Gangster No.1 is my favorite gangster film.

Growing up, I loved the gangster genre. It just got me goin’. I’d be up kicking thin air as Tommy beat the shit out of Billy Batts for telling him to go home and get his shine box, in Goodfellas. I’d be holding out my two fingers like a gun and narrating the vengeful God monologue with Jules in Pulp Fiction. It just got my blood pumpin’. Over the years as the hormones settled, however, the immorality of the genre just got to me. No longer did I find the black kid getting shot in the back seat as the car hit the bump, funny. In fact, I felt slimy for ever having laughed at it at all. The irony of it all gradually evaporated as I became in charge of my testicles and not the other way. The cool gangsters were just not as cool anymore. I now started contemplating concepts such as responsibility of an artist, of which I had been in staunch opposition of before; and the romanticization of crime and my own attraction towards it. I realized that as much as I, as an audience, was a contributor to this glorification of callous violence; the major fraction of the onus fell upon the filmmakers. They were the ones who were mythologizing immorality, while I was just buying the ticket.

A lot of readers would argue that it’s not exactly glorification because films in this genre, at least the good ones, end up closing of the karmic loop with the criminal protagonists paying for their sins. Look at Pulp Fiction as an example, Jules takes his survival as a divine warning and quits, thus walks away alive; while Vincent judges it as serendipity and thus ends up getting killed. Well, that argument is absolute bullshit and you’re fuckin’ full of shit for making it. Let’s face it, that character arc of rise to the top and the imminent fall after, just plain doesn’t work. The scenes that people emulate for years to come, that become pop anthems and are referenced in the crappiest meta-way possible by every other half-assed writer; don’t come from the latter half of that arc, but from the former one. The general attitude people come out with is “Yeah, yeah… crime doesn’t pay. But could you believe that fuckin’ scene where Pesci goes “How the fuck am I funny? What the fuck is so funny about me?” and Liotta almost pisses his pants. That was some funny shit, yo.” The only film I can think of that such a scene comes in the latter half is Scarface, y’know the whole “Say hello to my little friend!” bit; but if that isn’t glorification of violence, I don’t know what is. The second argument that the reader would probably bring up is that such glamorization of violence in gangster films acts as a mode of catharsis, thus acting as a ventilation of such emotions in the audience.

This argument again is absolute bullshit and you’re fuckin’ full of shit for making it. Because that’s like saying that punching a pillow ventilates the feelings of aggression, a technique that no shrink has recommended in decades other than Billy Crystal in Analyze This, since it has been proven to increase violent behavior rather than otherwise. In my teenage, I didn’t get the big deal P.T. Anderson made about the cheers that Bill Macy’s homicide-suicide got in Boogie Nights. I think I do now. Almost all gangster films, including Goodfellas and Pulp Fiction, commit the sin of designing their violent protagonists as relatable individuals; as the regular blue-collared guys cutting corners to make up for the imposed class differences. The problem lies the fact that even though these films are written as insider stories into the world of crime, they are usually written by people outside it; who like the romantic author in Unforgiven, glorify these characters without really dealing with the toll that the immorality, that drives their characters’ criminal lives, takes on their inner psyche. Instead, most modern gangster film rely on the audience’s ability to recognize the meta-irony of it all, to not take it all so seriously and just enjoy the ride. Royale with cheese, baby.

Gangster No.1 takes a more “holistic” perspective by not concerning itself with the nature of these criminals, but with the nature of crime; and thus implying, that of evil. Its violence is more hyperbolic and brutal than most gangster films put together, but the one key strategy that it applies that defends it from glorifying violence, is by not glamorizing the characters that carry it out and investigating their true nature that hides behind the dirty jokes and the sharp suites. This film is absolutely free of irony, shockingly funny anecdotes, clever plot twists, showdowns i.e. all the elements that would reduce it to a violent cartoon. There is very little here for boys to enjoy, this one’s for men. The violence in the film doesn’t have any humor about it, unlike most horror-porn bile or other films in gangster genre that the audiences have been subjected to in the past. The key difference is that where the horror-porn focuses on the victim in a violent scene, Gangster No.1 concentrates on the perpetrator (for a good reason that I will go into later on), thus nullifying any sardonic pleasure that audience would derive from it. By keeping most of its brutal violence off-screen, the audience not only suffers from the Jaws-syndrome of feeling the fear of the shark that is implied except not really there; but by inversing it and placing the audience as the victim instead of the executor, the audience feels the terror and the pain when the metals penetrates the meat.

