By Alex Hudson
October 17, 2002
Martin Scorsese makes depressing films about depressing people. His characters are invariably loners, outsiders; people who are unable or unwilling to live on terms other than their own. Yet for all their inhuman, barbaric acts - of which there are many - his fallen heroes are made more human than human by the sheer power of Scorsese's compassion for them. It is in their inhumanity that we see true humanity.
The Last Temptation of Christ
There is no more human character in the Scorsese canon than Jesus Christ. The point of Nikos Kazantzakis' novel The Last Temptation of Christ was to humanize the divine. Scorsese's attraction to the material and what he sought to replicate on screen was the palpable sense of conflict within Jesus between obeying his body and obeying his mind. To make Jesus human is to make his suffering profound and his sacrifice meaningful.
Almost without fail, the trajectory of the Scorsese protagonist will follow a Christ-like path. The Scorsese hero is ill-equipped to function within his given society, suffers as a result, and ultimately is redeemed for his suffering. It's an understatement to say that Catholicism - and its dogma of guilt and shame - would shape and regurgitate itself within Scorsese's work, appearing and reappearing again and again.
Taxi Driver
Whores, pimps and junkies pollute the sidewalks with their presence. Repugnant neon signs sell vice. The decay on the streets of New York City circa 1976 is less corrosive than the decay in the hearts and minds of the people walking the streets. Mankind has abandoned God, forsaking him in the ephemeral pursuit of pleasure. Enter into this world of chaos Travis Bickle.
Avenging angel soaked in blood, Travis Bickle is the representative contradiction at the heart of Scorsese's cinema: He is at once the will of God and an abomination of God's will. The opening shot of Taxi Driver, behind the lush but melancholic, jazz-heavy score from Bernard Herrmann, informs all. We see smoke ascending from the depths, enshrouding creation, and a metallic beast - a solitary taxi cab - emerges in slow motion from this mist of ruin. Travis Bickle is not of this world and he does not belong to this world; he is here to suffer.
Bickle takes a job as a taxi driver to occupy his insomnia. His record, like his conscience, is clean. Bickle floats around in his metaphorical metal coffin, watching life go awry around him. Paul Schrader, who wrote the script, based Taxi Driver on John Ford's epitomical Western The Searchers. Like Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) in The Searchers, Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro at his transformative best) is a returning war veteran unable to assimilate into an altered society. A brooding loner, Bickle is not blessed with social grace; there's an awkwardness in his interactions with people. The depravity with which Bickle finds himself surrounded further fuels his alienation.
The mere magnitude of Bickle's self-imposed isolation and resulting desolation elevate his suffering to the realm of Christ and render him sympathetic, but his path toward self-destructiveness and apoplectic violence compromise this core sympathy, rattling our identification and implicating us in the process. That Scorsese takes a character who is essentially an unlikable sociopath and turns him into an iconic vision of urban despair is a marvel. Scorsese's and DeNiro's image of an outsider unable to connect would strike a nerve in viewers.
Taxi Driver is a film that would never be made today, nor would it have been made before 1976. The artistic freedom won by the new breed of American auteur in the first half of the '70s materialized in the inception and realizing of uncommercial and challenging films. Taxi Driver, beyond any of these works, stands as a pinnacle and self-tribute to this era of unbridled creative freedom. For an ever-so-brief blip on the Hollywood timeline, the artists were in full control; auteurists had triumphed; filmmaking was restored to the hands of the artists. Killer sharks and dueling Jedis unmercifully killed this aberration, but the memory of that fleeting era still feeds filmmaker and audience desires for the perfect film.
Who's That Knocking at My Door?
Scorsese's bio is as well-known as his films. Born on November 17, 1942, the asthmatic Scorsese spent his childhood confined to his bedroom. His salvation was watching movies; European movies on his family's black-and-white RCA Victor television and Hollywood movies at the local theater. When he finally ventured beyond the walls of his Little Italy row-house, he was immersed in two types of neighborhood people: Gangsters and priests. Too frail for the gangsters, teenaged Scorsese entered a seminary to train to be a priest, but eventually his passion for film diverted his holy path.
Scorsese majored in film at New York University and excelled; his knowledge of film and artistic inclination instantly separated him from his peers. After a short stint of teaching in the same film program at NYU (Oliver Stone and Spike Lee were among his pupils), Scorsese made his first feature with the ultra-low-budget Who's That Knocking at My Door?, a modest but thematically intriguing character study. Scorsese's debut would establish all the themes which he would later explore with a more exacting gaze: Gunplay, confusion over women, obsession, Catholicism.
Who's That Knocking at My Door? would also reveal Scorsese's deft musical touch, as he innovatively used rock songs over several scenes, both to comment on the action and for the liberating seductiveness of the music itself. While common to use rock songs in films today, it was uncommon in 1968. Also original was the personal nature of the narrative. The main character, J.R. (played by Harvey Keitel in his first major role), is more or less Scorsese, a young adult in Little Italy trying to find direction, get his mind in working order. Scorsese films J.R. with varying camera speeds and unique camera placements; though unrefined, Scorsese's visual sense is alive and active from the start. In visuals, narrative and music, Who's That Knocking at My Door? would be a harbinger of things to come.
Mean Streets
With insatiable career burnings festering away at his core, Scorsese moved to California to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a Hollywood director. His first major undertaking, and his breakthrough film, Mean Streets is an autobiographical look at Scorsese's childhood; a gripping and rawly-powerful anthropological study of aimless lives in the big city. The slice of gritty life we are privy to is rich in detail, insular in mind frame and claustrophobic in feel.
