Summary
We are back at the first scene of the film, only now we have a lot more information. Jimmy, Tommy and Henry drive the car with Billy’s body in the trunk down the highway. We see the whole first scene again, only this time Henry’s voiceover plays over it. He says, “For most of the guys, killings got to be accepted. Murder was the only way that everybody stayed in line. You got out of line, you got whacked. Everybody knew the rules. But sometimes, even if people didn't get out of line, they got whacked. I mean, hits just became a habit for some of the guys. Guys would get into arguments over nothing and before you knew it, one of them was dead.” We see Tommy repeatedly stabbing the brutalized bloody corpse of Billy as Henry narrates. We see the men burying Billy’s body as Henry explains that Billy was a “main guy,” a prominent member of a rival gang, the Gambinos, and that his murder could create serious trouble for them if the Gambinos ever found out. “Before you could touch a main guy, you had to have a good reason. You had to have a sit-down and you’d better get an okay, because if not, then you’d be the one to get whacked,” Henry narrates.
The scene shifts to Copacabana on a Friday night, as Tommy and Henry greet some associates. Henry narrates, “Saturday night at the Coco was for the wives, but Friday night was always for the girlfriends.” Henry is sitting next to a girl raving about a Sammy Davis Jr. concert she went to. Her friend says, “You can see why a white girl would fall for him,” which makes Tommy stop. He can’t believe it, and the girl simply says that she can understand why a white girl would be attracted to a black man. After making sure that she has no plans to cheat on him with a black man, Tommy scolds the woman for saying such a thing, as it could be interpreted the wrong way. He agrees that Sammy Davis Jr. is talented and urges her to just “leave it at that.” A man sings onstage, while the audience watches attentively. The camera pans across the group as they watch. We see Henry walking his date up to her door and into her apartment at the end of the evening, as the light shifts from nighttime to morning to show that he has spent the night.
Next we see Henry and Karen arriving at a party carrying their two children. Paulie approaches Henry and asks, “What’d you do about that thing?” referring to Billy. Apparently the Gambinos have been looking for Billy, but Henry feigns ignorance, insisting that “Nobody knows what happened to him,” that Billy just disappeared. Paulie tells him to keep his eyes open, since the Gambinos are “busting [his] balls” about it. They go into the other room and eat. The scene shifts to the bar where they killed Billy. Jimmy pulls Henry aside to tell him that they have to move the body from where they buried it upstate, because the property was just sold to a developer who is going to build condominiums. Even though it has been six months since they buried the body, Henry agrees and we suddenly see the three men digging up Billy’s body in the middle of the night. At one point, Henry has to vomit because the body is so repulsive in its current state of decomposition. Jimmy and Tommy make jokes about the body as Henry continues to vomit. The next day, Henry hoses down the trunk of his car, covering his mouth and nose because of the horrible smell. As she walks by with the children, Karen asks Henry what happened and he lies to them that he hit a skunk.
In voiceover, Henry tells us that he got an apartment for his mistress, whose name is Janice, nearby so that he could sleep over a couple nights a week. We see Janice entertaining a group of friends and some of the men in the apartment. She takes her friends on a tour of her apartment as Henry narrates, “Janice and I were having so much fun, she started screwing up at work, and I had to straighten out her boss a little.” The scene flashes to Henry, Jimmy, and Tommy beating up Janice’s boss, hitting him, bloodying his face, and telling him that “Janice can do whatever she wants.” The scene flashes back to the gathering at Janice’s apartment and Henry throws Janice onto the bed. She runs away laughing and Henry walks towards one of her friends, leering. We see the men gambling around a table, and Tommy orders a drink. When the young bartender doesn’t bring Tommy his drink, Tommy becomes upset, and the bartender stutters his way through an excuse. Tommy makes fun of his stutter as the other men laugh. He gets more and more wound up, pulling out his gun and doing an impression of Humphrey Bogart in a cowboy movie, throwing the gun around carelessly. He shoots the young bartender in the feet and Henry rushes to the kid’s aid. Henry gets two younger mobsters to carry the kid to a doctor down the street. Tommy remains defensive and remorseless.
The scene shifts to Karen and Henry’s bedroom. Karen throws Henry’s car keys out the window, angry that he hasn’t been home in two weeks, and asking him straightforwardly what he’s up to. When she accuses him of lying to her, he picks up a lamp and throws it at the wall, just narrowly missing her head. “You’re fucked up in the head, Karen. This is all in your mind,” he tells her, but she won’t hear it and screams at him to get out of her life and go back to his “ready-made whores.” In the hallway, their daughter hears the fighting and looks anxious, as Henry leaves the house and Karen pushes his jacket off the rod in their closet. Abruptly we are transported to the bar where the men are gambling again. The young bartender has a bandage around his foot and limps towards the table with drinks, and Tommy begins baiting him once again. He tells the boy to dance for their amusement, but the bartender fires back, “Why don’t you go fuck yourself, Tommy?” The men guffaw in shock, as Tommy looks around insulted. Jimmy throws some money on the table, offering it to the bartender out of respect for him talking back to Tommy. “Are you gonna let him get away with that?” Jimmy asks Tommy, smirking, and Tommy abruptly pulls out a gun and shoots the young bartender many times in the chest, killing him. Henry is shocked and goes to examine the body, as Jimmy begins scolding Tommy for his impulsiveness. Jimmy then tells Tommy to dig the kid’s grave himself.
