Martin Amis on "Goodfellas"

Me, in my living room, holding up the October 1997 issue of Premiere. 

The actual 25th anniversary of the U.S. release of Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas isn't until September, but already it is being commemorated; there was a special screening at the Robert De Niro-spearheaded Tribeca Film Festival, a newly mastered Blu-ray disc is out (haven't watched yet; I've been busy), and my proposal for a making-of book on the movie was passed on by at least a dozen publishers in the past year. And I guess others are preparing their own appreciations, and starting on their research; hence, a post last night on Twitter from New York Post film critic Kyle Smith, asking "Where oh where can I get a copy of the Martin Amis essay on Goodfellas," and calling me out by name, as if I were perhaps some kind of underground Premiere archivist. 

Well. I did commission the Amis piece, for the 10th Anniversary special issue of Premiere (cover stars were Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, and Kevin Costner, deemed "The New Visionaries," well that didn't exactly pan out), and I edited said piece (actually not so much—I made one suggestion for an amendation, via fax, to Amis' agency, and got back a fax from M.A. telling me to go ahead with it—the assent did contain a hint of audible eyeroll as I recall—and then I didn't even make the change I had proposed, but at least if I wanted to I could say I had done something), and I do have the issue in my not insubstantial but hardly complete personal archive of Premiere print editions. 

The nearly 20-year print run of the magazine has never been digitized, and it's tiring to retell the story of why that's the case, and of how much I despise the individual who I hold responsible for the whole thing, etcetera. Every now and then I'll be looking for an old Premiere piece—one of my own, one of somebody else's; turns out it was a pretty good magazine overall, and a useful historical research resource—and I'll find that some enterprising soul with a lot of time on his or her hands has input the article (badly, in many cases, but that's a side hazard of amateurism in nearly every sense), which is considerate. Possibly not exactly legal but good God it's the Internet. 

The question of who actually has the rights to digitize the print run of Premiere is not one that I can answer, although I've sometimes thought about a crowd-funding campaign to do it myself. If such a thing ever got off the ground, inevitably someone would approach me and say, "You can't do that," which might be initially unpleasant but would also force the issue: shit would get sorted. 

In any event, I was up at around six this morning, and Amis' piece is pretty short (the David Foster Wallace piece on Terminator 2 that found a home in a U.K. bookstore house organ and is reprinted in Both Flesh And Not had originally been commissioned for this 10th Anniversary feature package, "10 Movies That Defined Our Decade" [cover line: "10 Movies That Rocked Our World"], but Dave, as was his wont, brought it in at WAY over the three-to-five-hundred-word length that our format for the package dictated, so we agreed to drop it rather than shoehorn it in, and Christopher Buckley ended up with the T2 piece which was aptly brief and crisp; Amis' essay is, hmm, let's see here, a hair under 500 words), so I figured rather than go out to Kinko's or something and scan a PDF of the thing, I'd just input it myself and put it up on my poor and often content-starved blog. So here it is. Thanks for the bug in my ear, Kyle Smith, and thanks to my now-neighbor Martin Amis. And apologies, maybe, to the Andrew Wylie Agency. 

It’s hardly news to say that Francis Ford Coppola made three movies about the mob. They form an obvious trilogy, purchasable in a video three-pack. Rather less obviously, Martin Scorsese is responsible for a mob trilogy too. The films are Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and Casino—with Mean Streets as a kind of poetic preamble or portent. 

Mario Puzo’s The Godfather is essentially trash: gripping trash, but still trash. In Coppola’s hands, the Puzo novel is, so to speak, rewritten by Nabokov, and the penny dreadful becomes an operatic masterpiece. The elevation is drastic, and brilliant, but it isn’t quite seamless. Puzo was cowriter on all three pictures, and his vulgar romanticism remains a contaminant. Although Coppola’s moral critique is both intelligent and severe, a laxity in the script accidentally allows the Corleones to be taken at their own evaluation. These men are not, or not simply, the murderous whores of Mammon; they also owe allegiance to a Puzoan fritto misto of honor, blood, uxoriousness, church attendance, and Sicily. In real life, of course, the mob had long abandoned such marginalia. After the Godfather craze, ludicrously, obeisances came back into gangster fashion, as postmodern accessories.

Somewhere along the way, Martin Scorsese, or his subconscious, made a crucial decision; his trilogy is nonfiction, based on first-person accounts. “True crime,” as a form, always entails a certain trade-off. You gain in authenticity, but you cannot rearrange the narrative to give it artistic cohesion, artistic shape. You are left with happenstance and inadvertence—with the messiness, the loose ends and false leads, that attend any human life. Scorsese, however, finesses the difficulty. His visual logic provides a guideline through the chaos. And for him, anyway, the mess is the message.

