Goodfellas Sociology

The film Goodfellas is a real story based on an American crime associated with the Italian Mafia. The narrator of the film, Henry Hill, tells the story of his uprising as a gangster and all the experiences that he went through along with Tommy DeVito, Jimmy Conway and many others. Goodfellas, otherwise known as “Wiseguys” tells the story of the many crimes the Italian Mafia had committed through the years. It starts with Henry Hill as a teen showing his obsession with the local gang in his neighborhood and the desire of him to be a gangster. Henry would work for the gangsters until he became one and started to partake in the criminal career which allowed him to live in a life of money and luxury. As Henry got older, he along with Tommy DeVito,

and Jimmy Conway would steal cargo worth millions of dollars from an airline near the JFK airport. Out of the three main characters, Tommy DeVito was the most known for his sociopath behavior and irrational violent ways with dealing with people that came his way. Although Tommy was known for his violent reactions, he was loyal to his friends and his friends were loyal to him. After many successful crimes committed, Henry gets involved with cocaine and that is when everything starts crashing down for the gang and after getting caught, they are no longer able to trust each other which led to fatality and imprisonment.
Many of the horrific crimes committed in Goodfellas are committed by Tommy DeVito, a violent, irrational and sadistic man who shows no remorse for easily taking the lives of many.

In an early scene we are able to see his failure to comply with social norms when he is sharing a story with his mob friends while they are dining and drinking, and when Henry tells him how funny he is, Tommy does not accept it as a form of a compliment but rather than an insult. Tommy acts out of the norm and gets upset for being told he is funny, and it gets worse when he is told to pay up the tab he had open in the bar, he reacts to all this by throwing a glass and breaking it on his face. Tommy shows he is not capable of having normal conversations with people without taking everything as an offense to himself, and precedes his reactions always in violations of the rights of others. He does not fear if people around him see him acting against the law and does not restrain himself from acts that can have him arrested. Impulsive and aggressive is his common way of behaving and we see him being aggressive not only with men, but with women too. He orders his girlfriend in a very jealous, threatening and aggressive manner to not speak to other men. Giving orders and having everything done his way is the only way to keep Tommy contemporarily

satisfied.
In the scene where Tommy, Henry, Jimmy and some of the other gang member are in a bar, Tommy orders Spider, a young bartender to fetch him a drink, and as soon as Spider response with “you said you were fine and didn't need a drink”, Tommy get hysterical and demands him to get him his drink but because Tommy acts upon impulse, Tommy shoots his gun at Spiders foot because he went to slow to get him his drink. The reaction his friends make to this incident indicate that even though the gang commits crime, they don't agree with violence in how Tommy reacted to Spider. Another incident with Tommy and Spider is in the same location, Spider replies to Tommy with “why don't you go fuck yourself” and Tommy reacts by killing him by shooting Spider six times. This is another incident that we are able to see his lack of conscience and his lack of remorse. While his friends are upset with Tommy’s actions, he does not feel any sympathy or guilt for his actions. When Jimmy tells Tommy that he will not help him burry a hole to burry him, Tommy is fine with the fact that he killed someone and now he has to burry him. Tommy’s abnormal behavior is hardly question by his friends nor is he stopped before he commits a crime due to the fact that because Tommy acts on impulse it gives no one any alert of the crime before it happens. His impulsivity is shown throughout the film as a characteristic that others fear and is the reason why not one of his friends will go behind his back. The only person Tommy appears to have close affection with is his mother, who he visits and shows his love for by greeting her with a hug and kiss and by being the only person in the film that he does not insult or mistreats.
Most of the murders Tommy commits are brutal, few of them were done with the use of a lethal weapon but most are done with beatings and physical assaults.

These assaults are usually initiated by a conversation that gets him irritable. The problem with these conversations is that Tommy takes them as insults and becomes easily provoked when in reality they are not intended to be taken out of context in a typical conversational norm. In the scene where Billy Bats was trying to humble Tommy, Billy comments about how Tommy use to shine shoes back in the day, this small comment became an attack to Tommy because he thought that Billy was saying too much in front of too many people for his comment to be considered just a joke. After the argument, Tommy comes from behind and attacks Billy with a brutal beating until he

dies.
Abnormal behavior such as Tommy’s would indicate a person is suffering from Antisocial Personality Disorder. The DSM-5 criteria illustrates that Antisocial personality Disorder requires individuals to show pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of rights of the rights of others, which Tommy demonstrates. He also shows to be deeply disturbed and incapable of controlling his aggressive and violent behavior. His goal was always to be considered a “made man”, a prominent member of the mafia and his desire for power is what is his rationale when doing all this crime and kept persisting until his goal became attainable. Although nothing justifies killing people for petty reasons, Tommy solved all his problems with violence and is perfectly defined as a sociopath. He committed theft, murder, torture, all crimes you can think of and by the very end he showed no sympathy or remorse for any of it. Neurological theories would indicate that people like Tommy are under-aroused and have abnormally low levels of cortical arousal which cause individuals to seek arousal which promotes the risk-taking behavior. One of the theories that supports the fact that Tommy is antisocial is that he has a higher threshold for fear and therefore he is more likely to fail to respond to danger cues that would inhibit him from committing violent acts. In all of Tommy’s wrongful actions not once did he fear he may be killed, or arrested. Even on the day Tommy was killed, his death was unexpected and unthought by him. Not much can be said if there are any genetic influences since they did not talk about his family nor his childhood in the film but viewers can assume his family wasn't well-off and Tommy had to work as a shoe shiner to make earnings. The development of his antisocial personality could also be due to the mutual biological-environmental influence which indicates that peers around him can serve as increasing a typical behavior, since Tommy is surrounded by mafia men that commit similar crimes it is of a higher chance that Tommy behaves abnormally because there are no peers that could work as corrective models. The treatment available for a person diagnosed with Antisocial Personality disorder is psychotherapy, family therapy and behavioral therapy. It is important for these individuals to be placed on prevention and rehabilitation. Since ASPD is chronic, individuals suffering from this diagnosis need to keep with treatment for life. If a person does not seek out treatment for this disorder, incarceration is usually the only alternative these individuals face. In the case of Tommy, he did not identify himself with needing treatment and because of this death was inevitable but if he was not murdered he would more than likely gone to prison.