The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Tuesday, April 23, 2019 — 5

I stopped watching football 
last year. Even before Kap 
took a knee, the NFL had been 
driven by a certain noxious 
brand of culture warring: 
the massive penalty flags, a 
collective shoulder shrug at 
domestic violence. The “clean 
hits” didn’t feel especially 
clean. The tackles seemed to 
be getting louder. Or maybe 
it was just me. The sad thing 
about sports is 
that 
they 
can 
be 
fun 
until 
you think about 
them too hard, 
and once you do, 
you can’t escape 
the ugliness. For 
every player I 
loved to watch 
— OBJ and that 
preposterous 
one-handed 
catch, 
the 
speedy, 
elusive 
Russell 
Wilson 
— I was haunted 
by 
an 
Aaron 
Hernandez. Or a 
Junior Seau.
“Seau,” 
a 
new “30 for 30” 
documentary 
from 
ESPN, 
follows 
the 
tragic 
undoing 
of the charismatic linebacker, 
whose suicide in 2012 ignited 
a 
long-overdue 
national 
conversation 
about 
the 
likelihood of football players 
to suffer chronic traumatic 
encephalopathy 
(CTE), 
a 
degenerative brain disease. 
Drafted by his hometown San 
Diego Chargers in 1990, Seau 
played nearly 20 years in the 
NFL, making two Super Bowl 
appearances and earning 10 
All-Pro selections. His death 
came as a shock not only 
because of his stature in the 
league, but also because of his 
cheery demeanor. “Buddy!” 
his friends and teammates 

remember 
him 
greeting 
everyone he met.
But as each NFL season 
passed, director Kirby Bradley 
illustrates, 
the 
damage 
football 
was 
inflicting 
on 
Seau grew more conspicuous. 
He announced a short-lived 
retirement 
from 
football 
through 
what 
his 
agent 
remembers 
as 
a 
bizarre, 
incoherent 
public 
speech 
in San Diego. He went on 
to play a final season with 
the Patriots, but it ended in 
heartbreak with a loss at Super 

Bowl XLII. Seau had been 
happily married and a doting 
father but began to withdraw 
from family life and turned to 
gambling. After retiring, he 
divorced his wife and spent 
less time with his children. 
Everyone 
who 
knew 
him 
was baffled by the dramatic 
change 
in 
his 
mood 
and 
personality. When a neighbor, 
an MLS soccer player who had 
suffered a concussion, told 
Seau about his symptoms, the 
linebacker scoffed: “I’ve had a 
headache since I was 15.”
For years, the NFL’s token 
response was that playing 
football 
was 
unrelated 
to 

degenerative brain disease. 
“Seau” is a damning look at 
the lengths the NFL went to to 
ensure that Seau’s death didn’t 
become a real problem for the 
league. Despite decades of 
research on the lasting health 
effects of a football career, it 
was only very recently that the 
NFL even acknowledged the 
possibility of a link to CTE. 
And though they’ve made 
various rule changes, the fact 
remains that the tackle, the 
animating force of football, is 
what makes it so dangerous. 
Junior Seau’s fight 
won’t be won so 
easily.
The NFL Draft 
is 
this 
week. 
Roger Goodell will 
saunter on and off 
a stage in Nashville 
to announce the 
picks, 
everyone 
there 
will 
boo 
him and when the 
weekend 
ends, 
there will be 254 
rookies 
in 
the 
league. 
Some 
of 
them 
won’t 
get 
much playing time 
in 
their 
careers, 
but some of them 
will. A few will 
be 
linebackers, 
like Seau, and in 
a lifetime of play, 
they’ll endure sub-
concussive 
blow 
after blow to the head. Over 
time, clumps of tau protein 
will build up in their brains 
until they strangle nerve cells. 
The research says CTE can 
make a 40-year-old man’s 
brain look like an 80-year-
old’s. Years after these players 
retire, they’ll find themselves 
becoming 
angrier, 
more 
depressed, 
more 
confused, 
more forgetful. And cowards 
like Goodell and Jerry Jones, 
who spent years peddling 
doubts about the link between 
this vicious sport and lasting 
trauma to the brain, will be 
laughing their way to the 
bank.

