The Godfather and its immediate sequel, The Godfather, Part Two (1974), changed all that, of course; and by 1990 the pre-eminence of Coppola’s masterpieces within the genre of the mob film was incontestable (though Brian De Palma had made an important contribution to the form with Scarface [1983]--a remake vastly superior to Howard Hawks’s 1932 film of the same name--as had Sergio Leone with Once Upon a Time in America [1984]). The best way, I think, to understand GoodFellas is to see it as the only successful attempt to make a mob movie of stature truly comparable to that of the Godfather films: and, moreover, one that understands that it would have been quite impossible to rival Coppola’s work by attempting anything profoundly similar to it. Samuel Beckett famously maintained that James Joyce had written literature that expanded the resources of language to the utmost, beyond what any other author could hope to do; and that, therefore, the only way to follow Joyce’s incomparable achievement was to go in the exactly opposite direction and to contract language to the maximum extent feasible. In somewhat the same way, Scorsese (whether with full self-consciousness or not) implicitly offers to rival Coppola by making a mob movie that is as much opposed as possible to the Godfather films.1 Scorsese himself has, in fact, more than once seemed to imply as much. 2
In the following pages I will keep the antithetical precedent of the Godfather trilogy steadily in view as I analyze what seem to me the three most important aspects of the mob lifeworld as represented by GoodFellas: the essentially proletarian nature of the stratum of the Mafia inhabited by the film’s characters, where the rewards of crime generally turn out to be considerably more meager than they may at first seem; the Hobbesian near-anarchy of violence, fear, and insecurity that characterizes everyday life in this proletarian stratum of the mob; and the attendant solitariness in which the characters of GoodFellas necessarily live.
The View from the Mafia’s Factory Floor
Perhaps the most obvious way that GoodFellas adopts a strategy opposite to that of the Godfather films concerns the radically different coigns of vantage from which the two filmmakers examine the workings of the Mafia. Coppola’s interest is almost entirely in top management: the Corleones themselves are the main examples, of course, but other examples include such secondary characters as the Tattaglias (the Corleones’ arch-rivals in New York in the first film), Virgil “the Turk” Sollozzo, Moe Greene, Don Barzini, Don Tommasino (Michael’s protector in Sicilian exile in the first film, who returns in the third), Hyman Roth, Frankie Pentangeli, and, in the third film, Don Altobello and Don Lucchesi. Such ruling-class types prefer to conduct business in private, and the spaces most prominently featured in the Godfather films are indeed private ones: especially fortress-like mansions, but also the offices, suites, and conference rooms of the mighty. In few respects is Coppola’s trilogy more profoundly a saga of American big business from the perspective of the boardroom than in the rigorous separation it observes between the machinations of the top bosses and the actual work on which all the wealth of the enterprise ultimately depends. Don Vito Corleone’s fortune is based primarily on businesses like bootlegging and illegal gambling; but never do we see a bet taken or a drink served. Coppola’s interest in the Mafia is macroeconomic (and macropolitical).
GoodFellas, by contrast, is very much a street-level film, with a keen interest in the microeconomics of organized crime.3 Much of the action takes place literally on the streets of New York City (mainly the unfashionable borough of Queens), and most of the rest is set in places like bars, inexpensive restaurants, airports, and prisons: all public spaces in which privacy is at a minimum. The highest-ranking Mafia executive in the movie is Paulie Cicero (Paul Sorvino), a mere neighborhood boss who, on a hypothetical organization chart of the mob, would surely be placed at least two or three levels below Michael Corleone; and even he is a secondary character. The protagonist is one Henry Hill (based on an actual person of the same name and played by Ray Liotta as an adult, by Christopher Serrone as a youngster), a proletarian type who, far from being born into Mafia aristocracy, is not even born into the Mafia at all. Coming from working-class poverty in a mixed Irish-Italian family, Henry as a child just happens to live across the street from a cabstand and a pizzeria that function as mob fronts and hang-outs for lower-level Mafiosi. Observing the goings-on there from his parents’ front window, Henry aspires to what he imagines to be the free, easy, and glamorous life of the mobsters: “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.” It is striking how pathetically modest are these examples of privilege, cited by Henry in voice-over, that convince him that being a gangster is somehow “better than being President of the United States.” As a schoolboy, he crosses the street to join the mob at the lowest possible level--doing such odd jobs as parking cars, serving food, and delivering messages--and gradually works his way up to modest success as the owner of a mob-connected restaurant and, later, as a dealer in cocaine.
The film gives considerable emphasis to the hard work required for such a rise. A pertinent example, relatively early in GoodFellas, is the sequence that shows Henry learning the hijacking business as an assistant to Jimmy “the Gent” Conway (Robert De Niro), his closest friend and chief mentor in the mob. Armed, they stop 18-wheel delivery trucks on lonely night roads, and Jimmy demonstrates how to acquire the goods with minimal bother. He demands to see each driver’s identification card, and then, after reminding the driver that he now knows his name and address, returns the card without further ado and with a $50 bill (a very considerable sum for a truckdriver in the 1950s, when this action is taking place). The effect is not just to make potential adversaries co-operative but even to make them accomplices in the hijacking enterprise; soon drivers in the area are not only handing over their wares without even token resistance, but also alerting Jimmy in advance to the more valuable loads. It is all a fairly plebian operation. The trucks in question are not carrying valuable works of art, precious gems, gold ingots, or sacks of cash, but quite ordinary items--liquor, cigarettes, razor blades, shrimp, lobsters--of the sort that can be sold quickly and almost anywhere: “Shrimp and lobsters were best,” Henry informs us. “They went really fast.” This activity naturally comes to the attention of the authorities, who dispatch what Henry, in voice-over, describes as “a whole army” of police to stop it. Jimmy handles the challenge with typical smoothness and efficiency; he simply co-opts the police assigned to arrest him, making them partners and sharing his take with them. In a sense, this is official corruption of the same general sort that plays such a large role in the Godfather movies. But there is an immense gulf in scale between Vito Corleone issuing instructions to congressmen and judges, on the one hand, and, on the other, Jimmy Conway handing over a few cartons of Pall Malls to uniformed beat cops.
