Village and Tribe

 

I’ve always remembered 1984’s The Pope of Greenwich Village as a pretty good Mickey Rourke movie since I first saw it fifteen years or so ago. Revisiting it this past week, however, I realized that I was wrong: The Pope of Greenwich Village is great and maybe even one of the best movies of the eighties. Adapted by screenwriter Vincent Patrick from his novel, the film is the story of aspiring restauranteur Charlie (Rourke) and how his stupid and insane cousin Paulie (Eric Roberts) is always getting him into trouble. On a more universal level, it tells a story about the importance of family, tribe, and community.

Casual prejudices and in-group preferences infuse the air that these characters breathe, with tribe all the more important and central to their lives in the multicultural context of New York City, where racial and ethnic differences in close proximity carry a much more urgent significance. An Irishman, for instance, worries that his neighborhood might “go colored” and can appreciate that “Little Italy got their own law and order” because “It’s the only neighborhood in the whole city where little kids and old ladies can still walk the streets at night.”

The Irish and the Italians, as fellow non-WASP Europeans, interact on a single social stratum as gangsters, cops, and small-time crooks, either enjoying a general détente or collaborating in little schemes. Both draw a sharp distinction, however, between themselves and New York’s various non-whites. Seeing Irish safecracker Barney (Kenneth McMillan) eating Chinese food from a street vendor, Paulie and Charlie are appalled. “Hey, man, you’ll die if you eat that shit,” Paulie exclaims. “This guy is sellin’ instant hepatitis here.” “Barney, don’t eat this shit,” Charlie finally says, snatching the Irishman’s egg roll and throwing it away.

Petty scammer Paulie is framed against the World Trade Center as he proposes to his cousin the big “score” with which he intends to make up for getting Charlie fired from his restaurant manager job. The background hints at hierarchies of hustle, suggesting players intimidatingly higher than the “Shylocks” mentioned throughout the film, with the Twin Towers looming as big as Paulie’s dreams but rendering the sordid reality of his life all the more pathetic in juxtaposition.

The trio’s disastrous heist not only puts each of their lives in danger, but also – and more importantly from a thematic standpoint – tests the integrity of Charlie’s relationship with his aerobics instructor girlfriend (Daryl Hannah). A Nordic beauty from Maine, Diane is the movie’s representative WASP, Charlie’s investment in her probably being partly expressive of his social ambition. The Pope of Greenwich Village’s opening credits, with Diane introduced in absentia through photographs on Charlie’s wall as Frank Sinatra sings “Summer Wind”, intimates that the romance is doomed to be a fleeting one – that Diane in one sense is already gone.

Diane, who has revealed to Charlie that she is pregnant with his child, has little patience for ne’er-do-well Paulie and can’t understand why Charlie continues to tolerate him in his life. “When are you gonna outgrow him, Charlie?” she confronts him. “Outgrow him?” Charlie muses. “Maybe WASPs outgrow people. Italians outgrow clothes, not people.” Later, after the “score” goes badly, Diane lets Charlie have it:

You listened to that fool [Paulie], Charlie. He’s an idiot. He lives in a fantasy, Charlie. […] Paulie uses you, Charlie. Don’t you see what you get for your loyalty to fam – he uses you. Why are you always one inch away from becoming a good person, huh? […] You just miss, you just missed by another fucking inch, you know, and you could really be someone special, but you’re all caught up in your tribal loyalty, and your neighborhood, [and] Paulie […]

“Diane, maybe I don’t want to change, alright? You ever think of that? Huh?” Charlie comes back at her. “If I don’t want to change, what the fuck are you doing with me?” he demands of her. “What the fuck have you been doing with me all this time?”

For Diane, the WASP, the interpersonal interactions of individuals carry greater weight than the blood relation of family or tribe – but not for Charlie, for whom blood is more than biology. He cannot bring himself to stop being Italian – nor does he want to. “I always knew this would happen,” he says after Diane has slapped him. Then he slips on his shades for emotional distance but also because – badly as things are going for him, in spite of everything – in this moment Charlie’s the coolest guy on the planet, because he knows exactly who he is.

“White bread?” a wounded and bedridden Paulie reacts dismissively to a slice of Wonder Bread. “No wonder these WASPs got no color, huh, Charlie?” Paulie, no doubt accustomed to eating real bread out of a baker’s oven, is also disgusted by the inhumanly canned, commercial soup with which Charlie nurses him. Then, in one of The Pope of Greenwich Village’s great ironies, village idiot Paulie is given the honor of putting into simple words the wisdom at the core of the film. “Our mothers was right,” he tells his cousin. “You really gotta stick with your own kind, you know?” Many viewers will be disappointed that Diane and Charlie don’t work things out, but this isn’t a love story about men and women; this is a movie about the commitment to blood.

The imperfect but still beautiful vision of community presented by Vincent Patrick in The Pope of Greenwich Village is that expressed by Nick Tosches in these lines from Save the Last Dance for Satan:

[…] as the Church comprises many churches, so the neighborhood – I can not capitalize the initial n no matter how strongly effect and meaning entice me to do so, for, here, to exalt the word would be to misrepresent the thing – comprises neighborhoods beyond number. This is not an idle analogy: the neighborhood is, or was, the embodiment of a spiritual ethos as supernal and puissant in reality as that of the Church in theory. As every neighborhood was a parish, and every parish was a neighborhood, so together they have died.

The true gauge of the freedom of any community is the measurement of the degree of equality by which the fruits of malfeasance are shared by the rulers and the ruled, the cop on the beat and the man or woman on the street. The essence of democracy, as of capitalism, is corruption. Only when the criminal in blue and the criminal in mufti, the peddler and the priest and the alderman and the drunkard – only when they are neighbors of common root and conspiracy is any neighborhood safe for the old lady on the stoop on a hot summer night; only then is there true charity, only then is there a justice that is real, and only then is there life in the air. As the social clubs close, so the churches empty. This is fact, not metaphor.

These may sound to some like words beyond good and evil, but not to one who was to the neighborhood born.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of the recently banned books Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism and Protocols of the Elders of Zanuck: Psychological Warfare and Filth at the Movies.