In 2006, I asked the writers contributing to Close-Up Film website to name their ten favourite directors currently working. Martin Scorsese came top of the poll. In response, I wrote this article examining his films.
“I don’t like him – he’s silly.”
So says Travis Bickle, the anti-hero of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), about his would-be girlfriend’s campaign partner, Tom. This from a man who plays out gun dramas in front of his bedroom mirror, whose idea of a good date is a sleazy porn flick, who lives alone and invents his life for his parents. And yet, it’s that very life that hundreds of young men have re-enacted since – “You talkin’ to me?” – just as they’ve imitated the punches of world heavyweights like Jake La Motta, and learned the “What’s funny?” scene in Goodfellas (1990) off by heart. So no matter how many times he is nominated as America’s greatest filmmaker, its one last cinematic hope, Scorsese seems doomed to be regarded as a boys’ director, one whose fast-talking, sharp-suited, clean-cut pics will glorify the Travises of this world, and make the Toms look silly.
In truth, this aspect of Scorsese’s work has always bothered me a little – are we not forced into taking the sides of wise guys and hoods? And I’ve often balked at the idea that Scorsese is an auteur. To me, he seems more like the directors of the studio age whom he so admires – craftsmen who plugged away at genre standards, hoping to introduce a touch of their own style or themes in a thoroughly conventional framework. Consider Scorsese’s output to date – he’s done gangster flicks (Goodfellas, Casino), a musical (New York, New York), a Biblical epic (The Last Temptation of Christ), a comedy (The King of Comedy), a boxing picture (Raging Bull) and a costume drama (The Age of Innocence). To each, he brings a bravura visual stylisation – as Michael Powell put it, “He breakfasts on images” – but the authorial impetus often seems to come from other directions. Scorsese himself has admitted in interview that Taxi Driver was more Paul Schrader’s film while De Niro seems to have been the driving force in wanting to get both Raging Bull and King of Comedy off the ground. By contrast, Scorsese himself was pushing for Last Temptation, a weaker project and one for which he is far less noted. So, more of a Vincente Minnelli, then, than an Orson Welles.
But it was in reconsidering Taxi Driver (re-released this week) and Mr Bickle’s role within it, and the strange trilogy that film forms with King of Comedy and Goodfellas, that I finally came to terms with Scorsese’s art. Because I realised that hiding underneath all those different genre outfits is the one that Scorsese has been practising all along – the melodrama. Only, this isn’t the weepy, slightly camp, emotionally overwrought “women’s picture” of classical repute; no, it’s a male – you might say, macho – variant. In each case, the form of the film is suited to the mindset of its lead character - Taxi Driver is dreamlike and counterpointed by Herrmann’s sometimes jarring, sometimes romantic score, King of Comedy is sliced up into little vignettes like a sitcom, Goodfellas put together with hyper-kinetic speed to represent the quick turnaround of life and death on the streets. But the outlines of each film are roughly similar: a young man, who is an outsider or loner, embarks on a quest for fulfilment or personal success that inevitably leads to violence. Travis decides to clean up the streets and save a young prostitute, Rupert Pupkin dreams of being on TV and Henry Hill of being a gangster. But at the end of each movie, an enigmatic epilogue reveals them as having achieved an almost folk-hero status. Almost as if society has recognised them at last… As Pupkin puts it, “Better to be king for a day than schmuck for a lifetime" – a sentiment shared by all three movies’ protagonists. But it’s not just to us and themselves that they’re out to prove their worth; more importantly, they’re trying to win the heart of a woman. Travis is chasing the goddess-like Betsy, Pupkin his old school friend Rita, and Hill, the tough New York broad, Karen.
All three men could – perhaps should – be classed as psychopaths. Travis’s failing grip on reality leads him into a terrifying killing spree, Pupkin is so obsessed with appearing on television that he resorts to kidnapping, while Hill is so enamoured of the gangster lifestyle that he seldom questions its never-ending cycle of violence and retribution. But it’s important to recognise that all three are also genuine ladies’ men. Rita remembers Pupkin as “Mr Romance”, and it’s true that his courtship of this clearly jaded and cynical woman is comparatively touching and sweet. Betsy tells Travis, “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone quite like you,” while Karen admits to being swept off her feet by Hill’s dazzling generosity.
We have to go deep into the dark and murky waters of male sexuality - not often discussed these days – to understand just how these guys might be classed as romantics. Female fantasies have been well documented by cinema over the years; there’s a lovely sequence in Launder and Gilliat’s British wartime propaganda film Millions Like Us (1943) where the young protagonist announces she’s off to join the RAF and we see a montage of smiling encounters with impossibly handsome pilots leading to the inevitable bended knee and ring on finger. But male fantasies are more ridiculous, more absurd. The template perhaps is the “knight in shining armour” come to rescue his damsel; the proof of love is more a test of strength. For what is Bickle doing in rescuing Jody Foster’s underage hooker if not rescuing Betsy herself? Unable to impress his blonde, blue-eyed object of desire, he runs across her younger alter ego and sets about ‘saving’ her from a future of exploitation and misery. And the conclusion? A dream-like image of Cybill Shepherd, hair blowing in the wind, gazing at him reverently in his rearview mirror.
