The Irishman: Are we all gangsters?

The Irishman is the latest in a long line of Martin Scorsese gritty films centered on the lives of men – sometimes in the mafia – most of which I haven’t seen.  I was drawn to this film, however, because it is based on a narrative about our American history about which I know very little.  The film is an enactment of a book – supposedly a confession – but actually a tale about 20^th century gang life that appears to be largely the concoction of a small time Philadelphia mobster, Frank Sheeran (Robert DeNiro) that was published in the book “I Paint Houses”.  The tale has been at least partially debunked by Slate Magazine, but it is still, even if it contains a great deal of fiction, a very good tale.

Slate Magazine points out what I felt to be true about this movie, it is a seamier version of Forrest Gump.  Frank Sheeran walks through a life – he calls it the life of a working stiff – and events happen around him.  Though he is the trigger man in many of these events, he is never really an actor in them.  He is stolid, unmoving, and passive while murdering, maiming, and creating mayhem.  He is never the mastermind; he is always carrying out orders. As my grad school reluctant roommate pointed out to me, the violence is never lingered over.  It happens and it is done with.  Things occur seemingly out of necessity, not out of love of gore. And it always seems to be just a job – a thing to be done.

So this three and a half hour film, with a slow and deliberate pace, is a lovely movie that tells an important tale.  And it glides by – it does not seem to be as long as it is.  It walks us through a version of history that, though certainly inaccurate, exposes us to some ugly truths – but these are less truths about teamsters and gangsters but truths about us – the American people.  We are complicit in acts that we witness – indeed, that we have executed, but that we, because of our American Exceptionalism, can deny as essential to our view of ourselves.  We were just doing our jobs.

At the end of his life, Frank is depicted as confessing to a priest, but he has little to confess.  He feels no guilt – he knew none of his victims – except one, Jimmy Hoffa, who proves to be an important exception.  It is as if his conscience has been exported into the mind of his daughter, Peggy (the older version, played in a three line role, by Anna Paquin).  Peggy is on to him from the moment when he drags her down to the corner grocery to watch him brutally beat the grocer who had pushed her out of his store after she got out of line.  He beats the grocer and breaks his hand because he laid a finger on his daughter.  He takes her with him because he wants to show her that he will protect her, to give her a sense of safety, but instead he collapses her world - she now fears him – but more importantly knows that she can’t ask for his support because it will be violent.  Peggy also knows – when everyone else in the family denies it – where the family wealth comes from.  And Peggy, the favorite of close family friend Jimmy Hoffa, sends her poison darts wordlessly in her father’s direction as she links what she sees on TV to his absences.

From Frank’s position, he is merely defending his daughter, indeed his whole family, from a violent world that would consume them.  He learned that the world was dangerous and to manage that in the army.  He fought the Second World War in Italy, and he was assigned to illegally kill German prisoners of war.  He continued to do this for the mob and then allegedly for Jimmy Hoffa when he was hired as Hoffa’s body guard.  Frank is of Irish descent.  He learned a little Italian in the army and this helps him connect with the Mafia, but he can never belong to it.  He works as the representative of the mafia for Jimmy Hoffa, but he is not there primarily as a gangster nor as a teamster, but as muscle.  Ultimately, though Frank has a lot of connections across various divides, he is an isolated man.  In his mind, he has isolated himself to protect his family - but Peggy's anger with him clarifies that he does not feel connected even at home.

Jimmy Hoffa (Played by Al Pacino) is an enigmatic figure for me. Before the film, I knew that he had disappeared, that he was likely killed by the mob, and that he was somehow connected with unions.  Al Pacino’s portrayal of him captured the charismatic leader of the Teamster’s Union at the peak of its and his power.  He delivered a simple but very persuasive message – we need to be united and then we have power because the country is entirely dependent on goods delivered by the truckers and warehouse workers in the one million strong union that he led.  And this union, and Hoffa, were in bed with the mafia.  Not just because mafia members drove trucks and rose through the ranks, but because Hoffa had amassed a huge pension fund and he controlled how the funds were invested – and the mafia needed financing for, among other things, the casinos in Las Vegas – financing that was hard to get from traditional sources.

