Scorseses Use of Narration and Sound in Goodfellas - Movie Review Example

Scorsese’s use of narration and sound in Goodfellas Martin Scorsese is known as one of the master storytellers of our time within the film medium, finding alternative ways in which to portray the story that compels the viewer to get inside the film and experience it rather than just sit back to watch. In Goodfellas, he presents the narrative of a man who had been inside the mob all his life, only coming out when he perceives he’s about to be killed. The story follows Henry Hill from when he is just a boy, still living in the crowded apartment he shares with his parents and six brothers and sisters, to his middle age when he finally decides to get out of the mob. However, the narrative actually begins with a shocking scene that takes place more toward the middle of the movie. Because of the way in which he filmed the movie, Scorsese is able to present a unique look at the mob from the inside looking out, drawing his audience into the story whether they wish to go or not and conveying a sense of realism that is missed in other films thanks primarily to his original use of dialogue and sound track to tell the story rather than through more traditional methods of dialogue and action alone. Throughout the movie, dialogue remains in the backseat as a driving force of the movie. Instead, the main character, Henry Hill, tells the story from his own perspective, frequently throwing in little observations that make it clear to us how mob thinking might be different from the average person’s. Observations such as seeing a man bleeding to death from a gunshot wound in the doorway to the shop in which he works and commenting that on the one hand, he wanted to help the guy, but on the other, he could understand why Paulie didn’t want the guy to die on his doorstep make us understand the hard practicality of gangster life in a way that might not have emerged had the scene been left without comment. As the movie progresses, it can be seen how this somewhat innocent kid working in Paulie’s shop becomes less and less touched by the violence around him. In a scene at which the grown up Henry is sitting around playing poker with Tommy, Jimmy and some other guys, Henry can be seen laughing when Tommy starts waving his gun around in response to the kid bringing drinks having left Tommy’s out. Although he stops laughing and goes to help the kid when Tommy shoots him in the foot, he seems more concerned with what to do about the body when Tommy kills the same kid later in the movie for having smart-mouthed back to him. When dialogue among the characters does occur, it is typically to let us in on what the other guys are thinking or to inform us about action that has taken place outside of the sphere of the film, frequently backed up with commentary by our helpful tour guide, Henry Hill, whose clarifying comments serve to connect the scene to the larger picture of the movie. It remains action and narrative, rather than dialogue, though, which shows us what’s important to know about several of these characters. The opening scene of the movie is brilliantly staged and timed to ensure the greatest number of viewers will stay in their seats throughout the rest of the film. It starts as Henry is driving a car with something loud and disturbing bumping occasionally from the trunk and two other men in the front section of the car with him, who he identifies as Jimmy and Tommy while he asks if they hear the noise too. When they pull over to take a look, a badly beaten and bloody man is in the trunk trying to get out. In response to this, Tommy is seen to pull out a large butcher knife and stab the man several times before Jimmy pulls out a gun and shoots the man a few more times just to be sure. Throughout this action, Henry is standing back watching with a somewhat reluctant look on his face, only coming forward when the man is obviously dead to passively shut the trunk. It is at this moment that we hear Henry’s voice saying “as far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster” and the movie is overrun with the sounds of the song “Rags to Riches” as the opening credits roll and the movie tracks back in time to 1955. But the numb expression on his face as he closes the trunk indicates Henry didn’t realize just what he would become when he made his choice to be a gangster. While he doesn’t lend a hand in the murder of Billy Batts, the man in the trunk who will be introduced more toward the middle of the movie when the beginning of this scene actually occurs, Henry’s reaction to the beating of Batts is to lock the door to prevent anyone else from entering and stands back along the side of the road to allow the vicious murder to be finished off. However, there is no dialogue happening throughout much of this sequence. The greatest degree of dialogue that happens occurs when the three men, with Batts in the trunk, stop at Tommy’s house to get a change of clothing and share an almost normal late night meal with Tommy’s mother before going out to finish what they’d started. It is precisely because the dialogue is so normal-sounding that it becomes so chilling as the audience realizes that all of the people at the table probably realize there’s a dead or soon to be dead man in the car parked outside. This becomes evident as Tommy’s mother accepts the story about the deer and loans him her butcher knife to “hack off the hoof” without asking any further questions or even looking outside at the car. This narrative effect and opening sequence are actually what serve to draw the audience into the movie, challenging them to come to their own conclusions regarding what is taking place. According to theorist Gerard Genette, “narrative in a general sense is presented as a system where the act of storytelling, the narrating, produces