For an Art of the People: How Art can Impact Society and Politics…and Why the Left Should be Involved

“The business of obscuring language is a mask behind which stands the much greater business of plunder.  The people’s property and the people’s sovereignty are to be stripped from them at one and the same time.  Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you really want them to understand.” – Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (English translation by Constance Farrington), 1961. 

 

During a period of substitute teaching at one of the colleges where I work, I had an intriguing experience.  It caused me to consider some important things about art and about the political role it can play.  The instructor I was filling in for was in the middle of showing her class the 2005 film Tyler Perry’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman. My only job was to show the rest. Naturally, I had heard of Perry, the tremendously successful African American writer, actor, director and producer, but my knowledge was limited to clips of his Madea character and satirical swipes taken at him by animated shows like American Dad! and The Boondocks.

Frankly, I didn’t think much of the film. The plot was contrived and melodramatic, and I had to stifle laughs at some of the dialogue in the “serious” scenes. As the film played on, I noticed something far more interesting in the audience.

First off, it was clear that a majority of students in the room already knew the film. While I was somewhat surprised that a then thirteen-year-old movie would remain so current among college students, I was even more struck by the fact that they didn’t just know the film; it meant something quite serious to them. Several times, multiple students mouthed passages from the dialogue before they were spoken. The folksy, friendly Christianity the film frequently displays was also enthusiastically nodded along to. What to me, a fairly experienced teacher of literature, seemed like a mishmash of cheesy cliches, was to these students something that spoke deeply to their lives and experiences. Most of them were non-white. While I can’t be sure about this particular bunch, the college has an unusually large number of students from financially troubled backgrounds. If this group was anything like my classes (and I did know some of the students that day), at least a good number of people there were the first in their families to attempt college. Perry’s message about the importance of endurance, faith, and family didn’t seem like a cliche to these people; it seemed like a profound truth. Believe it or not, this started me thinking about famed philosopher and dissident Noam Chomsky.

In several public talks, Chomsky has critiqued postmodernism. He argues postmodern thinkers are needlessly incomprehensible, primarily due to their jealously of the prestige won by researchers in the hard sciences. More seriously, he claims postmodernism is also a system of social control. Its tendency to inspire pessimistic paralysis is rather convenient for college administrations hoping to keep faculty under their thumbs. However, Chomsky differentiates between the effects of this system in wealthy countries and its impact on the developing world. While postmodern dominance is merely annoying in powerful countries like the US, in the developing world it does significant damage by causing academics to retreat into a navel-gazing cocoon. This robs revolutionary movements of the intellectual leadership they need when battling dictatorial regimes. But while I agree the damage he describes in poorer nations is probably more severe and overt, in subtler ways postmodernism (and the broader modern academic perspective on art) still hurts progressive social movements in wealthier countries like the United States. It does this by damaging the link between artistic creations and most human beings, which hampers art’s potentially powerful ability to inspire dreams of radical change.

The problems of establishing what deserves to be termed “art,” and of connecting that art to the people are certainly not new or easy. But these days, it seems the academic establishment is not even particularly interested in addressing them, less in any moral responsibilities art and artists might have, and far less in any moral responsibilities academics concerned with art might have. A few years ago, I had noticed, though not fully appreciated, an example of this in one of my own classes at this same college. The course was an introduction to poetry, and instructors were required to use the textbook Literature to Go, edited by Michael Meyer, an emeritus professor of English at the University of Connecticut. Early on, Meyer attempts to explain the difference between genuine poetry and mere verse. He does this by contrasting two poems on the theme of love: “Magic of Love” by Helen Farries, which is apparently often reprinted in greeting-cards, and a more literary work, “Love Poem” by John Frederick Nims. Meyer demonstrates how much commercial verse is constructed to order by quoting from a handbook used by greeting-card writers. He then tears into “Magic of Love” since it “relies on cliches…such as describing love as ‘a blessing from heaven above.’ Cliches anesthetize readers instead of alerting them to the possibility of fresh perceptions.” All of this seemed eminently reasonable to me. “Magic of Love” is everything Meyer says it is. (He didn’t even pick the worst line from it which, in my view, has to be “When love lights the way, there is joy in the day…”) Meanwhile, “Love Poem” struck me as a touchingly funny example of how a REAL poem should approach a subject like love. I expected this to be a rather quick part of the lesson, really just establishing some basic parameters about “literary” poetry.