Hoffa is portrayed as a murky kind of good guy.  He works to protect the working stiff from exploitation by the man.  When the working stiff sticks it to the man, by having a few goods fall off his truck, Hoffa has attorneys who can help protect the working stiff.  On a bigger scale, he is able to demand reasonable wages and health care and that pension plan.  He is a union organizer who, in this film, is completely identified with the union – it and Hoffa are one.  Hoffa’s tragic flaw is that he experiences this identification as providing him with the power that the union has – he believes himself immune to threats, including from powerful mafia bosses who don’t like his trying to shut off increasingly shady and low or no income producing loans from the fund.

The film intimates that JFK was whacked by the mob.  JFK is connected to the mafia through his father Joseph who amassed a chunk of his wealth through bootlegging during prohibition The mafia believed that they delivered the election to Kennedy – particularly through the Daley political machine in Chicago.  As I have mentioned elsewhere, the Daley machine prevented my grandmother, a lifelong republican, from voting in that election, and Chicago turned Illinois, which, in turn, delivered the Electoral College to Kennedy.  Then, once elected, JFK’s brother Bobby, as the Attorney General, went after the Mafia.  He also went after Hoffa, who had financially supported Nixon, and Hoffa was jailed, only to have his sentence commuted when Nixon was later in office.  Meanwhile, many Mafia Dons went to prison and the mob decided to seek vengeance in the way that it does.

Whether the mob hired Lee Harvey Oswald is less important to me than that power requires working with power brokers.  And the power brokers in this country include some corrupt and ruthless entities.  That both Nixon and Kennedy were, in different ways, beholden to corrupt figures should come as no surprise.  But it does.  The Trump phenomenon, through this lens, looks like business as usual.  The governing of this country is not the high-minded stuff of 1776, but the back room dealing of Hamilton, and the only difference is that Trump is dealing with the Russian mobsters of New York real estate more or less in the open.

Hoffa, meanwhile, is portrayed as a genuine and loving person.  Peggy opens up to him as a child.  They have a wonderfully cute engagement sharing ice cream sundaes and he is the father figure she can’t let her father be – and that she doesn’t trust Frank’s mafia boss, Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), to be.  Joe Pesci’s Bufalino is a wonderfully oily character.  He is a conciliator who gets things done – he knows how to fix a truck and he knows how to fix a negotiation that is going badly.  He takes care of business, and only uses muscle when it is needed – and calls in the muscle (Frank) with an innuendo – and more frequently has to let Frank know NOT to whack someone as Frank is sensitive to the needs of his boss.  Peggy, despite Russell’s giving her lots of expensive gifts, doesn’t like Russell.  Just as with her father, she smells a rat.

Who are we to trust in this world?  Hoffa increasingly comes to trust Frank.  Frank protects him as a body guard and by doing his dirty work.  Frank accompanies him when he goes to meetings, and he takes care of Frank, giving him a union leadership position.  And Frank does his job on the up and up.  He is a man of integrity in the union.  And when Frank’s union service is recognized, Hoffa, who is not yet allowed to return to a leadership position in the union, but who is pulling strings that are making it harder for the mafia bosses to get no interest loans, comes to his celebration.  And there we see Hoffa's tragic pride – his sense that he can’t be touched – come into play.  Hoffa is warned that he needs to back off.  Frank all but pleads with him to let things go. But Hoffa has not gotten to where he is by backing off.  He is full of bluster and loves attacking issues head on.  He loves the Union and he doesn’t want to see it pilfered by the mob.  He also believes himself to have the backing of those million strong members – and doesn’t believe the mob will do him in.

We, too, believe that we are in the right.  We believe that we are on the side of God (Unlike Lincoln who prayed that God would see him as doing the right thing).  We support our country.  We, like Peggy, root for the Hoffa’s of this world.  But, when push comes to shove, we do what is expedient.  We live in very small worlds and we do not take the long view.  Like Frank, we do what needs to be done to keep our own families safe and we really don’t have a sense of the havoc that doing that wreaks on the rest of the world.  We are implacable – unmoved by the fate of others that we do not know.  We supported Kennedy, and then Nixon, and now we are surprised by the level of support for Trump.  “How can they not see?” we ask.  But Trump is doing what has always been done – but he is doing it nakedly and boldly.

