A remake could never do justice to a Hollywood classic like Goodfellas
Thirty years on from the Scorsese classic’s release, it’s only a matter of time before Goodfellas gets whacked — and remade as a PC morality tale, writes James Morrow
Opinion
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Can you believe it’s been 30 years since Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas burst onto cinema screens?
And even more remarkable, can you believe that Hollywood hasn’t decided to update it with a new, woke, female friendly, and racially diverse remake of the classic?
It’s scarily easy to imagine.
It wouldn’t be called Goodfellas anymore, but instead something like “Gorgeous People” – with the first syllable really drawn out for emphasis.
Henry Hill wouldn’t introduce himself to viewers saying he always wanted to be a gangster, but rather by announcing, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a male champion of change.”
The soundtrack wouldn’t be all Tony Bennett and Mick Jagger but that cheerful, plinky ukulele stuff they use in auto insurance ads interspersed with some unlistenable “world music” dug up out of a back closet at Radio National.
Billy Batts, whose murder opens the original Goodfellas, would not have been in trouble with rival gangster Tommy for bringing up his past as a shoeshine boy, but because he misgendered him. Or rather, xer.
And instead of getting shot in a bar and finished off in the boot of Henry’s Cadillac Coupe de Ville, he would have of course been cancelled.
For years the film — which, full disclosure, this commentator thinks is as damn near perfect a film as has ever been made — has raised eyebrows for being not just too violent (guilty, your honour) but also too much of a glorification of masculinity.
The debate kicked off five years ago when the film hit the quarter century mark, when the New Republic published a lazy, paint by numbers thinkpiece slamming the film for being “poisonous, violent, degrading” and portraying a “narrow, simplistic view of masculinity”
This spawned a series of comment pieces for or against, including a notorious column from the New York Post’s Kyle Smith, who defended the film as a glorification of masculinity, calling it “a male fantasy picture — Entourage with guns instead of swimming pools, the Rat Pack minus tuxedos”.
Smith was actually wrong, for reasons we will get to but as the clock struck 30 this week the Guardian’s Guy Lodge took a look at what the headline called “Martin Scorsese’s damning study of masculinity”.
The piece was actually more measured than the headline suggested, but in our weird present age, surely it is a matter of time before someone puts out a hit on Goodfellas.
Our woke cultural commissars, filling the same role as Stalin’s censors, have three basic tools at their disposal as they remake the landscapes of our minds, preventing us from ever seeing or thinking anything that might end with “ist” or “phobic”.
One, try and shove it down the memory hole and hope there’s not too much outcry, which is what happened briefly to another classic, Gone With the Wind.
Two, slap more warnings on it than a pack of Winnie Blues and so that anyone watching gets the message that they really shouldn’t watch this, and if they do, they definitely shouldn’t enjoy it.
This is what one streaming service did to Blazing Saddles, even though the film is a hilarious send-up of the idiocy of racism. As Orwell told us “every joke resembles a tiny revolution”, and the woke revolution doesn’t want any competition.
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But by far the most popular move is to take the old, offending stories and re-make them as progressive fables for our time.
Only they call them reboots, which sort of makes sense, because it’s what you do to your PC when you’re trying to fix a problem but don’t really know what you’re doing.
Look at the woke remakes that Hollywood’s political-entertainment complex keeps putting out in lieu of actually coming up with new and interesting storylines.
Lately we have seen a slew of all-female reboots from Ghostbusters to Ocean’s 8. There’s even a female Fast and Furious reportedly in the works, which seems almost like a deliberately calculated move to sell tickets based on confected outrage over the inevitable bad jokes which will be made about women and driving.
In the last few years there was the new Charlie’s Angels that tried to turn the old TV franchise into an icon of you-go-grrrrrl feminism and Marvel’s announcement that it was developing new superheroes – including Snowflake, a non-binary black character whose superpower is as yet unclear but probably involves being able to read peoples’ minds for WrongThink.
Earlier this week they even staged an all-black (that’s the race, not the rugby team) one-episode remake of Friends, apparently to increase voter turnout or something.
These politicised re-imaginings of course miss the mark, of course, and are generally box office disasters. That’s because in all the disappearing, warning, and rebooting in the interests of “representation”, they miss any sort of moral complexity, which is what people want.
The reason Goodfellas’ defenders like Smith are wrong is exactly the same reason the film’s critics are wrong.
Goodfellas’ masculinity is a disaster, with pretty much everyone winding up dead, in jail, or in the case of anti-hero Henry Hill, in witness protection living anonymously in some small town where you order spaghetti with marinara sauce and get egg noodles and ketchup.
Readers can decide for themselves which of these fates is worst of all.