Glenn

Macro Essay  November 2005

The use of narrative methods and voiceover in "Goodfellas", and how it differs from more traditional gangster movies.

Scorcese uses pretty much every narrative type you can think of in "Goodfellas", mixing suspense with mystery and opinionated views with doubt. Its New York 1970 and the film opens with restricted narration, we see the three protagonists of the movie, Henry, Tommy and Jimmy opening the boot of their car and seeing a mangled up man barely alive begging not to be killed, which he is in a very brutal fashion by Tommy and Jimmy. Now we as the audience have just been shocked out of our seats in the first minute of the film and quickly put our detective caps on, and think to ourselves, obviously this guy has done something to piss these guys off, but we do not know what it is and don’t discover until halfway through the film just what this mans crime was. We know practically nothing about this, all we do know is that these three men in the car are not nice people and have no worries about killing another human being. We then hear the words “as far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster” via voiceover from Henry. We now realise that we will see this film from a subjective narrative view point. Henry will tell us his story, we will witness the comings and goings of the gangster life from his side of the story, this film is not to glorify the life of a gangster or discredit it, we are simply going to be shown it through one mans rise and fall through the ranks.

That is the main reason for use of voiceover in this movie, subjective view points, the characters will tell us their feelings and their beliefs, sure we can make our own judgements on the matter but they lived it, who are we to disagree with them.

We now go back in time to East New York in 1955 when Henry was a child, staring out of his window at the fancy men across the street, with their expensive suits and flashy jewellery we now can understand why a reasonably poor young lad would want to enter that lifestyle. The film from this point follows a linear narrative, everything happens in order, we see him as a kid working small jobs for the bosses like parking cars and selling cigarettes outside a school, meeting jimmy the gent and getting his first arrest, through to him becoming a grown man working bigger jobs and being treated like royalty having a table moved to the front of a bar to get the best view, our view however tends to switch hands after the arrival of Karen.

Scorcese doesn’t decide to stick with one man telling the story so he allows Karen and even Tommy to air their opinions on certain situations. We first hear Karen’s voice over when she is having a date with Henry in which he isn’t treating her very well and not showing her any attention. She tells us pretty much what we can tell just by looking at the scene but this lets us know that this lady Karen will be playing an important part in the film if she is given voice over in her first scene.

Thanks to the extensive voice over the narrative of the movie is all but unrestricted, the characters tell us everything that they know because that is the whole point of voice over in this film. They are explaining to us the audience what is happening and why things are the way they are. For example when Karen has a gun pointed at Henry’s face she tells us that she can never hurt Henry, we now know that Henry’s life is not at risk but Henry does not know this he still believes there is a 50/50 chance that Karen will pull the trigger, for once he is scared when we are not.

This film becomes a single strand narrative movie, we follow the lives of Henry and HIS family and HIS business, Scorcese doesn’t branch out and show us the goings on and the back stories to multiple characters, we see them as associates and friends of Henry not as their own person. The one time this differs is when Henry is told by Jimmy that a man he has known most of his life Morrie will not be killed when in fact Jimmy is planning to do it all along. Morrie is whacked without Henry’s knowledge and when Morrie’s wife calls round to his house and asks if he has seen him, Henry asks Jimmy what has happened Jimmy tells him that Morrie ran off with another woman. We are now the ones with an unrestricted view, we know more than Henry does about this situation and we are left in suspense, does this mean that now Henry is being kept out of the loop is Morrie’s fate soon to be his own.

Henry himself starts to think the same thing and we see him cracking up. He gets heavily involved in drugs and eventually gets arrested for drug smuggling. But because of this he is abandoned by his gang friends and gets into financial crisis. We are then treated to one of the most chilling scenes in the movie, Karen goes to see Jimmy and he sends her down the street to find something, he keeps telling her further and further until she sees some dodgy looking characters down an alleyway. Jimmy tells her to go in, while we are all telling her not to. Karen wisely in my opinion decides against it. We were in the same situation as Karen as it reverted back to restricted narration, we knew only what Karen felt, that this doesn’t look right, only Jimmy actually knows would have happened if she had drifted into the alleyway.

After this Henry decides to turn on all his former wise guy buddies to save his own neck, while in the courtroom the whole style of the film shifts. We are still being spoken to by Henry but no longer by voice over, while in the dock he looks directly at the camera and starts to talk to us. Everyone else in the scene is still moving but he has become separated from them like the whole thing was just a play and he as the narrator is stepping forward to give us the conclusion to his tale.

Goodfellas differs from many other traditional gangster films because we are told in some detail about the reasons and choices behind certain decisions that are made. We at times don’t try and make up our own minds because we are already being told by our narrators what to believe, and when you are enjoying a movie enough then you will go along with what you hear.

Also Henry is not your typical gangster, yes at first he was loving the life, pulling off the occasional robbery and rolling around in the money, but he is uncomfortable when it comes down to the heartless murder of people. We see in other films the lead man going around killing to get to power and not really caring about what he is doing, whereas scorcese keeps Henry in touch with us, whenever he seems to have done something to take him away from us Scorcese brings him right back, and I think that is the real theme, that Henry mustn’t become a stranger to us that me must care about what happens to him. In many gangster films the lead role has gone so far, done so many terrible things that we are hoping that by the end of the movie they will wind up like their many victims but in this case we are willing Henry to make it through alive, and in the end he lives. But not the life he would want.