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2007-02-21 - 4:41 p.m.

Okay, a lot has happened recently, like staying at my parents� house in Tarrytown and realizing it�s not a good idea for me physically to do that anymore, Nya and I going back to Brooklyn for Valentine�s Day and having a romantic dinner by the Brooklyn Bridge footing where we used to drink as kids, and getting screwed over by Jet Blue and being stranded at a hotel by JFK Airport for five days (although this did have its plusses). I�ll write about those things soon, but for now I�ll warm up by ranting about a film we saw at the hotel, Martin Scorsese�s The Departed.

Yeah, I know it�s a Golden Globe winner and nominated for Oscars and hailed as a Scorsese masterpiece and all. But it left me cold for the simple reason that it was presented as a contemporary story, rather than one from the early-90s. The movie starts with footage of the Boston busing riots, which were mostly 1974. Matt Damon�s character is a young boy, maybe 8 or 10. Then the film jumps ahead to him as a grown-up, perhaps 15 or 20 years � say 1994. But the setting is clearly not 1994, but present-day. Everyone has small cell phones. Reference is made to �reality TV�. Characters drive over the Bunker Hill Bridge, not opened until 2003.

Most importantly, the milieau is the world of rough-and-tumble Irish gangsters from South Boston. However I�ll go out on a limb and say that, for better or for worse, this world has largely passed away. Maybe there are indeed Irish gangsters somewhere. But it�s probably in low-rent inner-ring suburbs, not in Southie anymore. Southie, like countless inner-city neighborhoods before and after, has become attractive to the wealthy for residences precisely because it�s �inner-city� and therefore close to downtown. �Hey, I can see my office from here! Hmm, I could walk to work if I lived here��

I dated a girl from Southie in summer 1995. There was already a demographic shift starting to happen. Certainly there was a large part of the area that was still working-class Irish. She lived near the L Street Tavern, referred to in The Departed, but which was the setting for a key scene in Good Will Hunting from a decade earlier. It was the kind of townie place where, when I walked in to use the pay phone, all the regulars turned around to stare at the stranger entering their space. (A year or so later, a girl I knew got a shamrock tattoo behind an autobody shop � now that�s punk as fuck!)

But at the same time, a gay yuppie I knew was moving into a studio apartment overlooking an area park. My girlfriend�s family found that the value of their triple-decker house had shot up and were wondering if they should sell (I don�t think they ever did). These days, housing prices in South Boston are through the roof. You�d have to be an awfully successful gangster to afford a house. (Unfortunately, you probably also can�t afford one now on a blue-collar salary, like you�d get in the dwindling manufacturing sector.)

Where did the working-class Irish families go? I don�t really know. I�d like to think that like the former residents of the North End, a formerly Italian inner-city neighborhood now attractive to the wealthy with which I�m much more familiar, they moved to the suburbs in the classic American process of ethnic groups ascending in wealth and assimilating. That�s a pretty happy ending and maybe it�s too tidy to be true. But certainly I know I didn�t actually play the neighborhood-ruining villain�s role I was often assigned by outside observers, where I physically threw Nonna out of her apartment and demanded to pay triple the rent. Sorry, didn�t happen.

Whitey Bulger, the Southie crime boss on whom Jack Nicholson�s character Frank Costello is based, went on the lam at the end of 1994. I wish they�d kept the film in that time period. Don�t get me wrong � it�s a great piece of filmmaking. I hope Scorsese wins best director for it, like he should have for Taxi Driver or Raging Bull or even Goodfellas. I just can�t believe no one involved with the film picked up on the fact that the scene they were setting the movie in didn�t really exist any longer.

� 2007 Geoff Gladstone

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