a narrative through which the viewer constructs a story world, or diegesis” (Genette, 1980, p. 3). The viewer becomes a part of the story as the main character talks with him or her, informing the viewer of the inner workings of each event and inciting a closer relationship than could be established in any other format. This creates an interactive environment between the narrator and the listener in which it becomes necessary for the listener to interject his or her own interpretations and feelings to understand the differences and similarities between the life they know and the life experienced on the screen. Genette is the champion of structuralism, which is a set of concepts that works to first deconstruct a specific literary work and then reconstruct it in such a way that the reconstruction illustrates how the story works to convey its meaning to a variably interpreting audience. In other words, because audience members will each interpret scenes and phrases in their own way and from their own cultural perspective, it is necessary for the narrative to include tones, inflections, phrases and other information that conveys what the film-maker is attempting to say and structuralism examines just how that was done. In opening with the murder of Billy Batts, the narrative in Goodfellas starts with a prolepsis, a narration or evocation that occurs in advance of an event that will take place later, in recognition “that only in the interplay and nuance of language and story can readers be held and troubled long after they have put down the book that stays in their minds” (Hurst, 2006) or finished watching the film that will continue to haunt them with its troubling dehumanizing experience. Toward this end, Scorsese allows the dialogue of other characters to step in from time to time to emphasize the differences in communication styles and perceptions from another point of view and another mode of speech. Through this, he grants linguistic autonomy to his characters, providing them with objectivized language that serves to further enhance the overall effect. The actions of Tommy, the character played by Joe Pesci, are completely in character for him and for the genre of the movie. He is a small, insecure player in a big world of which he wishes to be a boss. His actions become more and more vocal and violent as the movie progresses and he is not discouraged. Despite his offenses against the rules of the mob itself in killing Billy Batts, he believes until the last moment that he is about to achieve his dreams. At the same time, Karen, Henry’s wife, is allowed to express her thoughts and observations in the same narrative style as Henry, making the movie, in a sense, a story of the couple. By allowing her narration to take control at times, Scorsese presents her as something other than weak and stupid as her actions within the film might suggest. The fact that she didn’t fully realize Henry’s business is brought out when she attends the hostess party with some of the other wives and sees through their cheap imitations of culture. Her strength is shown when she confronts Henry regarding his girlfriend and she points out “why should she have him?” Genette’s ideas are clarified in the writings of Diana Knight and Sarah Kozloff. According to Diana Knight, Genette’s basic idea of narrative action is concerned with the expansion of the verb. “He therefore formulates the relations between events and their telling via categories derived from the grammar of the verb, namely tense (narrative time: order, pace and frequency), mood (forms and degrees of representation: dramatic or narrative mode, direct or indirect speech reporting, focalization), and voice (active or passive relation of the narrating subject with his own story: levels of embedded narration, absence or presence of narrator in narrated story world)” (Knight, n.d.). In the case of Goodfellas, the method of using the narrative of one of the men closely involved with the inner workings of the mob serves to also draw in the audience, complete with verbal linguistic cues as well as internal translations as to what each of these seemingly innocuous phrases might mean to someone inside the organization versus outside. Sarah Kozloff makes the argument that it is perhaps because of its Godlike connotations that the art of the voice-over “has been charged with enforcing ideological biases, restricting the viewers’ ability to interpret onscreen events freely for themselves”, but Scorsese proves this false as his narrator continues to defend the glamorous life of the gangster even as the viewer is aware of the detrimental effects this has on his personality, well-being and happiness. “Because voice-over narration automatically creates a double-layering of commentary over visual track, it is unparalleled as a mechanism for creating distance and irony … And, fundamentally, because voice-over refers to the most traditional of storytelling forms – that of oral storytelling – it reaches out to the audience in a singular way, making the filmgoing experience feel more ‘natural,’ more intimate. Like ‘dear reader’ references in a novel, or dramatic actors making eye contact with a theater audience, using voice-over narration implies an implicit recognition of the spectator; the device flatters us with its confiding tones or challenges us with its direct appeal” (Kozloff, n.d.). This is brought into sharp focus when Henry stands up out of a chair and directly addresses the camera toward the end of the movie, shocking the viewer into the realization that they have been a witness to this man’s thoughts and actions and he knows it. That most viewers experience this reaction is testimony to just how effective the narration technique, used in conjunction with strategic dialogue and limited action, has been in drawing the audience into