According to Nabokov, the artist doesn’t punish the gangster merely by staging his downfall—a “tiptoeing conspirator,” say, with his cocked handgun. The artist punishes the gangster through ridicule. In Goodfellas the antiheroes blunder through a terrible anticomedy of shootings and beatings, of stabbings and stompings, their lives an unexamined nightmare of contingency. Coppola portrays the mob as a trade union of warrior capitalists. Scorsese’s hoods are sociopaths trapped in a category mistake. And they don’t even get the joke. 

Scorsese has a literary model: Kafka. The influence is most obvious in After Hours, in which Kafka is explicitly quoted, but it also sustains Scorsese’s vision of the underworld. Nothing could be more Kafkaesque than the central tenet of mob life, which runs as follows: This man is your lifelong friend, but he may want to kill you for money; you have to understand that; that is “this thing of ours.” In its dealings with the cosa nostra, Scorsese’s camerawork displays all its inimitable edginess and urgency; but we shouldn’t overlook the director’s steely moral wit. His goons see mob culture as a vibrant alternative to the schmuckville of 9-to-5. Scorsese insists, however, that they are money’s slaves and money’s fools. And he has them bang to rights. 

Comments

[Pete Apruzzese]

That was refreshing to read, I remember when it first ran in the mag.

Lost all my Premiere back issues during a move in 2000, so if you ever do a crowd-funding digitization scheme put me down for 20 bucks.

[Monophylos]

I've cherished a half-baked idea that Scorsese meant "GoodFellas" to be a story about people who never grew up--a reverse "Godfather" in a way because "The Godfather" is framed as a coming-of-age story for Michael Corleone. Michael's entrance into mob life is depicted as a regrettable but necessary shedding of youthful naivete. Henry Hill, though, is introduced as a spellbound child who's fascinated with the mob life because of his thoroughly childlike view of what it means to be grown up: staying up all night, drinking, throwing money around, breaking all the little rules of life without fear. And not once does Hill really learn any better. Yeah, he's smart enough to realize when the game's up, but even at the very end he's still lamenting the loss of the gangster life in the same terms that he praised gangster life as a kid looking out his window.

[Jonathan W.]

"The artist punishes the gangster through ridicule. In Goodfellas the antiheroes blunder through a terrible anticomedy of shootings and beatings, of stabbings and stompings, their lives an unexamined nightmare of contingency. Coppola portrays the mob as a trade union of warrior capitalists. Scorsese’s hoods are sociopaths trapped in a category mistake. And they don’t even get the joke."

If Premiere were extant and could have a thirty year anniversary issue in 2017, Amis could resubmit this as a piece on The Wolf of Wall Street, which has upgraded the mob trilogy to a tetralogy. Gotta love tetralogies.

[andy]

I would be curious to see the new Blu-ray sometime...I remember finding the current one scrubbed and shiny, to a degree that just about ruined the experience for me. I like my movies to look like movies.

[Zach]

Terrific piece. The Kafka connection is especially acute. I wasn't aware that Amis was this good on cinema (actually, I'm not all that familiar with his prose in general, for reasons that all reflect rather poorly on me, when I consider them. But don't tell your new neighbor that.)

[other mike]

enjoyed the piece, wish it was longer in fact. i never looked at raging bull as a mob movie before even though their presence is obviously felt. but it does make sense when you think about it.

[Oliver_C]

"I wasn't aware that Amis was this good on cinema."

Certainly 'Saturn 3', for which he wrote the screenplay, never remedied his reputation.

[Petey]

"The nearly 20-year print run of the magazine has never been digitized, and it's tiring to retell the story of why that's the case, and of how much I despise the individual who I hold responsible for the whole thing, etcetera."

Arrange to somehow run into him at a bar. Put Atlantis on the jukebox. No jury would convict you.

[jamey]

Oh, dear. Literary types let loose on the movies are prone to projection and extravagance. The "Kafka" of After Hours comes entirely from the Joe Minion script -- which has a painful history of derivation itself -- and what Amis takes as a critique of gangster foolery is in fact a celebration.

Every Scorsese mob/crime film ends not with deliverance from this peculiar evil (or the "slavery" of its compulsions, in Amis' terms) but the horror of lawful ordinary life: Henry Hill in a bathrobe, stuck with egg noodles and ketchup; the obese consumer-gamblers of Las Vegas, moving toward the camera in a stampede of stupid cattle (the age of high-rollers is over); and a former master con man teaching tricks to the masses in self-improvement seminars.

