Mean Streets

            This week’s movie is Mean Streets, first released in 1973, and the film that put Martin Scorsese on the map. Scorsese’s career has had its relative ups and downs, but he’s never made a movie that was less than interesting. It’s enormously to his credit that you can still say, after 25 years of pretty steady work, that he’s one of the few great filmmakers in America. Scorsese’s best work is almost always very personal, and I don’t think it’s at all accidental that so many of his finest films have subjects in some way related to his New York Italian background. Mean Streets, Raging Bull and Goodfellas all spring directly from this environment. Moreover in other powerful movies like Taxi Driver or New York, New York you can see transplanted from the Italian movies the kind of savage emotional gridlock so completely excavated there. This dynamic power was alive and well in Scorsese’s work as recently as Casino, itself a virtual remake of Goodfellas and still brimming with energy, violence and operatic emotionalism.

            For most viewers, the beginning of all this was Mean Streets. What bowled over so many critics of the time, and what’s still so impressive, is the movie’s raw, sometimes almost frantic, broadcasting of a highly specific milieu and mindset. Mean Streets is set in New York’s Little Italy (Scorsese’s own childhood neighborhood), and the environment is so steeped in ethnicity that you can almost smell it. It’s religious parades through the streets, brass bands playing traditional melodies, Italian restaurants with religious and cultural regalia, the stairwells and courtyards of apartments inhabited by members of the same family, and—most central to the Scorsesian world—small-time gangsters running everything. And it’s not just immediately visible stuff, it’s also the customs and speech and ways of thinking peculiar to the inhabitants of the place. Very often Mean Streets seems to be observing all this so intently and transparently that it looks like a documentary.

            But what kind of documentary would be able to give such a sustained, closeup look at individuals in their most intimate moments, analysing friendships and love affairs as well as the niceties of group relations? And what kind of documentary could show the day-to-day operations of a criminal institution as matter-of-factly as those of a grocery market or an insurance office? Because these gangsters aren’t at all heroic or larger than life like most movie gangsters—they’re insignificant guys of limited gifts who just happen to be putting their time in as numbers runners or loan sharks or black marketeers instead of as shoe salesmen or pump jockeys. And that everyday quality brings us back to the idea of documentary again—a documentary about a bunch of undistinguished young hoods in an Italian-American environment of crime and Catholicism and other ethnic customs.

            But for every moment that Mean Streets looks something like a documentary, there’s another when it doesn’t look like anything but a movie—and a very self-conscious, artistically-ambitious kind of movie at that. Tortuous or highly controlled camera movements, fragmented editing, slow-motion, lurid lighting, heavily-stressed and instrusive music—all of these mark the film very strongly as fiction. And so do the elements of theatricality and violence and emotional delirium in the story. Altogether, these qualities give Mean Streets the quality of a tour de force.

            As in so many of Scorsese’s most powerful films, the central character are trapped and devoured by contradictions—in their personalities and in their social environments—double-binds of which they are scarcely aware. The movie’s protagonist is Charlie, played by the young Harvey Keitel. Sharply dressed, smart, and polite, he’s grooming himself in the neighborhood numbers racket and other business enterprises of his uncle Giovanni, and he’s clearly a man on the way up. But at the same time he’s deeply religious, meditating on the fires of hell and the necessity for penance, and trying impossibly to apply the principal of good works in this life of his. The beneficiary of his charity, however, is an equally unlikely subject, a wild and crazy guy named Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro in the first of his amazing string of performances for Scorsese), a guy who is simply unable to put limits on himself. The impossibilities of both these characters are traced and retraced until they take on the fateful patterns of a tragic inevitability.

            All the performers, but especially Keitel and De Niro, give performances of a startling, Method-like intensity that is essentially Scorsesian. And they talk in an amazing kind of demotic speech, a chopped-up and repetitive dialogue-type that’s as hypnotic and stylized as anything in Harold Pinter or Samuel Beckett—only these exchanges are punctuated with grunts and obscenities and are sometimes so inarticulate as to be almost incomprehensible.