Instead, the reading of these two poems and Meyer’s commentary turned into a long, frustrating discussion. Several students expressed a preference for Farries’ work over Nims’. Some also objected to Meyer’s harsh dismissal of “Magic of Love,” declaring it unfair and snobbish. I was surprised but tried to make the discussion productive. We carefully went over Meyer’s contrast of the two works again and I asked a few questions about the difference between the ways the two writers used words. Much of the class seemed to better comprehend the point Meyer was making, but most of them still said they simply liked what Farries did more than what Nims did. It started to dawn on me that, while these students could certainly understand the concept of holding certain poems up as “literary,” they didn’t really see the point. Chalking the matter up to my lousy teaching, I moved on.

Looking back on this incident, I’m startled to realize just how distanced I was from the way most people approach art. Re-reading some of Meyer’s commentary, I’m struck by his attempt to discredit sentimentality: “Sentimentality cons readers into falling for the mass murderer who is devoted to stray cats, and it requires that we not think twice about what we’re feeling because those tears shed for the little old lady, the rage aimed at the vicious enemy soldier, and the longing for the simple virtues of poverty might disappear under the slightest scrutiny.” When I first read this, ahead of teaching the class, it just seemed like common sense. Now, I’m a little taken aback by the assumptions and careless associations it makes. The point about the “virtues” of poverty is fair enough, but what does that have to do with crying over (I assume the unpleasant fate of) a little old lady? And, while it certainly doesn’t excuse mass murder, isn’t a care for defenseless animals the sign of some shreds of humanity, shreds worth feeling something over? Even the point about the enemy soldier doesn’t hold up very well. Fearing and hating a soldier who is charging at you is a rational and understandable response, however unjust the war in question might be.

I’m deliberately being contrarian here not because I disagree with Meyer that these “sentimental” responses are insufficient; of course they are. I’m doing it because, for all his talk of probing more deeply into things, Meyer shows no signs of trying to understand why this kind of sentimentality has the appeal it does. This leads him (and me, initially) to dramatically underestimate how a poem like “Magic of Love” might sound to someone without a degree in literature. The process of getting such a degree exposes one to new ideas, but it also introduces one to a highly specialized way of thinking and talking about art, a way that will never be particularly familiar to the vast majority of human beings.

This disconnect is ironic since it was not shared by many artists widely venerated among academics. Shakespeare, for instance, was just as capable of writing barnstorming melodrama as Tyler Perry is, and he was certainly not above composing verses as eye-rolling as Farries’. It can be amusing to examine Shakespeare criticism over the centuries and read the frequent doubts expressed about the Bard’s less “literary” moments. How could the man who wrote the sonnets and Lear’s words over the dead Cordelia also write doggerel like “But when to my good lord I prove untrue,/I’ll choke myself: there’s all I’ll do for you.” from Cymbeline? Critics who scoffed at Shakespeare’s “lowbrow” spots missed the fact that he was a serious literary artist, but also one with a mass popular audience. He evidently understood that light verse and spicy situations are useful artistic tools when communicating with people, most of whom are not fellow professional writers. To be sure, all by themselves they can easily become vapid, but used with skill, and in conjunction with more sophisticated techniques, they can be effective and powerful.

Intriguingly, most current literary people would understand this point about Shakespeare. However, their attitude about contemporary literature seems to be that such things were all well and good back then, but they won’t do now. Why what was good enough for Shakespeare would soil the fingers of today’s authors is mystifying, and it leads the literary world into a curious realm of self-imposed blindness. Take this comment from an interview in The Guardian with British author Will Self, published earlier this year: “I think the novel is absolutely doomed to become a marginal cultural form…It’s impossible to think of a novel that’s been a water-cooler moment in England, or in Britain, since Trainspotting, probably.” It’s a good thing fans of Fifty Shades of Grey and the Harry Potter series didn’t know that. Of course, Self would probably proclaim those are not real novels, the same way Meyer denies the label of “poetry” to “Magic of Love.” What Self and Meyer seem to be getting at is that the only kind of writing that counts for them is what they deem to be “literary,” a term they get to define. Self is surely correct that most readers are uninterested in his version of literary fiction, but that does not mean they are uninterested in fiction itself. Bemoaning the lack of passion from the masses for literature the way Self does rarely seems to ask very much of the producers of literature. The fact that many people are willing to devour so-called non-literary novels should probably prompt more reflection and self-criticism among authors and critics. These people claim to care about the impact literature can have yet, when wondering why the public avoids literary fiction, they seem content to shrug their shoulders.