A later, more intricate example of the money-making enterprises in which Henry is involved, and one in which he is the prime mover, concerns a restaurant-owner named Sonny Bunz (Tony Darrow). Sonny is having some trouble with Tommy De Vito (Pesci), Henry’s other best friend and a man whose unpredictably violent temper makes him one of the more feared local Mafiosi. Posing as Sonny’s friend--and the two do, apparently, have a real personal acquaintance--Henry arranges for Paulie to become a “partner” in the restaurant. This instantly guarantees the restaurant-owner protection, not only from Tommy but also from the police and from anyone else who might be in a position to cause Sonny difficulty. But it also means that Sonny is obliged to pay Paulie a fixed, substantial weekly sum in protection money, regardless of his restaurant’s economic performance. Even worse, Paulie is now able to buy a wide variety of mundane consumer goods on the restaurant’s line of credit--everything from cases of Scotch to washing machines and television sets--which his organization immediately resells in the neighborhood at a steep discount; since the bills from the suppliers will never be paid, the resales generate pure profit. Eventually, of course, the Bamboo Lounge (the almost painfully pedestrian name of the restaurant, which features an ersatz Hawaiian theme) is driven so far into debt that it is unable to borrow a dime from the bank or to purchase anything on credit. Bankruptcy is the only option: whereupon the gangsters simply burn the place to the ground (in a finely ironic touch, they use the restaurant’s own matchbooks--which have “Bamboo Lounge” printed on the covers--to do the deed). Henry and his associates in Paulie’s neighborhood crime ring have enriched themselves nicely, while Sonny--who originally entered into the arrangement with Paulie in order to protect himself and his business--is left with nothing (“Fucking shame,” as he understandably comments). The episode is a good example of the street-level work of organized crime. Multiplied hundreds or thousands of times, it represents the basis of the vast fortunes possessed by the top Mafia bosses (like the Corleones) whom the movie never shows or even mentions. In and of itself, however, Henry’s scheme, like Jimmy’s hijacking business, is relatively small-time. As its name implies, the Bamboo Lounge is far from being the classiest joint in town; at one point, when (unaware of Henry’s long-term scheme) Sonny thinks he is trying to convince Paulie to become his business associate, Sonny rather pathetically brags that one of the restaurant’s strong points is that it is frequented by prostitutes. At the end, Henry’s continuing proletarian status is emphasized by the fact that he and Tommy must personally perform the tricky, dangerous labor of arson.
The principal psychological irony on which GoodFellas is structured is, then, the constant gap between Henry’s deeply enchanted view of the gangster lifeworld, on the one hand, and, on the other, the modest scale of anything that he actually manages to achieve by being a part of it. At bottom, he never grows beyond the awestruck kid who thinks that being able to double-park a car beside a fire hydrant with impunity is better than being President of the United States. This attitude persists to the end of the film, when Henry, in order to save his life, has turned state’s evidence against his friends and associates, entered the federal government’s witness-protection program, and left the mob life behind. At this point, with all the people who had meant the most to him ardently desiring to have him murdered, one might think that Henry would finally have gotten over his love affair with the Mafia. But no. He misses his old life dreadfully, and, in a phrase that the film has made a part of the language, remembers longingly that he and his fellow gangsters “were treated like movie stars with muscle”: not reflecting that his life was never at all like that of a movie star, and that he never had any real “muscle”--he never exercised any real power--except on a quite small scale.
This is not to say that Henry manages to gain no impressive rewards. The best and probably the most widely discussed example is the great sequence at the Copacabana. Wishing to impress his new girlfriend Karen (Lorraine Bracco), whom he later marries, he takes her on a date to the famed nightclub, where Henny Youngman (playing and, rather gamely, parodying himself) is doing his stand-up comedy act. The scene of the young couple’s entrance is one of Scorsese’s most renowned, for it is all shot with a Steadicam in a single take: and the unbroken movement of the camera suggests the ease and gracefulness with which Henry is escorting Karen into an exciting world of privilege and show-business glamor. Finding a line of people waiting on the sidewalk to get into the Copa, the two duck into a side entrance, go down a flight of stairs, and then make their way along a series of hallways and through what seems to be the main kitchen before emerging onto the nightclub’s floor. Henry distributes $20 bills to Copa employees along the way, and, once on the floor, finds himself greeted by name by the host--who, despite the fact that many other customers have been waiting for tables, immediately orders one for Henry and Karen. It appears almost as if by magic, literally whisked above the heads of a number of seated patrons and then set down right in front of the stage: so that Henry and Karen have been given, with no wait whatsoever, two of the best seats in the house. A man at a neighboring table (apparently one of Henry’s fellow mobsters) sends the couple a bottle of champagne, and Henny Youngman, trademark violin in hand, begins his act. What young couple (Henry is 21 at this point, and Karen appears to be about the same age) from modest backgrounds would not find the experience delightfully heady? Karen is just as impressed as she is meant to be, and the wedding follows before long.
In no other scene in GoodFellas does Henry come closer to enjoying the ease, excitement, and glamor that from childhood he has associated with the lifeworld of organized crime. Even here, however, we should consider what is actually shown rather than merely accept everything as it appears from Henry’s always enchanted viewpoint (and now from Karen’s newly enchanted viewpoint as well). GoodFellas does, indeed, subtly discourage such deflationary realism, for it is, in a loose sense, a first-person film, in fact a rare first-person plural film, with the voice-over by Henry and by Karen guiding us through the action, and many camera angles suggesting the view from their eyes.4 Yet, as ever with Scorsese, psychological subjectivity is sufficiently balanced by naturalistic objectivity that it is possible to see beyond the protagonists’ perspective as well as from the latter.
What, objectively, do we see in this scene? The Copa was at the time probably the most famous nightclub in the world: Scorsese himself, in a discussion of GoodFellas, has remembered that, “when I was growing up, the Copacabana was like a palace; you couldn’t get any higher in style and class."5 Still, it is worth considering that the Copa was, after all, a popular tourist spot that catered to a wide clientele--not any sort of genuinely exclusive private club. Though Henry is treated better than the ordinary members of the general public--the people waiting patiently outside on the sidewalk--he is not treated quite like an authentic big shot either: in that case, he would, surely, have been immediately ushered in through the front door (or maybe through a special private entrance) rather than left to find his own circuitous way through the kitchen. On the floor, the quality of the entertainment is indicated by the desperate staleness of Henny Youngman’s jokes (e.g., “Dr. Wellsler is here. Wonderful doctor. Gave a guy six months to live. Couldn’t pay his bill. Gave him another six months”). Since Youngman was in reality (as most viewers of the film in 1990 would have been old enough to remember) a much better stand-up comic than the brief footage of him here suggests, it is fair to assume that the effect of cheesy mediocrity is deliberate. Finally, even if we allow for the fact that Henry and Karen are young and inexperienced enough to find traipsing through the kitchen to be rather exciting, and rusty jokes delivered by a big-name performer to be genuinely enjoyable, it still remains to ask exactly what, in this scene, has been gained. The answer is just a pleasant evening on the town for the young couple and, from Henry’s viewpoint, the chance to impress a good-looking woman whom he ardently desires: not bad, but hardly the sort of thing that would generally be considered better than being President of the United States.
