The Departed
Place on List:
III. Period: 1960 - 2009
2.
Primary Texts: Film
Martin
Scorsese. The
Departed.
(2006)
Supporting References:
Document
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This source focuses
on the director and not on the information sheet object text.
“At present, with regard to the Hollywood cinema of the last
fifteen years, two directors appear to stand head-and-shoulders above
the rest, and it is possible to make large claims for their work on
both formal and thematic grounds: Scorsese and Cimino. The work of
each is strongly rooted in the American and Hollywood past, yet is at
the same time audacious and innovative. Cimino's work can be read as
at once the culmination of the Ford/Hawks tradition and a radical
rethinking of its premises; Scorsese's involves an equally drastic
rethinking of the Hollywood genres, either combining them in such a
way as to foreground their contradictions (western and horror film in
Taxi Driver) or disconcertingly reversing the expectations
they traditionally arouse (the musical in New York, New York,
the boxing movie and "biopic" in Raging Bull). Both
directors have further disconcerted audiences and critics alike in
their radical deviations from the principles of classical narrative:
hence Heaven's Gate is received by the American critical
establishment with blank incomprehension and self-defensive ridicule,
while Scorsese has been accused (by Andrew Sarris, among others) of
lacking a sense of structure. Hollywood films are not expected to be
innovative, difficult, and challenging, and must suffer the
consequences of authentic originality (as opposed to the latest in
fashionable chic that often passes for it).
“The Cimino/Scorsese parallel ends at
this shared tension between tradition and innovation. While Heaven's
Gate can be read as the answer to (and equal of) Birth of a
Nation, Scorsese has never ventured into the vast fresco of
American epic, preferring to explore relatively small, limited
subjects (with the exception of The Last Temptation of Christ),
the wider significance of the films arising from the implications
those subjects are made to reveal. He starts always from the concrete
and specific—a character, a relationship: the vicissitudes in the
careers and love-life of two musicians (New York, New York);
the violent public and private life of a famous boxer (Raging
Bull); the crazy aspirations of an obsessed nonentity (King of
Comedy). In each case, the subject is remorselessly followed
through to a point where it reveals and dramatizes the fundamental
ideological tensions of our culture.
“His early works are divided between
self-confessedly personal works related to his own Italian-American
background (Who's That Knocking at My Door?, Mean Streets) and
genre movies (Boxcar Bertha, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore).
The distinction was never absolute, and the later films effectively
collapse it, tending to take as their starting point not only a
specific character but a specific star: Robert De Niro. The
Scorsese/De Niro relationship has proved one of the most fruitful
director/star collaborations in the history of the cinema; its
ramifications are extremely complex. De Niro's star image is central
to this, poised as it is on the borderline between "star"
and "actor"—the charismatic personality, the
self-effacing impersonator of diverse characters. It is this
ambiguity in the De Niro star persona that makes possible the
ambiguity in the actor/director relationship: the degree to which
Scorsese identifies with the characters De Niro plays, versus the
degree to which he distances himself from them. It is this tension
(communicated very directly to the spectator) between identification
and repudiation that gives the films their uniquely disturbing
quality.
“Indeed, Scorsese is perhaps the only
Hollywood director of consequence who has succeeded in sustaining the
radical critique of American culture that developed in the 1970s
through the Reagan era of retrenchment and recuperation. Scorsese
probes the tensions within and between individuals until they reveal
their fundamental, cultural nature. Few films have chronicled so
painfully and abrasively as New York, New York the
impossibility of successful heterosexual relations within a culture
built upon sexual inequality. The conflicts arising out of the man's
constant need for self-assertion and domination and the woman's
bewildered alterations between rebellion and complexity are—owing
to the peculiarities of the director/star/character/spectator
relationship—simultaneously experienced and analysed.
“Raging Bull goes much further
in penetrating to the root causes of masculine aggression and
violence, linking socially approved violence in the ring to socially
disapproved violence outside it, violence against men to violence
against women. It carries to its extreme that reversal of generic
expectations so characteristic of Scorsese's work: a boxing
melodrama/success story, it is the ultimate anti-Rocky; a
filmed biography of a person still living, it flouts every unwritten
rule of veneration for the protagonist, celebration of his
achievements, triumph after tribulation, etc. Ostensibly an account
of the life of Jake LaMotta, it amounts to a veritable case history
of a paranoiac, and can perhaps only be fully understood through
Freud. Most directly relevant to the film is Freud's assertion that
every case of paranoia, without exception, has its roots in a
repressed homosexual impulse; that the primary homosexual
love-objects are likely to be father and brothers; that there are
four "principle forms" of paranoia, each of which amounts
to a denial of homosexual attraction (see the analysis of the
Schreber case and its postscript). Raging Bull exemplifies all
of this with startling (if perhaps largely inadvertent) thoroughness:
all four of the "principle forms" are enacted in Scorsese's
presentation of LaMotta, especially significant being the paranoid's
projection of his repressed desires for men onto the woman he
ostensibly loves. The film becomes nothing less than a statement
about the disastrous consequences, for men and women alike, of the
repression of bisexuality in our culture.
