Violence and Force
In a movie about the mob, it is not surprising that the use of violence and force are major themes. The mafia wields all its power because its members are willing to employ brutal violence and forceful, coercive measures in order to buy membership in its ranks. This violence, or the threat of it, is what makes government officials, cops, business owners, and others cooperate with the mob. Death is often around the corner, and throughout the film, we see almost all of the major members of the mafia "whacked," including Tommy. Martin Scorsese depicts much of the violence straightforwardly and unapologetically. It often comes in an unexpected way; Tommy shoots the young bartender Spider after giving him a vague look when he talks back to him, Morrie is ushered into a car as though it's an offer of friendship, then stabbed in the neck from behind; Tommy is brought in for what he thinks is a ceremony in his honor, before he is promptly shot in the face.
Violence is not just an anonymous, structural force; we also get an intimate sense of individual characters' violent impulses. Tommy, for instance, is a particularly savage killer, exhibiting a scary lack of remorse for his senseless acts. His violence is often unnecessary and impulsive, and he thinks little of the consequences. Though Henry is not as naturally violent as his companions, he has many violent moments in his personal life, as when he beats up Bruce for sexually assaulting Karen, and then when he throws Karen onto the ground after she threatens him with the gun. Violence is around every corner, unsentimental and gruesome, presented thematically to underscore the desperation and desensitization of the mob members' lifestyles.
Loyalty & Belonging
The most important value in the mafia is loyalty. The movie illustrates the theme of loyalty and its importance very clearly. From the first time that Henry gets "pinched" by the cops, he keeps his mouth shut and doesn't rat anyone out. As the young Henry leaves the courthouse, Paulie and the crew congratulate him and shower him with praise for his restraint. His silence affords him a sense of belonging in the group unlike he has ever known. His loyalty is rewarded by more protection and more opportunities to do jobs on his own. While this seems simple enough, he also learns quickly enough that the punishment for disloyalty to a family member is certain death. The pinnacle of belonging in the mafia is becoming a "made man." When Henry describes the qualifications for being a "made man," he tells us, "It means you belong to a family and crew. It means that nobody can fuck around with you. It also means you could fuck around with anybody just as long as they aren't also a member. It's like a license to steal. It's a license to do anything." Loyalty wins the mob member belonging, which in turn wins him a slew of privileges. The irony is that one of those privileges is the ability to be disloyal; Henry is disloyal to Paulie when he lies about not dealing drugs, and disloyal to his wife when he pursues affairs with two different women.
Drugs
Henry is a very successful gangster until he becomes involved with drugs while in prison. After he leaves prison, Paulie begs him not to deal drugs because it would compromise the reputation of the crew, but Henry goes behind his back. Initially, he is able to successfully balance his mafia duties and his side gig as a drug dealer, but soon enough it becomes too much to handle and is exacerbated by his own personal addiction to cocaine. Cocaine makes him sloppy and careless, and his dealing leads him to get arrested and subsequently cut off from the Lucchese family. Drugs unravel Henry's life and put him into a desperate situation.
Restraint and Silence
This goes hand in hand with belonging and loyalty, but the chief way that a mafia member can show his loyalty and commitment to the group is by "keeping his mouth shut." The worst thing a person can possibly be is an informer, a big mouth, a stool pigeon, or a rat. When the young Henry emerges from the courthouse, Jimmy expresses pride and tells him the two most important things to remember as a member of the gang, "never rat on your friends and always keep your mouth shut." Opening one's mouth and saying too much is always what costs a mob member his life, and as Jimmy and Tommy often tell us, a mobster never likes a "ball buster." The term "You're busting my balls" is thrown around constantly in the film and is meant to describe someone who doesn't know when to lay off and keep their mouth shut. Morrie is one such "ball buster" and he suffers for it, as does Spider the bartender and Billy Batts. In Goodfellas, silence is a virtue.
Immigration and "The Old Country"
The mafia itself is a social organization that traces its origins back to Sicily and Southern Italy. The members of the Lucchese crew are all 100% Italian, and their loyalty to the ways of the mob not only reflects their loyalty and devotion to each other, but also to the "old country" and to their history. As Henry tells us, he can never become a made man because he does not have purely Italian roots. Thus, purity of heritage is revealed as an important value of the Lucchese group and a central theme of the film. Part of what defines the mafia, its organization, and its values is its connection to Italy and old European structures that then transferred to the United States following a wave of immigration in the early 20th century. Heritage, ethnicity, and background are important to the characters in Goodfellas, and they define their relationships and allegiances. This is true not only of the mafioso; it extends to the marriage between Henry and Karen. Henry is half Irish and half Italian, while Karen is Jewish. In order to ensure her parents' approval, Karen lies that Henry is half Jewish. Through this, we see that ethnic background is an important issue for many of the characters in the film.
Food Preparation
One of the comic juxtapositions in the film is between violence and food. The mobsters, for all their employment of blunt force, intimidation, and unthinkable brutality, are fussy in the kitchen. After he bludgeons Billy to death, Tommy enjoys a home-cooked meal from his mother, still covered in Billy's blood. In prison, we see that Paulie and Henry's status as mafia members affords them a cushier lifestyle, and one of the central elements of their incarceration is their preparation of food and enjoyment of a shared meal. Henry cooks and gets high-quality food snuck in, describing jail as "not that bad." Then, on the day of his arrest, Henry is running around town trying to get a drug deal off the ground, while also juggling the preparation of a family-style Italian dinner. He leaves his iconic sauce in the care of his brother, and maintains a comically pedantic concern about how it will turn out. The film ends with Henry playing house in the Witness Protection Program, safe from the mobsters who want to kill him, but complaining that he "can't even get decent food."
Power
The life of a gangster is difficult, dangerous, and one has a high likelihood of getting killed. Still, when one is in the good graces of the organization, it's a pretty nice life. This is exemplified when Henry takes Karen to the Copacabana for the first time. He leaves his car with a man who isn't a valet, he walks through the line of people waiting to get in and through the basement, greeting everyone along the way warmly. When they arrive in the dining room, waiters put down a table close to the stage and Henry is greeted by everyone like a celebrity. Karen is impressed, and Henry is smug about the power he wields as a member of the mob.
At the end, even though he is able to avoid getting killed by his associates, Henry is sad to leave the mobster life behind, in large part because he is forfeiting the power that it brought him. He laments his fall in status, reminiscing, "Anything I wanted was a phone call away. Free cars. The keys to a dozen hideout flats all over the city. I bet twenty, thirty grand over a weekend and then I'd either blow the winnings in a week or go to the sharks to pay back the bookies. Didn't matter. It didn't mean anything. When I was broke, I'd go out and rob some more. We ran everything. We paid off cops. We paid off lawyers. We paid off judges. Everybody had their hands out. Everything was for the taking." More than the belonging, or the sense of brotherhood, the sense of power and entitlement is the main thing that draws in Henry Hill at the beginning, and it is the source of his sense of loss at the end.