Given the choice, there's little doubt which world the filmmaker, not just his goons, prefers.

[Petey]

"Given the choice, there's little doubt which world the filmmaker, not just his goons, prefers."

Yeah. I'll co-sign jamey's petition.

Martin Amis wrote some absolutely amazing books for the first twenty years of his career, but jamey's got his number here.

-----

In defense of Amis' broader thesis:

"According to Nabokov, the artist doesn’t punish the gangster merely by staging his downfall—a “tiptoeing conspirator,” say, with his cocked handgun. The artist punishes the gangster through ridicule."

And hence why Lubitsch's To Be Or Not To Be is the greatest Nazi film of all time. Them were gangsters...

[Clayton Sutherland]

"I would be curious to see the new Blu-ray sometime...I remember finding the current one scrubbed and shiny, to a degree that just about ruined the experience for me."

Interesting. I thought the Blu-ray looked rather soft and out-of-focus. Well, at least that shot early in the film where it pans across the street at night. Though the the long tracking shots are indeed impressive, I've always found the overall visuals of the film kind of muddled, and excessively grainy during the restaurant/bar sequences. Casino, to my recollection, had a much more conventionally polished look (of course, I greatly prefer Goodfellas as a film).

[Zach]

25 years in, and the tut-tutting over Scorsese's treatment of subjects hasn't abated. All in all, a compliment to the power of his art.

Of course there's an appeal to the thug life, and Scorsese is expert at dramatizing it. But to imagine that he isn't also aware of the price - in blood, in anxiety, in anything remotely resembling taste and self-awareness - is to miss at least half, maybe more, of those same movies. And that's not even touching the old fallacy of mistaking a filmmaker's subjects for surrogates.

I suspect that the same critical mentality holds The Age of Innocence and Hugo to be failures and aberrations, since there is no gangsterism to get Marty's motor running.

[Petey]

"25 years in, and the tut-tutting over Scorsese's treatment of subjects hasn't abated."

While I can't speak for jamey, why on earth would you assume either of us is "tut-tutting" Scorsese?

I'm not the Hays Code. I'm not the Socialist Realism Censorship Directorate. I'm not even the Twitter shaming hivemind. Only a government, a church, or a moron need their great art to be socially/morally redeeming.

I absolutely ADORE Goodfellas and Casino, and while I don't adore WoWS, I like it quite a bit.

I think Amis' analysis here is clearly incorrect, but I just don't understand why would that imply to you that I've got a problem with Scorsese or the movie...

[Zach]

"I think Amis' analysis here is clearly incorrect, but I just don't understand why would that imply to you that I've got a problem with Scorsese or the movie..."

Apologies if you got caught up in the crossfire, but my comment was mostly in response to the idea, per Jamey, that Scorsese was "celebrating" rather than "critiquing" the goon life. This strikes me as a patently false dichotomy, and what's more, it's the language of moral scolding. We've heard it before about Scorsese, plenty of times, and if there's some daylight between it and whatever Jamey is getting at, I'd be curious to know about it.

[Petey]

"Apologies if you got caught up in the crossfire, but my comment was mostly in response to the idea, per Jamey, that Scorsese was "celebrating" rather than "critiquing" the goon life."

Nope. Intentionally standing in the crossfire, cuz you're shooting at innocents. Like I said, I co-sign jamey's petition.

I certainly wouldn't phrase things in the terms you did, but to use Your Terms™, I do think Scorsese is clearly "celebrating" gangster life with notably more enthusiasm than he is "critiquing" gangster life. Both are there, of course, but the issue comes down to focus.

[jamey]

Zach, we're talking about the movies, not private morality. Of course gangsters are more a interesting and absorbing subject than law-abiding guys in bathrobes who go to work every day. Scorsese has always been attracted to characters on the verges.

And the energy he derives from personal violence is undeniable; Travis Bickle's blood bath stimulated his visual imagination in a way that, say, Newland Archer's dinner parties probably didn't, much as I (for one) enjoyed The Age of Innocence.

Anyway, nobody's a scold here. The real issue is/was the accuracy of Amis' analysis. I just can't see Goodfellas as a persuasive moral criticism of mob life. This isn't to say that Scorsese is a terrible person or actively endorses a murderous way of life. It's just that the ethical basis of art is dubious, at best, and movies in particular are wedded to sensory excitement....