“King of Comedy may seem at
first sight a slighter work than its two predecessors, but its
implications are no less radical and subversive: it is one of the
most complete statements about the emotional and spiritual bankruptcy
of patriarchal capitalism today that the cinema has given us. The
symbolic Father (once incarnated in figures of mythic force, like
Abraham Lincoln) is here revealed in his essential emptiness,
loneliness, and inadequacy. The "children" (De Niro and
Sandra Bernhard) behave in exemplary Oedipal fashion: he wants to be
the father, she wants to screw the father. The film moves to twin
climaxes. First, the father must be reduced to total impotence (to
the point of actual immobility) in order to be loved; then Bernhard
can croon to him "You're gonna love me/like nobody's loved me,"
and remove her clothes. Meanwhile, De Niro tapes his TV act which
(exclusively concerned with childhood, his parents,
self-depreciation) culminates in a joke about throwing up over his
father's new shoes, the shoes he is (metaphorically) now standing in.
We see ambivalence towards the father, the hatred-in-rivalry of
"brother" and "sister," the son's need for
paternal recognition (albeit in fantasy) before he can announce
himself to the woman he (very dubiously) loves; and the irrelevance
of the mother (a mere, intermittently intrusive, off-screen voice) to
any "serious"—i.e., Oedipal patriarchal—concerns. Thus
King of Comedy constitutes one of the most rigorous assaults
we have on the structures of the patriarchal nuclear family and the
impossible desires, fantasies, frustrations, and violence those
structures generate: an assault, that is, on the fundamental premises
of our culture.
“Since 1990, Scorsese has made four
films which, taken together, establish him definitively as the most
important director currently working in Hollywood. GoodFellas,
Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence, and Casino reveal an
artist in total command of every aspect of his medium—narrative
construction, mise-en-scène, editing, the direction of
actors, set design, sound, music, etc. Obviously, he owes much to the
faithful team he has built up over the years, each of whom deserves
an individual appreciation; but there can be no doubt of Scorsese's
overall control at every level, from the conceptual to the minutiae
of execution, informed by his sense of the work as a totality to
which every strand, every detail, contributes integrally. If the
films continue to raise certain doubts, to prompt certain
reservations, it is not on the level of realization, but on moral and
philosophical grounds. Let it be said at once, however, that The
Age of Innocence, which in advance seemed such an improbable
project—provoking fears that it would not transcend the solid and
worthy but fundamentally dull literary adaptations of James Ivory—is
beyond all doubts and reservations a masterpiece of nuance and
refinement, alive in its every moment.
“The other three films all raise the
much-debated issue of the presentation of violence. There seem to be
two valid ways of presenting violence (as opposed to the violence as
"fun" of Pulp Fiction, violence as "aestheticized
ballet" of John Woo's films, or violence as "gross out"
in the contemporary horror movie). One way is to refuse to show it,
always locating it (by a movement of the camera or the actors) just
off-screen (Lang in The Big Heat, Mizoguchi in Sansho
Dayu), leaving our imaginations free to experience its horror: a
method almost totally absent from modern Hollywood. The other is to
make it as explicit, ugly, painful, and disturbing as possible so
that it becomes quite impossible for anyone other than an advanced
criminal psychotic to enjoy it. The latter is Scorsese's method, and
he cannot be faulted for it in the recent work. It was still
possible, perhaps, to get a certain "kick" out of the
violence in Taxi Driver, because of our ambiguous relationship
to the central character, but this is no longer true of the violence
in GoodFellas or Casino. An essential characteristic of
the later films is the rigorous distance Scorsese constructs between
the audience and all the characters: identification, if it can
be said to exist at all, flickers only sporadically—is always
swiftly contradicted or heavily qualified.
“Yet herein lies what is at least a
potential problem of these films. One can analyze the ways in which
this distance is constructed, especially through the increasing
fracturing of the narrative line, the splitting of voice-over
narration among different characters in both GoodFellas and
Casino; but isn't alienation, for many of us, inherent in the
characters themselves and the subject matter? Scorsese has insisted
that the characters of Casino are "human beings":
fair enough. But he seems to imply that if we cannot feel sympathetic
to them we are somehow assuming an unwarranted moral superiority. One
might retort (to take an extreme case—but the Pesci character is
already pretty extreme) that Hitler and Albert Schweitzer were both
"human beings": may we not at least discriminate between
them? One can feel a certain compassion for the characters (even Joe
Pesci) as people caught up in a process they think they can control
but which really controls them; but can one say more for them
than that?