A somewhat similar though less elaborate moment occurs later in the film, after Henry and Karen have become an established married couple, and soon after Henry has become newly affluent thanks to a cocaine operation he is running out of Pittsburgh. They have spent some of their recent wealth on redecorating their house, and Karen is fantastically proud of her home’s new look. As they entertain a pair of friends--Morrie Kessler (Chuck Low), a wig dealer with mob connections, and his wife Belle (Margo Winkler)--Karen can hardly contain her excitement and enthusiasm as she urges Belle to admire the Hill residence. What we see is perhaps somewhat expensive--though it does not look very expensive--but it is, without question, stupendously gaudy and over-the-top: for instance, garish and excessively “busy” wallpaper, an overstuffed sofa with a zebra-striped throw (“And this we just had to have made special,” explains Karen), and a few outsized orange-red plastic flowers. Karen’s enthusiasm only grows as the décor becomes more ridiculous. “Watch the wall with rock,” she instructs Belle, as she flips a switch; and a wall decorated with a tawdry artificial-rock pattern recedes to reveal shelves on which are placed bottles of liquor and several electronic appliances. “The electricians did it special,” Karen brags. She then turns her (and Belle’s, and our) attention to a modern dining-room table of which she is particularly proud because it was “imported” and “came in two pieces.” We are bound to be struck by the meretriciousness of the rewards for which Henry is daily risking prison and death--especially if we happen to recall, in contrast, the genuinely luxurious and tasteful décor of the Corleone mansions.
We might say, then, that, if the Godfather films find something like high ruling-class tragedy in the Mafia, Scorsese’s film finds proletarian pathos, and even bathos, instead. “Our husbands weren’t brain surgeons, they were blue-collar guys,” as Karen puts it; and the ability of Henry and his peers to enjoy a standard of consumption much higher than the blue-collar norm is both limited and occasional. From the beginning of the film to the end, the gap between risk and reward yawns wide. In exchange for taking the most terrible chances, Henry enjoys temporary spells of modest comfort but never attains real financial security. It is typical, for instance, that when, at one point, Henry urgently needs to raise some bail money, he is unable to do so except by having Karen persuade her mother to mortgage her house.
A memorable turn towards the end of A Man for All Seasons (1960), Robert Bolt’s powerful (if historically problematic) play about Sir Thomas More, provides an illuminating metaphor here. At More’s trial for treason, his old protégé Richard Rich delivers damning testimony against him, testimony that the drama assumes to be unquestionably false. Upon learning that Rich has recently been appointed Attorney-General for Wales--presumably in exchange for his perjury--More says to him: “For Wales? Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. . .But for Wales!” At the end of the Godfather trilogy, Michael Corleone may have lost his soul (in the third film he explicitly tells a priest that he is beyond redemption), and he has certainly lost his beloved daughter Mary, whom he had treasured above all else; but, insofar as any individual might rationally be said to have gained the whole world, this billionaire businessman has done exactly that. By the end of GoodFellas, Henry, though never portrayed as one of the more violent mobsters, has certainly committed crimes that the Catholic Church in which he was raised would consider damnable to his soul. But he has not gained the whole world in return, or even Wales. In truth, he has never really gained a great deal more than the opportunity to double-park beside a fire hydrant. And at the end, in the witness-protection program, he has lost even that.
Marxian Society, Hobbesian Man
Nothing in GoodFellas at all invalidates the view of the Mafia presented in the Godfather films. But this is true in somewhat the same sense as that in which nothing in quantum mechanics invalidates classical Newtonian physics. The basic intellectual principle at work here is well established, though deeply counter-intuitive: Depending upon the order of scale and magnitude, what is in some sense the “same” phenomenon may require radically different frames of reference in order to be understood. Perhaps the homeliest example is actuarial science. Common sense would suppose that, in order to calculate how many buildings in a certain class of buildings are likely to burn down during a given year, or how many individuals of a certain group are likely to die, one would first try to estimate the likelihood of each particular fire or each particular death, and then aggregate all these individual estimates in a merely additive process. But such is by no means the case. The actuary has only an extremely limited ability to predict individual events and no real interest in doing so. Yet, because events on a large scale may have a kind of intelligibility that individual events and events on a small scale do not, competent actuaries are capable of estimating the total number of fires or deaths with sufficient precision to guarantee, most of the time, substantial profits for the insurance companies that employ them. The paradox is that, though differences of scale are in some obvious sense quantitative ones, they may nonetheless call for qualitatively different intellectual tools.
There is, to be sure, no rigorous equivalence between filmmaking and statistically based science. But what might be called the actuarial principle can at least provide a useful analogy to one major aspect of the opposition between GoodFellas and the Godfather films. The macroeconomic concerns of the latter make for a narrative of capitalist history that begins, chronologically, with the nearly pre-capitalist agrarian society of rural Sicily and reaches one possible culmination with the Cuban Revolution, another with the financial manipulations of global capitalism portrayed in the trilogy’s final installment. Though one would hesitate to describe Coppola as a Marxist in the same sense that his European peer and opposite number--Bernardo Bertolucci--can be readily so described, the Godfather series dramatizes processes of capital accumulation in ways that irresistibly invite the implementation of Marxist categories. GoodFellas not only refrains from in any way contradicting Coppola’s quasi-Marxist historical narrative, but, as we have seen, devotes considerable attention to the microeconomic labor processes that collectively form the basis of the national and multinational capital flows that yield the big fortunes at the top of organized crime. Yet the vast difference in scale between the two views of the Mafia means that the predominantly macroeconomic categories of Karl Marx are of only limited direct use in understanding the street-level operations of organized crime. As we continue to analyze the details of what Scorsese’s film shows, it is useful to consult a different materialist philosopher, one of opposite political allegiance to Marx and who wrote about two centuries earlier: Thomas Hobbes.
