Scorsese Departed
by Spencer Warren

Martin Scorsese was the sentimental favorite when he recently won his first Academy Awards, for best picture and best director with The Departed. The filmmaker often acclaimed as America’s most creative artist since he made his name more than thirty years ago with Mean Streets (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976) had, after five losses, finally received his long overdue official recognition from the motion picture industry.

Scorsese certainly has full command of his craft. He has developed an instantly recognizable, muscular style that overpowers the viewer and serves his frequently proclaimed god of free personal expression. Unfortunately, Scorsese’s more than three decades of such expression, but for one unusual film (for him), embodies the moral crisis of Western popular culture today and, indeed, of Western society: making a god of oneself in the name of “freedom,” substituting the unfettered self for higher, transcendent truth, and utter disregard of thousands of years of civilized tradition based on moral and social self-restraint.

Scorsese sees himself as a contrarian, like another leading director of his generation, Oliver Stone(Platoon (1986), JFK (1991), Natural Born Killers (1994), Nixon (1995)), and like their disciple, Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction (1994), Kill Bill: Vols 1 and 2 (2003 and 2004), Grindhouse (2007)). He sees himself in opposition to and outside of a morally corrupt society, which he exposes and transcends through his “art,” his personal expression.

The focus of much of Scorsese’s career -- apart from films he had to direct for “commercial” reasons, such as The Color of Money (1986) and The Aviator (2004) -- has been on the lowest levels of humanity, the gutter. Scorsese might say this is where he can expose the under-side, which he sees as the truth, of America. But perhaps the real reason he loves this subject matter is because it allows him to indulge his obsession with lots and lots of blood and filthy language on the big screen (which in The Departed reaches the level of evident psychosis). Maybe that’s where his searching mind and soul find transcendence. “I like the idea of spurting blood,” he eloquently explained to the Village Voice in 1976. “It reminds me. . . God, it reminds me. . . it’s like a purification. . . you know, the fountains of blood. . . like in the Van Morrison song. . . ‘wash me in the fountain.’” About this time he was a cocaine user and almost died as a result.

Scorsese gave this interview a month after his first big film, Taxi Driver, had opened. Five years later, he became the only filmmaker directly to inspire a presidential assassination attempt, when John Hinckley III tried to murder President Reagan – a crime that would have altered world history – so that, as Hinckley’s insanity defense successfully claimed at his trial, “he could effect a mystical union with Jodie Foster.” Foster plays a twelve-year-old prostitute in the depraved under-side of 1970s New York who is the subject of a John Wayne-like Westerns “rescue” by Scorsese’s psychopathic “hero,” Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro). Bickle is revolted by the moral filth all around him, but in Scorsese’s always upside-down world, he himself is part of it all – he takes a date, played by Cybill Shepherd, to a Times Square porn movie. He is named Travis, wrote one admiring critic, to invoke the Alamo hero Colonel William Travis. In the climactic red carnage shootout between Bickle and Jodie’s pimps, Bickle, in addition to his gallery of guns, sports a Bowie knife – the Alamo again, get it? The critic explained that Taxi Driver is a post-Vietnam critique of “the failure of masculinity as a set of behavioral codes on which to mold a life.” It exposes, among other things, America’s gun fetish and the “myth of the last stand” that is represented by the Alamo and is central to America’s self-image.

Hinckley identified with De Niro’s alienated Marine Vietnam. He saw the movie fifteen times and claimed it drove him mad; the film was shown to the jury as part of his insanity defense. Another movie that demonstrated the cost to society of such free personal expression was Stone’s Natural Born Killers, which reportedly inspired copycat murders. Its depiction of unrestrained violence as a metaphor for Stone’s hated “Amerika” complemented his factually dishonest JFK, which persuaded millions that our government murdered President Kennedy. These films prove the wisdom of the self-censorship Hollywood Production Code that ruled filmmaking from 1934 to 1966 and severely restricted violence and sex. Written by a Jesuit, Father Daniel Lord, the code wrote that movies have “larger moral responsibilities” because they appeal to all – “mature, immature, developed, undeveloped.” The code thus was based on the Judeo-Christian view of man’s flawed, sinful nature, which has been overturned by today’s cult of the “liberated” individual.

