Keeping Secrets
We recently saw a pre-screening of the Martin Scorsese epic The Irishman, starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesce with a great follow-on ensemble including Ray Romano, Bobby Cannavale, Harvey Keitel and Anna Paquin. It is probably Scorsese’s last great mob movie and it details the life and death of Jimmy Hoffa (Pacino) as seen through the narrated eyes of his surviving bodyguard, Frank Sheeran (De Niro). One of the great and defining aspects of this and all the great mob movies (Godfather series, Goodfellas, Casino, etc.) is the complex web of loyalties and betrayals that run through the stories and really provide the backbone to the theme of right and wrong. There is a perfectly appropriate and earthy narrated line in the movie that really summarizes everything by saying, “Usually three people can keep a secret only when two of them are dead.” I wonder if Scorsese knew that it was a Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard’s Almanac that first said, “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
While I love getting to see these pre-screenings due to Kim’s SAG/AFTRA membership (this year she’s actually on the nominating committee) and I particularly like hearing face-to-face from the likes of De Niro and Pacino in the after-show Q&A, this was a long, three and a half hour movie that felt a lot like Goodfellas and it would not make my top movie pick list. I didn’t think much about that until this particular lazy day here in Istanbul. We booked an extra day on the back-end of our motorcycle trip through Turkey and now we are lazing about trying to decide what to do with our unplanned day after fourteen highly planned days. I was reading my daily Financial Times news summary and in between all the Impeachment hearings news and Parliamentary Brexit shenanigans, the FT found a moment to include a review of The Irishman for their readers.
This juxtapositioning of stories and the similarities of the themes of gang dynamics and politics (Hoffa railing about AG Bobby Kennedy) and loyalty versus betrayal (the Frank Pentangles deposition before Congress) made me ponder what has become a hackneyed thought, that Washington and Westminster are becoming more like a mob movie than even Scorsese could have imagined.
I wonder whether Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are aficionados of the mob movies? I imagine that given his age, his New York upbringing, his raw sense of the world and his general demeanor that these mob classics would be favorites of The Donald. I can be far less confident about Boris Johnson since I’m not sure Eton and Oxford give credit for movie-going, but then again, he was born in New York City in 1964, and pop culture does seem to suit him… In any case, it is hard to not imagine that they each spend a great deal of their energy thinking about and worrying about and managing around the subject of personal loyalty and betrayal.
Trump in particular is very black and white on the subject. You are either with me 100%, do or die, or you are against me and are a worthless piece of shit who should be jailed for treason or hung at the very least. Does Donald not know how predictable the outcome of this movie about Mr. Trump Goes to Washington ends? Maybe he thinks he will be more like De Niro and spend his doting old age in a pleasant home somewhere (Mar-a-Lago?) thinking great thoughts about how he ruled the world and did it to perfection. But he must realize that the boss man (Al Pacino’s Jimmy Hoffa) is more likely to end up getting ratted on and then unceremoniously shot with two taps to the head and then rolled up in an old carpet, put in a car trunk and either incinerated or buried in an unmarked grave in the New Jersey swamplands.
The end seems near for both mob bosses Trump and Johnson. One manipulates the Executive Branch by firing anyone who doesn’t agree with his gangland tactics. The other uses the stooges of heritage and the traditionalists more concerned about the obligations of royalty to not interfere in the dealings of common folk and mere mortals, thereby rendering the Queen and the Prince of Wales as his personal patsies. Meanwhile the treasonous trolls of Congress and Parliament like Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff in Congress and Dominic Grieve and John Simon Bercow in Parliament are busy undermining the support for the mob bosses by getting the underlings that have lots to lose and nothing to gain anymore from the mob bosses, to turn tail on them. It always amazes me that these staffers that end up providing the support and executing the hits for the mob bosses don’t see their roles as “the men who are holding Mussolini’s coat” as ending badly for them. I guess fifteen minutes of fame and getting enticed into thinking that you are smart enough to escape the clutches of inevitability make it all seem worthwhile. There may be pardons and there may not be in the end. What they can all be sure of is that the needs of the bosses and the army will be served and that the tanks, whether they roll forward or retreat in reverse will likely roll over them with little regard.
When I think about Adam Schiff in particular, some may wonder why he is prepared to submit himself to such abuse and risk of incarceration or worse. I think it is an easy answer. He is less driven by fortune than the staffers who have sugar plumb dreams of monetizing their closeness to the mob throne. He has an ego driven by righteousness and everlasting fame and adoration by history. Make no mistake, he gets something for all his toil and tribulation, but it’s just not as crass as the guy who holds the mob bosses coat.
I have long said that the dog pack theory of life suggests that sooner or later the dog pack turns on the scrawny and bloodied alpha who bossed the mob so convincingly. There are few Frank Sheerans who keep their secrets and keep their respect and life. Most will be like Willie Cicci, the hitman and soldato to the mob that was based on real life mobster/informant Joe Valachi. What became of them? Well, the same as what became of the guy with Mussolini’s coat, they either spent their miserable existence in protective custody or they got whacked. The point is, as they say in the Robert Redford classic Sneakers, there are no secrets. Maybe Trump and Johnson need to spend more time at the movies and less time trying to muscle their secrets into oblivion.