This is an incredible stylistic choice because it is intentionally designed to alienate us from the protagonist, a great risk because it not only alienates the audience from the protagonist but also from the film itself. When the victim screams in agony, it comes from the throat of the audience. The Young Gangster is not just your usual antihero protagonist like Henry Hill or Travis Bickle, this guy is an evil villainous antagonist and we are trapped in his world for two hours. There is no hidden attraction in the repulsion we feel towards this guy. The men don’t want to be him and the women don’t want to be with him. He’s just fucking creepy and we feel unclean after watching the film.

The adjectives many reviewers have associated with the film are abominable, contrived, soulless, glib, and vicious. These reviewers are fucking stupid. There is a chasm of difference between a work of art that is soulless because the creator is soulless (Michael Bay, Brett Ratner), and one that is soulless because it is created as the subjective perspective of the soulless protagonist and narrator. The way of telling the two apart comes in the few key scenes that can either be classified as exploitative or insightful. Gangster No.1 falls into the second category.

The Young Gangster is the poster boy for malignant narcissism. The psychological condition of the malignant narcissist usually appears in the form of greed, envy, power lust, paranoia, lack of empathy etc.; but because they embody this attribute to an abnormally high degree, it makes them more similar, behaviorally, to psychopaths than to your run-of-the-mill narcissists. Both psychopaths and malignant narcissists share a complete inner void, thus searching for self-esteem through the external world; but what separates them, is the malignant narcissist’s ability to control his aggression and delay the pleasure he derive through his sadistic actions. A psychopath, for example Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas, uses aggression to dominate others into submission; while a malignant narcissist like the Young Gangster can sit on a beef for months or even years until the time is right for him to seek revenge in the most cruel way possible. For him, physical aggression is not a compulsion, but a choice. This makes malignant narcissists far more interesting dramatically because their actions become completely unpredictable and one never knows when they would act out, but one can stay assured that they would.

The narrative strength of Gangster No.1 comes from the choice of its narrator and the acute observation of his psychological state. To different degrees, we are all psychologically split into two states, our true self that only we are aware of and our created self, the mask we wear in front of others to make out true self less vulnerable to criticism. Usually the gap between the two identities is not so wide, making normal people introspective and consequently compassionate; since they know how they feel; they have the ability to know how the others would feel. This gap, however, for a malignant narcissist is so incredibly wide that their true self is almost reduced to nil and they are entirely consumed by the illusion of their created identity. To say that narcissists love themselves is somewhat of a paradox since their excessive love for their created selves stem from their excessive loathing for their true selves. Thus malignant narcissism is really just an extreme form of rationalistic solipsism where an individual ceases to live in the real world and instead creates an entire substitute reality in which nothing exists other than himself. And this is the world we enter in Gangster No.1, the Gangster’s fictional universe acting as a replacement for the real world.

Because a malignant narcissist is estranged from his true self, he feels no emotions associated to it. The only emotions he does feel are those of pride, envy and rage which are essential for the impervious and impregnable survival of his counterfeit self. Pride, not for any tangible greatness that he has achieved, but as an assumption of an uncontestable superiority that he possesses in his substitute reality:

For the lack of any interpersonal realm, the envy that a malignant narcissist has is towards the external objects and power that someone possesses, which he fantasizes about and desire for himself. For Young Gangster, this object of fascination and envy is Freddie Mays “the Butcher of Mayfair”, about whom in their first meeting, he says:

To maintain the authenticity of his substitute reality, it is essential for a malignant narcissist to make it impermeable to any form of criticism. Hence, instead of introspection which may lead to insecurities and feelings of inferiority, he must accept himself impassively and uncritically. For him, the perfection of his identity in his faux-reality cannot be found wanting. Thus he perceives the world as a constant aggressor against him, and any criticism, no matter how minor or unintentional, must not go unanswered. This leads to an omnipresent ego-syntonic rage within him. He may not act upon the attacks against him instinctively like a psychopath; in fact he will usually react to it with cool indifference, symptomatic of his impenetrable belief in his substitute reality, but will never let go of them until his revenge is fulfilled. In arguably the best scene in Gangster No.1, this aforementioned symptom is displayed. The Young Gangster enters Freddie’s apartment wearing the same suit as him, who ignores him. He starts a conversation with Mays’s girlfriend Karen, who he had previously been rude to. But it is not long before the talk comes to a screeching halt as Karen tells him about her engagement with Freddie. The conversation turns hostile and in the heat of the moment Karen spits on Gangster’s face, who takes a moment, wipes the saliva off his face, then:

The reaction shot of Karen’s face is priceless. In her eyes, one can literally see the terror travel down to her very core. In the next scene, Gangster sits in his car watching Freddie’s rival gang mow Freddie and Karen down. “What a comedy!” he says.

