Citizens of Hell
"You don't make up for your sins in church - you do it on the streets, you do it at home. The rest is bull*censored*, and you know it." (Charlie) Of all the film-makers dicussed here, none exploded with quite such volatile energy on the American screen as Martin Scorsese, with Mean Streets, in 1973. Of all our blood poets, none have displayed quite such a thirst and an appetite for ectoplasm either, nor such a painterly eye for the aesthetic virtues of blood. His films are positively soaked in it, yet Scorsese differs from other directors (whose shared mentors were that sacred trinity of savagery - Leone, Penn, Peckinpah) in two, all-important ways: He is Sicilian American (and like Don Vito Corleone, the emphasis is on the Sicilian), and he is a Catholic. Scorsese's films, at least through until Raging Bull, have a sensual, expressionistic depth and texture that one associates more with European auteurs such as Truffaut, Buñuel and Bertolucci than with the American trash-gurus such as Fuller (or even Hawkes and Ford). He also has a rare and suprisingly enriching (to his art at least) sense of sin. Scorsese is, of all t!he American directors that emerged in the 70's, the one with the clearest vision of modern civilization as He
(The movie slips into outright fairy tale in the last scene however, when the ice-angel Betsy `comes back' to him. Taxi Driver and Mean Streets simulated the experience of urban apocalypse for our edification and our education (even perhaps, our preparation?); meanwhile, the Bickles and the Hinckleys and the Mansons and the Goetzs (and the Reagans and the Bushes and the `Palantines'), and all the other citizens of Hell, keep themselves busy, making reality of the nightmare. Johnny Boy meanwhile couldn't give a damn. The climatic violence of the film, and its masterly, melancholy, almost dreamlike epilogue, constitute the film's best sequence: a montage of the various characters, doing what they do, while Johnny Boy staggers off clutching his neck wound, and opera plays on the soundtrack. Before Travis decides to vent his religious wrath upon the "venal" world of street-scum, he first directs it at the political candidate Palantine, for no obvious reason other than that he is associated in Travis' mind with Betsy, the vision of perfection who rejects him and turns out to be "like all the rest - in hell. Scorsese cites John Cassevetes (the actor turned director whose films were excercies in improvisatory acting and which illustrate, I think, most of its pitfalls) as a greater influence on him than Corman, however. Scorsese's film has far more dimensions to it than either Dirty Harry or The Searchers - it depicts Travis' acts not as heroic, or even anti-heroic, but as simply deranged, completely out of proportion, and motivated not by nobility or justesse but by madness and rage. (This closing shot is perhaps the single most effective and powerful image depicting "God's lonely man" in American movies, and it kills me every time I see it. Unlike Repulsion however the film has the breadth and scope of vision to create an actual all-inclusive world for us to inhabit - the world of a tormented soul. He saw the criminal mind as having a twisted relationship - or affinity - with that of the saint, and he used madness as his subject because it was the most fertile ground in which to develop his ideas about humanity. But, as far as relations to Taxi Driver go, Travis was never in love with Iris in any case, only infatuated with Betsy, on account of whom he made a go at Palentine. Mean Streets accomplishes the end of all great art - it takes us somewhere we would normally never care (or dare) to go, and shows us that we were perhaps already there, all along. The way in which Scorsese blends these two - the rock and roll and the violence - shows that he understood instinctively, better than anyone else until then, that cinema (or at least this kind of cinema, the kinetic, visceral kind) and rock n' roll are both expressions of revolutionary instincts, and that they are as inherantly destructive as they are creative. A more revealing and fitting harbinger for Scorsese's career in cinema could hardly be imagined. In a truly uncanny (and definitely somewhat suspect) case of life imitating art imitating art imitating life (a sort of endless loop seems to be created here, like mirrors inside mirrors), Hinckley was somehow `inspired' (or coerced?) to imitate a movie `hero' who was in actual fact a psycopath who in turn was inspired - albeit unconsciously - to act out his own fantasies of heroic behaviouir, as engendered by a culture gorged on such infantile ideas of manlihood and heroism as propagated by John Wayne films and the like (The Searchers is an exception, of course, because it includes both irony and melancholy in its vision of the `hero').
Common topics in this essay:
Johnny Boy,
Ethan Searchers,
Taxi Driver,
Mean Streets,
De Niro,
Girl Doing,
Apparently Travis,
Streets American,
Jodie Foster,
Bronson Batman,
johnny boy,
taxi driver,
mean streets,
de niro's,
harvey keitel,
de niro,
scorsese's film,
bernard goetz,
pauline kael,
everyday inferno burning,
streets american,
mean streets american,
johnny boy charlie's,
driver mean streets,
taxi driver mean,
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Acceptance Essays