Scorsese’s revolt against society also is evident in his films’ Catholic bashing. A product of New York’s Little Italy, he later dropped out of his studies for the priesthood at Fordham University to study film at New York University. De Niro’s monster avenger in Cape Fear (1995) sports crucifix tattoos all over his bronze muscles. The Departed has a totally gratuitous insult directed at a bishop as he dines in a restaurant. The apex of Scorsese’s anti-Catholic revolt, and of his transcendent personal expression, is his The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). This is the Passion by way of Scorsese’s Little Italy (New York accents included), climaxed by Jesus’s dream from the cross in which he has sex with and marries Mary Magdalene, living a “normal” life. Scorsese claims this blasphemy was a new, respectful perspective because he dramatized the human desires Jesus had to overcome. Others see it as another irresponsible exercise in his career of anti-social revolt, which he tries to dignify as his artistic expression. Interestingly, in his pro-Tibet movie Kundun (1997), Scorsese treats the Dalai Lama’s Buddhism with great reverence, the only time religion receives such respect in his career. In this we see the typical leftist embrace of the “Other.”

From Scorsese’s point of view, he should have won the Oscar for Gangs of New York (2002), a much anticipated and more ambitious film than The Departed, which merely switches his obsession with the criminal gutter from New York to Boston, and whose carnage is so extreme it falls into (unintentional) self-parody (as does his gratuitous shot at the end of the State Capitol -- our evil government a la Oliver Stone). In Gangs he ventures out of his usual contemporary milieu into history: the Civil War period. But he has little interest in the great issues of the American epic. Instead, typically, his focus remains on depraved criminality, moved back a century – gang warfare in a primitive section of old Manhattan.

Where the carnage in Taxi Driver comes at the end, in Gangs of New York Scorsese indulges himself right near the start: the 1860’s street set runs red, throats are slit hither and yon, as the rival gangs pursue Scorsese’s blood fetish, the one he projects onto his rotten United States of America. There’s a war for the future of self- government going on out there, but what does it matter next to Leonardo DiCaprio gaining revenge against Daniel Day Lewis, his father’s murderer? Later in the film, Scorsese brings in the New York 1863 anti-draft riots and has a shot of misguided immigrants trodding off the ships that brought them here so they can die – apparently for nothing – in the Civil War that was not even of their own making. This vicious anti-American movie received glowing reviews from the New York Times, and, on similar terms, from the “conservative” Weekly Standard .

Let us contrast Scorsese’s anti-history hallucination with real history. One of the poor exploited immigrants of Scorsese’s movie, the real-life Peter Welsh, was an Irish-born carpenter serving as a private in the famous Massachusetts Irish Brigade. In a letter he rebuked his wife for questioning his service, writing: “This is the first test of a modern free government in the act of sustaining itself against internal enemies. If it fail then the hopes of millions fall. . . . America is Irlands refuge Irlands last hope [sic.] destroy this republic and her hopes are blasted.” A forty-year-old Ohio corporal who had immigrated from England, George H. Cadman, wrote this to his wife in 1864, explaining his decision to re-enlist for a second three-year hitch: “If I do get hurt I want you to remember that it will be not only for my Country and my Children but for Liberty all over the World that I risked my life, for if Liberty should be crushed here, what hope would there be for the cause of Human Progress anywhere else?” Later that summer, outside Atlanta, whose conquest by General Sherman would ensure President Lincoln’s re-election and the final march to victory, Cadman was killed.

Scorsese evidently does not read history, but he could make a visit to the Bull Run battlefield and its modest monument erected by Union veterans in 1866. On the small stone pyramid, the exploited lower classes of his film inscribed these words: “In Memory of the Patriots Who Fell at Bull Run, July 21, 1861.” And if he did pick up a book, he would read that in the 1864 presidential election, in the midst of what is still by far the worst blood-letting in American history, almost 80 percent of the men fighting to save his depraved America voted to risk their lives and see the awful war through to total victory by supporting President Lincoln (who won 55 percent of the total popular vote).

