Martin Scorsese's America

Ellis Cashmore

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745645230
  9780745645223
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745658971
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

For over four decades, Martin Scorsese has been the chronicler of an obsessive society, where material possessions and physical comfort are valued, where the pursuit of individual improvement is rewarded and where male prerogative is respected and preserved.

Scorsese has often described his films as sociology and he has a point: his storytelling condenses complex information into comprehensible narratives about society. In this sense, he has been a guide through a dark world of nineteenth century crypto-fascism to a fetishistic twentieth century in which goods, fame, money and power are held to have magical power.

Author of Tyson: Nurture of the Beast and Beckham, Ellis Cashmore turns his attention to arguably the most influential living film- maker to explore how Scorsese envisions America. Greed, manhood, the city and romantic love feature on Scorsese's landscape of secular materialism. They are among the themes Cashmore argues have driven and inform Scorsese's work. This is America, as seen through the eyes of Martin Scorsese and it is a deeply unpleasant place.

Cashmore's book discloses how, collectively, Scorsese's films present an image of America. It's an image assembled from the perspectives of obsessive people, whether burned-out paramedics, compulsive entrepreneurs, tortured lovers, or celebrity-fixated comedians. It's collected from pool halls, taxicabs, boxing rings and jazz clubs. It's an image that's specific, yet ubiquitous. It is Martin Scorsese's America.

1

INTRODUCTION – GRAND, DARK,AMERICAN VISION

It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it a copy of another country.

There is a scene in No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese’s documentary about Bob Dylan, in which Joan Baez recalls Dylan’s scathingly reporting how scholars and highbrow critics were in the 1960s deconstructing the meanings of his lyrics and assessing the profundity of his vision. “All these assholes, they’re gonna be writing about all this shit I write,” Dylan told Baez.

Baez, one-time muse and folk artist in her own right, suggests that Dylan took pleasure from the earnest interpretations of his songs, most of that pleasure deriving from the fact that the interpretations bore no resemblance to what he had in mind when he wrote them. Baez remembers Dylan scoffing, “I don’t know what the fuck it’s about and they’re gonna write what it’s about.”

I guess I’m going to do something similar with Scorsese:I’m set to write what his films are about, possibly in a way he won’t recognize himself. Scorsese might be a fearless filmmaker who has steadfastly pursued his own goals, often in defiance of Hollywood traditions. But I’m less interested in him as an individual, more as a creator of a vision. His personal morality, his motives, his intentions, his aspirations rarely reveal a sense of purpose beyond creating art. Scorsese has never said he is trying to create a body of work that will tell us what he thinks of America. But it does exactly that.

Scorsese has the reputation of being a preeminent filmmaker. Rightly so. But can he enrich our understanding of America’s history, the values that unite it and the divisions that cleave it apart’ In a sense, the answer is implicit in his reputation: one of the reasons he is so widely acknowledged is that his work dramatizes and documents America in a way that’s both enjoyable and edifying.

We can understand history and contemporary culture through all sorts of creative artists as well as historians and social scientists; their aesthetic and scholarly work always offers a scope, an opportunity to examine something or somewhere. Since 1501 when the Italian merchant and explorer Amerigo Vespucci sailed along the west coast of South America, turned north and looked into the distance, there have been any number of visions of America. The very word “America” is thought to derive from the Latin form of the explorer’s Christian name, Americus. A land named after its first visionary became the source of countless other visions. Scorsese’s America is just one of them.

Despite his popular reputation as a furnisher of thrilling and ruthless tales of gangster life, Scorsese is an eclectic director, delving into novels, biographies, historical documents, and especially other films. As well as his chronicling Italian Americans’ attempts to chase the American Dream, he has dramatized such subjects as ethnic animosities in the nineteenth century, the morbidity of living in the twentieth-century metropolis, and the crumbling confidence in mainstream institutions, such as the family, the legal system, and big government. He’s captured the swarming egotism of America and the rewards and punishments offered by attempts either to escape or embrace it. His documentaries are often knowledgeable and enlightening reports on American popular culture and the struggles that both tear and repair it. America’s history, its torments and its crises; the people who build it and those who break it. They’re all there. Scorsese has put together a vision of America.

“Scorsese is fascinated by reckless obsessives.”
DAVID COURTWRIGHT, JOURNAL OF AMERICAN HISTORY

When you stand back and ponder, “What kind of America is Scorsese visualizing’ How can we interpret his films in a way that allows us to see a single image rather than numerous, fragmented impressions’” you scratch your head and reflect on the assortment of different subjects, periods, and genres Scorsese has essayed.

Two writers have offered their own ways of characterizing Scorsese’s America: as an obsessive society and one that is endlessly collapsing and restoring itself, always in the grip of violent change.

