By Costa Koutsoutis
“[P]aradise, we really managed to fuck it all up.”
This line, from the film Casino, perfectly encapsulates the grim and matter-of-fact mood of Martin Scorsese’s 1995 masterpiece. A fictionalization inspired by Nicholas Pileggi’s nonfiction book Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas about casino mafias in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the movie showcases how personal conflicts and petty greed ultimately lead to the collapse of the golden goose money making scheme of running a casino. It should have been easy, because it put all of those involved within the sphere of legal revenue generation. Organized crime’s connections to gambling are long and deep, so upping it on a grander scale of a “legitimate” business like a resort casino/hotel feels like a natural and easy-to-do upgrade. It should have been the American Dream, the step up into legitimacy that deep down, some mafiosos crave, but can never truly attain due to the sordid nature of their work. The film observes how personal pride and flaws bring about the downfall of an era of the mob. At the same time, it also captures a larger issue, which is showcasing how organized crime’s attempt to ride the American Dream to respectability and profit is inevitably doomed to fail.
The film follows Sam “Ace” Rothstein, a fictionalized version of real-life mobster Frank Rosenthal. Played by Robert de Niro, Rothstein is a sports handicapper/professional better for the Mafia hired to manage the mob-financed Tangiers casino. His job is to make sure the money, which is constantly being skimmed off the top, continues to flow both into those legitimate coffers, as well as ones of more dubious legality.. Or else. Unfortunately, a series of circumstances related to Ace’s longtime-friend and mobster Nicky Santoro (played by Joe Pesci as a fictionalized version of real-life mob enforcer and professional thief Anthony Spilotro) and Ace’s wife and long-time Vegas strip con artist Ginger (played by Sharon Stone) ultimately lead to various law enforcement agencies closing in on the notorious Chicago Outfit, a Midwestern “branch” of the Mafia running it all from behind the mask of the Teamster’s Union.
In his review for The Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan called the film “exhausting and claustrophobic”, which is interesting considering how big and broad it is literally, dealing with a space within the Nevada desert. It’s true though, seeing the way greed and short-sightedness destroys every possible path for advancement, every single opportunity with insistence on the so-called “old rules” of mob enforcement, vulgar displays of power, and insistence on not adapting entirely the modern capitalist trappings of upwardly-mobile legitimacy.
Ace is constantly-limited, trapped not only by the walls of a chintzy neon palace, but also by the codes of conduct set by his Mafia backers. Similarly, Nicky Santoro is trapped and limited by those same codes of conduct, not to mention his violent toxic masculinity that drives him to his own ruin. Roger Ebert effectively highlighted in his own original film review how the viewers, as eavesdroppers, see the last time “street guys” were allowed to handle something of substantial value and earning, because as we see, they blow it. Badly. And it’s all their fault, because of the toxic ways in which they are “forced” (in quotation marks because really, while these social forces are powerful they’re not omnipotent) to behave and feel. Their chance at ascending into a higher caste or strata instead becomes a descent into death, not just for them but for an entire subculture (if, admittedly, an openly violent one). This is showcased in the film’s ending, with corporate hotels and casinos taking over.
Rothstein’s pride prevented him from playing the “game” of local politics, resulting in the gaming commission chairman drawing attention to Rothstein’s criminal background and exposing the casino’s mafia ties. Santoro, on the other hand, succumbs to selfishness and carnality, sleeping with Rothstein’s wife.
Rothstein’s rise and fall is a fantastic film depiction of the American dream’s ugly reality: it’s a road to ignominy, poverty, and death paved with unspeakable violence all for a chance at something that in the end you are told isn’t for you. The goalposts shift, circumstances forged by capitalism and patriarchal violence take it away from you, or that same capitalism and patriarchal violence influence you to deliberately destroy it.
On the surface, the film ironically makes perfect sense as an American Dream narrative. Members of the socioeconomic lower classes working their ways up the ranks of their (unorthodox) career. Yet they blow their chances at power, money, and legitimacy because of their inability to be satisfied with what they were already getting, an inherent aspect of line-must-go-up capitalism and a representation of the never-ending chase for higher and higher status.
The “American Dream,” a fantasy capitalism sold to American workers throughout the 20th century, is inherently tied to the rise of the U.S. middle class. Arguably both an expansion and individuation of the Turner Thesis (also known as the Frontier Thesis, part of the larger messaging behind Manifest Destiny), the American Dream posits a world of infinite upward mobility and material rewards (the cliche of the suburban house, the 2.5 kids, etc) for anyone willing to work hard enough for their employer. The American national mythos holds that all people can achieve this dream.
In “Defining the American Dream: A Generational Comparison,” Clara Riggio highlights the term and definition’s appearing in the 1930’s, and how social mobility and financial security are major elements of it regardless of the age range of those interviewed. In an America then rife with economic opportunities, it makes sense that everyone would latch onto such an idea. The size of your front lawn thus became the new American frontier.
The many decades since then have, of course, proven this dream to be an unsustainable lie, with 2.3 million home foreclosures in 2008 sounding the death knell. The 21st century has further showcased the frailty of this concept, especially in the tumultuous economic uncertainty post-COVID as supply chains continue to crumble and trade wars return.