The scene shifts and we see Karen ringing the bell at Janice’s apartment, accompanied by her and Henry’s two children. “You keep away from my husband, you hear me?” Karen says into the speaker, as Janice sits anxiously on the couch. Karen becomes more and more agitated, ringing the buzzer over and over again and threatening to tell the other people in Janice’s building that she’s a whore. She threatens Janice and tells her to get her own man. The scene shifts abruptly and we see Karen from below pointing a handgun at the camera. She is sitting on top of Henry, who is just waking up to the sight of the gun. “Karen are you crazy?” he asks, and she insists that she’s crazy enough to kill him. “Do you love her?” she asks. When he tells Karen confidently that she is the only one he loves, she begins to lose her nerve. The camera zooms in on the different elements of the gun, the trigger, the tip, as Karen admits in voiceover that she couldn’t hurt Henry because she was still very attracted to him. After calming Karen down a bit, Henry throws her off him and onto the ground, taking the gun from her and holding it up to her temple while holding her down by the neck. He is furious that she threatened him, and hits the bedside table angrily before storming off. She is left on the ground sobbing and yelling that she’s sorry.
We see Henry bringing Paulie and Jimmy into Janice’s apartment. Janice greets the men and Henry sends her to go get them some cigarettes. The men sit and Paulie tells Henry that Karen came to his house to talk about Janice. Paulie and Jimmy urge Henry to return to Karen, because they are worried about what she might do next, and Paulie says that he will tell Karen that Henry is coming back to her and will show her the romantic life they once had. Jimmy is heading down to Tampa for a mini vacation, and Paulie urges Henry to go with him to relax—“And when you come back, you’ll go back to Karen.” Abruptly the scene shifts to a car where Henry and Jimmy are beating up a guy who owes them money. They are at the Tampa City Zoo in the middle of the night and we see a lion watch them drive in. Jimmy grabs the man and drags him over towards the lion pen, threatening to throw him over the moat, but Henry doesn’t want that. As they near the fence, the man tells him he’ll get them their money just as Jimmy is hanging him over the fence of the lion pen. We see the man in a payphone calling his associates asking for the money, as Henry narrates that when they returned from Tampa, they “were all over the newspaper.” Apparently, the sister of the man they roughed up at the zoo was a typist for the FBI and gave them away. We see photographs of Henry, Jimmy, and the man being arrested, then a courtroom in which a judge sentences them to 10 years in jail.
At a bar after the hearing, the men toast and drink to getting out of jail soon, as Karen stands nearby weeping. Henry says goodbye and walks out with Karen. After saying goodbye to her, he gets in a car and takes out a bottle of pills, taking a handful. “Now take me to jail,” he tells the driver. The scene shifts to a close-up shot of Paulie slicing garlic with a razor, as Henry narrates that Paulie was in jail at the same time and made all of the meals there, which sound like lavish Italian dinners. Vinnie made the meatballs, Henry tells us, as we see a montage of the men cooking in jail. We see a box of lobsters arriving at the jail, as Henry narrates that jail wasn’t so bad for members of the mafia, because they knew how to pull strings to get what they needed and “owned the joint,” all living separate from the people doing regular time and bribing the officers to get special privileges. Henry arrives with bread, cheese, meat, and liquor, as Paulie announces that it’s time for dinner. They sit down and share a civilized meal around the table, and Henry discreetly pulls out a plastic baggie with pills in it.
Outside the room where the gangsters live, Henry makes some drug deals for some extra cash with some inmates, bribing the officer on his way out. The scene shifts to inmates meeting their wives in a visitation room. Karen wanders in with her children and signs in with a guard. When she looks at the sign-in book, she is disturbed to see Janice’s name there, and immediately confronts Henry about it. Growing angrier and angrier, Karen throws a number of food items (and pills) that Henry asked her to sneak in onto the table, which causes a ruckus. She then complains that she has no money, that a friend recently advised her to get on welfare, and that no one is reaching out to her. Henry advises her to stay calm while he’s in jail, to not let Paulie or anyone else know that he’s dealing drugs, and wait until he’s out of jail next month. Henry promises Karen to never speak to Janice again.
Four years later. Henry is coming out of jail and he embraces Karen at a car. At home, his kids bombard him with love and questions. Looking around the house, Henry tells Karen that they’re going to move and that she ought to start looking for a new house. When she asks him how they’ll pay for a new house, he tells her he has to go to Pittsburgh the next day because someone there owes him $15,000. “Tomorrow you have to meet with your parole officer,” she says, but Henry assures her not to worry, and they head to Paulie’s for dinner, where a big Italian meal is served. Paulie and Henry take a walk in Paulie’s yard, where Paulie warns Henry to stay away from dealing drugs, because there’s a mob boss who is ending his life in prison because one of his guys was selling drugs behind his back. He also warns Henry to look after Tommy and Jimmy, because they are wildcards. Henry agrees to everything, even though he clearly intends to keep selling drugs. Indeed, the scene shifts immediately to Sandy, one of Janice’s friends and Henry’s new mistress, cutting up cocaine with some playing cards. In voiceover, Henry tells us that he didn’t stop selling drugs because it was so lucrative, and that “as long as I got the stuff from Pittsburgh, Paulie wouldn’t find out.” Indeed, the drug-selling racket is so lucrative that his next step is to get Jimmy and Tommy involved too.