the world created despite their best efforts to remain uninvolved. However, narration isn’t the only non-dialogue effect that works to move the story forward. Music plays a large role in the film as well, serving to illustrate, perhaps to a much greater extent than the narration itself, what is really happening as the story progresses. This relationship between narration and sound track is introduced immediately. As Henry delivers his line about wanting to be a gangster and closes the trunk of his car over the very recently deceased Billy Batts, Rich Adler belts out the first line of his song “Rags to Riches”, which is juxtaposed strangely against the scene of three men standing along the edge of an empty roadway over the dead body of a fourth in the middle of the night. This pattern continues throughout the movie, often allowing the music to drown out the dialogue happening between characters. As Henry begins to show real interest in Karen, the music switches to “Then He Kissed Me.” As Karen realizes more of the true nature of her husband’s, and therefore his friends, careers, the audience hears “Leader of the Pack.” When Paulie asks Henry about the missing Billy Batts, we are treated to an almost silent “Great Pretender.” Transition moments are often filled with music that works to illustrate what we can expect to see in the next scene while still remaining true to the pattern established of allowing the music to tell the story. Late in the movie, a modernized version of the traditional Christmas carol “Frosty the Snowman” is used as a transition between the discovery of the success of the Lufthansa heist and the entrance of Henry and Karen into the club. This transitional effect not only serves to switch from the jubilant screaming of Henry in the shower to the more subdued but still jubilant party at the club, but also serves to comment upon the nature of the characters of these men as well. Each of them have become a snowman by this point in the movie, incapable of feeling any true depth of emotional connection to the rest of the human race and living instead only to serve themselves. This is the beginning of the end for many of them as Tommy, aided by Jimmy, work to eliminate the rest of their partners in crime, for one reason or another. The systematic murder of each of the partners in the crime is commented on in a detached, almost humorous tone as the role is taken, even going so far as to mention Frankie Carbone was so frozen by the time he was discovered in the meat truck that it took him two days to thaw out for the autopsy. Also contributing to the realism of the film, most of the music and sound track seems to be completely normal within the context of the film – that is, diegetic sound. Diegetic sound is sound whose source can be visible on screen or otherwise implied to be present by the action shown. This can include the voices of characters, the sounds made by objects within the story and music that is represented as coming from instruments within the story space. This happens often within the story, as the camera will focus on the car radio or the jukebox within the club before expanding or rotating to show the characters in the car or room. As Henry is seen to be dating Karen, “Roses Are Red” is performed live on the stage in front of their table in a scene that is nearly repeated some time later while Henry watches a live performance of “Pretend You Don’t See Her” and somewhat guiltily glances at his girlfriend Janice. At other times, conversations are drowned out by the general crowd noise of the club, restaurant or party the characters are attending. In addition to adding to the shady, secretive nature of their conversations, the music helps to illustrate which portions of dialogue are important versus which are incidental as it swells or subsides in conjunction with the action. Thus, through the use of his master storytelling ability in the expression of film, Scorsese is able to present a more thorough and understandable image of the true gangster than many earlier renditions have been able to do with more hours in which to work simply through his creative use of narration and sound track. By allowing the music to make more in-depth commentary to the action as it smoothes transitions between scenes, Scorsese employs the emotional impact of song to tell the story more than actual dialogue. Through the use of extensive narration to tell the story, he both invites the viewer into mob thinking and allows greater insight to the criminal mind by explaining terms and phrases that might otherwise be missed. This insight provides an almost frightening realism that is brought to full force toward the end of the movie when Henry finally stands up and directly addresses the viewer as if standing in the same room. Although the style has received its criticism, it is undeniable that the principles of narration and structuralism discussed by Gerard Genette and others are exemplified in Scorsese’s film. Works Cited Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse. Cornell University Press, 1980. Goodfellas. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Perf. Robert DeNiro, Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci and Lorraine Bracco. 1990. DVD. Warner Brothers. Hurst, L.J. “Remembrance of Things to Come?: Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Day of the Triffids Again.” (March 31, 2006). May 17, 2006 Knight, Diana. “Structuralism 1: Narratology.” North Carolina State University: College of Humanities and Social Sciences, n.d. May 17, 2006 < http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/DEBCLASS/Knight.htm> Kozloff, Sarah. “A Defense – and History – of Voice-Over Narration.” A Look at Voice-Over Narration. (n.d.). May 17, 2006 < http://www.criterionco.com/asp/in_focus_essay.asp?id=14&eid=354> Read More