Junior Seau and the grim 
truth of CTE in football

MAITREYI ANANTHARAMAN
Daily Arts Writer

ESPN

TV REVIEW

30 for 30

ESPN+

One unexpected effect of live 
theater is that it makes writing 
accountable to speech, in a way 
reading 
fiction 
aloud 
doesn’t. 
Watching 
people 
interact 
as 
characters means that a theater 
writer has to recreate human 
interaction to some extent, and in 
a lot of plays the first thing to “get 
past” is the total non-resemblance 
of the script to real speech. In what 
world do people always say exactly 
what they mean, or at least the 
exact right thing for a set of clearly 
devised situations? Plays make 
the inner workings of fiction — 
plot, “characterization,” narrative 
structure — visible (and audible) for 
the viewer.
Of course, there’s a 
very good reason why 
most playwrights don’t 
try to replicate speech. 
Speech 
is 
frequently 
illogical and often bizarre, 
carrying with it highly 
detailed shorthands that 
demonstrate 
people’s 
relationships to each other. 
If people are unsure of their 
relationship to each other, 
verbal 
communication 
frequently doesn’t work at 
all. The 2018 play “Wheelchair” by 
Will Arbery demonstrates this in 
its style, which saturates the page 
with tics, half-sentences and whole 
conversational threads that don’t go 
anywhere. It can be frustrating to 
read.

GORDON

Can we
Um
How does that feel?

DEVON

The wine?

GORDON

Yes.

DEVON

Good, I love wine. Thanks sorry, 
I had the
craziest day, so when I saw the 
wine, I was just

GORDON

Yes it’s
Can we
Pause.

DEVON

What
Pause.

GORDON

What was crazy about your day?

This is a completely contentless 
conversation that continues in this 
fashion for pages and pages, but 
try reading it out loud! It’s not only 
recognizable as speech, it captures 
a subtle and rather common 
feeling of being stuck in a weirdly 
transactional situation, trying to 
bridge a gap between people who 
are unsure of their relationship to 
each other.
Gordon, a Jewish man in his 
sixties, is giving away all his 
furniture to Devon, a 19-year-
old Black man, for free. We find 
out later that this is in advance of 
Gordon’s eviction from the building 
in West Williamsburg, which is 
being redone as “artist studios.” 
Gordon first has a strangely 

intimate interaction with Devon 
and later with his niece Sascha, who 
is evicting him.
The nervous impersonality of 
the overall tone is coupled with the 
instability of the whole scene. The 
stage directions at the beginning 
of the play indicate that the action 
should be underscored both with 
the sound of construction and a low 
hum which is “enough to get in our 
brains.” There’s a Beckett-esque 
sense that the theater the play is 
staged in is some kind of limit: at 
one point Gordon says, cryptically, 
“Going out there — I will dissolve.”
The characters seem either 
anxious to leave or to be left alone, 
and they sometimes seem to not be 
directly addressing each other. This 
makes it that much more jarring 
when characters declare their love 
for each other, apologize for long-
standing hurts and speculate about 
religious concerns and the nature 
of correct action. Additionally, two 
vaguely-related 
monologue-rants 
that Devon and Sascha embark on 
completely shred the discursive 
fabric of the play. They read like 
emotional vomit, like a torrent of 
thoughts that burst some kind of 
dam.
“What am I doing? I hate talking. 
Everyone always cuts me off mid-
sentence or replies with ‘Oh.’ or 
‘Yeah.’ and I hate it, damn it. I’m 
scared to go outside. I’m scared all 
the angry old people can’t see how 
free I am … I can’t even do drugs, 
and can’t do anything right.”

