Between Consent and Descent

Martin Scorsese creates his films based on the aesthetics of auteur cinema in which he imposes his personality and visual style on the films themselves (D’Acierno 606).  He presents his own genre, that of the “mean streets” variety, where he can express his view of the Italian-American experience.  Although the main character of Goodfellas, Henry Hill, is of both Irish and Sicilian descent, Scorsese nonetheless comments on the generational gaps that appear in Italian-American families.  This “experience” comes to the surface in the DeVito family, demonstrated by the gap between Tommy and Mrs. DeVito.  Although their relationship reveals the cultural and ideological differences between mother and son, the painting by Tommy’s mother—played by none other than Scorsese’s own mother—provides the most symbolic and potent metaphor regarding this subject.  However, the gap also represents Scorsese’s, and through him Tommy’s, struggle with his two identities, Italian and American.

As in all his films, Scorsese employs symbolism using different types of art to deliver his most important themes to his audience.  In Goodfellas, he uses the art of painting in order to convey his representation of the problems existing in Italian-American families.  Mrs. DeVito’s painting, full of metaphors, presents one of Scorsese’s most prominent themes of his career.  The painting contains two dogs, one white and the other white with brown spots, pointing west and east respectively.  One imagines the white dog to represent Tommy and his assimilated, materialistic, and immoral “American” attitude towards life.  Pointing west, he embodies the “American Dream” mentality of third generation Italian-Americans, one that believes a life of crime does actually pay.  With Tommy as the white/American dog—an interesting animal to choose in the first place—Mrs. DeVito becomes the “dirty”, multi-colored dog, upholding both traditional Old World (brown) as well as New World (white) values.  She represents the generation of Italian-Americans who as “non-visibly black” people hailing from Sicily faced discrimination.  As she points east, the memory of her heritage remains in her heart as a second generation Italian-American (this theme is also very prevalent in Scorsese’s documentary Italianamerican).  One notices that the white dog stands on a higher level than the other, and not just due to perspective, thus demonstrating Tommy’s elevated status as an assimilated American.  Since he works for the mob, he enjoys money and power, things he believes make up the “American Dream” and things that his mother never dreamed possible.  He has achieved this “Dream”, something that he believes his mother has not.  The mise-en-scene and framing of this painting echo its metaphoric meaning.  The camera begins at the bottom of the painting, revealing first the dog attributed to Mrs. DeVito, and then the second dog representing Tommy, displaying the hierarchy of their family, Mrs. DeVito as the mother who came before and Tommy as the son who came after.  Once both dogs are in the frame, the camera pauses, allowing the mind of the viewer to catch up with their eyes in order to realize that the two dogs face opposite directions, a metaphor for the differing of opinions and moral values.  From here, the camera moves up and the viewer discovers even more.

Another motif that Scorsese utilizes throughout his film career makes its appearance within the film and within the painting.  “In Scorsese’s universe the sons have lost their actual fathers, their places having been usurped by father surrogates” (D’Acierno 636).  This theme surfaces earlier in Scorsese’s career in Mean Streets where “Charlie’s [played by Harvey Keitel] hero is a mafioso who speaks perfect Italian” (Mangione 416).  Curiously, there is no mention of Tommy’s father and as an adolescent Tommy is constantly in the presence of Paulie, the local mob boss, who becomes his replacement father figure, or godfather.  However, returning to Mrs. DeVito’s painting, a close-up on the graying man near the top of the frame reveals his undeniable likeness to Martin Scorsese, which proves ironic when Robert De Niro’s character jokingly asks if he “looks like anyone we know.”  Not only does the man closely resemble Scorsese but also the patriarchal figure missing from Tommy’s life (Bliss 98).  As the director of the film, Scorsese becomes the all-seeing, protective father residing over his cast and crew as well as his characters.  Because Tommy’s father is absent from the film and Tommy’s life in general, Tommy seeks someone to serve in his place, someone who can teach him the “ways of life”.  The surrogate his chooses is Paulie, a man with everything Tommy wants: money, power, and respect, especially the latter when Tommy creates issues regarding his pride.  This “neighborhood godfather” presents a feeble replacement for Tommy’s real father.  Using the relationship between Paulie and Tommy, “Scorsese narrates the breakdown of the third-generation Italian-American family and the failure of its traditional culture” (D’Acierno 636).  Scorsese presents Paulie as a more assimilated person than Tommy’s mother yet this mafia boss upholds some Old World traditions with regards to his “business”.  Only certain members of the mob may speak with him and all others must go through them.  However, Tommy, under Paulie’s influence, destroys the Italian-American moral values through another avenue, one regarding romantic relationships between men and women.  Before Mrs. DeVito shows her painting to her visitors, she asks Tommy why he does not settle down with a nice girl.  Tommy replies that he settles down with a nice girl every night but when his mother continues to prod him, he asserts that he loves her and therefore cannot settle down because he will never find someone like her.  This, of course, exposes the mother-whore complex of Tommy’s Catholic upbringing, which Tommy “projects onto [his] lovers,” refusing to be tied down by any woman (D’Acierno 641).