[Glenn Kenny]

"This isn't to say that Scorsese is a terrible person or actively endorses a murderous way of life."
No, but it is to flirt, and coyly at that,with saying that. A provocation not quite as interesting as the cinematic one, which Scorsese is not unaware of: see "Scorsese on Scorsese," where he recalls talking with Jay Cocks about older gangster pictures and the both of them giving up and saying "We love these guys." The excitement of "the life" is depicted excitingly, yes, but if you can watch the last third of "Goodfellas" and not be oppressed by the ever-encroaching nightmare, well, that's interesting for you I guess. Amis' analysis is sound.

[Zach]

Well, then I hereby rescind my apology. Gotta point out, though, that those aren't my "terms." They're Jamey's - and yours, I suppose, if you're signing his petition.

If the issue is focus, then there is, clearly, as much focus on the horrors of gangster life as their is on its (dubious) pleasures, if not more. Take the great coke-and-helicopter-paranoia sequence from the end of Goodfellas,- it's exhilarating to watch, and I can easily imagine Marty and Thelma having a blast editing that together over Nilsson's music - but do you really imagine Marty sighing as saying, "now THAT'S living...."?

Or take, say, 90% of CASINO. It's the story of a workaholic hood who goes from disgruntled to miserable over the course of 3 hours, looking progressively more ridiculous along the way (those fucking glasses!) And yet it's consistently fascinating to watch. To imagine that this is in the same universe as admiration or celebration is kooky.

[Petey]

"No, but it is to flirt, and coyly at that,with saying that."

No. No. No. It really isn't.

To take a favorite "these men are nihilists. There's nothing to be afraid of" director of the moment, I ADORE Gaspar Noé's films. I don't think identifying him that way is to flirt, and coyly at that, in saying he's a 'terrible person or actively endorsing a murderous way of life.' But then again, I love Melancholia too, which I know offended Glenn.

Same with Scorsese's gangster movies. (And we can certainly fit Taxi Driver into the conversation.) I'm not flirting with criticizing Scorsese as a person, (or as a director) by saying the films have highly 'problematic' social/moral content. They're fucking great movies. They're high art. Seriously, why are we the Hays Code?

"The excitement of "the life" is depicted excitingly, yes, but if you can watch the last third of "Goodfellas" and not be oppressed by the ever-encroaching nightmare, well, that's interesting for you I guess."

Right. Again, the "critique" is truly not absent. It's really there. No joke. But hell, even during the last third, the Monkey Man sequence, (even more Rolling Stones, Glenn), is damn good fun. Wouldn't want to live it, but love watching it. Again, just an issue of overall focus. (You help make my point with the Cocks reference, Glenn.)

-----

Tangentially, I'm an enormous fan of The Sopranos because the show is so EXPLICITLY about the tension between "celebrating" and "critiquing" gangster life. That core thematics helps makes the show quite interesting. (And I don't think that says anything about David Chase 'as a person', positive or negative.)

[jamey]

I'm sorry, but it sounds like some here are confusing storytelling with "real life". Debates about depicting evil (antiquated term, but please follow me a little) are as old as literature itself -- for example, William Blake complaining that Milton (of Paradise Lost, circa 1650) was "of the Devil's party", but didn't know it, because he depicted hell with far more eloquence and urgency than heaven.

If the subject matter or it treatment is so offensive -- say, Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Will -- that audiences can't the watch the film without revulsion, then we have problem. Beyond that, there's a life's worth of leeway. Take the extended coke/copter sequence of Goodfellas, since Zach brought it up. For me, it has no serious moral implications. It's exciting and visceral as cinema, but is a zero for instructive or cautionary value. I'm not watching this movie to be more morally informed. The only bad morality here would be a cheat, by the filmmakers.

The Sopranos is another interesting example. Recall the episode where the Jewish shrink tells Carmela that she can't say she wasn't told and that the practice of modern psychology accounts for mall behavior and ethnic pride parades? This is clearly the filmmakers having it both ways -- presenting Tony Soprano as a fundamentally sympathetic character despite the fact that people like him, in real life, are unspeakable monsters, as the shrink points out.

I guess I'm arguing that you can draw no conclusions about the character or moral nature of the artist, by judging the work -- unless the product reflects outright pathology. The fact that Scorsese's films are invigorated by mob life and violent behavior says nothing about Scorsese personally. There's no coyness here if, like me, you don't believe that narrative has instructive value.

[Glenn Kenny]

At this point I'd be delighted to agree to disagree.