This is Scorsese’s personal expression, his transcendent artistic “vision.” Not for Scorsese – or the Stones, Tarantinos and the lesser lights of contemporary Hollywood—the story of the Welshes and Cadmans.

The final Scorsese film examined here is his four hour documentary made for the BBC, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995). This excellent exploration of classic Hollywood merits some detail because it is unintentionally most revealing.

Scorsese loves the directors he calls the “smugglers,” those who managed to stamp their own personal expression on the films they made under the constraints of the rigid Hollywood studio system that prevailed before the 1960s. Thus, one of his favorite directors is Samuel Fuller, whom we might call the Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch (1969)) of the 1950’s for how he pushed his movies to the maximum limits then permitted. Scorsese loves Fuller’s 1963 Shock Corridor, in which the mental asylum is a metaphor for the insanity of American life. So much for the country that was defending the Free World against the most powerful tyranny in history. What does that matter in the face of Fuller’s transcendent insights?

Another movie Scorsese discusses is Outrage (1950) because, unusual for its time, it depicts another side of American life, in this case a rape and the victim’s aftermath as she struggles to cope. And it was written and directed by the only woman director of the period, the actress Ida Lupino. Scorsese shows the superb scene where the woman is alone in a warehouse parking lot after work and becomes aware she is being stalked – but we never see the man as she runs frantically for her life, nor do we see the attack. Our fear arises from Lupino’s complete focus on the victim and what we do not see. Likewise, Cat People (1942), another selection, strikes terror inside us through artful allusion – the black panther, a metaphor for the evil side of human nature – is sensed and heard, but never seen. It was directed by one of the most under-rated Hollywood directors, the superb Jacques Tourneur.

Although their subject matter holds obvious appeal to Scorsese, these two films, products of a traditional society that understood self-restraint and respect for social mores as the basis of artistic creativity, are the total opposite of his buckets of blood style of filmmaking – with one glaring exception, his 1993 Age of Innocence. This story of frustrated love among the upper class in late nineteenth century New York shows how Scorsese’s abundant talent could make a civilized movie, and an excellent one.

To conclude, most revealing among the selections for his Hollywood documentary, Scorsese discusses Boomerang! (1947), directed by Elia Kazan seven years before his On the Waterfront. It is based on a true story about a man wrongly accused of murdering a priest and almost sent to a judicial lynching by a fevered Connecticut town. Corrupt small-town America, 1947 – how this excites Scorsese! But a much superior studio product directed by Kazan two years earlier, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, does not interest him. Based on the famous novel, it is a beautiful story of a tipsy immigrant Irish father (James Dunn won the best supporting Oscar in one of the screen’s most moving performances) who can’t provide much for his tenement family, but whose dreaming inspires his young daughter (Peggy Ann Garner) to strive for a better life, and whose abiding love shelters her from the harsh world around her. Their Christmas Eve scene, as this singing waiter sits at his girl’s bedside and raises her sights to the heavens, gorgeously back-lit in expressive black and white, is not Scorsese’s world. It is the world of the quotidian, the commonplace, in which the best films of Golden Age Hollywood found moral depth; they did so by following the age-old aesthetic that had inspired Western art before the twentieth century – aspiring to an ideal of beauty.

For Scorsese and his like, to aspire to a transcendent ideal above and outside themselves – exploring their creativity by inter-acting with tradition – is a heinous infringement on their personal expression. So, vaunting their callow egos, they turn their backs on what is above and fix their gaze on their self-imagined hell below. Hence their nihilism, their destructiveness, the barren, non-moral wasteland of their careers, and, like rap “music,” with which they share much in common, the anti-social degradation that is their substitute for beauty. They have a very negative effect on our country.

Spencer Warren is ConservativeBattleline’s media critic.