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December 7, 2008
I watched a DVD of Martin Scorsese's rather conventional historical Gangs of New York (2002) last night. It is a complex film about about gang warfare and draft riots in the Five Points area of New York's Lower East Side during the Civil War era. The conventional narrative of revenge, the set design, period detail and gang warfare is framed by the violence giving birth to New York city and the American government's violent mistreatment of immigrant citizen. America as a political utopia transformed into a society ruled by violence, fear and corruption.
The era it explores the New York netherworld of 1862-63 – is one I know little about. Nor did I know about the Five Points area or the multifarious gangs – the Forty Thieves, the Dead Rabbits, the Bowery Boys et al – that fought savage street battles for possession of it.
I was reminded me of the work of Jacob Riis, a journalist and photographer of industrial America and a Danish immigrant. who exposed the deplorable conditions of late nineteenth-century urban life in his widely-read book, How the Other Half Lives.
Gangs of New York is not simply about street gang violence in the 1860s or a son's revenge quest. The gang warfare mushroom into a political movement on behalf of Irish immigrants, who turn in full force against their nativist enemies only to be steamrolled by the chaos and carnage of the riots of 1863 when the army and navy fired upon civilians, blacks were lynched from lampposts and the city went up in flames.
Scorsese's romanticized vision of gang warfare as a prelude to melting-pot patriotism is harder to buy, as we are watching a Western with its gestures Leone or Ford even if the film is set in New York. The core is still the archetypal characters of epic melodrama: the martyred father, the avenging son, the charismatic villain, the duplicitous friend, the beautiful and penitent betrayer and the theme of murder, revenge and redemption.
As Chuck Rudolph notes in Slant the end is interesting one. The film ends with a graveyard in the foreground and the skyline of Manhattan in the distance. The latter expands to tower over its surroundings while the graves of the slowly become smaller. As the history of New New York flashes by the past shrinks away. The history of the cinema is shown with computer effects and digital projection technology overwhelming the once-important record of the medium—the old reels of celluloid. So we are left with the memories of those who were lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the past.
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The film is shot in Fellini’s old Cinecittà studios. The Five Points area of New York no longer exists, so Scorsese turned to Italy's famous Cinecitta studios in Rome, where many of the greatest Italian movies were made, to rebuild his city from scratch.
It has carnivalesque air in which the references to social realism become pop mythmaking about New York history. That doesn't matter---it's a self-conscious film not a historical text--- whilst this split between reality and artifice runs through all Scorsese's major films.