To this Gordon replies “That 
feels like an error. What you did 
just felt like an error.” In a way, 
the overcorrection for the nervous 
tics of everyday life constituting 
its own kind of solipsistic fake-
ness. There’s no easy way out of 
the awkwardness of the situation, 
no good way to institute “normal” 
human interaction given the banal 
inhumanity of the situation. The 
long rants and confessions of 
various kinds that the characters 
give to each other land them right 
back where they started.
The 
discursive 
dead 
end 
“Wheelchair” depicts points to the 
larger context that frames the play. 
Devon taking Gordon’s furniture 
for free on the brink of his eviction 
can be read as an allegory for what’s 
happening in New York City as well 
as cities around the US, as long-
standing 
residents 
of 
cities get evicted to make 
way for younger and 
richer people.
The journalist Peter 
Moskowitz 
describes 
gentrification 
as 
“a 
theory 
of 
governance 
that places the needs 
of capital over people.” 
While 
gentrification 
in the United States is 
usually 
talked 
about 
in terms of individual 
gentrifiers and, much less often, the 
people it displaces, the frameworks 
that hold it up are less commonly 
discussed. Moskowitz shows that to 
understand gentrification, you have 
to understand the history of urban 
planning, real estate speculation 
and 
the 
almost 
half-century-
long legacy of neoliberalism in 
the United States. “Wheelchair” 
recognizes that Gordon, Devon and 
Sascha are swept up in a process 
largely outside of their own control, 
and it’s sympathetic to all three of 
them without excusing their faults 
and flimsy justifications.
The play seems, at times, to be 
approaching the question of how 
to continue living in a world like 
this, rife with alienation and at 
times downright cruel. All three 
characters largely fail at this: 
Sascha starts out by excusing her 
callous behavior with the folding 
of her nonprofit and devolves in 
her monologue to rapid-fire and 
contradictory buzzwords. Devon 
has so thoroughly internalized 
competition 
and 
individualism 
that he’s terrified of other people. 
Gordon makes recourse to lying 
about his past and proclaiming that 
he’s a “lamed-vavnik,” one of the 
36 righteous people for whom God 
preserves the world. The play seems 
to suggest that these failures are all 
very human, and it doesn’t make 
sense to punish people for them. 
The question of justice just out of 
reach, the play settles for a question 
of empathy.

‘The Wheelchair’ depicts a 
dead end in gentrification

EMILY YANG
Daily Arts Writer

BOOK REVIEW

The Wheelchair

Will Arbery

3 Hole Press

July 1, 2018

Henry Hill in ‘Goodfellas’

WARNER BROS.

UNDERCOVER CRIME SERIES

“When I was broke, I just went 
out and robbed some more. We ran 
everything. We paid off lawyers. 
We paid off cops. Everybody had 
their hands out. And now it’s all 
over.”
The 
relationship 
between 
organized crime in film and the 
reality which it is based on is 
both distorted and uncomfortably 
close. Often, on the silver screen, 
crime 
is 
sensationalized, 
a 

guiltless opportunity to root for 
the bad guys. But as I articulated 
with both previous installments 
of this series, I found that 
organized 
crime 
can 
expose 
dark truths about identity and 
American values. We don’t just 
consume mob mythology for the 
wisecracking and the brutality; 
under the surface, we connect 
with something deeper.
With that said, the best way I 
can conclude this cultural thread 
of the series is by digging deep on 
one of the most accurately told 
mob movies ever: “Goodfellas.” 

The mafia-fascinated journalist 
Nicholas Pileggi, who penned the 
film’s nonfictional source material 
“Wiseguy” ensured that nearly 
every scene is based on an event 
that actually happened, every line 
of narration an anecdote from the 
stories’ actual gangsters.
The 
result 
is 
a 
nuanced 
spectacle of the mafia that points 
out both the humanity and lack 
thereof among its members. Henry 
Hill, the story’s sharp, laconic 
main player complicates his sense 
of cultural identity when he joins 
the mob. While working at his 