This came home perhaps most vividly when one of Frank's truck driving gigs is to transport material for Howard Hunt.  This military hardware shows up on the shores of Cuba in Kennedy's misguided Bay of Pigs attack.  Howard Hunt, working for Kennedy at the time, ends up being a critical link in the Watergate case with Nixon a decade later.  Frank does a job.  Its a job he's been asked to do.  He gets paid for it.  But what occurs is beyond what he could have imagined when he woke up to go to work that morning.

As I am writing this, we are in diplomatic stand offs with Iran and North Korea.  Trump, to this point, has, if anything, been less assertive than other leaders.  As depicted in Madam Secretary, we are forever engaging in carrot and stick diplomacy as the biggest bully on the block.  We dictate terms to other nations – and we don’t respect their sovereignty.  Because we have played power games well and because we were isolated from major structural damage on our mainland during the last major war, we have enjoyed a long run as the biggest bully on the block.  We like to think that we have been the good guys during this time – rebuilding Europe and supporting the growth of economies – and feeding people – all over the world.  Going to Las Vegas – and enjoying the fruits of the collusion between the teamsters and the mafia – like going to Europe and enjoying the fruits of the post war rebuild is evidence that power brokering can support me – and I, in turn, support it.  I put my dollars into the slots and into the hands of the international tourist industry.  I pay my taxes and support the execution of our national agenda, and I vote for the leaders who execute a national agenda that undercuts the ability of other countries to function autonomously.

My complicity in the double edged sword of protecting our lifestyle and imposing damage on others by the very act of doing that is of a different order of magnitude than that of Frank.  Buying an IPhone that is constructed by a person earning slave wages is not equal to whacking a mob boss – except perhaps in the eyes of Peggy.  She, like our conscience, is not particularly articulate.  After Frank kills Hoffa, she refuses to have contact with him.  She doesn’t make her case, she simply withdraws and condemns him from afar.  I think that we are alienated from that part of our conscience that knows the enormity of our smallest actions – or more precisely – knows that we don’t know the enormity of our smallest actions.  Most of the time we don’t know the people that we whack.  But the chilling part about this movie is the implication that, by engaging in multiple actions that alienate us from our consciences, we end up being unable to feel meaningfully guilty about the actions that we engage in against those who are closest to us.  We become blind to the ways that we hurt those we love.

This film uses cutting edge technology to allow actors to appear young again.  It is a last hurrah – a last ride for this group of men that enjoy working together (Even though Scorsese has never directed Pacino before).  The technology gives them and us the illusion that we can turn back the hands of time.  The movie itself, though, chronicles the ruthless effects of time.  The vibrant men who have worked so hard to make their worlds safe end up aging poorly in prisons and, if they are lucky, nursing homes.  They are stuck in a kind of joyless suspended animation as they wait to die.  Perhaps the central tragedy is that all of our efforts – and they are expensive efforts – to create a safe world, are, ultimately, for naught, at least on a personal level.  Of course, Hoffa helped support a lot of working stiffs earn a middle class life.  Even the Russell’s of this world, with the help of Frank, helped create meaningful lives.  I certainly wouldn’t have wanted us to sit out the Second World War, even though it taught Frank how to be a house painter (someone who can whack a guy without getting splattered with blood).  I suppose I am glad to have greeted the New Year with a movie that has worked to keep the line to my conscience humming…

I do think there is something important about gender roles in this movie - not that the roles have to be played out in this way - but that they have been played out this way during the twentieth century.  Men were responsible for acting - and we did that with gusto.  Women's roles were more domestic, but, as depicted in this film, also moralistic.  They were responsible for instilling values in boys - and they did, as Peggy does, act as the consciences of men.  As women take on more leadership roles - as they take on responsibility, will they be able to retain their functioning consciences?  It is much harder to see the impact of our own actions - to see what cads we are being - than it is to see the actions of others.  As women assume leadership roles, will they help us be more circumspect about our actions?  Can they, in those leadership positions, retain their ability to feel part of a community, rather than to feel more isolated - to feel that they are going it alone?  Will this sense of community help us to truly work together rather than pretending that we are doing that while actually extracting what we think we need, and without thinking about the consequences of our extractions?

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