A good recent article on Hobbes is entitled, “The First Counter-revolutionary”; and this phrase is useful in understanding the complex originality of Hobbes’s thought.7 Hobbes counts as a figure of the political right because, in the first place, he posits peace, or order, rather than justice as the supreme social value; and because, in the second place, he insists that a government endowed with absolute power--preferably an absolute monarchy though possibly rule by a parliament with unshared powers--is the only way that peace can be reliably maintained. Yet, however anti-revolutionary this stance may be--and Hobbes, of course, wrote in self-conscious reaction to the English Civil War of the 1640s, which he, like most modern Marxist historians, considered to be a revolution--Hobbes has little in common with the conservatism that preceded him (or the proto-conservatism, if one considers conservatism proper to originate in Edmund Burke’s reflections on the French Revolution). To be a genuine counter-revolutionary means to have taken the pressure of the revolution itself. In Hobbes’s situation, this required understanding that all previous justifications of monarchy--whether theological, traditionalist, or, as was most generally the case, both--had been irretrievably exploded by the social, intellectual, and political forces that produced Oliver Cromwell’s revolutionary Commonwealth. Hobbes starts from scratch, so to speak, in producing an impeccably rational and materialist defense of absolute government, one that does not depend on mere precedent or on any imagined link between divine and earthly order. 8
The main basis for his argument is outlined in the crucial thirteenth chapter of his major work Leviathan (1651), “Of the Natural Condition of Mankind, as Concerning Their Felicity, and Misery.” By “natural condition” Hobbes means the state of humanity when unrestrained by force of law and government; and he sees it as no romantic anarchist idyll but as a horrifying condition of ruthless cut-throat competition in which justice plays no part and in which violence and fraud are the guiding principles. “Hereby it is manifest,” he writes, “that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.”9 This bellum omnium contra omnes, in which “every man is Enemy to every man,” would render nearly all pleasant or useful human activity impossible to sustain: and the life of humanity would be, in Hobbes’s single most renowned phrase, “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short” (ibid.) Only the “common Power” of absolute government can suppress such perpetual civil war and establish peace. For Hobbes, absolutism requires no further justification.
He realizes, however, that (even to a reading public well versed in the Christian doctrine of original sin) his description of humanity’s natural state may seem excessively harsh. Hobbes therefore argues, rather cogently, that the truth of his foundational assumption may be verified by the kind of empirical observation that anyone can undertake:
It may seem strange to some man, that has not well weighed these things; that Nature should thus dissociate, and render men apt to invade, and destroy one another: and he may therefore, not trusting to this Inference, made from the Passions, desire perhaps to have the same confirmed by Experience. Let him therefore consider with himselfe, when taking a journey, he arms himselfe, and seeks to go well accompanied; when going to sleep, he locks his dores; when even in his house he locks his chests; and this when he knows there bee Lawes, and publike Officers, armed, to revenge all injuries shall bee done him; what opinion he has of his fellow subjects, when he rides armed; of his fellow Citizens, when he locks his dores; and of his children, and servants, when he locks his chests. Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions, as I do by my words? (Ibid.)
In the context of the current discussion, it is remarkable how directly Hobbes’s examples from ordinary experience speak to the lifeworld of GoodFellas, to the quotidian habits and assumptions shared by Henry, Jimmy, Tommy, and their associates in the proletariat of organized crime--all of whom take great care to secure their valuables and never venture among their fellows without firearms. Though the parallel with what Hobbes describes is not completely precise, it is very nearly so. Hobbes, in the quoted passage, deliberately chooses not to describe the state of nature itself but leaves the reader to infer how bad the latter must be when one considers the insecurity and fear that characterize even the human condition as mitigated by the kind of laws and public officers available in seventeenth-century England. The general capacity of law to suppress the war of all against all is considerably greater in twentieth-century America. But Henry and his associates have deliberately placed themselves outside the law and so arrived at a condition much closer to Hobbesian nature--roughly as close, perhaps, as the power of society’s official coercive apparatuses was capable of achieving in Hobbes’s England.
In GoodFellas, Marx’s macroeconomic flows of capital operate, as it were, so far above the heads of the characters that they can barely be glimpsed. Though their determinant importance is not denied--and is, indeed, assumed--they possess no really concrete presence within the film. What is concretely shown on the “factory floor” of illegal capitalism that Scorsese represents--in addition to the working details of street-level Mafia businesses--is the inescapable violence of a Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes that is ultimately (but only ultimately) determined by the exigencies of profit-making. Again, there is a radical difference between the perspectives of Scorsese and Coppola. The Corleones are, to be sure, by no means immune to the violence essential to their empire: think of Vito’s near-fatal wounding at the fruit stand in the first Godfather film, of the machine-gunning of Michael and Kay’s bedroom in the second film, of the murder of Mary Corleone on the opera-house steps at the end of the third film. But such moments are exceptional, and, significantly, all constitute major nodal points in the narrative. All represent violations of the security that more typically surrounds the Corleones in their heavily guarded private spaces, where their own hands usually remain clean. In GoodFellas, by contrast, nobody’s hands are ever clean, nobody ever has reason to feel secure, and violence is just a normal part of everyday life. To borrow a phrase that one critic has used to describe the world of Casino (which, among all of Scorsese’s other films, is most closely allied to Goodfellas), there is, for Henry and his peers, no safe haven. 10
Henry is initiated into the omnipresence of violence on the lower reaches of the Mafia when he is still a child doing odd jobs around the cabstand and the pizzeria. About six minutes into the film, he is beaten up by his father (not himself a gangster but presented as typical of the culture from which lower-level gangsters are recruited) after the elder Hill receives a letter from Henry’s school complaining of months of absence on Henry’s part. The truancy is due to the fact that Henry is spending nearly all his time working for the mob; and, when he appears bruised and black-eyed before his immediate superior Tuddy (Frank DiLeo), he tells Tuddy that he may have to cut back on his job. But Tuddy will not hear of this, and immediately comes up with a solution to Henry’s problem. Collecting a couple of thugs, he has the postal worker who happens to deliver mail to Henry’s house kidnapped, seriously roughed up, and warned not to deliver any more letters from school to Henry’s address; to punctuate the point, the hapless (and of course wholly innocent) letter-carrier’s head is slammed about halfway into a pizza oven, with the promise that he will be baked to death there if he disobeys. Henry appears to take the whole incident as a welcome sign that his membership in “normal” society is fading and that his association with the Mafia is growing closer: “How could I go back to school after that and pledge allegiance to the flag and sit through good-government bullshit?”
