La Cosa Nostra
Funny how? Funny like a clown? Do I amuse you?
A few years back, I realized that one of my favorite genres is the mafia story. I struggled to square this with the troubling gender politics in these narratives (it’s never the mob wife I relate to), even as I cycled through a third rewatch of The Sopranos. Why should a therapized millennial woman raised on showtunes and sitcoms find such comfort in the private code of criminals?
It was on a recent rewatch of my favorite scene from Heat that I finally made the connection: a life in showbiz is a lot like a life in organized crime.
We spend our lives doing base, ridiculous things in the hope of one day getting “made”. The margin for error is paper thin. Fail to kiss the right ring and you just might sleep with the fishes. There are codes that are nearly impossible to explain to a lay person but which are widely accepted in “the business”, like production chains of command and the dangers of circumventing one superior to get to a bigger boss. As I watched Pacino’s detective and DeNiro’s thief face off over diner coffee, the parallels became undeniable.
In this way, representation snuck up on me. Look far enough outside yourself and humanity will still present you with a spotless mirror.
My last watch list was all inside baseball: movies about theatre, music, ballet, and film that grapple with artistic identity and creative madness. You can find that here:
Below are my five favorite mafia and/or organized crime stories, each of which illuminates some aspect of the madness of being an artist.
Goodfellas (1990) dir. Martin Scorsese
“My whole life, I always knew I wanted to be a gangster.”
My parents took me to see my first Broadway show when I was five or six years old. I drank in the ceiling of the Saenger Theatre, painted royal blue to resemble the night sky, the luxurious red velvet curtain that seemed to conceal a whole private universe. I remember thinking: there are people back there who are performing magic. I want to be back there: I want to be one of them. Cliché as it may seem, there is no refusing when the life chooses you. Just ask Henry Hill.
The Godfather (1972) dir. Francis Ford Coppola
“Everyone will still think you've got it. They're gonna be staring at your face, Mike. So walk out of the place real fast, but you don't run. Don't look nobody directly in the eye, but don't look away either. They're gonna be scared of you, believe me, so don't worry about nothing.”
Not everyone can stomach the arena. My first ever pilot season, I network tested three times. Sometimes I can’t believe my gall; eleven years old, in front of a room full of stone-faced executives in Brooks Brothers suits. Locked in on punch lines, holding for laughs, trained on hours of TV Land reruns and whatever technique the Louisiana public school drama department could instill. I didn’t know to be intimidated by Lorne Michaels when he sat in during run through on the pilot I did book that year. I only knew the mission: make them laugh. Kill, as they say in comedy, and don’t let them see you sweat.
Donnie Brasco (1997) dir. Mike Newell
“You think I hate you? I don’t hate you. This job is eating me alive. I can’t breathe anymore.”
A relationship has to be strong to sustain the potential months apart on tour, on location, or on contract. It’s no damn fun to be the one at home, and the one on the inside can lose themselves to the world and the character in the blink of an eye. Donnie Brasco loves his wife, but the role he’s playing undercover has consumed his entire being. And how do you explain the paradox that what happens on stage is simultaneously complete fiction and complete truth? The stress fractures require vigilance.
Heat (1995) dir. Michael Mann
“That’s the discipline.”
I have very nearly quit a few times: masters programs onboarded and abandoned, my stint as a music teacher, hours in therapy interrogating who I am when I’m not on the gig. Unfortunately, when the rubber meets the road, I don’t want to do anything else. The outside world and the art life are yin and yang. Vincent Hanna (the law) and Neil McCauley (the criminal) can’t do what they love without the other playing the antagonist. So too with art and everything outside of it: what would there be to make art about if not as a reflection of everything else?
The Many Saints of Newark (2021) dir. Alan Taylor
“It’s the wanting.”
Of course, it’s all a matter of perspective. Comparison is the thief of joy, yada yada yada. I’m not afraid to admit that the joy of all I have accomplished can be eclipsed, dwarfed by the longing for all I have yet to do. I yearn, I want, and wanting is the root of all suffering. It is also the fuel that drives the damn bus.
It’s thought experiments like this that make family dinners very challenging.
Honestly my knowledge of mafia stories is minimal and most of it is episodes of Monk and The Dead Zone.
Although if I ever discovered my grandfather had been part of the mafia I would not be shocked by it.