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“Why Don't You Go Down to Wall Street and Get Some Real Crooks?”: Capitalism and Masculinity in GoodFellas , Casino , and The Wolf of Wall Street

2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 75; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/19346018.75.2.04

1934-6018

Ciara Moloney,

Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory

across twenty-three years, martin scorsese directed three films—GoodFellas (1990), Casino (1995), and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)—that employ similar narrative structures and stylistic devices to explore variations on the same themes: class aspiration, greed, and masculinity in twentieth-century America. Though not a trilogy in the formal sense, the films are discursively linked, with Casino mirroring and expanding on GoodFellas and with The Wolf of Wall Street likewise engaging with GoodFellas and Casino. With extensive voice-over and a pop soundtrack, each film presents a breakneck-paced rise and fall of a criminal, with huge gulfs in each character's relative social status: in GoodFellas, Henry (Ray Liotta) is a low-level gangster; in Casino, Ace (Robert De Niro) is a professional gambler turned casino manager; in The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) runs his own stock brokerage firm. Each film is a period piece that uses historical crimes to create a time-displaced critique of the functioning of the contemporary economy. Each film also deals incisively with various forms of masculinity, particularly hypermasculinity, through the prisms of class, ethnicity, violence, and consumerism.One of the most noted features of GoodFellas is how it irresistibly draws viewers into its world, sweeping them up in the exhilaration of “the life.” Chronicling the rise and fall of low-level gangster Henry Hill, from its opening moments, GoodFellas uses an exciting pace, with an almost continuous aural collage of pop and rock songs and extensive first-person voice-over to convey the attractiveness of the mafia. Kathleen Murphy writes about GoodFellas’ “kinetic energy” and “terrible, tawdry glamour”: “We're taken in at our own risk, hooked on the film's speed, the power of its sights and sounds” (25). Much of the early parts of the film are essentially an extended montage, stitched together with pop music and Liotta-as-Henry's lively voice-over narration. Because of this kinetic style, many critics interpret Henry's view of the mafia as Scorsese's and interpret the film as ambiguous or amoral in its portrayal of the gangster characters. Murphy directly connects GoodFellas’ speed and energy to its apparent amorality: the film is too “subversive” to make moral judgments on its characters, instead “celebrating energy and style wherever found . . . Whether he or she is in the service of good or evil becomes moot” (25). Dean A. Kowalski uses Henry and the other gangsters to illustrate that justice is not “its own reward” (38), claiming that there is no one, given the choice, who would not lead a life like theirs: “Henry has virtually free rein to do what he wishes, and he becomes connected, respected, and affluent doing so” (33). But GoodFellas is a film with distinct moral clarity, centrally about the value of justice for its own sake. The viewer's identification with Henry and Karen (Lorraine Bracco) does not muddy the film's moral outlook but is central to it.The viewer becomes not a passive spectator but an accomplice. The audience acts as Henry and Karen's confidant, to whom they speak directly, like a close friend. The first shot after the opening credits is of young Henry looking through blinds at the mafia-run cabstand across the street; the close-up on his eye zooms out to show his face in profile. As Alex Dabertin notes, in the darkness with the outside lights on Henry's face, the shot clearly mirrors Norman Bates looking through the peephole at Marion Crane in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960). This association hints at aspects of Henry's character: like Norman Bates, he is not to be trusted; he is just as consumed by a different form of lust—in this case, for cars, gold rings, money, and power. But more importantly, the shot also mirrors the cinemagoer in a dark room watching a bright screen, thus implicating the viewers in that lust, as they too are likely taken in by the mafia's glamour. In making the viewer complicit in the characters’ actions, the film's critiques of capitalism and masculinity not only have greater impact; they also emphasize the viewer's role in their propagation. Acknowledging and exploiting the glamour and appeal of the gangster creates the space in which to destroy those associations.By seducing the viewers into this world and implicating them in the characters’ actions, the film creates empathy with characters who would typically be dehumanized as part of the criminal working classes. Instead, George Guida writes, GoodFellas reveals “to the public the ostensible savage's