Not long thereafter, Henry is on duty at the pizzeria when a man howling in pain from a serious gunshot wound turns up on the doorstep. Henry is slightly taken back--it is the first case of gun violence he has witnessed first-hand--but he almost immediately grasps that the most important consideration is not to tend to the man’s injuries but to make sure that the gunshot victim doesn’t cause any embarrassment for Paulie by dying in a building that Paulie controls. Henry, still a schoolboy at this point, responds with considerable aplomb, going astray only by using up what Tuddy (who is Paulie’s brother) judges to be too many aprons to stanch the man’s bleeding. Perhaps the most significant thing about this brief scene (it is only about half a minute long) is that we never hear who the man is or why he was shot. The latter question, especially, is simply not the kind that needs to be asked. In this world of perpetual civil war, a gunshot wound is as routine, and as little in need of explanation, as a paper cut in an office. Much later in the film, after the immense Lufthansa robbery that Jimmy plans has been successfully executed, it seems perfectly natural--and, of course, it is perfectly natural in the strict Hobbesian sense--that Jimmy should try to simplify the complexities attached to having so many accomplices and helpers in the crime by just killing them all off.
To live in such a world of continual violence means that violence is always a concrete potentiality: it leaves its mark on all of everyday life even if it happens not to be taking place at a particular moment. This ever-present possibility of violence, as distinguished from its empirical actuality, is, not incidentally, precisely what Hobbes means by war: “For as the nature of Foule weather, lyeth not in a showre or two of rain; but in an inclination thereto of many dayes together: So the nature of War, consisteth not in actuall fighting; but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary” (ibid.).
It would be hard to name a scene in all of cinema that represents war in this exact Hobbesian sense with greater vividness and intensity than the scene in Sonny’s restaurant where Henry tells Tommy that he (Tommy) is a funny guy. Along with several other associates, the two are relaxing over what appear to be friendly drinks and conversation. Tommy, always the most outgoing of all the characters, is dominating the table with a humorous story about a run-in he had with the law following a bank job in Secaucus. At each of Tommy’s punch lines the other men laugh uproariously--perhaps more so than the quality of the story really warrants, since Tommy’s well-known violent temper often makes people eager to please him. Intending to take part in the general appreciation, Henry says to Tommy, “You’re really funny.” It seems an innocuous, even flattering, remark; but Tommy claims to take umbrage. He demands to know exactly what Henry means, and within a few seconds the atmosphere at the table has changed from convivial laughter to unbearable tension: for everyone knows that violence, even murder, between the two close friends has suddenly become an immediate possibility. The tension grows along with Tommy’s apparent anger--“I’m funny, how? Funny like a clown? I amuse you? I make you laugh? I’m here to fucking amuse you?. . . .How the fuck am I funny? What the fuck is so funny about me?”--and it is impossible to tell whether he is genuinely furious or is playing a rather sadistic practical joke. Clearly (and rightly) terrified, Henry gambles on the latter option, and, after agonizingly long moments of indecision says, “Get the fuck out of here, Tommy.” Tommy accepts this response--whether on the whim of the moment or because he really was just kidding all along--and laughter returns to the table as quickly as it had vanished. But everyone, including the viewer, clearly knows that, when life is perpetual war, what Hobbes calls “actual fighting” may erupt at any moment without warning.
Tommy’s behavior in this scene is not necessarily quite as irrational as it may superficially seem (even though his mental stability is indeed questioned at several points in the movie). In a state of (or relatively close to) Hobbesian nature, the civil authorities cannot be called upon to resolve conflicts; and so each individual’s reputation for personal prowess assumes inflated importance. The actual point of the funny story Tommy tells is that he is so tough and resolute that not even a series of vicious police beatings can tempt him to turn informer: a very useful thing to have believed about oneself in the Mafia. Somewhat similarly, the notion that he might murder a close friend over an imagined (and trivial) insult can only enhance the reputation for ferocity that, on the whole, has real practical benefits for anyone in Tommy’s line of work. Even so, if he actually had attacked his partner Henry--and the clear implication of the scene is that violence has been just barely avoided--the resulting mess would not have been helpful to the serious business of profit-making. Here we see yet another dimension of the opposition between GoodFellas and the Godfather films. A now-famous maxim about violence (especially murder) that is repeated in various forms throughout Coppola’s trilogy is that it’s not personal, it’s just business; i.e., it makes reasonable capitalist sense. From the Olympian perspective of the Corleones and their peers, this is generally true. Though accidents can of course happen--one person can be killed by a bomb or a bullet meant for another--violence in the Godfather series is almost always undertaken for reasons directly connected to financial gain. But on the mean streets of GoodFellas, where Henry, Tommy, and Jimmy live, the very omnipresence of violence means that it cannot so reliably be confined to rational channels. When one’s lifeworld is a perpetual civil war of all against all--when killing without conscience is just an ordinary part of one’s job--violence that serves no truly practical purpose may explode at any time.
Such an eruption is narrowly avoided in the scene just considered, but takes place in another of the movie’s key episodes: the encounter with Billy Batts (Frank Vincent). Batts is a mid-level Mafia operative whom we meet when he is celebrating his release from prison with a party in Henry’s restaurant. Tommy comes in, and finds himself the target of some (not particularly good-natured) ribbing by Batts. Tommy’s rage and frustration are obvious, and his friends have to restrain him from attacking Batts on the spot. For Tommy has no good recourse: not only is Batts about a generation senior to Tommy within the mob, but, unlike Tommy or Jimmy or Henry, Batts is a “made” man, i.e., one who is protected by the Mafia hierarchy and cannot be harmed without explicit authorization from the top. Tommy leaves, but returns a few hours later when the place is almost deserted, ambushes Batts, and, with Jimmy’s assistance, beats and kicks the man (apparently) to death. The three friends throw Batts into the trunk of Henry’s car, but, as they are driving to dispose of the body, discover their victim to be still alive. So they stop and finish with a gun and a knife what they began with fists and feet. No good can conceivably come of this murder, and none does. Later in the film, unseen (and unmentioned) top bosses have Tommy killed in retaliation. In an exquisitely cruel irony, he is murdered at what had been falsely represented to him as the ceremony in which he himself would be promoted to the rank of made man.
