Martin Scorsese's America E-Book

Ellis Cashmore

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: PALS-Polity America Through the Lens series
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 453

Beschreibung

For over four decades, Martin Scorsese has been the chronicler of an obsessive society, where material possessions and physical comfort are valued, where the pursuit of individual improvement is rewarded and where male prerogative is respected and preserved. Scorsese has often described his films as sociology and he has a point: his storytelling condenses complex information into comprehensible narratives about society. In this sense, he has been a guide through a dark world of nineteenth century crypto-fascism to a fetishistic twentieth century in which goods, fame, money and power are held to have magical power. Author of Tyson: Nurture of the Beast and Beckham, Ellis Cashmore turns his attention to arguably the most influential living film- maker to explore how Scorsese envisions America. Greed, manhood, the city and romantic love feature on Scorsese's landscape of secular materialism. They are among the themes Cashmore argues have driven and inform Scorsese's work. This is America, as seen through the eyes of Martin Scorsese and it is a deeply unpleasant place. Cashmore's book discloses how, collectively, Scorsese's films present an image of America. It's an image assembled from the perspectives of obsessive people, whether burned-out paramedics, compulsive entrepreneurs, tortured lovers, or celebrity-fixated comedians. It's collected from pool halls, taxicabs, boxing rings and jazz clubs. It's an image that's specific, yet ubiquitous. It is Martin Scorsese's America.

Leseprobe

MARTIN SCORSESE’S AMERICA

Ellis Cashmore is the author of Polity titles Tyson: Nurture of the Beast and Beckham, now in its second edition. Among his other recent books are Celebrity/Culture and The Black Culture Industry.

MARTIN SCORSESE’S AMERICA

ELLIS CASHMORE

polity

Copyright © Ellis Cashmore 2009

The right of Ellis Cashmore to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2009 by Polity Press

Polity Press

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Polity Press

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5897-1

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CONTENTS

  1    Introduction – Grand, Dark, American Vision

  2    Dream Gone Toxic

  3    Whose Law’ What Order’

  4    Minds and the Metropolis

  5    Pawns in Their Game

  6    What the People Want

  7    Family Values

  8    Idea of a Man

  9    Women Lose

10    Submission to Romance

11    Conclusion – Price of Money

Filmography

Bibliography

Index

1

INTRODUCTION – GRAND, DARK,AMERICAN VISION

It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it a copy of another country.

There is a scene in No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese’s documentary about Bob Dylan, in which Joan Baez recalls Dylan’s scathingly reporting how scholars and highbrow critics were in the 1960s deconstructing the meanings of his lyrics and assessing the profundity of his vision. “All these assholes, they’re gonna be writing about all this shit I write,” Dylan told Baez.

Baez, one-time muse and folk artist in her own right, suggests that Dylan took pleasure from the earnest interpretations of his songs, most of that pleasure deriving from the fact that the interpretations bore no resemblance to what he had in mind when he wrote them. Baez remembers Dylan scoffing, “I don’t know what the fuck it’s about and they’re gonna write what it’s about.”

I guess I’m going to do something similar with Scorsese:I’m set to write what his films are about, possibly in a way he won’t recognize himself. Scorsese might be a fearless filmmaker who has steadfastly pursued his own goals, often in defiance of Hollywood traditions. But I’m less interested in him as an individual, more as a creator of a vision. His personal morality, his motives, his intentions, his aspirations rarely reveal a sense of purpose beyond creating art. Scorsese has never said he is trying to create a body of work that will tell us what he thinks of America. But it does exactly that.

Scorsese has the reputation of being a preeminent filmmaker. Rightly so. But can he enrich our understanding of America’s history, the values that unite it and the divisions that cleave it apart’ In a sense, the answer is implicit in his reputation: one of the reasons he is so widely acknowledged is that his work dramatizes and documents America in a way that’s both enjoyable and edifying.

We can understand history and contemporary culture through all sorts of creative artists as well as historians and social scientists; their aesthetic and scholarly work always offers a scope, an opportunity to examine something or somewhere. Since 1501 when the Italian merchant and explorer Amerigo Vespucci sailed along the west coast of South America, turned north and looked into the distance, there have been any number of visions of America. The very word “America” is thought to derive from the Latin form of the explorer’s Christian name, Americus. A land named after its first visionary became the source of countless other visions. Scorsese’s America is just one of them.

Despite his popular reputation as a furnisher of thrilling and ruthless tales of gangster life, Scorsese is an eclectic director, delving into novels, biographies, historical documents, and especially other films. As well as his chronicling Italian Americans’ attempts to chase the American Dream, he has dramatized such subjects as ethnic animosities in the nineteenth century, the morbidity of living in the twentieth-century metropolis, and the crumbling confidence in mainstream institutions, such as the family, the legal system, and big government. He’s captured the swarming egotism of America and the rewards and punishments offered by attempts either to escape or embrace it. His documentaries are often knowledgeable and enlightening reports on American popular culture and the struggles that both tear and repair it. America’s history, its torments and its crises; the people who build it and those who break it. They’re all there. Scorsese has put together a vision of America.

“Scorsese is fascinated by reckless obsessives.” DAVID COURTWRIGHT, JOURNAL OF AMERICAN HISTORY

When you stand back and ponder, “What kind of America is Scorsese visualizing’ How can we interpret his films in a way that allows us to see a single image rather than numerous, fragmented impressions’” you scratch your head and reflect on the assortment of different subjects, periods, and genres Scorsese has essayed.

Two writers have offered their own ways of characterizing Scorsese’s America: as an obsessive society and one that is endlessly collapsing and restoring itself, always in the grip of violent change.

First, David T. Courtwright’s summary: “Scorsese is fascinated by reckless obsessives.” Gusting through every film there is what Courtwright, in his 2005 analysis of The Aviator, calls “the hurricane of obsession.” Obsessive people, that is, in an obsessive society. Scorsese brings this to life through both his characters and the environments in which they live and die.

Obsessives sometimes give way to their obsessions, taking their own lives or those of others, doing things that land them in trouble or arranging their own lives in a way that doesn’t so much invite problems as drags them in. But most of the time, they just incorporate their obsessions into their lifestyles in a way that nobody else notices. We see them everywhere, probably without knowing it. They’re in supermarkets, sitting next to you on the subway or in a plane, working at the desk facing you at work or in the library. They’re people preoccupied with something or someone to a troubling extent. Troubling, that is, for them and everyone around them.