Gangsta, please.
I watched Goodfellas last night.
I’d held off on it for a long time. I wasn’t a big fan of The Godfather, and in general, gangster movies just don’t appeal to me, but… it was available for instant-play on my Netflix, and I had some time to kill… and I thought I’d go out on a limb.
Now, before I continue, I have to clarify to the men reading why I didn’t like The Godfather. So, here’s my reasoning… there’s an hour-long wedding party at the beginning and a whole lot of nothing. I actually stopped watching it the first time I tried. I got so bored that I stopped watching it. Lame. It gets better towards the middle… so about 2 hours in. Then it gets boring again. And, no, I haven’t bothered to watch the others.
Moving on.
There’s something about gangster films. (And that’s “gangster” in the original sense of the word, not “gangsta”) There’s that strange sense coolness to them even though they’re doing horrible things. Stealing, cheating (the law, their wives, their girlfriends), murdering, and generally getting away with all of it. It’s not surprising that a consequenceless life intrigues some people.
Goodfellas starts out with some guys riding down the road. They hear some bumping around in the trunk. They pull over and open the trunk. A bloodied man rustles around. Joe Pesci drops some f-bombs and stabs the guy a few times and Robert DeNiro shoots him too. Ray Liotta stands back a bit, looking horrified and the voiceover says, “I always wanted to be a gangster.”
Interesting beginning to say the least. It goes on to show the ravaging affects of a “consequence-free lifestyle” and after the movie, I was left wondering why anyone would still want to be a gangster. All that happens is everyone is constantly on edge and paranoid, never knowing who was going to turn their back on who.
And all of it starts with greed.
Greed for the lifestyle. Greed for the power, the respect. Greed for the money. Greed for the women, the drugs, the promotion. And all it leads to is ruin.
Paranoid that someone’s going to kill you, imprison you, catch you. Your best friend for 15 years, your wife, your girlfriend, your boss, your kids. You never know.
I recently watched another movie too about this same thing called The Departed. It’s all about the same thing. It all comes down to a main theme of greed = ruin. And I don’t get it.
Not that I’ve never been greedy or jealous of stuff or friends or people, but I can’t understand the continuous draw of it. So many people just want so bad to live like this, and it always ends the same. How many gangster movies end happily?
To recap: It’s always intriguing to me to find movies that have an overtly Biblical theme or moral thread wrapped up in them that they don’t mean to do. But that’s exactly what Goodfellas (and pretty much every gangster movie I’ve seen) taught me. Greed = ruin.
Sometimes, it’s just hard to mask a truth.
What movies have you pulled a message out of that probably wasn’t what was intended?