Othello is my favorite Shakespeare tragedy. And from the looks of it, the same seems to be true for Louis Mellis and David Scinto, the writers of Sexy Beast and the source writers of Gangster No.1. Sexy Beast had the dynamic of Othello/Iago in Gal/Logan, and the same dynamic exists between Freddie Mays and the Young Gangster in Gangster No.1. Essentially, Gangster No.1 is a reworking of Othello through the eyes of Iago, which makes it far more effective and interesting to me than it would be if told by an objective ubiquitous storyteller. Maybe my love for Othello stems from my belief that the best stories are the one that have the best villains. Iago is the most kick-ass villain of all time. Iago, also a malignant narcissist and the obvious basis of the Young Gangster, is a true Machiavellian. He deceives, manipulates, steals and kills to gain the position that he believes he truly deserves, but which is instead given to Cassio by Othello. In the past, scholars have characterized Iago as chaos anthropomorphosized, who commits random acts of evil for the sole purpose of pleasuring himself. However, I’ve always sensed a very strong homoerotic element in Iago’s envy towards Cassio, not because Cassio is his love-object; but for Othello’s preference of Cassio over him. But if Iago is malignant narcissist, then how can he love anyone but himself? I believe his love for Othello stems not from a longing to love in a regular sense but from envy for the position of power and wealth that Othello holds. It is not as much that Iago loves Othello, but rather that he wants to be Othello.

This is also highlighted in the relationship between the Young Gangster and Freddie Mays. There is an astonishing scene in the middle passages of Gangster No.1, in which Freddie and Gangster are alone for the first time in the film. As they drive to a club in the car, Gangster gazes at Freddie Mays with a look that is very hard to classify, and seems to be a mixture of suggestions that he wants to be Freddie and that he loves Freddie. He tells us how much he loves Freddie’s suit, shirt, cufflinks and tie-pin. Freddie catches his look and gives him the tie-pin with his initials on it. Then comes the moment of subtle brilliance, as this is the first time when Gangster looks away from the camera. We catch the corner of the expression on his face and for the first time he seems vulnerable and exposed, as he finds acceptance from the person he is most fascinated by and possibly loves. But that still leaves us with a problem, that is if Young Gangster and Iago think of themselves as complete within their substitute reality, where is the room for Freddie Mays and Othello in it?

Freud defined narcissists as individuals that were in a constant active process of keeping away from their ego, anything that would diminish it. He believed the root cause of narcissism to be the failure to identify with either parent as an object during the phallic stage in infancy. So, instead the infant resolves the crisis through internalization, i.e. he identifies his own self as his love-object. As he grows up in a self-object state, the child develops an emotional vacancy and thus is unable to create a definite self-identity. Resultantly plagued by deep insecurities and an identity-crisis, the child usually retreats into his grandiose substitute self to compensate for a fragile true self. Because this love for his substitute-self is all-consuming, narcissists are completely unable to love anyone else. Freud considered love to be an ego-deflating process since it involves an admission of an incomplete self and a longing for completion through reciprocation of love from someone else. Narcissism is instinctual to all human beings since it is essential for one’s biological survival, and in loving another, we surrender a part of this narcissism hoping for the same in return. A narcissist, because he considers his created-self to be complete and superior to others in every way, he dreads dependence on anyone else and fears feelings of vulnerability and loss. Thus narcissism in many ways develops as a defense mechanism against feelings of inferiority and rejection, which are essential parts of being human and alive. So in many ways, narcissists roam this earth as the living dead.