There do seem to be some writers moving in a different direction. In a 2017 piece for the New York Times Book Review, author Viet Thanh Nguyen criticized the orthodoxies found in many writing workshops: “Plot is usually seen by workshop writer-teachers, or teacher-writers, as the property of so-called ‘genre’ writing…as if literary fiction were not also a genre.” It is refreshing to read Nguyen break through the artificial walls much of the literary scene insists on banging into. Going further, Nguyen points out the writing workshop has a tendency to de-politicize literature, and that literary historians have shown this is no accident. Nguyen argues passionately that the type of fiction usually deemed “literary” often has little to say to marginalized communities, and that writers emerging from these communities who want to fight their oppressors need not feel bound by manufactured aesthetic rules: “We come from communities we do not wish to renounce in the name of our individualism. We come wanting to do more than just sell our stories to white audiences. And we come with the desire not just to show, but to tell.” Exhilarating as reading this was, I was disturbed by a letter responding to this article by the poet Stephen Dunn. Defending the workshop process, Dunn ignores most of Nguyen’s points and repeats assembly-line complaints that “agenda-writing…tends to lack the freshness and vitality of discovery.” Dunn even goes on to dismiss the unique literary perspectives of victims of prejudice: “…women and minority writers…have burdens similar to those the rest of us have: to discover what they didn’t know they knew, and to make something memorable out of whatever it is that’s important to them, whether it’s an act of revenge or a walk in the woods.” While Dunn’s huffy resentment may be uniquely his, I fear his lazy assumptions and course catalog-style language about what can and cannot be “memorable” are more common in the literary world than Nguyen’s boldness.

Of course, recognizing the airtight chamber that is much of “high art” these days does not mean that “populist” works are fulfilling Nguyen’s life-changing goals or offering a path to human betterment leftists can get behind. In a piece for Current Affairs magazine, Lyta Gold has skillfully detailed the limited politics of the Harry Potter world, and the less said about any social implications from Fifty Shades the better. Over the years however, there have been plenty of novels that combined seriously progressive social goals, literary skills, and popular appeal. It is a myth that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin practically touched off the Civil War, but it certainly helped galvanize growing opposition to slavery. A century later, Richard Wright’s Native Son would help push continuing racial oppression to the forefront of the national dialogue. Edward Bellamy’s utopian science fiction novel Looking Backward started a political movement that would become one of the forerunners of the Socialist Party of America. Speaking of that party, its most famous leader, Eugene Debs, drew inspiration from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. That novel helped shape Debs’ devotion to the downtrodden, and the book sustained the faith in justice he stuck by throughout his difficult life. I find it upsetting to realize all of these works would probably be given the cold shoulder by the academic literary scene today, were they to appear as contemporary novels. All of the authors had clear social or political goals, and wrote with an eye on a broad, general readership. This meant they had to tell stories, in a fairly direct way, and create characters and dialogue that would be appealing, or at least accessible, to non-academic readers. As far as the literary world of today is concerned, writing like that may have been acceptable (if quaint) “back in the day,” but would be risible in our more sophisticated world. What precisely such an attitude has gained for the world, or for art, remains to be seen. Of course, the socially inspiring artistic creations of the past remain available. There is also a wealth of older criticism and commentary from times when such writing was comprehensible, and even interesting, to readers outside the academy. All of this can continue to move people, but it’s not enough. As Brianna Rennix (also at Current Affairs) has pointed out, older works are bound to be less pertinent as the years go on. We need contemporary artists, critics, and academics to step up to the plate and speak to the concerns of people living in today’s world.