This is where I part company with those who feel Taxi Driver’s ending glorifies and condones Travis’s actions. Rather, it reveals just how lost in his own fantasy Bickle really is. For me, the epilogue here is quite clearly signalled as a dream. After the shooting stops, we see Bickle will his own suicide as he mimes putting a pistol to his head. Then we cut to an overhead shot that mimics the perspective of those who have had after-death experiences. The camera floats through the hall and out into the street, like a soul departing the body. The corpse is leaving the mess behind him and floating towards myth. And then we see and hear the ending Travis wanted, the one he’d been visualising all through the film, where the child’s parents are grateful and recognise his efforts, and Betsy comes back to him, penitent, regretful, loving…
Scorsese pulls the same trick at the end of King of Comedy, where Pupkin’s madcap antics eventually, after a jail term, seem to lead him to the celebrity he so desperately craved. Here, though, the dream has been anticipated throughout by a series of fantasy sequences where Pupkin exorcises the demons in his head; in one particularly hilarious scene, Scorsese literalises Pupkin’s desire to prove himself by having his protagonist imagine his old schoolmaster come onto a live chat show to beg Pupkin’s forgiveness and admit that he, his teachers and all his old school chums were wrong about him after all. Of course, Scorsese wants to keep it ambiguous whether these ‘dream sequences’ are happening or not; they’re filmed in exactly the same style as the rest of the narrative. That way, we are led to see how our society could hero-worship such figures and reflect on the disturbing psychosis that implies. But at the same time, it would be wrong to interpret them literally; their power derives from the fact that, so involved have we become in the twisted ideas of the these men, that their idea of ‘success’ can seem applicable in our own world.
It may seem strange to lump Goodfellas in with these other two films; Hill seems comparatively normal and down-to-earth next to Bickle and Pupkin. But it’s the very fact that we see him that way that makes Goodfellas arguably the most chilling film of the three. For, whereas the other two are led to acts of violence through mania, Hill engages in them willingly. He actively courts a lifestyle in which murder is an occupational hazard. Scorsese plays a “push me-pull you” game with our point of view throughout this film. Take the famous sequence where Hill leads Karen into a nightclub restaurant though the kitchens, all done in one glorious Steadicam take. As if through Karen’s eyes, we see doors magically open before us, waiters obey our every whim, the staff ready to greet us, a table whisked from nowhere and brought to the prime spot by the orchestra. We understand how Karen becomes intoxicated by such a demonstration of power. But lingering in our minds is an earlier scene where Hill was brutally upstaged by the hot-headed Tommy (Joe Pesci). In an unguarded moment, he told Tommy he was “funny”. The latter deliberately takes the comment the wrong way and proceeds to attack Hill: “What’s funny? Am I a clown here to amuse you? What the fuck is funny about me?” And we cut to a shot of Hill, mouth agape, paralysed with bewilderment, seemingly unable to move. He looks ridiculous, he looks funny. The joke is on him, that this oh-so-fantastic life could suddenly switch and turn against him. But it’s also on us who have identified with its excitement and freedoms, and have secretly been willing Tommy on, sweating with anticipation at the promised moment of violence. What’s “funny” is how we can find this aura of violence so attractive, so compelling, and not want to turn away from it.
In fact, Goodfellas is actually structured like a series of sketches, with gags or throwaway lines acting as the punchlines at the end of each scene. A boy gets casually blown to bits – “I’ll bury him. Where’s the shovel, anyway?” A man climbs into a car and has a knife thrust into his neck – “I thought he’d never shut up!” In the heat of their activity, the gangsters don’t seem to realise how ludicrous they are, just as Pupkin, so keen on being a comedian, fails to register the crowds gathering round him and his friend Masha as they argue on a city street. Looked at this way, Scorsese’s films are nothing less than “comedies of embarrassment”, but ones where we are so aligned with the protagonist’s point of view that we only register subliminally how much of a spectacle they are in the eyes of others.
Henry Hill’s moment of apotheosis doesn’t come with the vanquishing of enemies or some 15 minutes of fame but with ratting out his friends. In this particular epilogue, the central character has to abandon everything he’s worked for and set up a whole new life. And what is this life? Only the one that all the rest of us lead – the boring, workaday existence that the Goodfellas sneered at. And Hill resents it, pining for the lost days of glory. The identification of audience and psychopath is complete. Our “hero” has shopped the baddies and become like us – but both of us are still in thrall to the gangster dream. And most disturbingly of all, this time we know the epilogue is real – Goodfellas is based on a true story and Henry Hill on a genuine person. What Goodfellas represents, then, is the conclusion of Scorsese’s investigation of the male melodrama, where the masculine impulse to prove oneself dovetails with the audience’s identification with a violent protagonist. The only problem is, unlike with the female melodrama, no-one’s crying, just laughing…