[Phil P]

Between the Hays Code and complete moral anarchy there is actually a rather large middle ground. To suggest that the moral viewpoint of the artist is irrelevant is something nobody believes. How many people today would say that the racism of Birth of a Nation doesn't tarnish it artistically? But getting back to gangster movies, I think both The Godfather and Goodfellas are masterpieces that show both the attractive and the repellant aspects of the criminal life. The problem with the Hays Code viewpoint is that it's narrow minded and simplistic. But now and then I have seen crime films that for me cross the line in sympathetic depiction of criminals. What I find strange is that so many people feel they have to apologize about expressing a moral viewpoint at all.

[jamey]

If you really want to consider Scorsese's gangster films as moral critiques, what exactly is the rationale for making mass-market movies about the moral failings of persons and organizations which either don't exist any longer, have no basis in reality (notwithstanding the "journals", Travis Bickle? really?) or have such marginal applicability to the life of moviegoers that they can only seen be as curiosities (or. more pertinently, entertainment)?

Turn Marty into a moralist, and then you're in *real* trouble, because if viewed in the light, the movies are preposterously self-absorbed and diversionary. Major crimes today are committed by politicians, corporate boards and investment bankers, not loners, psychopathic mobsters or con men normalized to the requirements of mass-market storytelling and celebrity glamour. Similarly, nobody improves the moral climate by making mass-market movies featuring celebrities who commit crimes, accompanied by pop songs. Seen as moral commentary, these movies are ridiculous.

There may or may not be a need to apologize "about expressing a moral viewpoint" -- depending on whether the person or the work expressing that moral viewpoint has any moral authority in the matter. Politicians, hedge fund managers, Hollywood and celebrities express moral viewpoints all the time. The problem is, it's bunk.

You really don't want to take this road. Turn Scorsese into a moralist, and there's too much he can't answer for. It's the movie business, for Christ sake.

[Petey]

"But now and then I have seen crime films that for me cross the line in sympathetic depiction of criminals. What I find strange is that so many people feel they have to apologize about expressing a moral viewpoint at all."

You certainly don't have to apologize for rejecting certain art based on a moral viewpoint. Roger Ebert, a reviewer I generally loved dearly, tended to give zero star ratings to a large number of films I adored, pretty much exclusively on moral grounds. And those zero star ratings made me rush out to see those movies, because those ratings were reserved for highly EFFECTIVE films that morally offended him, and the effectiveness was a positive blurb for me.

But as far as I'm concerned, Ebert didn't have to apologize, I don't have to apologize, and neither do you. We're all free to demand different things from our fiction. My point here is not to determine the proper role of morality in fiction, but merely to say that Martin Amis is wrong, wrong, wrong about Goodfellas.

(Very tangentially, curious if you liked Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley book, or if the immersive power of cinema makes things different for you...)

-----

"The Sopranos is another interesting example ... This is clearly the filmmakers having it both ways..."

I think it's much more than having it both ways. I think the series was, at its very core, ABOUT the audience's tension between feeling excitement and repugnance in gangster life.

It's why the series starts with Melfi meeting Tony, and ends with Melfi closing the door on Tony. (With the audience's intended panic attack at the very end serving just as epilogue.) Melfi is our surrogate. And not only do Melfi and the other psychiatrists push this theme continuously, but so do other characters and situations, repeatedly.

"You really don't want to take this road. Turn Scorsese into a moralist, and there's too much he can't answer for."

I'll co-sign again.

[andy]

I'll just say: yeah. Like I said about Wolf of Wall St--I wasn't going to see it bc it didn't look like having that guy glamorized would appeal to me. At all. Goodfellas does. Other things do. Some things don't. The idea that Wolf or Goodfellas needs to have a critique implicit/ explicit or it's therefore unconscionable (or, alternately, to put words in um, someone's mouth: "How dare you say it doesn't!"), misses the mark. That guy in Wolf looks like a gross douchebag, and I don't care about giving him the time of day. The best mobster (or whatever) movies make us care to see douchebags glamorized, basically on the basis of charisma and kicks, despite our basic disapproval. If someone is upset about Wolf or Goodfellas bc they feel they are amoral--great for them. If someone needs to stake the validity of the films on the idea that NO YOU ARE MISTAKEN--um, great for you. Most people don't care; we're all adults and we manage the inherent complexity of these films just fine.

[Petey]

Richard Brody disagrees with the Amis analysis of Goodfellas...

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/scorseses-achievement-with-goodfellas

[Peter Lehmann]

Ah,catholicism vs. protestantism. I will write the essay if nobody else has done it yet (which I don't believe for a second, but I will check the Scorsese literature.)
And it is not just about the criminal code - remember King of Comedy.
Not sure about Kafka yet, but otherwise Amis has it right.