Stuck in Quaratine Pt. 3

Quarantine has brought something that I do not get to often during the school year: SLEEP! With my early bird classes and a need to get to the early bird shuttle before sunrise, my amount of sleep I was getting before quarantine was not optimal. I woke up at 5:45 am on an average day to get myself showered and ready for another day of school. I often didn’t get home until 9-10pm due to the timing of Water Polo both club and high school. Although the high school season started right before quarantine, allowing us to end practices closer to 7 or 8, the effect it had on me was yet to wear in. My body was on a scheduled timer, telling me to get to sleep at exactly 11:00pm every night, no later, no earlier. In quarantine I have greatly altered my sleep schedule, experimenting in habits that were nearly physically impossible if I wanted to function during the school day. I have found myself staying up tell 12am or as late as 2am playing video games with friends. I have set a soft bed time at around 12am, but I have often gone over it like I would if it were to be a rare sleep over party with the boys. The other night I told myself I was only going to start the movie Goodfellas, but I ended up watching the entire 2.5 hour Scorsese classic, finding myself finishing it at 3am. I enjoyed it though, there was lesser consequences for staying up tell 3am and I felt revitalized of sorts when I woke up, still having enough energy to go through my day. The movie also brought all sorts of foreign feelings that I have welcomed with the pandemic. The movie grasped my interest as I watched in off my phone in my bed, something I haven’t done in years. I was also able to use some of a friends advice in decoding Scorsese’s symbolism that he uses in the movie. My favorite most recognizable use of symbolism was the use of silhouettes, and how they could foreshadow the characters bad actions that they would commit a few moments later. My favorite example of it was the entire series of events during the killing of Billy Batts, from when he was insulting Tommy to when they killed him inside Henry’s nightclub. They knew that Billy Batts was a “made man” meaning he was 100% Italian and sponsored by a member of the mob. Being made was a sacred tradition, essentially a confirmation into the mafia, giving a person one of the highest honors known in the mafia realm. By killing Billy Batts, it put a heavy weight on Tommy, while Jimmy and Henry accompanied him to bury the body. They drove out to an undisclosed location in New York and buried the body and this is where the symbolism began. Throughout the scenes the men were picture in silhouettes, with a distinctly red background giving off a bad omen for what was to occur further down the line of the movie. At the end of the scene we see a shot of Henry, and right before the transition we see a dark silhouette over his face before a bright red flash on his face and a instantaneous transition into the next scene. Up to this point in the movie we saw a nearly entirely successful Henry Hill thrive in life, knowing almost everyone in the neighborhood in which he resides, watching a powerful uprising of this man into the life of a mobster. He treated people with respect and held a strong image of himself, doing things the right way (in the name of the mob of course). After we saw the red flash we began to see Henry and his fellow mobsters began to fall and show flaws in their lifestyle. Henry began to reject advice from those who helped get him there and he fell deep into one of the infamous killers of the mafia: drugs. I took notice of the use of silhouettes and also unusually bright “shadows” over characters to attempt to predict what were to occur throughout the movie. This became a great interest of mine over quarantine and although it has been limited to one experience thus far, it has been a memory grand enough to share over my blog.