First, David T. Courtwright’s summary: “Scorsese is fascinated by reckless obsessives.” Gusting through every film there is what Courtwright, in his 2005 analysis of The Aviator, calls “the hurricane of obsession.” Obsessive people, that is, in an obsessive society. Scorsese brings this to life through both his characters and the environments in which they live and die.

Obsessives sometimes give way to their obsessions, taking their own lives or those of others, doing things that land them in trouble or arranging their own lives in a way that doesn’t so much invite problems as drags them in. But most of the time, they just incorporate their obsessions into their lifestyles in a way that nobody else notices. We see them everywhere, probably without knowing it. They’re in supermarkets, sitting next to you on the subway or in a plane, working at the desk facing you at work or in the library. They’re people preoccupied with something or someone to a troubling extent. Troubling, that is, for them and everyone around them.

Scorsese makes films about them. In doing so, he contrives to make films about the society in which they operate and which gives rise to their obsessions. “From his first feature film, Who’s that Knocking at My Door’, Scorsese has been an observer of life on the margin,” writes Esther B. Fein, “and the movies he has directed since then . . . have studied that viewpoint from different angles, and through different lives.”

Gentle psychopaths, tortured lovers, and avaricious gangsters share space with vengeful malefactors and woebegone wannabes, in what David Bromwich calls the “Scorsese Book of the Disturbed.” They are united only by the compulsive resolution that fires their pursuits and by the unbreakable spirit that eventually condemns them.

It sounds like a world of misfits. But it’s not: everyone in America is an obsessive in one sense or another. Everyone fusses over things that would either amuse the Dalai Lama or make him despair: like goods, revenge, or public acclaim. Everyone wants to be a winner of some kind. Success is a very American preoccupation.

Scorsese is a kind of annalist of the obsessive society, where material possessions and physical comfort are valued, where the pursuit of individual improvement is rewarded, and where male prerogative is respected as if a favorite ornament that has been fixed in position for so many generations that we dare not change it.

Why should these be regarded as obsessions’ After all, America didn’t invent materialism, any more than it created the individual and vested in him – I use the masculine pronoun deliberately – a sense of purpose and desire for self-improvement. Yet, it was in America that these were changed into unquestioned values, principles to guide a population’s conduct and to reward as beneficial. In themselves, they aren’t obsessions; they become so when they intrude on the mind of independent citizens, motivating them to the kind of behavior that upsets not just other people but the entire social order of which they’re part. This leads us to the second way of characterizing Scorsese’s America.

In reviewing Gangs of New York in 2003, James Parker proposed another dominant feature of what he considers Scorsese’s “amateur sociology.” Setting aside whether Parker equates “amateur” with lack of scholarly rigor rather than ineptitude, his point is that Scorsese’s storytelling condenses complex information into comprehensible narratives about a society that’s always shifting. For Parker, Scorsese’s work provides us with a model of “threatened or collapsing order.”

The “order” he refers to is an arrangement of codes, rules, protocols, and laws in which everything is in its correct or appropriate place and in which people are disposed to act toward each other according to patterns or accepted norms. Orders exist everywhere there are humans: gregarious creatures that we are, we establish and maintain stable and predictable ways of conducting our lives that allow others to do likewise. So why, in Scorsese’s conception, or at least Parker’s interpretation of his conception, are they under threat’

Codes and constitutions creak in The Age of Innocence, they crack up in Taxi Driver, they renew and restore themselves in The Color of Money.

Parker doesn’t expand his point, but I’ll make inferences in the chapters to come. Orders don’t stand still like buildings: they are continually under threat or in imminent danger of collapse. Some repel or absorb the threats and give the impression of continuity, if not rocksolid stability, while others actually do cave in. Scorsese essays both forms. In Casino, we witness the final throes of a criminal order established on the principles of greed, ambition, and capital accumulation. A near-perfectly calibrated system, but with inbuilt hubris, contrives its own demise.

In a parallel universe we find Bob Dylan’s onetime backing band reminiscing on sixteen years spent on the road, rising from barroom gigs to packed stadiums, meeting blues legends and entertaining groupies, but sensing, as Robbie Robertson puts it, “the beginning of the beginning of the end of the beginning” as they prepare for The Last Waltz.

America is full of orders collapsing, while others emerge. Codes and constitutions creak in The Age of Innocence, they crack up in Taxi Driver, they renew and restore themselves in The Color of Money. Collapse lurks around every corner and new orders are never far away. This is certainly a way of approaching Scorsese’s take on American society. And the idea of an entire society racked with obsessive thoughts is also full of promise.

Scorsese has offered pictures of an ever-changing America in which people are sometimes raving, more often just passionate about whatever stirs them. But there’s always a connection between the people and the world around them; Scorsese makes us see that it isn’t just around them – it’s actually inside them too.

