Goodfellas Essay Questions

What does membership in the mafia offer?

The way Henry describes it, membership in the gang offers a certain amount of protection. Loyalty to the group and to the boss begets more loyalty, while any acts of impudence, ungratefulness, or disloyalty ends in near certain death. If the gangster can keep his mouth shut and pledge his allegiance to the group, he is afforded a lot of money, a sense of community, and the ability to live outside the law without consequence. To him, it is the ultimate freedom—that is, until he betrays the mafia and his life is on the line.

What is the effect of the graphic violence in the film on the viewer?

Although the studio previews of the film were impacted negatively by the amount of violence, the violence is not simply gratuitous. The violence in the film is often shocking, intense, and disgusting, but this only serves to show the tawdry underbelly of mafia life for what it is. Rather than sanitizing the lifestyle of the characters, the film seeks to expose it in all its contradictions, its ironies, and its gruesomeness. As we see how desensitized the gangsters are to the violence around them, we realize that for them, a life of fear and brutality is a small price to pay for the power they achieve by joining the gang.

Why did Paulie and Jimmy abandon Henry after his drug arrest?

Paulie had already warned Henry about his drug trafficking activities and ordered him to stop. He knew both that drug-addicted gangsters were unreliable and that the penalty for mob bosses whose associates sold drugs would be a lifelong jail sentence. Paulie abandons Henry to protect his operation and the future of the Lucchese family.

Jimmy abandons Henry for related reasons. While the two men do have a genuine relationship and work closely together, Jimmy needs to make sure that he is not connected to the drug deals. He doesn't want to see Henry killed, but he knows that if Paulie gets wind of the fact that he helped Jimmy with the drug deals, he'll be more vulnerable to getting whacked. Additionally, he knows that his connection to the deals would result in considerable prison time.

Why does Karen choose to be with and then stay with Henry?

When Henry hands Karen the bloody gun after pistol-whipping the man who assaulted her, she has a decision to make. While she knows that her girlfriends would never stay with a guy like Henry, she can't help but feel attracted to the way that Henry not only stuck up for her honor, but also that he—in asking her to hide the gun—involved her in it and shared some of his power. As she tells us, the event didn't repel her so much as "turn her on." Similarly, later, when she is angry with Henry about the inconsistent life of a mob wife and his affairs, she is magnetically attracted to him, and cannot bring herself to leave. What's more, Karen has a lot of self-respect, and refuses to give up on him so easily. After discovering he's having an affair, she narrates, "But still I couldn't hurt him. How could I hurt him? I couldn't even bring myself to leave him. The truth was that no matter how bad I felt I was still very attracted to him. Why should I give him to someone else? Why should she win?" Karen, for all her vulnerability, is a tough woman, and refuses to give her husband up to someone else.

What do you make of the ending of the film?

By the end of the film, Henry Hill has been pushed into a corner, living out the remainder of his life under the Witness Protection Program. With the threat of getting whacked by either Jimmy or Paulie, Henry elects to become an informant, thus saving his own life and the lives of his family members. While that should serve to give him a great deal of relief, he confesses to us that he resents his new life as an average suburban "schnook," and dreams of the celebrity and the status that being a gangster offered him. He wants to experience the thrill of a good hit and living a life in danger, but he knows that he cannot possibly risk it anymore. As we see him, grimacing in a bathrobe on the front lawn of his new residence, the shot shifts to show Tommy pointing a gun towards the camera and smirking, an homage to the film The Great Train Robbery. The image cycles back to where Henry was at the beginning of the film, showing that he will never quite outrun his desire to be a gangster, even though his wish is a deadly one. In this way, Scorsese indicts the culture that could let such a strangely destructive fantasy still live in Henry, while also seeking to empathize with his character.