The details of the Batts murder underscore how thoroughly violence--lethal violence-- is interwoven with the fabric of everyday life for Henry and his pals. When Tommy returns to the restaurant, Jimmy--who never had any particular grievance against Batts--is chatting with the older mobster on terms of apparently perfect amiability. But he understands what Tommy is up to, and, when Tommy is ready for the ambush, Jimmy immediately takes part; several shots show Jimmy kicking Batts on the floor with special determination and viciousness. No moral qualms about the murder are ever displayed (though Tommy does deliver a heartfelt apology to Henry for ruining several tablecloths in order to keep blood off the restaurant’s floor). Later, on their way to bury the body, the three friends stop at the home of Tommy’s mother to borrow a shovel and a kitchen cleaver. Mrs. De Vito (Catherine Scorsese, the director’s own mother) insists on preparing a full sit-down dinner for the boys: though Henry seems a bit uneasy, Tommy and Jimmy not only enjoy the food and conversation with great gusto but make coded inside jokes to one another about the unfortunate Batts. Meanwhile, the camera shows the trunk of Henry’s car, and a faint banging noise informs the viewer that Batts is not quite dead yet. Later, when the three friends finish him off on a lonely night road, it is with resolute efficiency.
Batts’s murder so perfectly encapsulates the state of nature, of unceasing war, in which Henry and his fellows live that the episode might well be taken as the most deeply typical in the entire film, as the real moral (or rather amoral) center of GoodFellas. Scorsese seems to invite precisely this judgment by several strategic directorial choices. The scene on the dark road where the killing of Batts is completed forms the film’s prologue; it is detached from the main body of GoodFellas and presented to the viewer before any characters have been introduced or any narrative situation established. In reddish tones that harmonize with the color of Batts’s blood, we see Tommy repeatedly thrust the kitchen cleaver into the still (though barely) living Batts while commanding, “Die, you motherfucker!” To make assurance doubly sure, Jimmy then fires four shots from his .38 revolver into Batts’s body at point-blank range. And then, almost immediately, we hear Henry’s first line of voice-over: “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.” Even before we really know who Henry is, his lifelong love for the mob life has thus been savagely ironized by the horrific violence just witnessed. Later, when the scene (presented from slightly different angles) is repeated in proper narrative order, Henry’s voice-over supplies the most cogent expository account in the film of the Mafia’s bellum omnium contra omnes:
For most of the guys, killings got to be accepted. Murder was the only way that everybody stayed in line. You got out of line, you got whacked. Everybody knew the rules. But sometimes, even if people didn’t get out of line, they got whacked. I mean, hits just became a habit for some of the guys. Guys would get into arguments over nothing, and, before you knew it, one of them was dead. They were shooting each other all the time. Shooting people was a normal thing. It was no big deal.
Thomas Hobbes would have understood perfectly.
World Without Solidarity
Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short: it is not by accident that, of the five adjectives in Hobbes’s famous description of human life in a state of nature, solitary should be placed first. For solitariness is the privation that primarily determines all the others. Indeed, this point is key to understanding the specifically political opposition between Hobbes and Marx. For Marx, human beings have an intrinsic capacity for solidarity; and for Marxism the ultimate alternative to capitalist competition is a radicalized democracy in which uncoerced men and women will form egalitarian social relationships of peaceful co-operation and mutual assistance. Such is the very definition of communism. But this capacity for solidarity is exactly what Hobbes denies. For him, dog-eat-dog competition results not from social, economic, or political systems but from the fundamental and unalterable realities of human nature. Accordingly, for Hobbes it is only unlimited pressure from above, in the form of absolute government, that can establish any even relatively peaceful order among human beings: any order that offers even moderate hope of human life that will be at least somewhat rich, nice, humane, and long.
Once again, in the emphasis on solitariness, GoodFellas is a deeply Hobbesian film; and once again we find a basic opposition between Scorsese and Coppola. For Coppola, human solidarity is a real possibility. Though we hardly ever see solidarity take specifically communist forms in his movies (as we sometimes do in Bertolucci’s), solidarity for Coppola is concretely manifest in the smallest and most ancient of social units, the family. This is quite evident, of course, in the Godfather trilogy, as the very title suggests. Though Corleone family solidarity is, to be sure, potentially fragile and subject to both violation from without and even betrayal from within, it is nonetheless both genuine and meaningful. Vito and Michael (and also Vincent, who in the final film becomes the third Don Corleone) are emphatically, if not always successfully, family men. Coppola’s concern with the family extends, indeed, well beyond his magnum opus. Family ties are central to such other fine films of his, otherwise so different from one another and from the Godfather series, as Rumble Fish (1983), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), and Tetro (2009); and they can be important even in films in which they are not the principal focus, like Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988). The family unit maintains a kind of shadowy presence even in some of Coppola’s films that do not represent it directly: as witness the allegorical father-son relationship between Kurtz and Willard in Apocalypse Now (1979), a shadow familial tie that is in large part responsible for giving the character of Kurtz an importance beyond his (very limited) screen time. It seems fitting that Coppola, perhaps more than any other important director, has made extensive use, both behind and in front of the cameras, of members of his own family (his father Carmine Coppola, his sister Talia Shire, his daughter Sofia Coppola, and his nephew Nicholas Cage, among others).
Though Scorsese has employed family members too (most notably his mother Catherine, who, interestingly, also acted for Coppola), neither familial nor any other sort of human solidarity is conspicuous in his films. The typical Scorsese hero is a solitary figure, and this can be fundamentally true even if, for example, he is as socially conformist in formal, external ways as Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) in The Age of Innocence. The most deeply prototypical of the director’s protagonists might thus, in some respects, be Travis Bickle (De Niro) in Taxi Driver: a man who comes from nowhere and belongs to nobody; a nearly allegorical embodiment, at some points, of isolate existential Angst; and a character whose entire dramatic presence in the film amounts to an extended acting-out of his anguish at being unable to enjoy any meaningful connection with other human beings. His signature line, spoken to his own mirror in his drab and otherwise empty apartment--“Are you talking to me? Well, I’m the only one here”--in a way says it all.
It could also be argued, however, that The Last Temptation of Christ is even more radically Scorsesian than Taxi Driver in its fascination with human unconnectedness. Indeed, to interpret The Last Temptation in this way makes it easier to understand both Scorsese’s interest in the material taken from Nikos Kazantzakis’s great novel on which the film is based--which, set in Biblical Palestine, is far removed from Scorsese’s more usual setting of New York City--and also the director’s brave determination to get the film made despite serious obstacles that included threats of physical harm. For who, after all, is Jesus (Willem Dafoe) as Scorsese (or Kazantzakis and Scorsese) present him? He is a man who, faced with the “temptation” to become a family man with a wife and children, chooses instead to be tortured to death, alone, on the cross. Solitariness does not get much more radical than that.
