I’ve already tackled the recent trend of “trigger warnings.” Recently, Cate Blanchett, Quentin Tarantino, Ian McKellen, Judi Dench and Ralph Fiennes all rallied against its usage, which has been slapped on films such as “Gone With the Wind,” “Goldfinger,” “Blazing Saddles,” and “Dumbo.”
AMC has now added a trigger warning to another classic, Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas.” Before the film begins, a message reads at the top of the film: “This film includes language and/or cultural stereotypes that are inconsistent with today’s standards of inclusion and tolerance and may offend some viewers,”
“In 2020, we began adding advisories in front of certain films that include racial or cultural references that some viewers might find offensive,” an AMC rep told the New York Post.
“The f–king political correctness has f–king taken everything away,” Bo Ditel, who played a police officer in “Goodfellas,” told The Post. “This is how life was back then. It was not a clean beautiful thing. You can’t cleanse history. If you want to tell true history, you gotta tell it the way it is.”
Michael Franzese, a one-time captain of the Colombo crime family, said he was amused by the note “We don’t need anyone protecting mob guys. It’s crazy,” he said.
I’ve already described trigger warnings as a way to treat audiences as little children. It comes out as a lecture, as if being told you’re too stupid to process a film, or work of art, on your own. You basically need to be talked down to. It amounts to an absolute insult to our intelligence.