Analysis
The brutality of the violence depicted is often shocking, grotesque, sudden, and vivid. In contrast with the playful and light-hearted tone of much of the rest of the film, the depiction of violence is wild and unsettling. Its suddenness and vividness has the effect of showing the audience just how horrible these men are pushed to be by their positions in the mafia, and how deep into the tawdry life of organized crime they are. In not holding back from depicting the brutality of these gangsters, Scorsese shows their lives for what they are, and exposes their fearful violent impulses as misguided and arbitrary. If violence were only suggested or hinted at in the film, the viewer might not understand the darkness of the scenario in which Henry (and Karen) have found themselves. For the gangsters in Goodfellas, violence is casual and everyday, and they have become numb to its stomach-churning dimensions.
By depicting it in all its graphic detail, Scorcese prevents the viewer from becoming complacent with the violence committed, or from glamorizing the lives of these thugs. When Tommy kills Billy, it is with an impulsive and mad brutality that is nearly unfathomable, and it contrasts with his appearance as simply a comic wise guy. Later, when we see him stab the still-alive Billy over and over again in the trunk of the car with his mother’s butcher’s knife, we again see his nasty side. The scenario is so outrageous and disturbing as to be comic; the class clown of the gang standing over an already mangled body with his Italian mother’s butcher’s knife, all because of a comment about his job as a shoeshine boy. Tommy is at once a mama’s boy and a cold-blooded killer, and the way that these two truths coexist create some of the film’s most potent, comic, and grotesque tensions. The film’s unapologetic depiction of gore reveals a great deal about how being in the mafia inures the characters to violence.
The unsavory quality of many of the gangsters’ characters is revealed in different ways throughout the film. In addition to being violent and brutish, they are not good men, speaking in bigoted ways and treated women poorly. Of course, we know that Tommy is an exceedingly violent man from the beginning of the movie, but he also consistently shows himself to be a hothead and a racist, seemingly incapable of empathy or level-headedness. Henry uses derogatory terms for black people throughout. When one of the girls at the Copacabana talks about Sammy Davis Jr., her friend expresses an understanding about why a white girl might fall in love with a black man. Tommy becomes confused and protective, eventually telling her that he’s “making sure [he’s] not gonna end up kissing Nat King Cole,” as though his date’s attraction to a black man has some kind of polluting effect. He is at once paternalistic and racist in his treatment of the issue. Goodfellas is a depiction of a certain historical moment with a very specific cultural context, and it portrays how the brutality and clannishness of the life of a gangster makes fearful and sensitive bigots of the men who choose to join.
Tommy’s complete lack of ethics and near-sociopathic violent streak makes his crooked character rather readily apparent, but Henry’s mistreatment of his family and dishonesty is revealed to the viewer more subtly, if no less devastatingly. As his marriage with Karen begins to crumble, we see the toll his actions take on her and their children. She begins to unravel, becoming more hysterical and less rational, as she watches her husband pull away and ruin their union. Their children stand at the edges, listening to their violent fights silently from the hall. Henry grudgingly makes promises to come back to her and to remain loyal, but he is always looking for ways to stray and do things his way. This extends to his dealings with Paulie. Indeed, Henry promises both Karen and Paulie that he will do their wishes by remaining loyal and not selling drugs. No sooner is he out of jail, however, then he is cutting up cocaine with a new mistress, betraying both of them. While Henry has been a protagonist for much of the film, he now becomes more of a liability and an antagonistic force to those around him, choosing the dark side over a more decent life. Even for a gangster, he seems to be treading a particularly unsavory path.
The camera angles and editing remain playful and outrageous throughout this section of the film. Scenes cut abruptly from one location to the next, and the viewer gets used to not being able to predict what will come next. The scene in which Tommy kills the young bartender is outrageous and unexpected as it is, but it is followed immediately by a scene in which the harried and unhinged Karen is violently confronting her husband’s mistress, small children in tow. This scene progresses into a startling image of Karen holding a gun pointed up at the camera, waking Henry up from sleep with the threat of a bullet. Indeed, the threat of violence is often shown from the perspective of the potential victim. When Karen threatens to shoot Henry, we see her as if from his perspective. When Henry holds Karen down on the ground and threatens her with the gun, we do not see her perspective, but we linger with her after Henry storms off, as she lies sobbing on the bedroom floor. When Jimmy and Henry intimidate the man into giving them money by hanging him over the fence to the lion pen at the Tampa Bay Zoo, the camera swings around to show us an upside down view of the lions, as if we are being hung over the fence. The camera is a fluid and unpredictable presence, and shows us many sides and perspectives.