The mean streets of the title are lonely and cold. Played with peculiar ease by Harvey Keitel, Charlie is our protagonist-slash-Scorsese's alter-ego. A continuation of J.R., Charlie is Scorsese shining light on his own demons, a crushing confession of his inability to lead a good Catholic life. Charlie is bathed in shadows, reds. His favorite hangout, his friend Tony's bar, is drenched in reddish hues; the place of sin is a veritable Hell.
In stark contrast to Charlie stands Johnny Boy, Robert DeNiro as id unleashed. Johnny Boy neither cares about doing right nor about receiving forgiveness for his wrongdoing. While the burdens of conscience haunt Charlie they are powerless against Johnny Boy. Charlie, recognizing that Johnny Boy is a time bomb waiting to explode, tries to save his friend, but finds resistance both from Johnny Boy's obstinacy and from the Mafia hierarchy that Charlie aspires to impress. To save Johnny Boy - and his soul, by extension - risks his career advancement. The metaphor of a young man desperately juggling his conscience with his burgeoning career is less fiction and more a mirroring of Scorsese.
The relationship between DeNiro and Scorsese defines both men's careers and begins with Mean Streets. DeNiro wanted to play the lead role of Charlie, but Scorsese insisted on Keitel continuing as his alter-ego. Mean Streets is above all about the clash between ego (Keitel) and id (DeNiro), with the end result - Charlie failing Johnny Boy - symbolically representing Scorsese's siding with his id. From Mean Streets onward, Scorsese would focus on main characters embodying the id - reckless, irrational, emotional - and these characters would almost exclusively be played by Robert DeNiro.
Raging Bull
Raging Bull is the story of a wife-beating, inarticulate, mediocre boxer whose only skill in life is his ability to take a ferocious beating in a boxing ring and not fall down. There is perhaps no character in cinema more self-destructive and self-torturing than Jake LaMotta.
Raging Bull is ostensibly about boxing. If Mean Streets was a metaphor for a man trying to start his career, Raging Bull is a metaphor for the struggles to sustain a career. The grueling, bloody fights of Jake LaMotta (Robert DeNiro in an Oscar-winning turn as the former champion) are shown in poetic beauty; Scorsese films the boxing matches as elegant religious rituals. Jake's punishment in the ring is his penance for his misdeeds out of the ring. Jake takes pain and deprives pleasure to please God. Never more apparent is this sadistic display than in Jake's brutal fifth and final fight with Sugar Ray Robinson. Jake willingly allows Robinson, his life-long rival, to batter him. Jake is beaten, but he refuses to be defeated. Backed against the ropes, Jake goads his nemesis to inflict yet more punishment. Arms outstretched, head down, he takes the pain.
Martin Scorsese's brooding wasteland of loneliness and self-carnage glimpsed us an unlivable modern world, a world of unbearable hurt with no ready escape. Jake LaMotta, like most of Scorsese's protagonists and perhaps more than any of them, strives inarticulately for salvation. LaMotta fights not so much with other boxers but with the world, which is bitterly closing in around him. When the dreams of importance fade, all that is left is to find inner peace. LaMotta's quest for solace is as poignant as it is hopeless.
The Age of Innocence
A work of beauty worthy of Visconti, Scorsese's The Age of Innocence is a visual odyssey through the repressed world of politeness and manners otherwise known as late-19th century high society. Based on Edith Wharton's exquisitely incisive novel, Scorsese's The Age of Innocence captures time and place with a painterly touch and with a writerly wit.
Though The Age of Innocence is devoid of physical violence, it is one of Scorsese's most violent films. Newland Archer's (Daniel Day Lewis as repression incarnate) desire for Countess Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer in radiant glory) powers the film forward, violently juxtaposing against both the imposed languidness of the social milieu and the accompanying restrictiveness of speech and actions. Like the figures in the paintings carefully placed throughout scenes, Newland is literally trapped in the frame, unable to act on impulse, unable to be.
Evocative of Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, The Age of Innocence is deliberate and mannered. As great directors age, deliberateness infects their work, as the risk of tarnishing their reputation outweighs the risk of experimenting. The over-choreographed fluidity of the camerawork in The Age of Innocence at once stuns in its preciseness and transports us unquestionably to the world of surface.
Absolution of Sin
If Hitchcock made us voyeurs, Martin Scorsese made us sadists. His cinema of sadism has upped our tolerance for cinematic violence, not by the mere virulence of his depictions of violence, but by our identification with fundamentally flawed and violent people. Scorsese's strong identification with his characters becomes our identification. Scorsese latches onto the core connectivity - and thus humanity - of his characters, and within that universality is our hook. We can see through the eyes of his protagonists, and however repulsive their actions, we feel what they feel; their pain is ours.
Of all the American auteurs to emerge from the '70s - Friedkin, Coppola, Lucas, Malick, Spielberg - most burned out or faded away, while only a precious few endured. Martin Scorsese, more than any of them, persevered; the strength of his artistic vision so great that he withstood where others failed. While Hollywood was obsessed with trends, high concept, the gimmick of the moment, Scorsese stayed the course, never betraying his love of cinema. Intent to show humanity as it is, Martin Scorsese purged his sins through his films, and he let his audience do the same.
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