Prof. Baick on Billy Bathgate

CL201Feb28, 2008
Prof. Baick, Billy Bathgate: Film vs. Book.

Prof. Baick was hamming it up five minutes before start of class, working the audience as he tested the microphone. With ceaseless energy he got the class involved in reading out loud, calling on individual students and reading along with them. His heroic efforts were fueled with humor and dedicated to the cause of student participation.

Comparing movie and novel, we were urged to look beyond the few pluses on the side of film and realize the many depths of text. Watching movies is a passive consumption, which is fine, but reading is an active production which goes further. The film is a packaged delivery of the book while reading it is a re-creation of it.

Reading brings us closer to the real historical context, reminding us of the purpose of E.L.D.'s historical fiction. In his turn, E.L.D. is to historical reality as the film is to the book. The author repackages history for us in the form of the fictional novel and delivers us to the doorsteps of historical reality. Captivated by the story, we are freed to take a detached view of a painful reality that would be no entertainment by itself, and may even be unbearable to learn about in depth.

Being an inhabitant of the locale and with his history backround, Prof Baick sees many layers of meaning in the city settings, the neighborhoods, streets and monuments, towns and countryside portrayed in the novel. Reading about fictional characters and their doings reflects on real people and their experiences. We enrich our understanding by our knowledge of prevailing conditions of the time and place, and the events that led up to it. In the historical sequence with The March, Ragtime, now Billy Bathgate and leading up to The Book of Daniel, we get to ride the crest of a giant wave of a century of history.

Prof. Baick reminded us that the Great Depression is the context of Billy Bathgate, when crime was an open secret and a path out of poverty, at least for some such as Billy, and remains so to this day! We learn through Billy something about reality that I, for one, am glad to be spared the experience of. Gangland, with its crime, prostitution, violence and abuse is a separate underworld that distracts us momentarily from the same qualities that prevail in mainstream reality, which I can now regard at arm's length, and understand my fascination with Mobster films in general and Billy Bathgate in particular.

The activities of crime organizations occupies a vacuum that is expanded by the retreat of corporate capitalism as a result of the Great Depression. Dutch Schultz can afford to spread money around in an impoverished county in upstate New York to buy a not-guilty verdict on his trial. Saratoga appears as an oasis of wealth in the desert of rural New York, but we do not see the real breadth of the economic structure behind it, just the horses. Pervasive and real as they may be, gangs are still marginal in the overall economic context.

In the movie, The Godfather, Michael Corleone, trying to persuade Kaye Adams to marry him, assures her that his father is just like any businessman or senator, and the business will be completely legit in five years. Kaye responds heatedly that Michael is being naive, that senators don't arrange to have people killed and Michael quietly retorts, "Now who's being naive?".