What else could I possibly call this one except: 'As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster.'

It’s easy to take Goodfellas for granted. Like Breathless or Rio Bravo, it is a film that has become so ingrained in the cultural firmament, its influence has reached so far and deep, that you forget just how radical the film was when it came out, how pervasive its style and content have become. In many ways, we are living in a post-Goodfellas world, in the same way we’re living in a post-Jaws, post-Star Wars world—the three defining American films of the past half century. (This isn’t, like, a researched dissertation so don’t yell at me about this assertion, if you disagree. But feel free to praise if you do.)

Let’s start here: Goodfellas is crazy good, fellas. It is the first real mafia movie of Martin Scorsese’s career, which is shocking given that he was already associated with the genre. But Mean Streets is about boys around the periphery of organized crime but are really scofflaws, and Raging Bull—those guys are just Italian.

But Goodfellas is really about the structure of the mafia, how you start in it, how you work your way up, how you do or don’t get made. We take it for granted now, but this had never been done before in this way in the American cinema. This wasn’t a fictional kingpin in New York or Miami, this wasn’t about the streets of New York 100 years ago. This was about The Mafia. Real guys in a real New York family. And then suddenly, the 90s were full of movies like this, movies that wanted to be Goodfellas.

So: Goodfellas is based on the memoir of Henry Hill (played by Ray Liotta at his most beautiful), a mobster in post-war New York with ties to the Lucchese crime family. The film chronicles his life from his teenage years parking cars for the Ciceros (based on the real life Varios—capos in the Lucchese regime), through his entire twentysomething career in crime, his friendships with Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) and Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci), and his volatile marriage to Karen (Lorraine Bracco—goddess!).

There had been made, of course, by 1990, incredibly graphic crime movies, but Scorsese takes it a step further in terms of the banal brutality—think of the opening of the film. We open in medias res, Henry, Jimmy, and Tommy are driving in the dark and they keep hearing a banging, so they pull over. They open the trunk and Tommy immediately lunges and stabs a guy who’s in there several times—he still has a huge ass knife on his person. The casualness of the violence is unsettling.

This happens in a single wide shot—just like later when we see Henry beat the shit out of the guy who lives across the street from Karen. We see Henry approach and then start wailing on the guy in his driveway in one shot. The anticipation from seeing Henry walk across the street doesn’t have quite the payoff as we’re expecting. The lack of any cut makes the moment brutal and ugly. Henry hits him over and over and over, and because of the way it’s shot, we want it to stop.

But back to the opening scene, right after Tommy stabs the guy in the trunk, Jimmy shoots him, and this happens in a quick succession of shots—this is what the people want to see. The quick cuts detaches the audience from the truth of what’s going on. This makes violence fun. This gives the audience a sense of relief. They don’t have to sit with the reality, but can just revel in the bang bang.

Goodfellas is the first movie in Scorsese’s oeuvre that implicates the audience in the violence, where the violence is not only both realistic and grotesque concurrently, but where the style of the acts of violence on display is itself a commentary on the bloodlust of the American audience. He would deepen and expand this theme for the rest of his career, perhaps arriving finally at its logical conclusion in Killers of the Flower Moon, a movie whose every violent act is anti-entertainment, repellent and pathetic. Goodfellas is just the first step of this 30-year-plus journey, and as such, a lot of the violence is still a lot of fun! There are moments of commentary but mostly the film gives the audience what it wants—guilt-free, fun violence, which is why it remains his most popular film.

It’s also the first time that Scorsese made one of these films that is just bursting with plot and incident, a form that would also continue in his work, leaping through decades of characters’ lives at a breakneck pace, yet never feeling rushed. Every moment is perfectly calibrated, never skimping on either plot or character. We get a full sense of Henry Hill’s childhood in just about eleven minutes. We get a full sense of Henry and Karen falling in love in about five and a half minutes. Somehow, inexplicably, it works.

The film is also incredibly gay. Actively, intentionally gay. And that’s why we’re all here. When we first see Henry all grown up, the camera covets him, as Marty’s camera often does with beautiful men; a slow pan up his entire body, his silky suit, and we first see him with the famous eyeliner that Liotta wears to show off his eyes. He’s gorgeous and we want to fuck him—even the cishet men who watch the film and don’t realize that they want to fuck him, want to fuck him.

The film is about the performance of masculinity, as seen in the film’s most famous scene, Tommy busting Henry’s balls—“I'm funny how, I mean, funny like I'm a clown, I amuse you? I make you laugh, I'm here to fuckin' amuse you?” It’s okay for Henry to laugh like a hyena at whatever Tommy’s saying, but Henry pointing it out explicitly, “you’re a pistol, you’re really funny,” somehow emasculates Tommy. He doesn’t want his identity to be “funny.” He wants his identity to be dangerous. So he makes it dangerous.

All of these men are in drag, though—with the polyester suits (Ray Liotta’s pants cup his ass perfectly, btw), the rings, the coiffed hair. But if you called it out as “drag,” your life would be in danger. To quote Barbra Streisand every third paragraph in her memoir, it’s the dichotomy…

Everything else I have to say has been said before, by smarter people. So I’ll leave you with one more stray thought: I was really struck this viewing by the way Liotta’s speech rhythms are similar to Leonardo DiCaprio’s in his Scorsese pictures. Is that Scorsese’s strong hand in direction? Did DiCaprio study Liotta? Is it just a coincidence? Possibly a combination of all three. Francesca, if you read my blog, please find out and report back. xx