Bad News for Goodfellas

By David Samuel McCalmont

Warner Brothers / Alamy

“Trigger Warning” for an American Classic

AMC (American Movie Classics) has just slapped Martin Scorsese's 1990 masterpiece "Goodfellas" with a trigger warning. "This film includes language and/or cultural stereotypes that are inconsistent with today's standards of inclusion and tolerance", the warning states, "and may offend some viewers."

This might seem harmless.

But it's not.

What you have is a multi-national corporation telling you how to interpret and react to a work of art.

That is not how art works; it certainly is not how art is supposed to work. This is no different from a museum hanging a sign that interprets Mona Lisa's smile for you. (Actually, museums are telling visitors how to think about centuries-old iconic works of art, but that's another essay.)

These trigger warnings, which have also been used to vandalize classics such as "Gone With the Wind," also remove the best part of watching classic films, which is struggling with the morality of what you're witnessing.

One of the many brilliant aspects of "Goodfellas" is how it makes the viewer complicit. Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) takes us on an insider's tour of life in the Mob and we're dazzled, intrigued, drawn in.

These guys are cool.

These guys are having a blast.

Why work 9-to-5 for a paycheck?

These guys aren't wasting away in a cubicle, barely staying ahead of the monthly bills. They say what they want – to anybody, including their wives. They do what they want – at all hours of the night. They laugh, drink, play cards, establish a reputation for respect by settling scores with people who cross them.

Could life be better than this?

Parable of Good and Evil

There's a moral attached to the tale of "Goodfellas" and it comes at us when the "party life" falls apart. We discover that these are not party-hearty goodfellas out to flout the rules and having a good time doing so. Turns out they’re cold-hearted gangsters with no sense of loyalty or friendship, much less morality or compassion for their fellow human beings.

Watching "Goodfellas" forces us to come to terms with our complicity and teaches us an important lesson: our complicity blows up in our face as the kill-count rises. Henry Hill gets sucked into the glamor and loses his soul. The viewers get sucked in but don't lose their souls because they never leave the house.

If you were told up-front that this movie is racist, or something else that runs afoul of today's morality cops you may miss the whole point of the movie. If you're pre-warned that these are bad guys and that the director doesn’t meet today’s moral standards, you'll miss the lesson that comes, first with siding with them and second being betrayed by their true personas.

The whole idea of trigger warnings is an anti-art insult to the viewer's intelligence and is ultimately destructive because it is through the kind of moral dilemmas a movie like "Goodfellas" hits us with that we are forced to think through what we've just experienced. It is through this emotional struggle, and attempting to make sense of it, that we gain wisdom and maturity.

The thought police think we're as dumb as dirt and need guidance to arrive at their conclusions, not ours.

"Goodfellas" is not looking to offend anyone. It's a parable, a teaching tool about how a glitzy life of gangsterism and evil leads only to despair.

Doing the thinking for someone else – which is what these “trigger warnings” do – stunts our emotional growth.

But that's the whole idea, right?

The cultural left wants a country of helpless, emotionally stunted, immature automatons. They are much easier to control than people who can be left alone to view a piece of art and arrive at conclusions that fit themselves.

Trigger warnings are different from content warnings about sex, violence, swearing. Content warnings do not judge. Trigger warnings judge and judging is the viewer's job, not the assignment of Hollywood's fascist and sanctimonious elites (especially not the wet-behind-the-ears recent college grads these businesses hire to do their dirty work).