The Irishman

The Irishman | Final Trailer | Netflix
We watched the movie over the weekend, three hours at one stretch was a bit much on account we'd had a rough day. It was great.

In case you haven't seen it, here's a couple sentences from the intro to Wikipedia's article. I'm thinking this should be enough to get you up to speed:

The film follows Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), a truck driver who becomes a hitman involved with mobster Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) and his crime family, including his time working for the powerful Teamster Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino).

Should I put in a spoiler warning? How do you know if something is a spoiler or not? Near as I can tell, what spoils it for one person is an enticement for another. Now maybe someone has done some research (or just thought about it a lot) and figured out how to tell which is which. Just I've never heard of him, or her, and even if they had, I'm not gonna read their lessons, I'm just going to charge on blindly.

Many of the characters in the film were real life people. I'll have to take the word of the story teller's about the mob guys (they're all in Wikipedia), but I remember the name Hoffa and George Meany of the AFL-CIO. I remember that, I didn't have to look it up. Sure, I did look it up, but that was only to check, but that's just the kind of thing I do, I'm trying to be accurate.

Anyway, must of been what was in the news. I was like 12 years old when JFK was shot. I remember the neighbor girl was crying about it. Didn't make me feel like crying. I didn't know the guy and Dallas was a heck of a long way away. Never mind that six years later when I turned 18 we landed on the moon. That's the thing about this movie, we keep revisiting times I remember. Pretty cool, actually.

The first thing I noticed was Frank's experience as a soldier. He was in combat in WW2, he was in it up to his neck, carrying a rifle around in Italy and shooting Germans. So right off we know he knows how to follow orders and kill people.

After the war, and after he's been home for awhile, he gets to meet a neighborhood bigshot. Frank comes in with his hat in his hand, all humble like, showing proper respect. And it's appreciated.

According to the movie, the Chicago Mob got JFK elected and they expected a favor in return, that favor being kicking the Commies out of Cuba. When JFK muffed the Bay-Of-Pigs invasion, the mob got pissed and had JFK whacked.

On the other hand (also according to the movie), Jimmy Hoffa might have arranged it because Robert Kennedy was persecuting Hoffa and the Teamsters Union for corruption. Kill Robert and JFK would send the Army. Kill JFK and Robert would get shuffled off when the new President came in. This is very similar to my favorite theory about JFK's assassination, except in that version it's the New Orleans mob escaping persecution for drug dealing.

When the mob boss (Russell Bufalino, played by Joe Pesci) tells Frank that Hoffa needs to be killed (not that he ever says it so many words), he implies that the order has come down from on high, someone higher than the mob boss. We are never given a name, just someone higher up. So maybe there is an Illuminati who all the mob bosses report to, or maybe this mob boss spoke to God, or maybe he just made it up.

I think there was another point I wanted to make, but I can't conjure it right now. Maybe I'll think of it in a bit.

Now I remember (I went back and added links to the text), it was the lifestyle, the clothes, the cars, the nights out at the fancy clubs. Whatever happened to that? Did we run out of money, or would we rather just sit at home and consume packaged entertainment? Or was that something that came out of winning the war and we were all strutting peacocks, but then the feathers lost their allure and people wandered off in search of new campaigns to fight? Or maybe we belong to tribes we no longer believe in.