Fin: That 'Goodfellas' trigger warning, misremembering Michael Richards, and ScarJo’s Torment Nexus

This week’s notes column.

In film culture today, some things matter. Like economic questions, creative questions, and how the movies will look in the future. We always argue about which movies are great, which are bad, and why. The Oscars, the box office, and all that stuff. 

But do you know a thing that doesn’t matter? The content warnings that cable networks display before classic movies. 

We’ve been through this before, with Blazing Saddles and that three-minute “disclaimer” added to the film on one streaming service four years ago, which even spent most of its three minutes praising the film. 

But even less significant than that are those cards that appear on screen for a few seconds before movies on HBO, Showtime, AMC, and other channels are shown. 

Someone noticed last week that AMC’s showing of Martin Scorsese’s 1990 classic Goodfellas includes the following text:

“This film includes language and/or cultural stereotypes that are inconsistent with today’s standards of inclusion and tolerance and may offend some viewers.” 

Now, were I in charge of writing the disclaimers for AMC’s movies, would I have included that? No, probably not. But the freakout to this has led to has been, to be charitable, a bit disproportionate. 

No, that disclaimer is not “censorship.” No, it does not “ruin” Goodfellas.Are they “whacking a classic,” as the New York Post described it? No, not that either. Also, as the Post reports, the warning was affixed to the movies back in 2020- and it took nearly four years for anyone to notice. 

The Post also felt the need to quote ex-cop, Fox News fixture and frequent Scorsese guest actor Bo Dietl and, for some reason, spelled his name wrong, despite that name appearing in the newspaper probably a thousand times over the last 30 years: 

“The f–king political correctness has f–king taken everything away,” Bo Ditel, a former NYPD cop who played a police officer in “Goodfellas,” told The Post. “This is how life was back then. It was not a clean beautiful thing. You can’t cleanse history. If you want to tell true history, you gotta tell it the way it is.”

If you don’t like the disclaimer, you’re welcome, as always, to fast-forward through it. Or go in the other room for ten seconds. Or watch Goodfellas in some other way, of which many are available. The film has been released in many different home video formats over the years and is also on every VOD channel.

Plus, it’s AMC. Like most non-HBO networks, it also edits out cursing, sex, and other stuff, which is much more censorious than a brief disclaimer at the beginning.

The critic Glenn Kenny, who wrote an (excellent) book about Goodfellas called Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, brought this up last week: 

The debate over whether movies about the Mafia perpetuate stereotypes that are offensive to Italian-Americans is not in any way a creation of modern-day “wokeness”- this was a thing that was a live issue in the early 1970s, when The Godfather was being filmed, and also came up on The Sopranos.

I tend to err on the side of there being nothing wrong with mob-themed films and TV shows on their own — it is, after all, the subject of some of the best movies and shows ever produced — but that filmmakers should treat these issues with care, and also make room for telling stories about Italian-Americans that don’t involve La Cosa Nostra. 

But whether or not you like the disclaimer, Goodfellas has not been “ruined.”