In Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Henry Hill wants to impress Karen. What better way, he reasons, than to show her he’s a real big shot — such a Goodfella, in fact, that he knows the secret way in to the Copacabana, and such a good fella that he even takes the time to hob-knob with the little guys while he’s at it.
The seduction works on Karen, but it works on us, too. The Copa Shot is one of the most iconic tracking shots of all time, a mesmerizing sequence that draws us in with small, intimate, perfectly timed details: a winking doorman, a bustling kitchen, a stack of milk crates lining the secret passage. Every second feels crammed with intention, little features meant to show us all the ways Henry has risen from the working class to the front-row table. Scorsese must be such a genius, we marvel, for having choreographed such an intricate dance through the Copa’s corridors.
Only, Scorsese didn’t do shit. It was all the Steadicam guy:
As the Steadicam operator, a guy named Larry McConkey, recalls about his magnum opus: “It was just walking! I was thinking, ‘I’ve gotta do something to rescue this. This is terrible! It’s gonna get cut.’”
The shot had to be in the movie for the plot to work, but that was pretty much the extent of Scorsese’s intention. Marty later explained, "It had to be done in one sweeping shot, because it's his seduction of her and it's also the lifestyle seducing him,” but at the time, his only direction to McConkey was in broad strokes: they have to enter through the back, walk down the hallway, and enter the club. He trusted the cast and crew to handle the details.
So, uh, about those. Most of those tiny moments that give the shot such joie de vivre were just ad hoc ploys to avoid fucking up the shot. When McConkey needed a slight delay to get the Steadicam down the stairs, Liotta improvised giving the doorman a tip. When McConkey felt we needed to see Henry's face for a second, Liotta ad-libbed his line to the Copa staffer. And lest the audience might notice that Henry and Karen enter and exit the kitchen through the exact same door, the set dressers swapped out a few of those milk crates in the few seconds they had off camera.
Actually, Scorsese didn't even want to go through the kitchen. "Why would they go in the kitchen? They're going to the club!" he protested. All he cared about was the table at the end. It had to “fly in,” like the tables did in the restaurants when Marty was a boy. "That's the most important thing!" All the other stuff in the shot — all the pulsating signs of life that make it feel like you’re peeking into a hidden universe — was never even part of the plan. The happy result of collaboration, yes, but mostly unintended.
Sometimes unintended consequences can be good. We go to work just trying not to fuck up and end up creating a masterpiece. We go out to a bar to hang with our friends and end up meeting someone new. We start blogging about a YouTube video and end up discovering a new ham-fisted theme for the whole post. These things happen, despite our original aims, because we mostly operate with good intentions. We want to create something timeless. We want to open our lives to new people and experiences. We want to finish a dang post this month. Unfortunately, whether or not we achieve these things is, even with our best intentions, often left to fate.
We Can’t Blame You, Because You Have Gooooooood Intentions
When a guy named Miles Taylor revealed himself this week as “Anonymous,” the former White House official who has criticized Trump from the shadows, he couched the revelation in the language of good intentions:
We spent years trying to ameliorate Trump’s poor decisions (often unsuccessfully), many of which will be back with a vengeance in a second term. Recall, this is the man who told us, “When somebody’s president of the United States, the authority is total.” I believe more than ever that Trump unbound will mean a nation undone — a continued downward slide into social acrimony, with the United States fading into the background of a world stage it once commanded, to say nothing of the damage to our democratic institutions.
The press seems to have treated Taylor’s revelation like a public mea culpa, but to me it reads like an inadvertent confession. What were Taylor’s intentions for opposing Trump? Because he was getting in the way of Doing Evil Shit (emphasis mine):
Make no mistake: I am a Republican, and I wanted this President to succeed. That’s why I came into the Administration with John Kelly, and it’s why I stayed on as Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security.