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            One of the most fascinating things about Mean Streets, and also about Scorsese’s other movies with Italian-American subjects—Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Casino—is to see the combination of attraction and repulsion that the culture holds for the filmmaker. Lots of things about it can be very reassuring to members of the culture: the closeness of cameraderie and family ties, the way the culture provides conduits for emotion and action, the dense familiarity of the traditional environment, the well-defined codes and structures of power. And a similar function is performed by the major cultural institutions of the Catholic Church and the gangster profession—one hesitates to give it the grand name of the Mafia.

            But all of these things can have another face, they can be limiting and suffocating instead of identity-giving. Or rather they can be limiting and suffocating as well as identity-giving. The same cultural commonalities that give meaning and identity to individuals by placing them within traditional social definitions can also oppress them and crush them. Look at Teresa, caught halfway between the neighborhood and the big world. To us she is easily identifiable as an energetic, intelligent and beautiful woman with plenty of potential. But the brutal ignorance and prejudice of the community label her as “not right in the head” because of her epilepsy, and one sees immediately how the traditions of this culture include the medieval superstitions of a small village.

            Similarly the criminality of the most prominent men may bring a kind of order and civility, but of course it rests ultimately on violence. The willingness of seemingly all the males to break into a fistfight or a beating or even a murder is only the other side of their masculine horseplay and kidding around. Maybe the best example of this is the priceless scene in the first half of the movie where Charlie, Johnny and Tony go to help their friend collect a debt from some other Italians across town, and where the group literally can’t decide whether to sit down and have a friendly drink together or spit mortal insults and beat each other’s brains out.

            The contradictions of this situation are of course most pointedly dramatized in the character of Charlie. Like many another movie hero he’s torn between ambition and love, but the form of his dilemma is highly specific to his environment. The people he loves are Johnny Boy and Teresa, and both of those people are misfits in the community. Johnny Boy is terminally irresponsible and people think Teresa suffers from a kind of shameful deformity. At the same time Charlie wants to be somebody, he wants power and respect, he’s driven to realize his advantages as Giovanni’s nephew. And since Giovanni explicitly warns him against both Johnny Boy and Teresa he has a major problem—one that he finally can’t do anything at all about.

            This same contradiction is seen in Charlie’s shared allegiance to Catholicism and to the life of the streets. We have Scorsese’s testimony that the two forms of power in his own community were the gangsters and the priests, and that since his health was too precarious for gangster life he decided at one point to become a priest. Charlie’s consciousness of sin, his wish to perform a real penance for sin, and his attempt to live out a project of Christian charity modelled on St Francis of Assisi in helping Johnny—these are clearly basic and important aspects of his emotional life. The absurdity of his religious fervour in this environment is visible to his companions—as for instance when Teresa points out that “St Francis didn’t run numbers”—but it isn’t visible to him, he can’t let himself see it. And the film itself tries to show sympathetically how Charlie’s situation is a human one, how being torn the way he is torn is very understandable, no matter how impossible it may be.

            And finally, the contradictions of Charlie’s inner life—which are a version of the contradictions of the community—is also built into the movie. Mean Streets works on fragmentations and alternations. It moves from religion to violence, and it shows the violence of religion embodied in images of the bleeding crucified Christ. It moves from friendship and family to crime, and from traditional festivals and music to bars and fights and rock ’n roll. And just as Charlie has a really tortured relation to the neighbourhood so does Scorsese, whose movie wants to invoke a Method-school authenticity but is constantly zooming into modernist art-cinema. Like its French New Wave models, Mean Streets quotes from its favorite Hollywood movies like The Searchers and The Big Heat, and it brandishes tricks of reflexivity like the home-movies of the credit sequence or the strange presentation of the restaurant-owner’s partner’s suicide. It’s down and dirty, and at the same time it’s self-conscious and arty.

            In subsequent films—above all in Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas—Scorsese would outline these contradictions with greater elegance and economy. But Mean Streets has the raw energy of discovery, and in some ways it may be Scorsese’s most honest movie. Certainly it remains an astonishing achievement.