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I Heard You Socialize Groceries
While ‘The Irishman’ failed to highlight the benefits of unions, a Florida grocery store showed Americans why socialism sometimes works
Like it or not, we learn our history from the movies. Steven Spielberg, who long-ago appointed himself America’s seventh-grade history teacher, understands that. Maybe because he’s trying to reach 13-year-olds, he doesn’t credit the audience with knowing or understanding very much, and ends every movie with a superfluous coda in which the point of the story is explained. And yes, Spielberg’s version of “The Irishman” would have ended with a patronizing monologue about how we “forgot about da workin’ man” against the backdrop of a tattered American flag drooping in a low breeze above a shuttered factory. And while it’s popular to view movies as purely entertainment or purely art, with no responsibility to educate, I would have preferred expository overkill to a movie about unions that doesn’t tell us anything about unions.
How are we supposed to comprehend the tragedy of our societal failures, to learn from our mistakes and plan for our future, without understanding our past?
Because my wife and I have a smiling, sweet-smelling, spitting-up newborn to take care of, we had to watch “The Irishman” in installments. As the 3.5-hour movie about mob corruption of unions became a two-week, episodic affair, with days between viewings, I had plenty of time to reflect on the movie, its artistry, and what it was trying to say. But mostly I kept asking, when is anyone going to explain what a labor union is?
No one never does. Martin Scorsese’s crime movies love to illustrate process: How a struggling restaurant transforms into a bootlegging front in “Goodfellas.” How the local gambling economy hierarchy of kickbacks functions in “Casino.” In the entire runtime of “The Irishman,” there is only a single mention of labor exploitation, and a brief one at that, buried late in the movie. At 2 hours and 59 minutes, just before he’s sentenced to prison, Robert De Niro’s character, who has gotten away with countless murders, complains about being convicted for what he considers a minor crime: accepting a sweet deal on a car (a Lincoln) from a fellow crook in exchange for loaning out unionized…