Although former Vice President Joe Biden is likely to pursue progressive reforms that conservatives oppose (and rest assured, we will challenge them in the loyal opposition), his policy agenda cannot equal the damage done by the current President to the fabric of our Republic.
In his role at DHS, Taylor contributed to an unconscionable system that separates kids from their families and terrorizes countless communities of color. He believes he is operating with good intentions, but the only reason he opposes Trump is because the president’s petulant tantrums present too much of an obstacle to enacting harmful policies efficiently.
So Taylor emerges from the shadows… for what? The less-capable-of-shame psychopaths at OANN, who would never deign to gild their pursuits in terms of virtue, are happy to throw him under the bus. Here’s an excerpt from an op-ed yesterday, which I won’t link here:
Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf issued a statement saying Miles Taylor never once expressed disagreement with any of the President’s policies. I support Wolf’s statement. I served as the Executive Secretary for the Department during Taylor’s tenure and never once did Taylor indicate any type of intentional resistance to anyone. Ever. Taylor’s imaginary game never materialized and he ultimately slinked away from DHS with his tail between his legs.
Miles Taylor seems like a dying breed of Republican, in that he’s a man who still believes, bless his heart, that this party of mean-spirited trolls can operate with good intentions. He can’t see which way the wind is blowing, but he can lick his finger, raise it in the air, and — despite feeling the breeze all over his finger — point confidently to the east.
The Fox in the Hole
This piece at the Verge about Foxconn’s Wisconsin scam represents a different kind of delusion: the tendency of our political leaders to believe in the good intentions of corporations. Back in 2018, it felt obvious to anyone with any sense that the Foxconn plant was a cynical scheme to siphon public money for nothing in return. The same was true of the Amazon HQ2, which Chicago’s leaders tried desperately to reel in, unaware that Amazon itself was holding the rod:
City, state, and county officials pledged at least $2.253 billion in tax breaks and other financial incentives to Amazon. The figure includes payroll credits, sales tax exemptions on construction costs, property tax breaks, and investments such as transit improvements and workforce training.
Transit improvements and workforce training are, of course, things that Chicago could offer for its existing residents and workers, but investing in people’s lives does not result in 50,000 coveted tech jobs. Neither does bidding on these corporate schemes in the first place, as New York City learned when Amazon scrapped the HQ2 plans after less than a year.
It’s difficult for us as citizens and workers to rely on these institutions of power to operate with good intentions. The intent of a corporation is to make money, yet we hope that they really intend to provide jobs. The only intent of a politician is to win elections, yet we hope that they intend to do so by improving people’s lives. Of course, some politicians only intend to make money; some corporations intend to win elections. The grift goes both ways.
That’s not to say there aren’t political leaders who have good intentions, or that corporations can’t contribute to society rather than plunder it. But when money or power are involved, intention bleeds into ambition, and even the best-laid plans devolve into schemes.
My dad likes to tell a story about a missionary he met in Thailand. In an area where most people’s living conditions were less than ideal, at a time when the country had yet to catch up to the western world, the missionaries lived in comfortable houses behind secure gates, with plentiful access to good WiFi and good beer and their own cars. Dad liked hanging out with this missionary, but it was clear that somewhere the mission had strayed from its original intentions. “You know, we came here to do good,” he’d tell my dad with a smile. “And we ended up doing very well.”
A Birthday Wish
My birthday is on November 3. This is also Election Day. I have never dreaded a day more in my life. I can’t tell you how surreal it’s been to hear “November Third” — normally one of the sweetest phrases in the English language — uttered a million times over the past month in all the grimmest contexts imaginable. Will this be a new date to live in infamy? We’re running out of days on the calendar without a corresponding American tragedy. I should reach out to my friends who were born on September 11 and ask for moral support.
Anyway, I hope you will do your part to make this a good birthday. I don’t care how you intend to vote, but I do care whether you intend to vote. If you haven’t already, please make a plan. Then pour one out for me on November 3, whether you think I’m smiling or not.