psychological complexity and high degree of civilisation” (6). As Carl Freedman writes, the first-person psychological subjectivity is balanced against a more naturalistic objectivity, allowing the audience to see events from Henry and Karen's perspectives but also beyond them (48). Henry says in voice-over that he and his family were respected in the neighborhood due to his involvement with the mafia, who acted as the police force for people who could not go to the police, while the simultaneous visual narrative is of child-Henry carrying out orders to petrol-bomb some cars. The voice-over ironizes the image, creating a gap between Henry's subjective view of “the life” and his reality. The film asks viewers to empathize with the characters and their decisions while maintaining a critical distance for moral judgment.Henry is raised in a working-class Irish and Italian American family in Brooklyn. Rather than being born into the mafia's aristocracy as depicted in films like The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), Henry is not born into the mafia at all, but instead just happens to live across the street from a cabstand operated by gangsters, Freedman notes (45). Henry describes thinking as a child that being a gangster would be better than being president of the United States, but as Leighton Grist highlights, “the latter is not remotely an option” (108). A working-class Catholic growing up in the 1950s, Henry is excluded from the corridors of political power: although the religious barrier to the presidency would be broken just a few years later, it would be broken by a Harvard-educated heir to a political dynasty. Freedman points out that Henry's examples of how being a gangster is better than being president are “pathetically modest” (45): they can double-park without getting a ticket and play cards all night without anyone calling the police. But for Henry, even these modest privileges represent a level of social mobility and a sense of belonging he has no other obvious means to achieve. “Within Henry's world,” Bambi Haggins writes, “this was his best shot and he took it” (448). Henry later describes “people who worked shitty jobs for bum paychecks” as “dead.” For Henry, escaping the working-class poverty in which he was raised—his father was always “pissed that he made such lousy money . . . pissed that there were seven of us living in a tiny house”—is a prerequisite to living at all.Henry is perceived by himself and others as pulling himself up by his own bootstraps. Prizing individualism and complete self-reliance, bootstraps rhetoric, as analyzed by Kevin B. Smith and Lorene H. Stone, holds that a capitalist economy readily provides opportunities for all and that financial success can be achieved through hard work and initiative (94). GoodFellas ironizes this rhetoric by applying it to a criminal context. Sometimes Henry's actions parallel that of a typical corporate employee who would be praised for overcoming his working-class background: in the Copacabana scene, he is networking, exchanging pleasantries, and using his connections. He sits in on negotiations about Paulie (Paul Sorvino) partnering in the Bamboo Lounge and coordinates deliveries on Paulie's behalf. He works his way up from a part-time job after school to a lucrative full-time position. His criminal activities are legitimized in voice-over with bootstraps rhetoric: Karen says, “None of it seemed like crimes. It was more that Henry was enterprising. That he and the guys were making a few bucks hustling, while other men were sitting on their asses waiting for handouts.” In an ironic juxtaposition, this voice-over accompanies images of Henry and Tommy (Joe Pesci) robbing a truck driver at gunpoint. Grist reads GoodFellas as a historically displaced critique of the Reagan and Bush administrations (103–04), and Karen's words evoke the rhetoric pioneered by Ronald Reagan to attack the New Deal–Great Society welfare state. In 1964, Reagan urged voters to support Barry Goldwater by asking that they “resist the temptation to get a government handout” (“A Time for Choosing” 5), and as governor of California, Reagan described welfare programs as rewarding “people for not working” (“Second Inaugural Address”). By evoking Reagan's anti-welfare rhetoric about the laziness of those accepting “handouts” to justify gangsters’ criminal activities, GoodFellas exposes the lie at the heart of the notion of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps: the capitalist economy does not readily provide opportunities for all. Not only was the mafia the most achievable avenue available to Henry for the kind of social mobility that Reagan posited as available to all, but it is obvious that had Henry been born in different circumstances, he would be applying his skills in networking and negotiating in legal business. Unlike his friends Jimmy (Robert DeNiro), who Henry says “actually enjoys” stealing, and Tommy, who lashes out violently at slight provocations, Henry does not appear to enjoy stealing