From this we can conclude that there is in fact no room for Othello and Freddie Mays in the lives of Iago and the Young Gangster, respectively. After the stage of strong fascination towards his love-object, must come the one of an all-consuming envy to quench which a malignant narcissist must destroy the one he loves and is jealous of the most and take his place to re-establish his sole position in his substitute universe. This process is essential for the survival of his grandiose created-self. He must obliterate what he loves the most outside of himself, in order for him to maintain an absolute love for himself. It is just a matter of a trigger that would unfurl the events leading to this impending conclusion. For Iago it comes as Othello picks Cassio over Iago and for the Young Gangster it comes when Freddie picks Karen over him. For as I said earlier, malignant narcissism develops as a defense against insecurity and vulnerability of an individual’s true self; and the ostensibly callous acts of rejection by Othello and Freddie Mays in the eyes of the two malignant narcissists ensure their imminent demise.

The sexuality of Iago and the Young Gangster is an even stickier issue. There are subtle as well as obvious suggestions in both texts indicating both their homosexuality. The subtle psychological indications come through the frequent use of zoological imagery in the speech of the two characters, suggesting within them the conflicting instinctual ids and the restraining super-egos, representing powerful yet repressed sexuality. The most obvious and key one comes in the prominent use of a horse as a motif in both texts. In Othello, Iago describes to Barbantio, the marriage of her daughter with Othello as “an old black ram… tupping your white ewe”. Later on, he again refers to Othello as a “Barbary horse” covering Desdemona. In Gangster No.1, the horse is again an important visual motif. Freddie Mays loves horses and has pictures of them all over his apartment. As an engagement gift, Karen plans to gift him a painting of a horse placed right behind where he sits. When she shows it to Gangster, he says:

A horse is a powerful visual symbol embedded in our collective unconscious as a representation of strength, speed and most importantly sexual prowess. By comparing Freddie and Othello to horses, Iago and Gangster essentially acknowledge the two as sexually potent individuals. It is very interesting to note the similar fashion in which the two do so, complimentary of the sexual potency of Freddie and Othello while perverting their image only when associating them with Karen and Desdemona respectively. This is an obvious suggestion of their undercurrent homosexuality.

But the most obvious suggestions come in two key scenes from both texts. In case of Iago, it’s when he narrates, to Othello, the steamy details of Cassio’s alleged sexual fantasy that he acts out on Iago in his sleep, mistaking him for Desdemona. Iago uses the unconscious domain of sleep to incriminate Cassio of committing adultery. By blaming Cassio for initiating the sexual fantasy, Iago paints himself as being the inactive recipient, so as to diminish the conflict between his superego and id, in Othello’s eyes. Despite his use of the unconscious to do so, undoubtedly, this acts as Iago’s veiled yet conscious ploy to declare his sexual identity, wherein he clearly presents himself to Othello as sexually open and desirable. In Gangster No.1, the scene is set at the club where Freddie meets Karen for the first time. The first shot is an absolute masterpiece. As Freddie checks his coat at the counter, Gangster follows him and notices his own reflection in the glass divider behind Freddie’s back. He positions his reflection exactly behind Freddie making it appear as if it is his head on Freddie’s torso. We see the two bodies and the reflection in the middle. This can be read as the perfect representation of Gangster’s feelings for Freddie, he wants to do both, be Freddie and also fuck Freddie. They sit at a table as the waitress brings in a bottle of red wine and pours it in Freddie’s glass.

Freddie starts to order from the menu.

Two transvestites walk by behind them.

The club owner asks Karen, a dancer at the club, to keep Freddie company. Karen comes to the table while Freddie is not there. Assuming Young Gangster is Freddie from the initials on his tie-pin, she starts talking to him. He treats her very rudely and calls her a gold-digger and a whore. She’s about to leave when another dancer introduces her to Freddie. Freddie tells the Young Gangster to go dance with the other dancer, he resists but eventually goes. As he dances, he cannot take his eyes away from Freddie and Karen, burning with jealousy. Karen tells Freddie she’s a singer, who asks her to sing. Young Gangster returns to the table. She goes to the stage and dedicates the song to Freddie:

Young Gangster stares at Freddie. Then looks away, smiling at his own pathetic self.

