Goodfellas Analysis

again, this sense of vulnerability is a handycap which is in films such as The Godfather is something that is attributed only to the female protagonist.

Madden said that: „Scorsese’s film work often deals with male psychology, the crises and struggle of masculinity, often tied into Catholic guilt or Italian American identity.“ In order to understand why he deals with these struggles we have to be aware of the autobiographical connection that Scorsese has with the worlds that he created on screen.

A great example is the interpretation of breaking the fourth wall In Goodfellas which could be compared to what Diego Velasquez did in the painting Las Meninas. In the beginning of Goodfellas there is a scene of the young Henry Hill looking through

But he ended up in a Catholic high school and thought he wanted to become a priest up until he „stumbled upon the film department“ (Scorsese and Brunette, 5) at the NYU. This was something that changed his life and changed his view towards Catholicism. „Scorsese explains a critical element in his own work, and offers an insight into the mystical gaze. ‘I don’t really see a conflict between the church and the movies, the sacred and the profane … I believe there’s spirituality in films, even if it’s not one which can supplant faith … It’s as if movies answer an ancient quest for the common unconscious.“ (Leonard, 99). He, just like his characters, culturally belonged or wanted to belong to a certain group of people that never managed to fit into their „natural“ surrounding, or they can see further in comparison to their community. According to Shadoian, what changed the modern gangster film is

There is no way of working out of the condition of them being us and us being them. Gangster and nongangster alike are immobilized in the vacuum left by the untenability of the American dream for a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate society. Nor are we left aghast by the situation. If Michael is a monster, we realize and accept why he has to be one. The man must do what he does; his choices are made for him and not by him. They have been made for him long ago by the competitive business society in which he lives. The audience understands, and regrets the inevitability of his situation, because the lines of its own lives have similarly rigidified after the evaporation of the dreams of the late sixties. Michael does not fall to pieces at the end; he is not shattered. He is burdened, lonely, and withdrawn, very much like ourselves, who act out the reality of our lives without a full awareness of what it signifies. The films are neither revolutionary nor masochistic. They elicit our curiosity in a context of stalled contemplation.“ (270)

What scorsese did, was that he made his protagonists deal with their problems, mostly the hard way, but they did, while The Godfather showed us how the films that were after fifties had characters that just kept heading on the beaten track until the very end of it. This is where the influence of religion comes in. In Mean Streets, religion is