But for American workers, from those involved in the gig economy zipping from job to job to more “stable” office workers in various tech and administrative fields, it’s still a hard goal to abandon. The American Dream is a difficult legacy to get rid of, considering its fruits exist within living memory. Post-WW2 “Baby Boomers” purchased Levitt houses in vast swaths of suburban sprawl, while the following generations of millennials (and even some Zoomers) grew up in them. The idea Riggio puts forth of how it provides stability and security is a powerful one, because the social bonds that produce a society (large or small) depend on stability and security.
Even the Mafia, seeing their own ecosystems and parameters of sustainability and economic growth, would integrate its philosophy into their own. In a 2024 study connecting crime communities and toxic masculinity, Alberto Mirasola, Giovanni Travaglio, and Isabella Giammusco write “In Mexico, research suggests that meeting cultural expectations about masculinity—demonstrating financial power and successfully offering a pathway to financial independence—enables cartels to recruit new members, especially in disadvantaged working-class communities,” something obviously-transferable to the 1970’s Italian-American mob of Casino.. And it makes sense, transferable to the Mafia, or really any subculture that exists outside of mainstream legal, economic, and behavioral subcultures. It’s a model of behavior that promises the American Dream’s economic and social freedoms but also allows for the muscular patriarchy of traditional (as in brought in via immigration) “Italian male behavior”. It’s not difficult to see how the mob of Casino continue to blindly carry on what Carlos E. Cortés labels as, while analyzing director Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal “Godfather” Mafia film series, “Italian traditionalism”.
By this, Cortés means not only adhering to traditional patriarchal male-female roles, maintenance of Italian traditions in the United States, and standards of behavior and beliefs, but also the enforcement of all that through both implied and active violence. And while Cortés, in discussing The Godfather Part II, references how the film (especially in showcasing Vito Corleone’s rise to power) takes place in the early to mid-20th century and are thrust into a younger America, Casino’s mob are different in the 1970’s, aping Cortés’ “Italian traditionalism” without understanding its roots as a connective thread back to Italy and the places that immigrants to an early 20th-century America had to make for themselves. Now, those same traditions – and subsequently, the protagonists of these mob stories who cling to them – are drowning in the capitalistic deluge of the American dream.
Pesci’s Santoro fights at the drop of a hat, over money issues, attacks on his pride, or even just annoyance. He bullies, harasses, and exploits women (including his own wife), but his intent on “earning” to maintain a level of financial independence from other higher-ups in the Mafia is, to him, entirely-legitimate. He believes himself a representation of the American Dream, with legitimate investments and a house in the suburbs, a young son in private school playing little-league baseball. But it’s no surprise that he allows himself to ruin that mobility, because the morals and ideals of toxic masculinity, crime, and American hashtag-hustle culture more broadly encourages you to view loyalty and friendship as temporary. Santoro views his friendship with Ace as the kind of friendship where they go “way back,” but has no problem sleeping with his friend’s wife and even ultimately trying to murder that friend (in the film’s opening scene featuring a car bomb). Even in his “American dream” life, his relationship with his wife is primarily one of appearances, as he is shown having turned his home bedroom into “a bank vault” as he calls it, corrupting the center of this modern middle-class American model life of his with the money he’s not supposed to be making according to “back home.”
Santoro is, in the film, ultimately killed by the Mob for his indiscretions. Ace, at the end of the film, goes back to betting and handicapping for the mob in the Midwest. He bemoans at the end of the film, “After the Teamsters got knocked out of the box, the corporations tore down practically every one of the old casinos. […] But in the end, I wound up right back where I started. I could still pick winners, and I could still make money for all kinds of people back home. And why mess up a good thing?” Somewhat ironically, it’s in this apparent failure, a return to his origins, that one could argue he’s achieved some level of that original definition of the American Dream. He has a reliable and trusted place, where security and stability are guaranteed because of how you contribute to a capitalistic endeavor. Has he learned a lesson here about the greed that brought it all down? Possibly, possibly-not. The shackles of that toxic behavior are difficult to shake off, but Ace does seem to realize that he absolutely could have instead ended up buried in an unmarked grave like Nicky. Or like Ginger, whose official cause of death is listed as an accidental overdose but a private subsequent investigation tells Ace that she was deliberately-given a “hot” dose, made to kill. Or any one of the others whose lives are considered forfeit by the Chicago Outfit powers-that-be, cutting their losses no matter who they hurt. Which also feels, again in light of the Dot-Com crash, the 2008 financial crisis, and COVID, somehow uniquely-appropriate for a story about the American Dream. If it doesn’t work, the bosses just burn everyone and everything and retreat.
In the end, wherever you stand on the overall issue of whether capitalism is inevitable, whether the American Dream by our definition can actually be reached, the approach to it through crime really does showcase the weakness of its roots. If you’ve gotta cross the lines, however blurry, is it really going to pay out? And more importantly, are the kinds of people willing to cross those lines repeatedly ever going to be satisfied in their hunt for their own American Dream? Because the evidence consistently shows us that no, they won’t be.
But maybe that’s America anyway, the ouroboros that constantly eats and eats, unable to be satisfied, and sustained by constantly consuming itself. Immortal only in name, an existence of never enough.