Young Gangster claps with tears in his eyes that you can catch only if you look close enough. The song choice is fairly primitive and usually I don’t like it when song lyrics comment on the narrative, but it can be looked over in this case since the Gangster is the narrator and it may not be the song that Karen sang, but that represents the state of mind. Also because of the subtlety with which the scene plays out, the song doesn’t really seem too overbearing. It may not read very subtle, but that’s because I’m highlighting aspects that seem relevant to the homosexual theme running through the scene. The psychosexual nature of the way the Young Gangsters kills his victims is also indicative of his homosexuality. He shoots Lennie Taylor in the leg, calmly dresses down to his underwear, pulls out his axe and then cuts Lennie’s dick off. He throws Maxie through the glass window of his apartment after electrocuting his balls. Just before he chops Roland’s head off with his axe, he strokes his frizzy hair. He kills Billy by running him over in a parking lot with his car, who tries to outrun it, fully naked. Because narcissists think of themselves to be complete in every way possible within the confines of their substitute reality, theoretically speaking they should be asexual and can derive sexual pleasure only through masturbation, since they are their own love-objects.

However, they can also be hypersexual, pretty much fucking anything that can provide them with any amount of narcissistic pleasure; either through admiration from the partner or through a successful act of seduction. In the case of the Young Gangster, he loves the world of men, the cigars, the suits, the vulgar jokes; this is the world he wants to be a part of and it is to this world he looks to for sexual acceptance and approval. This is the reason he despises women, or as he calls them the “birds”, he is not only jealous of the fact that they are more emotionally adept, something he lacks, but also because they have the right biological anatomy to attract the men he wishes would be sexually active with him. My guess would be that he is asexual, but his undercurrent repressed sadistic homosexuality erupts every time he is about to kill a man. He doesn’t just shoot them; he makes an event out of it. He slowly dresses down to his underwear and then goes to work on them. If one looks closely, one can actually spot him moan slightly as he dresses down to kill Lennie. By not reworking the character of Cassio into the screenplay for Gangster No.1, the writers are able to highlight the malignant homosexuality of Iago; since his drive to destroy Othello no longer is only about power but also sexual envy.

Many people seem to have been disappointed by the climax of Gangster No.1, and for the life of me I can’t understand why. It is the perfect way to end the film as far as I’m concerned. See, it is not good enough for a malignant narcissist to just get his revenge; he needs his victims as an audience to witness his revenge. He earns his narcissistic pleasure through acknowledgment of supremacy from his victim. This is also the reason behind the brutal method for his killings; it is not good enough for him that his victims just die off a bullet, for him the payoff is the look in their eyes as he butchers them. Those who have rejected him or caused him to feel insecure must admit their inferiority to him in order for him to feel complete. Gangster destroyed Freddie Mays, having him sent to prison for thirty years for a murder that he himself committed. But that is not good enough for him, since the payoff for him is not the suffering of Freddie Mays, but being able to tell him that it was he who caused it. He wants Freddie to acknowledge Gangster55’s (so called because he is 55 years-old in the third act) superiority because it is only then that he can balance his previous rejection.

For Gangster55, no attack, intentional or otherwise, can ever go unanswered, no matter how long back, because perfection of his ostentatious-self can’t allow for even a scratch on it. When he threatens Freddie to come meet him after he returns from the prison, he wants Freddie’s revisit to his old apartment to be the same as the first time when Young Gangster visited it thirty years back. He wants Freddie to want his suit, his shoes and his apartment. He wants to be able to throw a wad of cash at Freddie, and for him to take it graciously. He wants Freddie to acknowledge his superiority, just the way he acknowledged Freddie’s superiority when he was young. It was never really about him wanting to be Freddy when he was young; it was about him becoming Freddie and more and then wanting Freddie to want to be him. That’s his narcissistic payoff. He wants Freddie to acknowledge that he is “the horse” now. He rehearses his speech before Freddie shows up, all suited up; just the way Freddie was when he met him first. When Freddie does show up, Gangster55 is asleep on his leather couch; his shirt untucked, his pants a little too high up, and his sleeves folded. Not the way he planned it.

He opens his eyes to see Freddie looking down at him, suited up in a cheaper suit but wearing it well. It was a great ploy by the filmmakers to have Freddie be played by the same actor as his older self, while switching actors in the case of the Gangster. It is done to show how Freddie was Freddie right from the beginning to the end, a dynamic entity, but because the Gangster had no real identity himself and wanted to become Freddie, he changes to a completely different person altogether. The apartment looks the same it did in 1968. “Like what you’ve done with the place”, Freddie says sarcastically. Not the impact that Gangster55 had expected, which makes him angry. Gangster55 tries to buy Freddie, the way he was bought as the Young Gangster. “Freddie, I want you to take the money. I took your money, you take my money.” Freddie wants none of it, which now really pisses Gangster55 off, he throws the bundles away. He throws the picture of the horse off the wall, insulting Freddie by claiming that he is not as sexually potent as he used to be. He then goes on to offer Freddie the apartment, his shoes, his tie-pin. Freddie wants none of it, none of the things that were so valuable to the Young Gangster. He just stares at Gangster55, disgusted.