It might be understandably charged that I am calling for a kind of “dumbing down” of literature and art, that I don’t think readers need to challenge themselves with difficult works as long as the works are socially useful. One might also read into my distaste for literary obscurantism an attempt to revive Soviet-style attitudes that attacked artists who refused to toe a politically-determined line. Neither of these is what I am calling for, but the latter charge is much graver. For much of its history, the USSR exercised strict censorship over artists. This is most famously associated with Stalin’s promulgation of “socialist realism” as the only state-sanctioned mode of aesthetic expression. The policy dictated a model of art, directed by Leninist principals. Under Stalin, numerous artists (including many faithful communists) were brutally persecuted. Even when the policy was moderated after Stalin’s death, the silencing of dissident artistic voices remained common. This was tyranny pure and simple, and no modern socialist should have any time for it. While I do wish for more art encompassing socialist principals, this peoples’ art would be the polar opposite of the perverted Soviet caricature of such an art. Far from believing in any kind of aesthetic mandate, I appeal to artists’, critics’, and academics’ individual consciences. They should always be free to do as they see fit. However, they should recall that, in our society, they are often freer than the mass of humanity since they are a class of intellectuals. In a 2017 preface to his 1967 essay The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Chomsky writes: “What of the responsibility of intellectuals? Those who qualify for the title have a degree of privilege conferred by this status, yielding opportunity beyond the norm. Opportunity confers responsibility–which, in turn, poses choices, sometimes hard ones.” I do call on artistic intellectuals to remember that they are members of the human family, and that this family is the wellspring of their passions and skills. I call on artistic intellectuals to consider trying to communicate with as much of the human family as possible, to comfort it and possibly try to aid its quest for greater freedom and dignity. But this call is, and must remain, an appeal to personal responsibility.

To return to the first charge, that my call is for an art stripped of complexity and nuance, I would concede that some socially conscious art can lean towards simplicity and even ephemerality. George Bernard Shaw commented on why this might be worthwhile in discussing his preference for Ibsen over Shakespeare: “A Doll House will be as flat as ditchwater when A Midsummer Night’s Dream will still be as fresh as paint; but it will have done more work in the world; and that is enough for the highest genius, which is always intensely utilitarian.” I don’t think Shaw’s point can be dismissed lightly, and it’s certainly worth considering in relation to any worries about overly simplified art. Still, I largely disagree with it, and it’s not really what I’ve been arguing for. Shaw drastically underrates the social impact art is capable of, whether or not it has clearly defined political objectives. The socialist dramatist Edward Bond’s description of how, as a working-class teenager, his life was transformed by seeing a production of Macbeth is a powerful answer to Shaw’s notion that the work of “mere artists” does little “work in the world.” Absolutely I want to see some art challenge people, and I want to see readers and audiences push themselves. But art should be a two-way street, there are different kinds of challenges, and difficult “high” art is also fully capable of having a real-world impact, if it can speak to people in a meaningful way. Also, there’s no reason artists need to make some kind of either/or decision. Much as I might dislike a great deal of art created along the lines of postmodern literary theories, I wouldn’t want to see it vanish since it certainly matters to some people. I also don’t believe every work of art needs to have a political goal, and I’d hate to see some sort of orthodoxy appear over the notion that it does. There is room for all types of artistic expression. The problem is not that critics and academics laud some art most people will never have any interest in, but that they applaud little else and never seem to think about what lies behind that mindset. A great retort to this attitude is found in these lines from the 1950 film All About Eve, spoken by a theater director in response to snobbery over his plans to make a movie: “The Theater’s for everybody–you included, but not exclusively–so don’t approve or disapprove. It may not be your Theater, but it’s Theater for somebody, somewhere.”

Of course, as I’ve already stated, it is up to artistically-centered intellectuals themselves what to do. Why should they consider descending from their towers? On the academic front, while the right’s claim of a left-wing stranglehold on academia is an exaggeration, it’s hardly without some justification. If your average English department is at least fairly progressive, it’s worth asking what these intellectuals do for the cause they claim to believe in. (Ironically, conservative and reactionary “intellectuals” often seem to understand art’s political role much better. The enduring popularity of Ayn Rand’s novels is just one of several examples.) The social justice stickers on the office doors of many English professors are very nice, but what about trying to orient their discipline, for whatever it’s worth, towards the cause of human progress? To quote from the main body of The Responsibility of Intellectuals: “In the Western world, at least, they [intellectuals] have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression. For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.” Chomsky was probably not primarily thinking of literary and artistic intellectuals, whose ability to impact the real world is limited, but I hardly see why that means they should be free from all responsibility. If art can play its role in human betterment, and it can, those intellectuals who consider themselves the stewards of art should think about how they are contributing. Indulging in baffling theoretical debates does nothing for the world, although it certainly may bring promotions. If that’s what academics are in it for however, they should take the stickers down.

