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77 From Mean Streets to the Gangs of New York ethnicity and urban space in the films of martin scorsese paula j. massood Sometimes I think the best thing would be to make films here in New York, not to deal with Hollywood, simply try to do things you really believe in. —Martin Scorsese Little Italy for me is in a sense a microcosm for something much, much larger. —Martin Scorsese Martin Scorsese is almost as famous for being a New Yorker as he is for being a filmmaker. Along with other New York directors such as Woody Allen and Spike Lee, Scorsese maintains strong links to the city of his birth and, except for a decade-long residence on the West Coast in the s, he has lived and worked constantly in New York, locating his production company, Cappa Productions, and many of his films in the city. Scorsese’s career has been prolific and his films varied, ranging from documentaries to historical epics set at different points in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, he has consistently turned his sights on the city’s neighborhoods, especially Little Italy and Lower Manhattan, presenting detailed and often intimate portraits of their streets and people. In stories set in Little Italy’s Elizabeth and Mulberry Streets, or at the Five Points’ convergence of Park, Worth, and Baxter Streets, Scorsese’s films explore the interconnected themes of ethnicity and the maintenance of literal and figurative borders. He draws upon, and often revises, generic conventions to construct narratives that are at one and the same time about local and national mythologies. The majority of Scorsese’s films have some relationship to the city, often providing detailed maps of particular neighborhoods. This essay focuses on a Chap-05.qxd 1/12/07 12:13 PM Page 77 selection of Scorsese’s films that link urban space with ethnicity, such as Little Italy’s Italian Americans in Who’s That Knocking at My Door () and Mean Streets (), and the Irish immigrant population of the Five Points neighborhood in Lower Manhattan in Gangs of New York (). In considering these films, along with Goodfellas (), I will discuss the ways in which Scorsese presents New York as both utopian and dystopian—a place of family, tradition, and group identity that is also limiting and insular and where any form of border crossing is often life-threatening. Moreover, the films reflexively play with generic conventions , often calling out similarities between the gangster film and the western, two genres concerned with location and the often violent expansion of turf. In this way the films, while specifically “New York” in setting and (as will be further discussed) in sound, are overwhelmingly—and self-consciously—American in theme. They masterfully connect the tribalism of New York with national narratives of isolationism, violence, and belonging. They reject the overdetermined myth of the melting pot often ascribed to the city and replace it with the boiling cauldron described by Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (): “All the animals come out at night: whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal . . . Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” Travis is looking at the city as an outsider with no desire to belong. In the films discussed here, point of view originates within the community and conflict revolves around the tension between individual and community desires. For this reason, Taxi Driver is not included in this essay. While Who’s That Knocking at My Door, Mean Streets, Goodfellas, and Gangs of New York span more than three decades in Scorsese’s career, they are linked in ways that extend beyond gangs, gangsters, and turf battles in their focus on setting , story, and style. Of these films, Who’s That Knocking and Mean Streets are the most closely related, belonging to what was originally planned as a trilogy. It is often said that Scorsese’s films, particularly those focusing on Italian American characters, are semi-autobiographical, and this early, partially completed trilogy is most clearly connected to the director’s youthful experiences in Little Italy, with many scenes shot in his family’s or neighbors’ apartments and buildings. In their focus on the experiences of a group of young men from the neighborhood, the films introduce the prevalent themes in Scorsese’s oeuvre, which include family, morality (especially Catholicism), and fidelity to tradition (often presented as parochialism or a blind allegiance to social mores). The...

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