or killing for its own sake, only the material comforts these acts provide him. Henry became a criminal simply because he believed in the American dream, and crime was the most available path for him to pursue it.But even as he embraces the ideology of the American dream, Henry does not get to achieve it. Although he becomes cash-rich, he does not transcend his class. As Freedman writes, Henry remains a part of the criminal world's proletariat, having, for example, to “personally perform the tricky, dangerous labor of arson” (47). The action takes place not in elite backrooms but in public spaces with minimal privacy: city streets, bars, restaurants, airports, and prisons (Freedman 45). Henry is of low rank within the rigidly hierarchal mafia, and his mobility has a defined ceiling: he can never become a “made man” because he is half Irish. Grist notes the mafia's being “racially exclusive” as problematic from a left-liberal perspective, because of the film's often nostalgic tone effectively romanticizing racial exclusivity (114). But this racial exclusivity is used to deflate the nostalgia, reminding the audience that although the characters may be othered due to their class and, in the period, their ethnicity, they participate in racial exclusivity and supremacy. This reminder is provided throughout the film, including when Henry uses anti-Black slurs, when Tommy chastises a girl for expressing attraction to Sammy Davis Jr., and, in a context with more ambiguous power dynamics, when Karen has Henry pretend to be Jewish when meeting her parents.Othered ethnic whites in GoodFellas propagate the system of racial classification and hierarchy, rather than finding common cause with each other and with people of color against that system, which primarily benefits white Protestants. The nostalgic tone is both most clearly established and deconstructed through the film's use of music. Early on, as the viewer is seduced into “the life,” there is a stream of 1950s crooners and 1960s girl groups. Over time, the style and tone of the music shifts, until Henry gets arrested and it stops altogether. When the music returns at the end credits, it is Frank Sinatra's “My Way,” but as covered by Sid Vicious: the punk cover reveals a supposedly triumphant, nostalgic song rooted in a midcentury Italian America to be a snotty ode to self-centeredness.The film's critique of gangsters’ racism, greed, and violence counters Larissa M. Ennis's assessment that GoodFellas attempts to revalorize white masculinity during the multicultural 1990s by fabricating a history that casts ethnic white men as victims in a “fantasy of shared trauma” (174). Instead, GoodFellas depicts both the oppression of what Ennis calls the “off-white” (174) working class in the mid-twentieth century and their complicity in racial exclusivity and superiority, which foreshadows their assimilation into normative whiteness. Both sides of this are captured when Tommy dates a woman who does not want to go out alone with him because he is Italian: “You fucking believe that? In this day and age! . . . A Jew broad! Prejudiced against Italians!” Henry's entry into the mafia and the sharp boundary line for his ascension within it are both inextricably linked to his ethnicity. He is white, but not the right kind of white: in the mainstream world, he is too Italian, and in the criminal world, he is not Italian enough.Although Henry gains significant material comforts from crime, he does not gain the financial security and status of bourgeois wealth. Karen proudly shows off their gaudy, ostentatious decor, bought with the profits of Henry's drug-dealing, including an imported table that she brags “came in two pieces.” Although these items are likely expensive, they are aesthetically far from the “tasteful” luxury of the ruling class. Despite these displays of consumption, Henry lacks significant assets: Freedman highlights Henry's need for Karen's mother to re-mortgage her house to raise bail (50). During a police search, Karen flushes cocaine Henry had planned to sell down the toilet, and afterward he says to her, “That's all the money that we had, Karen! I was depending on that!” Indeed, Henry's financial success consistently manifests in ways that are showy but not especially meaningful. In the Copacabana scene, perhaps the moment most illustrative of the heady exhilaration of “the life,” Henry gives “twenty dollars each” to the various acquaintances he sees. Yet when Henry and Karen marry, they live with Karen's parents, an arrangement that must be for financial reasons since Henry finds it stifling and regularly stays out all night. Outside the context of the mafia-connected world, even these showy, shallow displays of wealth are out of his reach: when Henry tries to pay his bill at the beach club in cash, Karen must explain to him that he must sign for it.Grist points to the scene at the beach club as foregrounding the classed boundaries of Henry's masculine authority, placing his “economic and cultural capital as useless outside