Martin Scorsese Week: Gangs of New York (2002)

1 year ago

STRATEGIES FOR REALIZING HELL

by Evan Bryson

Daniel Day Lewis is in this film and he plays Uncle Sam.

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As an initiate of Martin Scorsese’s cinema, I’ll keep my remarks brief. I hope to minimize blowback by understating my case.

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Some of you may be wondering why I’ve never bothered with the work of Martin Scorsese. I just hadn’t gotten around to it.

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When I try to imagine the smell of pig shit, the heat of bricks boiling in the night’s fires, the stench of whores’ thighs against the duck-buttered asses of belching men, the bawling of colic babies against the counter-melody of grief-sick Irish mothers, coupled with the Beijing Opera Suite, etc., I’m reminded again that humans (or Americans, anyway) must simply feel less now than they did a century and a half ago.

The pansensory hell of daily living is lost to us. We have Febreze and noise-cancellation headphones, pills to decrease appetite and lubricants to numb our sex organs—as if increased pleasure were a product of culling stimulation, in the way that delayed gratification (not finishing a bag of Skittles, say) is cause for reward. And then there’s all this gross circulating capital to insure our healthcare, and our plushly carpeted homes, and our Toyota Camry’s that last forever. Insulation, I’m not debating, has its appeal. If we want to encounter the world and the smelly, greasy, crowded slab of its pleasure/pain—well, we have movies to suggest to us what we might experience and supposing so, suggest what we may feel. But in reality—perhaps this is a great consolation to some—our equipage to engage with grief, trauma, tenderness, rapture: these faculties are reduced.

Scorsese’s camera is a hungry hydra fixing many eyes on many warriors; it salivates for all this sensory shit, the shit-show of 1860s Manhattan, the brothels, the ale-houses, the caked mud and tallow candles, the mouths full of bad teeth, the dry blood on blades, the perfumed dudes in corsets. He really puts it in our pores, on our tongues even, like the Eucharist.

Don’t get me wrong. The success of Gangs of New York rides on the patient feel-goodery of costume-drama and child’s pageantry. Its like an R-rated Newsies, if you will. Both films cover roughly the same territory though Scorsese’s is longer—so it has more songs. Newsies’ choreographed dances, replete with smiling newsboys singing around fountain set pieces, are replaced by choreographed fight scenes of feral adults, hissing when not bloviating. The crane shots persist, and arc gracefully over Gangs’ pulverized bodies to take in the young, crumbling New York squalor. Sometimes this squalor is on fire. Usually it is breathtaking.

I don’t want to continue comparing Gangs with Newsies; there isn’t much to compare, as you know.

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Remembering now whom I was paraphrasing above: George Scialabba, from his essay “Extra-Sensory”: “The things that matter most to us, the terms in which we tell our life stories—loves, beliefs, tastes, ambitions—presuppose a degree of vicarious experience, an extent of information, inconceivable 50,000 years ago; while our ancestors’ significant 1ife-experiences—to have lived among intimately familiar and subtly discriminated flora and fauna; to have enjoyed or endured sensations and enacted impulses with a vividness, spontaneity, and intensity unattainable now—involved a radically different balance of direct and vicarious experience, of intensive and extensive information. Our existence is immeasurably more mediated, less immediate, than theirs.”

I realized, sometime between writing the above over the last three days, updating the menu at the cafe, and going on evening runs, that Scorsese’s New York is one possible realization of hell. Its density, its over-crowdedness, the profusion of dandified and dirtied extras, the competing foci, architecture grinning with its broken teeth as the idlers stroll by—these are the same slums from What Dreams May Come, the hell of fallen timbers and stacked ship-masts and endless agonizing labor shared among millions of wretched souls, back-lit by the industrial fires of Mordor. (The subterranean opening of the movie is mired in that of Middle Earth’s own dreary caverns, where the orcs fart out of the foul dark soil.) Lateral hell, hell by Escher, Brueghel’s The Tower of Babel-like hell. A more current depiction of this hell-as-too-close, hell-as-too-loud, hell-as-too-smelly, is from another likewise aggressively shot, spritely edited, zealously scored epic, Slumdog Millionaire. India as hell. Dirty, busy, over-populated, divided by ethnic and religious ties, with the meat of its tragedy condensing and pooling under the lower caste for the edification of Western audiences. Hell is a European co-production.

The Committee on Social Thought, or some other group of corn-fed deep-feelers, found Danny Boyle’s vision of hell tawdry for its promotion of “poor-ism”—those conventionally luxurious tours of places that make you want to cry. But visiting hell has always been “poor-ism.” When Dante steps off the boat on his journey, and circles down through Gustave Doré’s gruesome engravings, he leers at the deeds of his damned Florentine contemporaries with the little relief of knowing he will not have to join them. “You’re here, too?” he asks Brunetto. “Eh, they got me on sodomy.” “Nice. I’m on spiritual quest.” “Yes. Well. This is unprecedentedly awkward.” Satan lives at the bottom of the ninth circle smothered in ice, chews on Judas Iscariot and impotently wing-beats all day. Virgil and Dante escape down the fur of his back. Isn’t that awesome? Endless burning sands, rivers of boiling blood, a lake of ice—and millions of screaming souls crammed in close quarters, blinded by pain, incapable of admiring the scenic vistas. And not that hell isn’t big—the place is huge. In Milton’s “reboot” of the Fall, he imagines hell as a great metropolis, Roman in its conquest for dimensions, with Pandemonium as its capitol. Satan is miffed that his city-planners can’t get a hold of the chaos. He flies around outer-space to clear his head where nobody can bother him. Hell is other people.

The ontological differences between heaven and hell presuppose their narrative potentials. Heaven isn’t very interesting. Paradiso scholars are an unsexy lot doing tedious, genteel labor. And, holding to Blake’s opinion, we know Milton is on Satan’s side, on the side of charisma and virility. Scorsese, like the other visionaries before him so nostalgic for hell, is on Satan’s side too. Scorsese wants us to feel more, to feel everything, to pass through hell’s gates as Amsterdam Vallon does. The revolting violence, strangulations, stabbings, bludgeonings, lynchings and cannon-fire of the film’s climactic last fifteen minutes suggests that Scorsese really does not want to move his audience or protagonists through the montaged matte-history of purgatory or into the grave-crumbled heaven, where death is forgotten in the shadow of the Twin Towers (a jarring anachronism, though its symbolic portent is difficult to argue with). This is why he sets his store on a U2 song for the credit wrap-up: not just an Irish band, but a band for the end of a certain idea of Ireland. An Ireland of—god, I don’t even know—of designer eye-wear—to prop-up the idea of a designer eye-wear America. Heaven remains the boring old routine of orbiting a celestial body in sing-song admiration. Hell, by contrast, though gravity-burdened (thus its heat), has boulevards for heroics.