This disregard for traditional values and morals comes directly from his “life lessons” with Paulie, who, like most mobsters, has a wife and a girlfriend; at one point Henry Hill states that “Saturday night was for the wives but Friday night was for the girlfriends.”  Rather than settling for anything less than his mother, Tommy wants to live the ultimate mob life, gaining respect and power and sleeping with as many women as possible.  This destruction of values and the traditionally held family structure stems from Paulie’s “model” life because Tommy idolizes him as the epitome of success.  This influence “estrange[s] him […] from his family” and undermines the family as a whole, moral, and cultural unit (D’Acierno 640).  The two dogs facing opposite directions in the painting demonstrates this undermining as the two obviously place their values in very different things.  This poses the question of whether if Tommy’s father were literally in the “picture,” would Tommy and his mother face the same way, thinking with the same mind, or would they perhaps face each other and accept their differences?  Alas, no definite answer stands out, and instead they are practically “estranged,” as Mrs. DeVito tells Tommy that she never sees him anymore when he first enters her house.  This conflict between them represents Tommy’s internal struggle and the relationship between consent and descent.

According to Lester D. Friedman in Unspeakable Images, “Werner Sollors labels ‘descent’ [as] relations determined for us by blood or nature [heritage] and ‘consent’ [as] relations we choose to accept [choice]” (19).  However, for Tommy they are two sides of the same coin and nothing reflects this conflict better than Tommy and his relationship with his mother.  As someone connected to her past and her family, Mrs. DeVito represents the “descent” side of the coin.  On the flip side, Tommy proves the theory of “consent” along with its “New World Freedoms […] contractual choices […] [and] self-made assertions” (Friedman 19).  Because of this, Tommy gives up his Italian-American heritage in order to become American.  However, Scorsese demonstrates Tommy’s inward struggle over his culturally split identity while his mother has successfully integrated the two by only allowing those of full Italian-American descent to become made-men in the mob.  On the other hand, Henry and Jimmy, with their Irish heritage, remain wise guys while they believe Tommy moves up in the ranks.  In this instance, Tommy embraces his background because it will allow him to move up in the social structure of the mob when he usually pushes his Italian identity aside in order to become successful in American standards.  This back and forth motion between Tommy’s two opposite rather than parallel identities reveals Scorsese’s own similar struggle and it becomes one of his foremost motifs, not only in the film but also throughout his career.  This split identity appears earlier in the film when Henry first meets Karen’s mother and tells her that he is half Jewish.  When she asks which half, Henry replies, “The good half.”  By saying this, Henry distances himself from this Irish and Catholic upbringing—he also hides his gold cross under his shirt before entering her house—much like Tommy does with his immoral and extremely violent behavior. This poses Scorsese’s ultimate question; what does it mean to be Italian and American?

This internal struggle presents only one of Scorsese’s most used and important motifs brought to light within the film through metaphor.  Mrs. DeVito’s painting provides an avenue for Scorsese to express his version of the Italian-American experience without enlisting a character to announce the problems outright.  The symbolism within the painting exposes the gap between Tommy and his mother as well as the generational gaps found in many Italian-American families.  These struggles and issues in the film reflect the anxieties and personality of its director, marking Scorsese as an American auteur of the highest quality on par with his idol Federico Fellini.

Works Cited

Bliss, Michael. The World Made Flesh: Catholicism and Conflict in the Films of Martin

Scorsese. Lanham, MD and London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1995.

D’Acierno, Pellegrino. “Cinema Paradiso.” The Italian American Heritage. Ed. Pellegrino

D’Acierno. New York: Garland, 1999. 605-641.

Friedman, Lester D. “Celluloid Palimpsests: An Overview of Ethnicity and the American

Film.” Unspeakable Images. Ed. Lester D. Friedman. Urbana and Chicago:

University of Illinois Press, 1991. 19.

Mangione, Jerre, and Ben Morreale. La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American

Experience. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

*This paper was written for Film Studies 120: Italian-American Film taught Spring Quarter 2005 at UC Davis

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