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1990 Movies and the Off-White Gangster LINDA MIZEJEWSKI In Goodfellas, one of the year’s most critically acclaimed films, the main character says of a fellow mobster, “Jimmy was the kind of guy that rooted for bad guys in the movies.” In the first year of the new decade, Americans sometimes found it difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys. With the Berlin Wall and the Soviet bloc newly dismantled, Cold War political anxieties were suddenly replaced by fears of a reunited Germany and nationalist conflicts in Eastern Europe. Mikhail Gorbachev was elected as the first executive president of the Soviet Union and received the Nobel Peace Prize. Closer to home, U.S. troops were still in Panama at the start of the year following an invasion the previous month that President George H. W. Bush had justified by characterizing Panama dictator Manuel Noriega as a drug-dealing gangster and thug. But in putting a million-dollar bounty on Noriega’s head, Bush himself was criticized in some quarters for gangster behavior. The matter was all the murkier given that Noriega had previously been on the payroll of the CIA, which Bush had directed in the 1970s. In the first week of the year, a sensationalized national news story further confused the good guys with the bad guys. On 4 January, a well-to-do young white Boston widower named Charles Stuart jumped to his death from Tobin Bridge into Boston Harbor. A few months before, Stuart claimed that a black man had hijacked his car and fatally shot his pregnant wife. While civil rights advocates protested, young black men all over Boston were seized and searched, and eventually one was picked up and identified by Stuart in a lineup. But before the suspect could be formally charged, Stuart ’s friends and family members came forward with evidence that the black hijacker story was a hoax and that Stuart himself was the murderer. His motives were the stuff of pulp fiction—a three-figure insurance policy and a blonde female associate at the office. It was the decade’s first national “melodrama of black and white,” to use the term Linda Williams assigns to a larger American racial narrative that often entails the black man “in melo24 dramatic configuration with the body of the white woman, and the white man” (300). The white couple in this particular story fit the popular category of “yuppies”—educated, urban, ambitious Anglo Americans not often caught in the wrong part of town. Yuppies were prominent figures in the national imagination because tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans allowed the income share of the wealthiest fifth to rise to a record 46 percent this year. But even this top tier was experiencing an economic slowdown that was openly being labeled a recession. Meanwhile, investigations revealed that thousands had been defrauded in junk bond scandals, in which Michael Milken—who pleaded guilty to securities fraud and was imprisoned and fined $600 million— became an icon of thirtysomethings’ corruption. At the same time, the working classes suffered from a stagnated minimum wage and the increasing move of manufacturing jobs to overseas sites (Borger 51; Samuelson 22–23). The widening gap between rich and poor was widely blamed for the rising crime rates, as increased drug use and drug trafficking made crime profitable. Charles Stuart’s story was credible because the face of urban crime at this moment was “colored.” Black and Hispanic gang warfare, escalating through the previous decade, reached critical proportions in urban areas nationwide . The Crips and the Bloods, the most notorious of the Los Angeles–based gangs, showed up in other American cities and in the common American vocabulary as shorthand for urban violence.1 The eminence of gang warfare raised the stakes on the threatening poses of rap music, which had edged from the margins to the mainstream of popular culture. As a fashion, an attitude, and a music style, rap was cool instead of cult, appealing to both white and black youth. “Yo! MTV Raps!” was MTV’s highest-rated show, and journalists noted that teens tuned in “and hit the malls to put together the new styles by Saturday night” (Darnton 78). Some rap groups had socially conscious agendas, but others glamorized transgressive behavior and street violence, often with sexually explicit language. Censorship efforts frequently backfired, with groups such as 2 Live Crew instead playing up a menacing...

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