the Fifties. But of course we do see it, even if we don’t notice that we’ve seen it, and it alters our perception of the sequence. Combined with our angle on the shooting, it puts us in the scene, ruins the immunity the camera seems to promise us. Although we don’t become the Liotta character, the distance we maintain from him is not enough for any kind of judging irony, only for an irony of bewilderment.

When Liotta says he has always wanted to be a gangster, the joke, in the wake of the angry, muttering violence of his companions, is about as dark as a joke could be, but it is a joke. It’s funny (and disturbing) because it skirts and avoids the several obvious meanings such a scene and such a comment might have: gangsters are just murderers; gangsters are free from all ordinary moral constraints; it’s good to be a gangster because it’s nice to be a thug. What the joke says is that being a gangster is a career and a mythology, and that both the fact and fiction of the job are likely to be more than you bargained for. This impression is confirmed by the sense of burlesque in the sequence: the corpse that isn’t dead, the fury of de Niro and Pesci, particularly Pesci, at this figure’s insolent insistence on being alive when he’s supposed to be gone – which has to be, of course, an unacknowledged fury at their own incompetence. We are a long way from The

2 Name______Date______Film & Lit. Mr. Corbo Godfather, where even bloodbaths are programmed with precision. In Goodfellas,‘I always wanted to be a gangster’ means: ‘I knew what I wanted but I didn’t know what I’d get; still don’t know what I’ve got. I don’t even know if I’m entitled to call this horror a horror.’

‘This is the gangster as comic hero,’ Gilberto Perez says of Goodfellas. The formulation sounds wrong, but only because we tend to think of comedy as comfortable. The voice-over narration, Perez says, ‘is in itself no more comic than the action, but the interplay between action and narration yields the uneasy comic effect characteristic of the film’. ‘The narrative of Goodfellas,’ Perez adds, ‘is an extraordinary formal achievement, of the kind that would deserve being hailed as pathbreaking avant-garde experimentation except that it was done in a work of popular art.’ This is similar to Orson Welles’s remark that The Outlaw Josey Wales would have been regarded as a masterpiece if it had been directed by someone other than Clint Eastwood, and the point of my description is to suggest, however sketchily, just how much may be going on in any movie that’s any good.