“You’re mad. That Freddy is dead”, Freddie says. “No, it’s you. You drive me fuckin’ nuts, you do. What is it with you? Where are you coming from? Explain it to me ‘coz I really wanna know. What have you got that I haven’t got? I’m the better man.” He is vulnerable, almost crying. He tells Freddie that he killed Lennie Taylor, for which Freddie paid thirty years of his life, but Freddie is unwilling for revenge. “You’re pathetic”, he says to Freddie. “Yeah, I was. I was vain. Handsome Freddie Mays. Butcher of Mayfair. Who’d want to be that guy?” This almost kills Gangster55, since that is exactly what he has been trying to be all his adult life. His invincible perfect created-self is Handsome Freddie Mays, the butcher of Mayfair; and now Freddie comes along and says he was pathetic, essentially saying Gangster55 is pathetic. Freddie has rejected him again, something he had been wanting to avenge for thirty years. He realizes what he has been jealous of all along are not the things Freddie owned, but his personality, his inner world, his identity and his ability to love and be loved; something he can never get because he has no identity of his own. See, he can own a horse, but he can never be a horse. He realizes that no amount objects he owns can ever buy for him Freddie’s individuality. In other words, for the first he is confronted by his true self, as his counterfeit-self shatters to pieces.

As he finally realizes that he cannot win against Freddie, he pulls out a gun and gives it to Freddy, asking Freddy to shoot him, but Freddy doesn’t want to do it. As his final ploy, Gangster55 narrates to gruesome details how he watched and laughed at Freddy and Karen, as they lay bleeding to death on the street. Gangster55 knows that if Freddie would kill him, he could still die with his ego unscathed; since it would prove that even if he were not any superior to Freddie, at least he wasn’t any worse. “C’mon Freddie, just shoot me. KILL ME!” Freddie points the gun at him for a while, then puts it down and walks away saying, “I’m just an old man in a crap suit. I like it that way.” Gangster55 has lost. In his desperation to die with the pride of his grandiose-self intact, he decides to commit suicide. He takes his clothes off, like he does before his every killing, and folds them neatly into a pile; the tie-pin still has the initials FM on it. He stands at edge of his balcony burning pound bills, and says:

He asks himself the question he has been running for all his life. When he asks himself that question, there is no answer, because there is no him. When his created ego is destroyed, he no longer has a reason to live. He doesn’t exist, only his illusion does; and if that doesn’t exist, what has he got to live for? The first thought of introspection is his death because that is the realization of his inner void. The lack of fear of death of his grandiose-self comes from the immense fear of death of his true self. For a true solipsist, he is “the God and the world” and his death encompasses death of all. That’s a very scary thought for a narcissist, because other than that he fears nothing in or from the world. He is the one and only in his universe and Gangster55 is not ready to surrender just yet:

Gangster55 realizes that his entire life has been an illusion, the shattering of which must also bring his end; and his choice to commit suicide is his final “fuck you” to God. He is an unsubmitted will that controls his life and death. He jumps off his balcony. Perfect. This brings me to the real reason I wanted to write this review. In my Days of Heaven review, I wrote that I saw psychological reasons behind the construction of the vengeful Old Testament God; who is cruel, authoritarian, ruthless and maybe even sadistic.

As I elaborated in my Days of Heaven review, it is logically impossible for God to be vengeful or cruel, and so these qualities obviously have to be based on a perception of God rather than Truth itself. The traditional problem of evil is the dilemma of how a benevolent God could permit evil to be a part of creation. The obvious solution to the problem of evil would be the existence of free will that is present because of God’s benevolence. The key to the story of Garden of Eden lies not only in the choice that Adam made, but in the fact that he had a choice. If the source of Good in Man is God, then Man can attain perfect Goodness only through annihilation of his Ego leading to merger in God, i.e. through the undoing of the biting of the Apple; which would logically imply that the source of Evil in Man is envelopment in the most complete form of Ego. This in turn implies that Good and Evil are not perfectly correlated with morality and immorality, since the former pair are the principles and the latter are the subjective interpretation of them, thus implying the presence of Ego that would make the decision.