its working-class context” (110–11). Juxtaposed with all Henry risks to achieve this, including a near-constant threat of violence, he has given up his soul not for the whole world but for not “a great deal more than the opportunity to double-park beside a fire hydrant. And at the end . . . he has lost even that” (Freedman 50). Yet to Henry, the greater level of consumption he enjoys is unambiguously worthwhile—in comparison not to the wealth, security, and status of the upper classes, but to the working-class poverty that was his only other option. Near the start of the film, Henry's father belts him for not going to school. In voice-over, Henry tells the audience, “I didn't care . . . The way I saw it, everybody has to take a beating some time.” Henry's choice, then, is between two lives marked by violence and exclusion, and he chooses the one wherein he can buy his wife an imported table that comes in two pieces.The mafia in GoodFellas is, in essence, a corporation. This is made most explicit near the film's end, when all the gangsters are being arrested and a voice in the background is heard saying, “Why don't you go down to Wall Street and get some real fucking crooks?” This line emphasizes the similarity between mafia operations and financial capitalism, the post-industrial form of capitalism driven by the finance, insurance, and real estate sectors’ extraction of rents, rather than industrial capital formation (see Hudson). Moreover, the parallels between illegal and sanctioned capitalist methods are explored even more fully in Casino and especially The Wolf of Wall Street. The difference between the mafia and finance capitalists is primarily one of class: the line highlights the irony that “crooks” on Wall Street will not be arrested for crimes similar to or more serious than those of working-class gangsters like Henry. Although the mafia is viewed as a family or tight-knit friendship group by Henry—he explains being “made” not in corporate terms, but as meaning “you belong to a family and a crew”—the mafia proves itself to be fundamentally about profit generation and protection of those at the top.In Stiffed, Susan Faludi asserts that the postwar American man was promised that the sense of belonging and purpose so many men had experienced in the armed services during World War II could be found in the corporate workplace, as a reward for their loyalty. But “[i]n truth, the fix was in from the start: corporate America's promise to continue the World War II GI's wartime experience of belonging, of meaningful engagement in a mission, was never authentic . . . What these companies were offering was a secure job, not a vital role. And ultimately even that would prove a lie” (Faludi 29). The offer of camaraderie parallels Henry's initial experience with the mafia. He describes his attraction to the mafia in terms of belonging: “People like my father could never understand, but I was a part of something. I belonged.” In addition to the consumer comforts he gains, a feeling of belonging to something larger than himself is one of Henry's main motivations. But ultimately, the promises of community, loyalty, and belonging are illusionary.Henry's self-conception is bound up in the very thing that keeps the loyalty and belonging he craves outside of his grasp: hypermasculinity. Donald L. Mosher and Mark Sirkin define hypermasculinity as a personality constellation based on entitlement to callous sex, perceiving violence as manly and danger as exciting (150). Mosher and Silvan Tomkins further define machismo as a worldview that “chauvinistically exalts male dominance by assuming masculinity, virility, and physicality to be the ideal essence of real men who are adversarial warriors competing for scarce resources (including women . . . ) in a dangerous world” (64). Outside of some small exceptions tied to Italian culture, most notably the gangsters’ frequent cooking, the mafia in GoodFellas is an overtly hypermasculine organization in which machismo is the norm. There is an expectation that gangsters will cheat on their wives, with Henry saying casually, “Saturday night was for wives, but Friday night at the Copa was always for the girlfriends.” Violence and danger are constant, threatening to erupt even in peaceful moments. Henry explains this culture of violence in voice-over: “You got out of line, you got whacked. Everyone knew the rules. But sometimes, even if people didn't get out of line, they'd get whacked. Hits just became a habit for some guys. It didn't take anything to get yourself killed.”The culture of constant threat that Henry describes corresponds to Mosher and Tomkins's point that the “macho” man must “compel enemy men to submit through violence” (64). When Billy Batts (Frank Vincent), a “made” man recently released from prison, makes a comment about Tommy having once been a shoeshine boy, Tommy and Jimmy beat him close to death as Henry watches. Having been disrespected, Tommy reasserts his masculine authority through violence. In the world of the