Fascist AMC has slapped Martin Scorsese’s 1990 masterpiece Goodfellas with a trigger warning for “cultural stereotypes.”
“This film includes language and/or cultural stereotypes that are inconsistent with today’s standards of inclusion and tolerance,” the warning reads, “and may offend some viewers.”
To the simpleminded, this might seem harmless, but it’s not. What you have here is a fascist multinational corporation telling you how to interpret and react to a piece of art. That’s not how art is supposed to work. This is no different from a museum hanging a sign that interprets the Mona Lisa’s smile for you.
These trigger warnings, which have also been used to vandalize classics like Gone with the Wind, also remove the best part of watching these movies, which is struggling with the morality of what you witness.
What I mean is this…
One of the many brilliant aspects of Goodfellas is how it makes us complicit. As Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) takes us on an outsider’s tour of mob life, we’re dazzled and intrigued. These guys are cool. These guys are having a blast. These guys aren’t wasting away in a cubicle, barely staying ahead of the monthly bills. They say what they want. They do what they want. They laugh and drink and play cards… What a life!
What makes Goodfellas moral is what happens next when it all come apart, and we discover that these are not runaround guys flouting the rules, but cold-hearted gangsters with no sense of loyalty or friendship.
Watching Goodfellas forces us to come to terms with our complicity and teaches us an important lesson as our complicity blows up in our face as the bodies pile up. Henry Hill got sucked into the glamour and lost his soul. You and I get sucked in but don’t lose our soul because we never left the house.
If you are told up front that this movie is racist or whatever… If you’re pre-warned that these are bad guys, you miss the lesson that comes with 1) siding with them and 2) then being betrayed by their true personas.
The whole idea of trigger warnings is fascist, anti-art, an insult to the viewer’s intelligence, and ultimately destructive because it is through the kind of moral dilemmas a movie like Goodfellas hits us with that we are forced to think through what we’ve just experienced. And it is through this emotional struggle and attempting to make sense of it that we gain wisdom and maturity.
Goodfellas is not looking to offend anyone. It’s a parable, a teaching tool about how a life of gangsterism and evil leads only to despair.
Doing the thinking for someone else — which is what these lame-ass trigger warnings do — stunts our emotional growth. But that’s probably the whole idea.
The left wants a country full of helpless, emotionally stunted, immature babies. They are much easier to control than those of us who think for ourselves.
And yes, these kinds of trigger warnings are very different from content warnings about sex, violence, and swearing. Content warnings do not judge. Trigger warnings judge and judging is our — the viewers’ — job, not the job of Hollywood’s fascist and sanctimonious elites.
John Nolte’s first and last novel, Borrowed Time, is winning five-star raves from everyday readers. You can read an excerpt here and an in-depth review here. Also available in hardcover and on Kindle and Audiobook.