Movies from My Hometown: GOODFELLAS and the Queens-Nassau Borderlands
by Daniel Pecoraro, Staff Writer
As far back as I can remember, I never wanted to be a gangster.
I can thank my parents, or more specifically my dad, for that. There was a lot of (pretty fair) bristling over the negative Italian stereotypes of wiseguys and whacking, and ultimately no interest in exposing me to The Sopranos, the Godfather films, or Goodfellas (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1990). It took me until college to get around to the latter two, as part of a summer course on the History of Crime in New York City. To be clear: not a film course. A history course. The syllabus was literally just the first Godfather (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), The French Connection (dir. William Friedkin, 1971), Donnie Brasco (dir. Mike Newell, 1997), and Goodfellas. The prof was unorthodox to say the least—we didn’t even read the real-life Henry Hill’s book—and I learned very little about the ostensible course topics, but it was a worthwhile cinematic education.
And what I saw amid the bullets and the bloodshed of Goodfellas was surprising: it was home. I grew up in Southeast Queens, under the flight paths of JFK Airport, a quick jaunt away from the Rockaway peninsula and the Five Towns of Nassau County (Cedarhurst, Hewlett, Inwood, Lawrence, and Woodmere). My grandfather worked his final job before retirement at the since-shuttered Pergament home improvement store in the barely keeping on Five Towns Plaza. I played Little League over the fence from the cattails of the Idlewild.
And after the first 45 minutes or so of the film, set in the predominantly Italian East New York of my father’s early youth, there it all was. The same prefab diners on the edges of the city. The same strip malls, including the aforementioned Five Towns Plaza. The same houses with the clapboard siding and front lawns I rode past in the back seat on the way to pediatrician’s appointments, grocery runs, and trips to Burger King over in Hewlett. Of course, it was all a different era, 1960s and ‘70s versus ‘90s and 2000s. But the buildings, the roads, the general ennui, basically the same.
Above all, though, I saw a very similar form of the in-betweenness I had growing up, not quite in one sphere, not quite in another. A little bit of Queens, a little bit of Long Island, and a lot of liminal space. I see some of that in Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), one of the key players in Paulie Cicero (Paul Sorvino)’s family but never able to be made due to his half-Italian, half-Irish ancestry. A little detached, even around his closest associates, Jimmy Conway (Robert de Niro) and funny guy (funny how?) Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci). Someone who despite his success — much of it in and around the environs of JFK Airport — could not quite fit in, and who needed to get out before it was too late. But I also see that in Karen (Lorraine Bracco), the least believable Jewish girl, out of place both in her own home but also among the mob wives upon Karen and Henry’s marriage. Two people who were lost, inexplicably finding each other (after an awful double-date and Henry standing Karen up), and ending up in the suburbs, first of Karen’s youth, and then as regular schnooks in the Witness Protection Program. The borderlands of the county line made them, in the non-omertà sense, and protected them, zig-zagging away from the feds in the helicopters for long enough. But it was also what unmade them. And it all happened in a world under the surface from, but in the same geographic locus, of what also made me.
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