As for writers and other artists themselves, they may want to consider these words from Albert Camus’ Nobel Prize banquet speech: “…the writer’s role is not free from difficult duties. By definition he cannot put himself today in the service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it. Otherwise, he will be alone and deprived of his art. Not all the armies of tyranny with their millions of men will free him from his isolation, even and particularly if he falls into step with them. But the silence of an unknown prisoner, abandoned to humiliations at the other end of the world, is enough to draw the writer out of his exile, at least whenever, in the midst of the privileges of freedom, he manages not to forget that silence, and to transmit it in order to make it resound by means of his art.  None of us is great enough for such a task. But in all circumstances of life…the writer can win the heart of a living community that will justify him, on the one condition that he will accept to the limit of his abilities the two tasks that constitute the greatness of his craft: the service of truth and the service of liberty.” 

Even art that does not aim as high as what Camus calls for, however, can be at the service of those who suffer history.  Making people laugh, giving them something to cling to, connecting with their experiences, none of these are earth-shattering but they can make life easier to endure and, considering what life can be like under capitalism, making it easier to endure should be greatly honored.  In the end, I’m really just requesting that artists ask themselves a simple question: if their work is not meant to better the world, and if it’s not likely to be even potentially accessible to most of the people who inhabit the planet, what exactly has it been created for?             

GOODFELLAS, Being the Third in an Ongoing Series About Movies That Piss me Off

“Who cares?”  That question came into my mind about 25 minutes into watching Goodfellas and just stayed put until the seemingly endless film mercilessly concluded.  Honestly, I’ve started writing this piece several times and I’ve had a lot of trouble getting past “Who cares?”  Why did I spend my time watching an incredibly long movie about an awful person doing terrible things?  Well, at least now I get all the references in cartoons.

About awful people doing terrible things, in reality there are plenty of good reasons to watch such a movie.  I’ve seen and admired such films, several of which chronicled far more despicable tales (true and fictionalized) than the rise and fall of gangster Henry Hill, the protagonist of Goodfellas.  I’ve even appreciated a good number of movies about mobsters and gangsters.  The difference is that all these other films answered that pivotal question for me.  For the most part, Goodfellas doesn’t.  Even worse, when it does sort of answer, it says things I find utterly repugnant.

At this point I think it’s important to note that my critique of Goodfellas is going to be a moral one.  The acting, direction, writing, photography, etc. are all excellent and deserve to be praised.  But, considering how I felt about the film’s characters and its general vibe, the superb technique of Goodfellas felt like a gorgeously carved mahogany table, covered by a beautifully embroidered cloth, both under a meal of shit.  I’m well-aware that many people will argue there shouldn’t even be moral critiques of films.  I find that, in conversation, most people apply this argument rather selectively.  However, even if the view is consistent, I simply don’t share it.  Anyone who rejects non-cinematographic criticism of movies may want to stop reading now.

Next, I should head off another dismissal tactic I see creeping around the corner, that I think any stories about bad people need to be didactic lessons.  I think no such thing, and I believe moral didacticism can sometimes be rather simplistic and irksome.  However, I also believe the disdain expressed for it often represents a form of elitist contempt for a natural desire on the part of most people to see evil get punished, or at least condemned.  Certainly that desire is frequently way too reductive, but I don’t see why some take such glee in running it down.  Surely any halfway decent person can at least sympathize with the desire for straightforward moral clarity, however much they’ve learned that life and art are usually more complex.  Maybe it isn’t always, but sneering at that desire frequently looks like juvenile contrarianism and/or smarmy “cleverer than thou-ness” to me.

Enough caveats!  How can I hate such a great film?  It’s best encapsulated by the beating up of the mailman; I almost stopped watching at that point.  For those unfamiliar with Goodfellas, early in the film we are shown the young Hill getting involved with the world of organized crime.  A letter from his school reveals to his parents that he has been cutting class.  Hill’s father beats him up in response (more on Hill’s suffering later) and the gangsters Hill has been associating with devise a scheme to let him stay in the group.  I fully expected them to threaten or attack Hill’s father and, frankly, they’d have had something of a point, and young Henry’s gratitude to them would have made some rough moral sense.  Instead, they savagely assault the local mailman, forcing him to deliver any mail concerning Henry directly to them so they can hide it from his parents.