neighborhood’s seedy cab stand is 
all he’s ever wanted, he can never 
truly be one of the family.
“My father, who was Irish, 
was sent to work at the age of 11, 
and liked that I got myself a job,” 
Hill says. “And my mother was 
happy after she found out that the 
Ciceros came from the same part 
of Sicily as she did. I mean, to my 
mother, that was the answer to all 
her prayers.” Henry’s half-Irish, 
half-Italian heritage prevents him 
from securing a position in the 
upper echelons of the mafia. His 
existence as an immersed outsider 
to the roiling, brutish politics of 
Sicilian families not only gives 
the film a unique perspective, but 
shapes Hill’s bitingly sardonic 
worldview.
For playing a boozing, robbing, 
racketeering wiseass, Ray Liotta’s 
performance as Hill is surprisingly 
quiet. Hill’s cool reservation is 
linked to his isolation from the 
mob, his hesitation to always speak 
in sharp contrast to the vitriolic 
comedy of Joe Pesci’s Tommy 
DeVito. Tommy, a total Sicilian, 
is something of a foil to Hill, a 
hypothetical path of even greater 
reputation and criminal success if 
Henry weren’t part Irish.
One of the subtlest moments in 
the film that lays out this parallel 
is when the two are eating dinner 
at Tommy’s mother’s house along 
with Robert DeNiro’s Jimmy 
Conway. 
“Henry, 
what’s 
the 
matter? You don’t talk too much. 

You don’t eat much, you don’t 
talk much,” his mother observes. 
And with his signature calmness, 
Henry replies with a chuckle, 
“I’m just listening.” To that, 
Tommy’s mother launches into a 
joke about a similarly tight-lipped 
man, concluding that “In Italian, 
it sounds much nicer.” What 
better way to articulate Henry’s 
permanent feeling of exclusion 
from the Sicilians around him?
The most hilarious part of 
this conversation, though, is that 
from Tommy’s car, a gagged mob 
boss, Billy Batts thuds against the 
inside of the trunk. Later on, when 
Billy, Tommy and Henry must 
dig up Batts’s body and rebury 
it, the movie goes a step further 
in distinguishing Henry from 
his brutal companions. Tommy 
jests while hoisting his Batts that 
they’re going eat wings at his 
mother’s house that night. Henry, 
in arguably the most realistic 
response to that comment, turns 
away and wretches. As much as he 
accepts and partakes in the mob’s 
violent deeds, he has a conscience. 
His isolation not only blocks him 
from becoming a “made man” 
like Tommy eventually does, but 
makes him less desensitized to 
gore than his fellow wiseguy.
The other fascinating aspect of 
Hill’s ethnic separation from the 
mob is that it may be the reason 
that he was spared from life in 
prison. In “Wiseguy,” Pileggi 
draws 
from 
Nassau 
County 

Narcotics Detective Daniel Mann 
to reveal exactly what made Hill 
an precious potential informant 
for the FBI. “Henry, in fact, 
was neither of high rank nor 
particularly vicious; he wasn’t 
even tough as far as the cops could 
determine. What distinguished 
Henry from most of the wiseguys 
who were under surveillance 
was the fact that he seemed to 
have total access to all levels of 
the mob world.” In other words, 
Henry’s ability to scale effortlessly 
between various echelons of the 
organization the reason he could 
inform on each of them.
In the end, Henry’s illegibility 
to become a “made” boss with 
his own unit working under him 
saved him from the heat. His 
outsider status was a blessing 
in 
disguise. 
In 
examining 
“Goodfellas” through a lense 
of cultural division, it becomes 
apparent that, what separates us 
from those around can shape us 
for the better.
Henry Hill is certainly not 
a defensible character. He is at 
his best a charismatic natural 
mastermind, and at his worst, a 
paranoid, drug-addicted, convict. 
And yet, he somehow gives us 
all someone to root for in the 
underworld of crime. Henry is at 
once a shimmering, impossibly 
magnetic image of the mafia’s 
verve and a wide window into the 
harsh realities of organized crime 
— a brute and a sympath. 

ANISH TAMHANEY
Daily Arts Writer