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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