Henry Hill is of course very far from being such an extreme character as Travis or Jesus. But Henry’s very ordinariness in some ways makes him an especially compelling illustration of the absence--indeed the impossibility--of solidarity within the Mafia lifeworld. In this way, he contrasts not just with the likes of Travis Bickle or Jesus Christ but also with Jimmy and Tommy, the major secondary characters within GoodFellas. Both are in their different ways extraordinary. Jimmy is distinguished by sheer precocity and brilliance: a legend within the mob before the age of thirty, he had begun doing contract killings at sixteen and eventually masterminds the richest heist in American history. Tommy stands out because of his fiery temper and a propensity for violence that seems extreme even to other Mafiosi (at one point, for example, he shoots an aspiring teenage mobster in the foot when the youngster is insufficiently prompt in bringing Tommy a Scotch-and-water; and he later murders the kid for being a bit surly about the incident). Henry, by contrast, is a classic middle-of-the-road protagonist. He is not only less violently inclined than many of his colleagues, but, in general, has a kind of vanilla or white-bread flavor--a rather generic quality--that Scorsese accentuates by casting. Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro, after all, are both highly distinctive performers, with signature acting styles and faces that are memorable without being classically handsome; and De Niro, before agreeing to a supporting role in GoodFellas, had, of course, triumphed in major starring roles like Travis Bickle and Jake La Motta in Raging Bull (not to mention his equally brilliant turn as the young Vito Corleone in the second Godfather film). Ray Liotta is more like a character actor--even though he takes the leading part in GoodFellas--with bland, forgettable good looks and a screen presence that is perfectly adequate without possessing anything like De Niro’s or Pesci’s intensity. He is thus well qualified to play Henry Hill as a typical gangster Everyman, whose life shows the essential unconnectedness of the Mafia world more convincingly than that of a less ordinary and less middle-of-the-road character could.
The essential solitariness of mob life is well illustrated by Henry’s relations with Jimmy and Tommy. Though the two men can be formally described as his best friends, it is more accurate to say that they are the closest he has to friends in an environment where authentic friendship is almost impossible. The Hobbesian (or near-Hobbesian) state of anarchic emergency in which the mob operates means that at any moment an individual’s own interests, and even his own survival, may come to depend (or appear to depend) on the elimination of others, including even (in some cases especially) those to whom he has been closest; and, in addition, the general omnipresence of violence tends, as we have seen, to make for a certain amount of nearly random killing. Thus it is, in the scene at the Bamboo Lounge, that Henry sees with awful clarity (as Liotta’s face makes painfully evident) the real possibility that Tommy, to whom he has been close since both were children, might murder him over a meaningless pleasantry.
A more complex but at least equally disturbing encounter takes place with Jimmy in another restaurant toward the end of the movie. Henry, who up to this point had managed to avoid any but relatively brief stays behind bars, has been arrested on a major narcotics charge that could send him to prison for 25 years to life. Jimmy invites Henry to meet in a diner: ostensibly to catch up and discuss Henry’s legal case, but actually, as Henry sees, so that Jimmy (who had been helping Henry in the cocaine business) can try to gauge the odds that Henry will turn informer. The problem for Jimmy is not just that Henry might turn him over to the cops. Even worse is the possibility that Paulie, who had strictly forbidden his subordinates to deal in narcotics, will learn of Jimmy’s involvement and have him killed. Though the two old friends pretend that their conversation is friendly and casual, De Niro and Liotta create a strong undercurrent of anxiety and menace. When Jimmy asks Henry to travel to Florida to assist in a contract murder, Henry (who has never received such a request from Jimmy before) knows that, if he goes to Florida, he will be the victim of the hit. The man he has always liked and looked up to, the man who initiated him into serious crime, is now planning to have him killed. But this unfortunate turn of events in no ways surprises Henry. It is just the sort of thing he has learned to expect: “Your murderers come with smiles. They come as your friends, the people who have cared for you all of your life. And they always seem to come at a time when you’re at your weakest and most in need of their help. So I met Jimmy in a crowded place we both knew.” In the scene that immediately follows, Henry and Karen are talking to a federal law-enforcement official about the witness-protection program.
Friendship is, then, in the end illusory for Henry and his fellows. There is a cruel dilemma operative here. The exigencies of this particular line of work make it impossible (as the movie explicitly emphasizes a number of times, especially through some of Karen’s voice-over) to socialize or form friendships with anyone outside the Mafia; while the very nature of the Mafia makes it impossible for authentic friendship to flourish within. It is a perfect catch-22.
Neither does the family substantially mitigate the Hobbesian solitariness of the mob lifeworld. As for the family into which Henry is born, we see little of it; the most important thing about it, for the film, is just that the tiny and horribly overcrowded house where all seven Hills live happens to be across the street from Paulie’s mob businesses. The only significant interaction we see between Henry and his father is the savage beating that results when Henry’s truancy from school comes to light--as though a physical attack worthy of a mobster is likely to stimulate in Henry a passion for formal education. His mother’s most striking appearance comes when, having made a little money from his work for Paulie’s gang, Henry proudly shows her his brand-new outfit, a tailored brown suit with white shirt, tie, and shiny black shoes. “Hi Mom, what do you think?” he says with great enthusiasm. “My God, you look like a gangster!” she replies with horror--a true enough response that is, however, unlikely to discourage Henry, since the gangster look is exactly what he is aiming for. Henry’s involvement with his family is so minimal and so uncongenial to him that we are surprised, late in the film, to discover that, as an adult, he has maintained a relationship with one of his brothers. But we never really learn anything about that relationship, and the contrast with Coppola’s intent focus on fraternal relations--in the Godfather films and in a number of others--is striking.12
The viewer sees a bit more of the Hill household that is established when Henry marries Karen; but it is difficult to describe what they create as a family in any but the most technical sense. Though Henry is strongly attracted to Karen as a date and a girlfriend, when she becomes his wife he quickly loses interest and begins to neglect her, preferring to spend time with his fellow mobsters or with his mistress of the moment (with each of whom his relations seem to be pretty exclusively physical). The marriage decays into a morass of shouts and arguments (save whenever Henry is handing Karen a wad of cash), and reaches a low point in a scene where Karen awakens Henry from a nap with a loaded, cocked revolver pointed directly at his face (and, in some of the shots, straight into the camera): the domestic situation is so bad that, in a somewhat humorous turn, Paulie and Jimmy feel compelled to assume the unwonted role of marriage counselors. Henry and Karen have two daughters, but neither parent seems to care much for them; and, indeed, the girls are rarely on screen except to witness their parents’ fighting, or, on one occasion, to be dragged along by Karen when she goes to scream at one of Henry’s girlfriends. Though the marriage endures, after its fashion, throughout GoodFellas, it comes as no surprise to learn, from one of the slides that follow the film proper and precede the credits, that Henry and Karen eventually part ways.