True Good is then beyond morality and immorality since it’s an action performed not for the satisfaction of individual ego, but for the sake of satisfying itself as a principle; in other words it is performed for the “glory of God”. In the same way, a True Evil action transcends morality and immorality since it is performed only for the sake of satisfaction of Ego; i.e. True Evil lies not in immorality but amorality. The Evil is in the desire to usurp God (or any ideal that one may consider higher than oneself, e.g. Truth, Love, Justice etc.) to assume his place as the “God and the world”, all self-contained within an individual’s Ego. It is a belief that no higher force, ontological or otherwise, exists beyond the individual’s Ego and the only duty a Man has is towards himself, an end to which all means are acceptable. For him morality is subjective, situational and relative to his own ends. The True solipsist is not Evil by nature, but by implication. He acts Evil not because he believes in it, but because it provides higher narcissistic supply than acting Good. Evil is malignant narcissism, leading to an inverted conscience meaning that his superego idealizes Evil. Like a moral cannibal, he wander through the population feasting on human “spirit”, attaining narcissistic pleasure through inflicting pain and misery.

Throughout the film, Gangster fondly says, “Look at me. Look into my fuckin’ eyes”, and it always brings out extreme reaction from those he says it to. They get hysterically angry or start bawling their eyes out or get scared out of their skin. You see, when he asks them to look into his eyes, he wants them to see that there are no remains of any soul that he may have had left in him. When they look into his eyes, they see something inhuman, like an alien in human skin, and it scares the shit out of them. Gangster is the Devil personified.

Because a malignant narcissist remains completely enveloped in his grandiose-self; he has an immense Jungian “shadow”. In fact in most cases, it would be safe to say that a malignant narcissist is his own “shadow”. This allows him, more than most other people, to indulge in Scapegoating; i.e vigorous projection of flaws onto others as a way of coping with the denial of one’s own “shadow”. A malignant narcissist because he is incapable of introspection, is especially prone to scapegoat others for his own failings. One of the major symptoms of malignant narcissism is paranoia, which is caused by a malignant narcissist’s projections of feelings of envy, greed, jealousy etc. onto others. As an example, this explains Gangster55’s misassumption of Freddie’s response in the climax. He feels because he was envious as the Young Gangster by the wealth and power that Freddie possessed, so would be the case when the tables are turned.

Coming off the tangent, as each individuals where we may not be considered malignant narcissists, behind the veil of an organization, such as a religion or society; humans are capable of incredible amount of Evil. Whether it is the corporations that act like psychopaths when individually all its workers may not be considered to be so, or the holocaust of the Jews by the Germans or the countless other acts of cruelty that humans have incurred on other humans while representing an organization. Time and again, history is laid with examples of communities of people acting as a collective form of malignant narcissism, loosing empathy for their fellow humans by dehumanizing them as being the inferior race or religion etc. Inferring from this, it is my belief that it was the collective Ego of the society in the Old Testament times that scapegoated God to be cruel, vengeful, authoritarian etc., since they believed themselves to be created in his image, not realizing that source of Evil lied in their collective Ego that separated them, from Him. There can also be possible sociological reasons behind this scapegoating since fear is a great motivator for the states to enforce moral behavior amongst the citizens in the society, and has historically been proven to be so. Spreading the fear of a ruthless, angry and vengeful God might have done the trick for in the Old Testament times.

Othello: Will you I pray, demand that demi-devil
Why he hath thus ensnar'd my soul and body?

Iago: Demand me nothing; what you know you know
From this time forth I will never speak word

Even though I love the final exchange between Othello and Iago, where Iago’s answer comes not from his glibness, but from his inability to be introspective; the loose end of Iago’s storyline always bothered me. The ending of Gangster No.1, represents to me the perfect end to a malignant narcissist, since the natural extrapolation to his life is death by suicide. Like its namesake, a narcissist can only fall in love with his reflected image, and end his own life on realizing it to be an illusion.

(Note: I don’t consider The Godfather 1 & 2 to be films of gangster genre. One, because they’re top-heavy we never really see much of the dirty work at the ground-level. The two films are more like, as Coppola puts it, a grand opera about a King and his three sons who each have different parts of his personality.)