On one level, yes. But the story is about them, and it’s glamorized. You wouldn’t watch a movie about losers. Message is these people are worth watching, their story worth telling. It was well done though.
Discussion
The wise guys are always so likeable. Loved that too in The Sopranos, where the first few seasons you get charmed by how funny they are. But then suddenly they reveal how they were total scum all along.
Probably how it feels getting caught up with these type of guys for real.
yeah, was like — here’s a story about how funny and crazy these degenerate sociopaths are! And that was really all there was to it.
Do not agree with that at all. Movies are always about interesting people in interesting situations - you said it yourself.
The mob was comprised of very interesting people because they lived by their own rules, but as it is shown, they’re objectively pieces of shit.
Goodfellas shows that they all pay a price for the way that they live and the movie tells that story. There is nothing glamorous about being in prison or being a strung out paranoid loser drug addict. Nothing glamorous about worrying about getting murdered by your only friends or getting executed by your own people. Nothing glamours about being in witness protection.
That’s where these guys all end up, and Goodfellas is a movie about that arc. To me it’s just telling the story. Anyone who watches that movie and likes the characters or roots for them is an asshole. They’re scum bags of the highest order.
They are interesting because the movie glamorizes them. Even the prison scenes have them cooking good food and making a big deal of it. Are mobsters really that interesting? Or have they been sold to us as interesting?
The characters were glamorized at first but ultimately bereft of anything redeeming. Henry Hill was a loser, and it made no difference that he testified against his benefactor because his benefactor was a scumbag too. There was no sense of betrayal because the moral stakes were so low.
“Scorsese insists, as he has for years, that his films do not glorify violence, but express the fear he felt growing up on a Lower East Side ruled by Italian-American dynasties.” -from the article “Conversations with Martin Scorsese” 😂😂
That was how they lived, in prison or otherwise. So that’s what is shown. I’m not sure why you’re conflating glamorization with their lifestyle, which was decadent in many regards, but also completely reprehensible foundationally. I just watched this movie a month ago and it was very obvious that it’s the opposite of glamorized, it’s showing monsters. It is crystal clear in the movie that their lives are not enviable at all and they’re nothing more than low-bottom scum bags.
And obviously, yes, mobsters are interesting to most people. There have been countless movies and books about mobsters that have done very well in the mainstream. The market has proven that people are interested in mobsters.
The market finds mobsters interesting because while many dull people are also evil scumbags, their evil is juxtaposed with glamor, money, nice things. And I buy Scorcese’s rationale — it really does seem like he’s revealing a traumatic and paranoid world, and he does it well. I was just wondering the effect of being exposed to sensationalized and glamorized yet well made renditions of someone else’s trauma on me over several decades.