We can’t be sure if this event actually occurred.  Goodfellas is based on Nicholas Pileggi’s book Wiseguy, a non-fiction account of Hill’s crimes, which I haven’t read.  Hill had some communication with the filmmakers while Goodfellas was being produced and reportedly praised the film.  However, elements may well have been fictionalized or amalgamated and it’s (very) possible that Hill simply lied about certain things.  The bit with the mailman doesn’t seem like something that would require such deception, what with no political sensitivity or involvement of prominent people, so I’m operating as if the event happened more or less as portrayed in the film, although the implications of the scene’s treatment by director Martin Scorsese and the rest of the creative team are the same even if it was a fabrication.

Assuming he was real, I wonder what happened to that mailman.  Did his wife have to explain to their children why Daddy would wake up screaming?  Did he eventually go to jail because he’d committed a serious federal crime and was too terrified to tell anyone why?  What were his hobbies, his interests?  What was his name?

We don’t know any of this because the mailman is, in the words of the film, an “average nobody,” something Hill considers the epitome of disgrace.  This is the theme running all throughout Goodfellas: Hill’s passionate quest to avoid being a nobody, to be important, to have control over his own life.

These are not desires to be waved away; certainly I don’t dismiss them.  The vast majority of human beings who have ever lived have, and have had, only limited control over their own destinies.  It is rather sobering to think of all the potentially brilliant writers, inventors, scientists, performers, teachers, and etc. who never had the chance to go anywhere because they were women, slaves, the wrong “race,” or because it simply profited someone for them not to be able to afford food and shelter.  It is downright infuriating when one also factors in all the people who might not have had the potential of the aforementioned group, but would have been quiet heroes to their families and friends.  Certainly some people flourish, in big and small ways, despite all adversity.  But thinking honestly about the oceans of people who were (and are being) snuffed out because a decision was made or a fortune just had to get bigger would inevitably make most people pretty depressed.  The next, less common step, is to get angry.

Henry Hill certainly gets depressed and angry over the circumstances he grew up in and he had a right to; I felt for him at that stage.  Goodfellas shows us the Hill family struggling financially, with Henry’s younger brother disabled and needing constant medical attention.  In my view, a society that allows people to potentially lose everything because they have medical problems is an abomination.  In these early scenes, I definitely felt for the Hills, including Henry.  I felt even more for him when his father is shown abusing him.  Hill’s father has legitimate cause for misery but, with the classic, twisted mindset of a cowardly bully, he takes this misery out on Henry, clearly thinking, as bullies do: “If I can make this weaker person hurt, I’ll feel better.  At least over him, I have power.”  Again, assuming all this is more or less accurate, I’m sure Henry felt small, alone, and terrified.

He then proceeds to spend his life making other people feel small, alone, and terrified.  He also genuinely relishes it, delighting in his ability to have power over people weaker than him.  There is never so much as a hint that Hill feels the slightest hesitation about his actions.  After all, according to Hill anyone he can victimize should be victimized since they have committed the ultimate crime of being, in the famous words of the film’s final scene “a schnook.”

The notion that he might have conquered his fears by banding together with people like the mailman, naturally never crosses Hill’s mind.  He’s excited and eager to join the strong in stomping on the weak, because he sees that as the only thing worth doing and the only way to prove one’s worth.  The concept that most people are “losers” and “nobodies” only on the surface, and only because of a system that devalues their humanity would be anathema to Hill.  His reaction to thousands, millions of mailmen, bartenders, janitors and etc. joining hands and attempting to take power would have been a cruder version of Louis XVI’s thoughts on the declaration of the French Republic.  For all his lamenting of his childhood experiences, Hill actually reveres the system that keeps him and his family in the dirt; he simply wants, in his own way, to benefit from it.  His thoughts are not directed towards revenge against his father or anyone else, which would have been philosophically fair, if unfortunate.  Instead, he looks at predators and bullies and says “How can I be like them?  Who can I stomp on?”  The mailman is simply the first manifestation of Hill’s desire to assert his own power, specifically by hurting those who cannot defend themselves.  Hill’s worldview is clearly predicated on there being a face to smash with his boot.

Goodfellas gives us little time to stop and empathize with the various “losers” Hill and his friends dispense with, the treatment of the mailman setting the tone early on.  We never get to know anyone outside Hill’s world well.  For the most part we’re stuck with Hill and company as they demonstrate their greed, brutality, and racism.  About that last point, to be fair Hill does appear perfectly polite to his brother’s black physician, suggesting he’s willing to put that particular element of “toughness” on the shelf if he thinks he can get something for it.