film, Tommy's transgression in this instance is not murder but violating the mafia hierarchy and killing someone of higher status. Tommy is never punished for murdering young bartender Spider (Michael Imperioli), but in retaliation for killing a made man, he is shot in the head, becoming an enemy compelled to submit through violence.The group dynamics of “macho” men that Mosher and Tomkins describe are evident in GoodFellas. Young men are socialized to be hypermasculine, and expression of fear is inhibited through dominance and contempt (Mosher and Tomkins 67), such as when Henry sees a man shot for the first time and is chastised for wasting eight aprons on plugging his wound. In hypermasculine culture, rejection by parents makes acceptance by male peers much more important (Mosher and Tomkins 71), as is evident when Henry is beaten by his father and becomes more engrossed in “the life.” Most significantly, Mosher and Tomkins explain that when a man is accepted into the hypermasculine group, there is laughter and affectionate banter but underlying tension: “You can smile with your friends and relax . . . but not too much since someone may be testing the pecking order” (73). A sense of constant threat pervades the dynamic between Henry and his friends, where a fun conversation could explode into violence without warning. Freedman sees impending violence as central to GoodFellas. He explains: “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” (55).The unrelenting pressure in hypermasculine culture is visualized most famously in the “how am I funny?” scene, in which Tommy apparently takes great offense at Henry saying that he is funny after Tommy tells an amusing story. The atmosphere becomes tense as the chorus of laughter withers to nothing, and Tommy becomes more and more riled up. Henry calls his bluff, and the laughter returns. But violence really could break out over such a minor slight: just moments later, Tommy hits a man over the head with a glass bottle after the man asks Tommy to pay his bill. Later in the film, he murders bartender Spider for telling him to “go fuck himself.” This behavior is not significantly outside the norm for the group: Jimmy goads Tommy into shooting Spider, and although Jimmy is annoyed and angry with Tommy for doing so, Henry is the only character who seems sincerely upset by the event.Faludi notes that a consumerist culture leaves little room for the positive, productive aspects of traditional masculinity, and so violence becomes a demonstration of a “crude semblance of masculinity”: violence displays the traits of traditional male utility, “strength, decisiveness, courage, even skill” (37), but without constructive direction or purpose. For the gangsters in GoodFellas, masculinity must be asserted through domination. It can be asserted in part through spending, as when Henry gives twenty-dollar bills to the Copacabana staff, but the coding of consumerism as feminine prevents this practice from being the main means for demonstrating their masculinity. Henry purchases ostentatious home decor with his drug money, but this is presented as his providing for Karen, who shows it off to friends while Henry stands there quietly. Violence, then, becomes the primary site of masculine assertion, and so violence underpins every interaction between the male characters. This makes even the friendliest of relationships fundamentally adversarial rather than ones of community, loyalty, and belonging.On its release in 1995, Casino was met with muted praise: it was considered stylistically impressive but thematically and narratively derivative. In a typical review, Stanley Kauffman wrote, “Casino is only glitzy wheel-spinning . . . Three hours of it” (27). It uses similar stylistic devices to GoodFellas, including an extensive pop-song soundtrack, dual voice-over narration, and a nearly constantly moving camera, and has similar thematic concerns and narrative. Set in the 1970s and ’80s, it has a temporal overlap with GoodFellas, which is set primarily in the 1960s and ’70s. Robert Casillo writes that the critical consensus on Casino was that it was “overly dependent, even parasitic, upon Scorsese's earlier works, especially GoodFellas” (327). It has been called “old territory already travelled” (Bondanella 279), “GoodFellas removed to Las Vegas” (Friedman 175), and a “gorgeous but chilly surface” that leaves the viewer “hungry for drama” (Brode 267–68). The film's reliance on GoodFellas is often overstated. Casino is capable of standing on its own, but it does invite the viewer to read it alongside GoodFellas. The similarities between the films draw them into relation with one another, which illustrates their differences more clearly. As Grist writes, Casino reflects and elaborates on GoodFellas, revisiting “comparable thematic preoccupations” on a bigger canvas (217). Grist sees Casino as the final part in a gangster trilogy with Mean Streets and GoodFellas (217), but his inclusion of Mean Streets is forced: that film, primarily about a young Catholic