The Ethos of Mean Streets

34.David P. Johnson, '". . Just a Mile From the End of the Line,'" Northwest Magazine, 2 February 1 969, pp. 10-11. In his article Johnson mentions The Columbia. His research and assistance led me to the source ofboth films. The sequence ofevents leading to the preservation of Hydro and The Columbia involved the full cooperation ofmany friends of film and history. Hydro and Division a are now available R cords the vice General THE ETHOS OF MEAN STREETS BY LEONARD QUART AND PAUL RABINOW Leonard Quart: Assistant Professor of Film & American Studies - Richmond College. Paul Rabinow: Associate Professor, Anthropology Richmond College. In the past decade, historians have been uncovering and discovering whole new areas of inquiry: the family, immigrants, women, working class, popular culture. So, too, the film has begun to deal with aspect' of the American past and present that Hollywood has either ignored or twisted out of recognizable shape. In the main, the films that have dealt with Italian immigrant and second generation life—Marty, Brothers Rico, Pay or Die, House of Strangers—have been bound to melodramatic or comic stereotypes so broadly drawn that little of the complex concreteness of the culture could seep through. Italians were seen as moral or venal racketeers; loving, hysterical Mommas; earthy authoritarian patriarchs; and dialect comedians named Luigi. They were exotics whose distinctive patterns and customs were portrayed merely externally as superficial trappings or colorful flaws, but never as people with a distinctive consciousness 'and tradition which could not be discarded easily and which provided much of the substance of their everyday life. In its shallow treatment of the Italian-American ethos, Hollywood was just sticking to its own commercial principles: don't tamper with successful formulas, and don't risk alienating the mass and ethnic audience by creating a complex and possibly controversial social universe For to deal with the community honestly would mean that real empathy and criticism would have to be extended; that the limits, mores, oppressions, as well as authentic strengths, ofthe culture would have to be painfully drawn. It would also implicitly challenge the powerful strain in American mass culture and mythology that holds that we are all really the same—that acculteration and assimilation has been so thorough that only a few dialect jokes and foods have been left as a pop residue. Marty Scorsese's Mean Streets dispenses with the largely apocryphal community of street vendors and earth mothers, aglow with warmth and humanity, and explores one aspect ofthe real community in a manner that has not been encountered in American film before. Mean Streets is Marty Scorsese's third film, and though somewhat uneven and inchoate artistically, it profoundly subverts most ofHollywood's Italian American fantasies. 33 The film's aims are as limited in scope as the neighborhood (Little Italy) itself, but that turns out to be its very strength. It focuses almost exclusively on "the boys," that male universe hovering uneasily between adolescence and the ultimate integration into marriage and family life. The film is devoid ofparental figures except for the august personage ofGiovanni, the neighborhood's Godfather. But the treatment here differs markedly from that in other films in that the Mafia figure is viewed from a dual perspective: Charlie's adulation and Scorsese's light mockery. First, he is seen through the eyes of the boys, primarily Charlie, the film's protagonist and anti-hero who romanticizes his uncle and relates to him in the most formal and submerged manner. For Charlie, Giovanni is like the church, a source of transcendental authority, held distant to better keep his aura unblemished. The film's texture is less involved with the internal processes of the boys than with the cultural symbols that binds the community together. There is a code and Uncle Giovanni is an enforcer ofone part of it, just as the church serves this function for higher realms. However, parallel to this exalted vision of Giovanni, Scorsese almost imperceptively demonstrates his fallibility. The limits of Giovanni's code are laid bare by his analysis of the epileptic girl, Teresa, as "touched in the head," or his cliched self-perception as a man ofhonor especially in relation to the...