Once again, I’m drawn back to my “who cares” reaction watching these monsters parade across the screen.  About the only recognizable stirrings of human emotion I felt after the mailman scene came from the occasional baffled wailing of Hill’s daughters, caught up in what must have been an indescribable nightmare for young children.  Aside from them, virtually everyone on screen for longer than a few minutes was hideous and extremely dull.

It might be expected that I didn’t enjoy watching Hill get away with all this in the end, and I didn’t.  Of course, Hill did get away with it and, even in fictional stories, there’s no reason a bad person shouldn’t be shown facing no justice for what they’ve inflicted.  It happens a lot in life, after all, as the case of Hill demonstrates.  I think it’s important to depict this and, again, I don’t expect stories to always be satisfying or pleasing in their conclusions.  However, Hill’s own attitude to the fact that he avoids any significant consequences for multiple cold-blooded murders (among other things) is nothing short of jaw-dropping.  He actually seems to view this as some kind of tragedy due to the fact that he can no longer take anything he wants and push other people around.  Watching the final scene again, I found myself mouthing the words “What a fucking brat!”  When I first watched it, I’ve rarely been happier for a movie to end.  And yet this finale might contain the best refutation to my argument.

The strongest defense of Goodfellas from my moral charges would probably be that Scorsese and his collaborators are subjecting Hill to a great deal of irony.  This reading might argue that we are meant to view Hill, not just as a monster, but as utterly clueless.  For such an idiot, having to wait on lines and being prevented from grabbing any shiny object in sight would be far worse than any kind of severe punishment, because punishment would still leave his self-image as an important person intact.  As such, Hill could be seen to have meticulously crafted his own Hell and cannot even appreciate how much he has escaped.

This defense is a tempting one and I would imagine it is what Scorsese and the other filmmakers probably believe.  However, I think it is undone by the mood of the film.  Throughout Goodfellas, I got the strong impression that everyone involved was entranced by Hill, that they found him fascinating, wild, and outrageous.  This gets back to my point about the film’s technique, which is correctly praised as excellent and seminal.  By welding all this so tightly to Hill’s version of his story without significant variation, the filmmakers, whatever their intentions, participate in a form of myth-making and seem to largely assent, not only to Hill’s take on himself, but to his attitude towards society.  None of this means that the filmmakers are bad people, but I do think they were seduced.  They then used their talents to seduce us on Hill’s behalf and on behalf of a mindset that not only worships crude “strength,” but perversely considers anyone who lacks its version of “strength,” namely the ability and/or willingness to destroy other people, to be guilty of an upside down version of sin.  It is this kind of reverse morality that can help feed the poisonous and solidarity-defeating notion (which one finds far too often, even among generally decent people) that the real problem in the world isn’t barbaric injustice, sad as that might be, but rather the fact that so many people are “weak.”

Again, I’m virtually certain this is not what Goodfellas is trying to do; after all, few people hold the beliefs I just outlined (thank goodness), especially when given time to seriously consider them.  But partially understood feelings can certainly take control, whatever one’s genuinely held principles, and I believe the filmmakers’ fascination with Henry Hill took over Goodfellas and allowed the film to become a conduit for Hill’s thinking.  All the famous set pieces, the quotable lines, the iconic scenes, these craft a narrative about how amazing Hill and the other gangsters are.  “Sure,” the film seems to be saying, “they’re bad, but aren’t they incredible?  I mean, you can’t make characters like these up!”  But is this true?  Without Scorsese’s virtuosity, we’d just have a pack of creeps, all rather boring in the rare moments when they weren’t disgusting, and unfortunately that’s pretty commonplace.  If the filmmakers indeed got this, they provide no moment of jarring clarity, no piercing break in the masquerade where the aesthetic pyrotechnics die down long enough for the ugliness and banality to wash over us.  And while it can be problematic to judge a work of art by the reactions of audiences, the giddy fanboy tone I’ve often picked up from admirers of Goodfellas doesn’t suggest the film is prompting much in the way of introspection.  To return to the concept of moral critique, plenty will say the film has no obligation to do any of the things I wanted it to.  True enough, but I think it would have been a much better and more meaningful film if it had.

And so, as I watched a cruel man who hurt people suffer the horrific fate of not being able to get his favorite type of pasta anymore, I thought a lot about that mailman.  Hopefully he was OK.  In any event, and for what little it’s worth, best wishes to him and his family.  As for Hill, who cares?