Scorsese’s characters are often, to use Fein’s phrase, on the margin, or what Gavin Smith, Donald Lyons, and Kathleen Murphy call “the edge of America.” By elaborately exposing what Smith and his colleagues anoint “chosen people plucked willing or not out of anonymity and inertia,” Scorsese shows a society that both commissions and condemns the same actions – in roughly equal proportions – and invites a perspective, or a way of seeing something we might already know but would probably not want to acknowledge.

Richard Blake, in 2005, captured the uneasy relationship by likening the director to a torturer: “Scorsese has peeled back the eyelids of his audiences and forced them to watch the sordid, cruel realities of urban life that most of us would rather not see” (p. 25).

Cliff Froehlich of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch believes that Scorsese’s films “vary wildly in quality and content.” Yet, Froehlich argues, despite the variations, the films “display key traits that distinguish the director’s entire oeuvre . . . unified by his recurring themes.”

Froehlich doesn’t spell out what he sees as Scorsese’s “recurring themes.” But the challenge is there: what are the themes that repeat themselves, reappearing in different guises time and again, giving Scorsese’s films an identity as an integrated oeuvre’ The obsessive society and its collapsing orders provide shape and direction for Scorsese. But, to follow Froehlich’s point, there is an unusually wide range of subjects, and to make sense of them, we need to identify distinct themes. I’ll deal with a theme in each chapter, though, as the readers will soon recognize, several of the themes blur into each other, into patterns.

Considering that Scorsese’s films cover over 160 years of American history, there is a surprising continuity of style and thematic consistency in his work, though understandable changes of emphasis as he, like the rest of us, has matured. Scorsese’s history might be imperfect, but it’s provocative and, for this reason, I haven’t tried to identify breaks or interruptions: for work of such breadth, there are actually few. In this book, I’m more interested in the coherence of Scorsese’s cinema and what it tells us about the way he understands and perhaps wants us to understand America. Next, I’ll outline the chapters and, in the concluding chapter, I’ll stand back to see how they all crystallize into the patterns.

Chapter two. Success is integral to America. It’s almost as if Americans are under obligation not just to be successful, but to exhibit that success. They have found the perfect ideal. Scorsese’s elemental GoodFellas is a kind of primary film in this respect. In this film, which was released in 1990, Scorsese restored what had been something of a guiding light in his films of the early 1970s. The hunger for achievement, or rather the actions it has excited, has helped shape many films of radically different sensibilities, from Citizen Kane to The Wizard of Oz. In Scorsese’s hands, it becomes an inspiration, though not for the noble. Scorsese heroes are not engaged in a metaphoric search for the great American grail.

The American Dream and the way it motivates the quest not so much for money but for the type of “success” money represents is obviously dominant in Scorsese’s America: here, reprobates, fraudsters, extortionists, and miscellaneous other scumbags vie with wholesome, doe-eyed youths whose pursuit of the Dream will end in tears. In fact, everybody’s endeavor ends in tears.

This is an America that, for all its democratic ideology and Christian doctrine, upholds a culture in which the vast majority of those who chase the Dream will be broken by it. If there is one brutal argument propounded by all Scorsese’s films, this is it. Everyone chases the dream, some by legal means, others by other, more innovative methods. In GoodFellas and other films, Scorsese dispenses with simplifications such as law and order, opting instead to see the two as tendencies rather than absolute poles; tendencies that don’t necessarily lead in different directions.

Chapter 3. I examine Scorsese’s understanding of the sometimes symbiotic relationship between, on the one hand, the forces of law and order and, on the other, the forces of criminality. The gray area in which cops and criminals coexist in mutual tolerance is what really arrests Scorsese’s attention. There are no good guys and bad guys in America: just people who see themselves as the former, but whose actions suggest they are the latter.

Lurking everywhere in Scorsese’s work is an individual urgently trying to assert, or reassert, his individuality in the teeth of monsters who feed on such peculiarities. Individuals are quirks, oddities, their foibles those of fugitives and eccentrics. Scorsese doesn’t make horror films, of course; but he does make films in which corporations, organizations, syndicates, and even whole cities try to swallow and digest individuals in their strivings for uniformity. Never a romantic, Scorsese resists the quieting message that individualism can never be suppressed for long. In his America, it is frequently consumed by larger, more powerful entities that thrive on sameness.

Crime, for Scorsese, is a caricature of power: a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Chapter 1: Introduction ߝ Grand, Dark, American Vision
• Chapter 2: Dream Gone Toxic
• Chapter 3: Whose Law? What Order?
• Chapter 4: Minds and the Metropolis
• Chapter 5: Pawns in Their Game
• Chapter 6: What the People Want
• Chapter 7: Family Values
• Chapter 8: Idea of a Man
• Chapter 9: Women Lose
• Chapter 10: Submission to Romance
• Chapter 11: Conclusion – Price of Money
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index