GoodFellas

Morbid curiosity brings me back to GoodFellas. This is no life I would want to live.

Despite the money, power, respect, connections, privileges, etc., you take one wrong step and someone shoots you in the back, and none of that stuff matters. Obviously, right?

Since Mom died, I've had a pretty strange relationship with materialism. As my siblings and I sort through what she left behind, we have choices to make and conversations to have about her belongings. Who gets what? What are these things worth? Sentimental value vs. monetary value? Everything seems to have a story, a significance, to one or more of us, and we have these conversations that must end in a compromise.

Is any of this stuff worth a fight? Not really. I just want everything to be settled fairly and in a way that would honor Mom and keep from blowing my family apart. This is harder than you think. When siblings start talking about money and wants and entitlement and so on, a lot of old stuff can surface — stuff that isn't worth the fight in my view.

Maybe that makes me a pushover. If the choice is a fight or taking something I don't want anyway, just take the damned thing. I never bought any of this stuff. I'm not attached to much. You can't take any of this stuff with you.

So the materialism depicted in gangster pictures doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Fine clothes, jewelry, houses — I wouldn't be able to enjoy any of that if I didn't come by the stuff honestly, and you can only fit so much into a casket.

Blame that viewpoint on a blue-collar upbringing — the same life that Ray Liotta's character decries in this film, as though anybody who works hard for a living must be a sucker. Maybe all blue-collar workers are suckers. I don't mind.

Having said all that, I've been going on some "retail therapy binges" that have left my credit card smoldering. Mom lived like a pauper for years and always "meant to" do things and "get around to" this or that, and she never did. She wished she could have certain things that she never got to have. She did without for years.

I think about all that stuff when I pass a record shop or an electronics store and catch myself saying, "Nah, you don't need that," or "You can't afford that," or any other "responsible" saying that, were this any other time in my life, would work to keep me from acquiring more and more stuff. Maybe this makes the pain go away for a little while — the feeling of power I get when I can just say, "Screw it. I'm buying it."

Maybe there's a portion of that rationalization in all of us — not just the gangsters in the film, but everyone who seizes what he or she wants. We tell ourselves we deserve something, that we've worked hard, that our relatives did without and now we refuse to do the same, etc.

I understand that point of view, now that I've seen how quickly life fades away.

There's really not much else to say about GoodFellas. This film neither motivates me to write nor begs for frequent re-watching.

At this point in my life, the film isn't even a distraction from everything else. After morbid curiosity, all you have left is this shot.