man's struggle with his faith, has little thematically or structurally in common with GoodFellas and Casino outside of being in the gangster genre. It is notable that Grist was writing before the release of The Wolf of Wall Street, a film that revisits the same thematic preoccupations on an even larger canvas and closes the loop opened by GoodFellas and Casino in a manner much more befitting a trilogy. Scorsese's subsequent return to the gangster genre, The Irishman (2019), approaches similar broad themes—masculinity, capitalism, violence, greed—but its deliberate pace and focus on union politics distinguish it from the breakneck rise-and-fall stories of the greed trilogy.Whereas GoodFellas, set among street-level gangsters, implies similarities between the mafia and corporations, Casino blurs distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate business. Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro) is a mafia-connected professional gambler who is selected to operate the Tangiers casino in Las Vegas, bought by the mafia with a loan from the Teamsters Union. The criminal and legal aspects of Ace's enterprise are indistinct from one another: overtly criminal behavior, such as skimming the bosses’ cut off the top, is dependent on the smooth operation of the casino within the law. Ace seeks to be a successful businessman in the mainstream world through opportunities given to him through organized crime. This does not mean giving up the practices and values of the criminal world—violence, greed, at-all-costs ambition, and self-advancement—but simply applying them in a legal context. “Back home, they would have put me in jail for what I'm doing,” Ace says in voice-over while he receives an award from a country club. “But out here, they're giving me awards.” The transition from gangster to mainstream businessman is completed in The Wolf of Wall Street, in which the gangsters are a key part of the regular economy.The casino as depicted in the 1995 film is both a metaphor for and a manifestation of speculative capitalism. Casinos often have been deployed as a metaphor for contemporary financial speculation, notably by Susan Strange in her 1986 book Casino Capitalism. Grist sees Casino using this metaphor to create a historically displaced critique of the speculative booms of the 1990s, thus extending GoodFellas’ response to Reaganomics (219). Much as the casino is a place where money generates money without “passing through the reassuring filter of industry or the market economy” (Grist 218–19), financial derivatives and other speculative investments generate profit without productive interaction with the traditional economy. Ace emphasizes that the house always wins: “This is the end result of all the bright lights and the comped trips, of all the champagne and free hotel suites, and all the broads, and all the booze. It's all been arranged just for us to get your money. That's the truth about Las Vegas. We're the only winners. The players don't stand a chance.” Ace's depiction of gambling is criticized by Karen Jaehne, who writes that no casino would want a reputation for no one ever winning, as this would discourage potential customers. Yet Ace's declaration does not suggest that individual gamblers never win, but instead suggests that their winnings are dwarfed by the profit of the casino operators. Jaehne uses Ace's claim that only the house wins as evidence that underlying the film is a “puritanical distrust of gaming” (45). While she frames this distrust as an unconscious, reactionary impulse, the film carries a deeply embedded moral critique: not only of gambling, but also of speculation, which, as Ryan Gillespie outlines, has been fused with capitalism in law, material practice, and the American cultural imagination since the Gilded Age (365). Scorsese's film represents Las Vegas as emerging from and embedded in the broader capitalist system, not breaking from it. The film's depiction of casinos as being entirely profit-driven is simply a stark depiction of all for-profit industry, but especially the financial industries, where nothing is built or made, and money generates money.Intimately tied to Casino's critique of financial capitalism is its depiction of diverging forms of masculinity. Nicky (Joe Pesci), who is a working-class Italian American, participates in violent hypermasculinity similar to many of the characters in GoodFellas. Early in the film, he repeatedly stabs a man in the neck for speaking rudely to Ace. He regularly asserts his masculinity through violence, including putting a man's head in a vise and tightening it until his eye pops out. He is cavalier about burying bodies; he explains, “I mean, you gotta have the hole already dug before you show up with a package in the trunk. Otherwise, you're talking about a half hour or forty-five minutes of digging.” Ace, however, asserts his masculinity through his appearance and conspicuous consumption. The large number of expensive suits he owns is made conspicuous by their various colors,