Perhaps the scene that most brilliantly, if indirectly, illustrates Henry’s lack of family connection is, on its face, a very social one: the famous scene showing what prison is like for mob wiseguys. Along with Paulie and a number of his other associates, Henry is serving a term in a federal penitentiary; but their mob connections and the ready cash they have with which to bribe guards mean that they enjoy special privileges--notably the freedom to hang out with one another apart from the general prison population, and access to good food, wine, and Scotch from outside. “In prison, dinner was always a big thing,” says Henry in voice-over as the scene begins; and the camera shows a wonderful close-up of Paulie slicing garlic very finely with a razor blade, like a celebrity chef on television. Loving attention is paid to the various delicacies that comprise the mobsters’ dinners--steaks, seafood, pasta with meat sauce, bread, cheese, red and white wine--and to the details of food preparation. The culinary sights and sounds are quite appetizing, and probably few viewers have watched without feeling some hankering for a traditional Italian meal. We readily believe Henry when he tells us that prison, for a wiseguy, “really wasn’t that bad.” But the qualifying clause he immediately adds strikes a jarring note: “excepting that I missed Jimmy, who was doing his time in Atlanta.” It is Jimmy whom he misses--not his wife and children? And then, perhaps, we realize with a start that this scene of happy dinnertime domesticity is unique in what we have seen of Henry’s life. Convivial meals or other social occasions with his family have never seemed to exist for him. It may be tempting to say that Paulie’s gang is his real family--except that they are all professional criminals and (probably) all murderers, so that, as we have seen, no real closeness or trust can exist there either.
Henry Hill, then, is an especially compelling type of Hobbesian solitariness precisely because--in sharp contrast to Travis Bickle or Jesus Christ, to Tommy De Vito or even Jimmy Conway--he leads a life that, in externals, is so emphatically normal and so full of ordinary interpersonal connections. He has steady work, a circle of professional associates, male companions with whom he socializes, a home, a wife and family, and one or another sexy girlfriend. But the point, of course, is that this network of relationships is a hollow shell, inside of which Henry is desperately alone.
Nothing in GoodFellas illustrates this apparent paradox better than the brilliant climactic sequence--it is almost a film-with-the-film--that traces the single day, dated Sunday, May 11th, 1980, which ends with the big drug bust. Throughout the day, Henry is surrounded by other people but essentially solitary. Beginning before 7:00 a.m., he spends the day racing around, trying to attend to numerous chores, all of which involve other people and almost none of which goes well. For instance, he brings to Jimmy some guns he has bought for him; but Jimmy decides he doesn’t want them, and angrily refuses to pay. Driving to the hospital to pick up his paraplegic brother Michael (Kevin Corrigan), he nearly rear-ends another car; and, when he arrives at the hospital, Michael’s doctor is so horrified by Henry’s own harried, unhealthy appearance that he insists on examining him. Henry has to prepare a shipment of cocaine at the apartment of his girlfriend Sandy (Debi Mazar), have sex with her, and resist her furious entreaties to stay the night. He tries to arrange for his drug courier Lois (Welker White) to take the narcotics to Atlanta, but she makes mistakes and causes problems, including a surly refusal to fly without her “lucky hat.” Throughout these and other hassles, a helicopter (which turns out to belong to federal drug agents) has been following Henry around. The extreme tension and anxiety of the whole situation are accentuated, diagetically, by Henry’s paranoia-inducing addiction to cocaine (like Tony Montana in Scarface, he samples his own wares to excess), and, extra-diagetically, by the way that Scorsese’s cameras, famous for nearly always moving, are here more hurried than ever. It is almost with a sense of relief that he is finally arrested at around 11:00 p.m. Indeed, the arresting officer provides Henry with what is, in a sense, his most reassuring human connection of the day: “Freeze!” the cop commands as he points his automatic pistol at Henry’s head. “Don’t you move, you motherfucker, or I’ll blow your brains out!” Though it may not seem the friendliest greeting, it provides Henry with a measure of comfort: “Only cops talk that way,” as Henry explains. “If they had been wiseguys, I wouldn’t have heard a thing. I would have been dead.”
But Henry is not dead at film’s end. GoodFellas is not high tragedy, and has nothing of the grand “operatic” quality that so many viewers have seen in the Godfather films. The film ends, as it begins, on street level. Though Pileggi’s journalistic account ends by suggesting that, owing to the advantages he has managed to extract from the witness-protection program, “Henry Hill has turned out to be the ultimate wiseguy” (289), Scorsese’s Henry Hill takes his leave of the audience on a quite different and much more plebian note: “I’m an average nobody,” he tells us in his final line of voice-over. “I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.” Henry, of course, is referring to his situation in witness protection, and means to contrast this life, where he “ha[s] to wait around like everyone else,” with what he still feels to be the excitement and glamor of the mob. But the viewer must reflect that the central psychological irony that has determined Henry’s character throughout the film--that is, the vast gulf between his incurably enchanted view of the Mafia and the cold, hard realities of what the latter actually has to offer--is still operating here: and that Henry’s description of himself at the end really applies to his mob life from the beginning. From childhood to middle age, Henry has operated in something experientially very like a Hobbesian state of nature: a world where essential solitude is enforced and where lethal violence is frequently a fact and always an immediate possibility. And he has done so from a predominantly proletarian position, for rewards that, even at their best, have always been more meager than he chooses to believe, and that have never been even remotely commensurate with the terrible risks and penalties--physical, moral, legal, psychological, spiritual--that attend them. Ultimate wiseguy? From the first to the last frame of GoodFellas, Henry Hill is much more like the ultimate schnook.