“Beyond that, though connected with
it, is the films' increasing inflation: not merely their length
(GoodFellas plays for almost twoand-a-half hours, Casino
for almost three) but its accompanying sense of grandeur: for
Scorsese, apparently, the grandeur of his subjects. One is invited to
lament, respectively, the decline of the Mafia and of Las Vegas. But
suppose one cannot see them, in the first place, in terms other than
those of social disease? The films strike me as too insulated, too
enclosed within their subjects and milieux: the Mafia and Las Vegas
are never effectively "placed" in a wider social context.
Scorsese's worst error seems to be the use in Casino of the
final chorus from Bach's St. Matthew Passion: an error not
merely of "tease" but of sense, comparable in its enormity
to Cimino's use of the Mahler "Resurrection" symphony at
the end of Year of the Dragon. If it is possible to lament the
decline of Las Vegas, it surely cannot be inflated into the lament of
Bach's cheer for the death of Christ on the cross.
“One cannot doubt the authenticity of
Scorsese's sense of the tragic. Yet it is difficult not to feel that
he has not yet found for it (to adopt T. S. Eliot's famous
formulation) an adequate "objective correlative."
“Martin Scorsese began the 1990s on a
high note with GoodFellas but as the decade progressed, he has
lost the support of the critics and the public. Arguably, Scorsese
hasn't tapered off as an artist; instead, the problem may be that his
more recent films have failed to fulfill audience expectations. If
so, it is somewhat ironic as Scorsese remains consistent in his
thematic concerns and commitment to style as self expression.
“Casino is admittedly a
demanding film. Viewer identification isn't solicited and the film's
violence is excessive but without the absurdist connotations found in
GoodFellas. On the one hand, the film offers a portrait of the
Robert De Niro character, a gambler who, through his connections with
the Mafia, gets to manage a casino in Las Vegas during the late 1970s
and early 1980s. But Casino is also an "epic" in
that it reflects the growing power of corporations; realizing the
money to be made, "respectable" business takes over Las
Vegas. Not unlike his role in Raging Bull, De Niro's character
succeeds ultimately to the extent that he survives. Scorsese's
concern with surviving in a world that is violent, brutal, and
overwhelmingly indifferent to the individual has been evident in his
films from early on; but, in his more recent works, this concern is,
if anything, treated with greater hesitation and delicacy.
“Much has been made of Scorsese's
Catholic background and its influence on his work. Kundun
indicates that his interest in religion isn't confined to
Christianity. Kundun can be taken as a companion piece to The
Last Temptation of Christ; but it can be considered equally in
relation to Casino and the recent Bringing out the Dead.
Like Casino, Kundun is an epic film; and its
protagonist is also made to confront his fallibility and mortality.
In Kundun, the Dalai Lama gradually achieves full
consciousness of the destructiveness existing around him; the
realization is what motivates him to accept the necessity of his
survival. But unlike Casino, the violence in Kundun is
constrained; it exists as a threat that fitfully and devastatingly
erupts. Kundun is one of Scorsese's most stylized films.
Consistent with his aesthetics, the film is a combination of
expressionism and realism, with the former given precedence. Although
the film doesn't directly impose viewer identification with the Dalai
Lama, Kundun repeatedly features the Dalai Lama's subjective
responses. In effect, the film manages to be a simultaneously
distancing and intimate experience. With Bringing out the Dead,
Scorsese and Paul Schrader collaborated on a project that evokes
their seminal Taxi Driver. Like the earlier film, Bringing
out the Dead takes place on New York's "mean streets"
and features a male protagonist who, in addition to having a job
which places him in direct contact with the city's seamy side,
harbors a martyrdom complex and wants to obtain salvation through
becoming a savior figure. Th crucial difference between the two films
resides in the character of the protagonist. Unlike Taxi Driver's
Travis Bickle, the Nicolas Cage character in Bringing out the Dead
is motivated by genuinely humanistic impulses. He wants, not unlike
the Dalai Lama, to be a good person who is capable of actively
preserving human life. The character undergoes a crisis regarding his
worth; at the film's conclusion, he finds salvation through accepting
his guilt over failure. As in Casino and Kundun,
Bringing out the Dead is concerned fundamentally with the
struggle between death and survival; and, like Casino, it is a
brutal film. Although the film possesses an absurdist edge at times
that suggests a black comedy, it is unrelenting in its capacity to
disturb and horrify.
“During the 1990s Scorsese produced
works that have challenged the viewer as powerfully as any of his
previous films. The films may have not found acceptance partly
because his vision has become increasingly somber and elegiac. On the
other hand, Scorsese refuses to despair and his films continue to be
exhilarating and life affirming statements.”
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