Martin Scorsese and the American Dream

By Jim Cullen

More than perhaps any other major filmmaker, Martin Scorsese has grappled with the idea of the American Dream. His movies are full of working-class strivers hoping for a better life, from the titular waitress and aspiring singer of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore to the scrappy Irish immigrants of Gangs of New York. And in films as varied as Casino, The Aviator, and The Wolf of Wall Street, he vividly displays the glamour and power that can come with the fulfillment of that dream, but he also shows how it can turn into a nightmare of violence, corruption, and greed.  
 
This book is the first study of Scorsese’s profound ambivalence toward the American Dream, the ways it drives some men and women to aspire to greatness, but leaves others seduced and abandoned. Showing that Scorsese understands the American dream in terms of a tension between provincialism and cosmopolitanism, Jim Cullen offers a new lens through which to view such seemingly atypical Scorsese films as The Age of Innocence, Hugo, and Kundun. Fast-paced, instructive, and resonant, Martin Scorsese and the American Dream illuminates an important dimension of our national life and how a great artist has brought it into focus.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Jun 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781978817432

Book preview

Martin Scorsese and the American Dream

Martin Scorsese and the American Dream

JIM CULLEN

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cullen, Jim, 1962- author.

Title: Martin Scorsese and the American dream / Jim Cullen.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020041767 | ISBN 9781978817418 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978817425 (cloth) | ISBN 9781978817432 (epub) | ISBN 9781978817449 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978817456 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Scorsese, Martin—Criticism and interpretation. | Motion pictures—Social aspects—United States—History—20th century. | Motion pictures—Social aspects—United States—History—21st century. | American Dream in art.

Classification: LCC PN1998.3.S39 C85 2021 | DDC 791.4302/33092—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041767

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2021 by Jim Cullen

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

For the students, faculty, and staff of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, my home of nineteen years

Contents

Preface

A Martin Scorsese Feature Film Chronology

Introduction: The Provincial Cosmopolitan

1 The Elizabethan Era

2 Redeeming Dreams

3 Impressive Failures

4 Dream Critiques

5 Recurring Dreams

Conclusion: Dream of Life

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

REEL LIFE: Martin Scorsese as an instructor at New York University, 1969. Located on the border between the insular Little Italy and worldly Greenwich Village, NYU would be the crucible of hope where his American Dream of artistic success would come into focus. (Photofest)

Preface

This book explores the intersection of two topics and their impact on American culture. One topic is an idea. The other is a person—or, more specifically, that person’s body of work.

The idea is the American Dream. It’s one that’s familiar to virtually everybody (and by everybody, I do not mean simply residents of the United States, but indeed much of the world at large). For some, the American Dream is a concept of shimmering possibility. For others, it’s a bald-faced lie. For still others, it’s a myth that may have once been true but has lost its power. Like all big ideas, definitions of this one can vary, as can the assumptions that underlie it. Actually, the American Dream is a more ambiguous and contradictory idea than it appears to be, complexities I have explored in a number of previous books.¹ That’s why the introduction that follows makes some effort to establish a framework for the discussion, through which the arguments in the subsequent chapters will be threaded.

The person in question here, of course, is Martin Scorsese, a man who, as of this writing, is often referred to as the greatest living American film director—an accolade that’s both unofficial and contestable. Whether or not you actually subscribe to this belief, it’s not hard to make a case that Scorsese has been a major cultural figure for the past half century. His impact can be gauged in terms of commercial success (which, as is true of even the most successful artists, has been uneven), his recognition by his contemporaries (Academy Award nominations for his films have been almost de rigueur, even if they’ve won relatively few), or the longevity of his movies as touchstones in the culture at large. Indeed, it would not be hyperbole to suggest that Scorsese has been a household name in families where movie-watching, whether in theaters, via home video, or streaming, has been common—which is to say most families in the past five decades.

Actually, it’s precisely Scorsese’s outsize presence that complicates any effort to manageably discuss his legacy, which is why it’s important to make clear what this book does and doesn’t do. It’s not a biography, and it’s not a comprehensive study of his art. There’s already a huge literature on Scorsese’s work that has flowed through a series of media tranches. This includes a steady stream of daily journalism that includes now-deceased contemporaries such as Pauline Kael, Richard Schickel, and Roger Ebert, whose commentary holds its own against any that has followed.² (It helps, of course, that these people knew Scorsese personally, and were able to talk with him in real time about his movies as they were made.) There’s also a large body of scholarly critiques of Scorsese’s work, ranging from book-length studies to articles in academic journals.³ Finally, there’s Scorsese’s own commentary on his work and that of others, a corpus that’s impressive in its own right. These include book-length sets of interviews that were conducted, collected, and published by a series of writers and editors, as well as works like the A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies, a 1995 documentary and subsequent companion book that documents his encyclopedic knowledge of film history, in which he alternates between the breathless fan—sometimes literally; he’s explained that his lifelong battle with asthma is why he speaks in such rapid-fire fashion⁴—and an informed artist whose habitual intertextuality deepens the experience of watching his films on both a conscious and subconscious level.⁵

An additional complication to producing a book about Scorsese is one intrinsic to the medium of film in any form: it’s a huge, sprawling kingdom. There’s an enormous temptation for a former English major like myself to treat movies as if they’re literary texts and talk about them exclusively in terms of plot, character, dialogue, and the like—which is a serious mistake. That’s because there are other dimensions that always have to be considered if one is going to talk meaningfully and credibly about movies, even if it’s impossible to finally keep all the balls in the air at once. These include the purely visual and aural components of cinematic experience; the role of technology; commercial and financial considerations; and others. The Motion Picture Academy isn’t kidding when it dubs itself an institution devoted to the arts and sciences of cinema, because movies are really about both (among other things).

Moreover, filmmaking is an ineluctably collaborative process. Strictly speaking, calling any movie, as many were labeled at his direction, A Martin Scorsese Picture is a misnomer. Writers, actors, cinematographers, and production and costume designers are simply the tip of a celluloid iceberg, which is evident to every viewer who sits through the credits that roll at the end of any film. Insofar as it’s practical to do so, the contributions of such people will be noted in the pages that follow.

That said, the premise of this book remains that it still makes sense to speak of Martin Scorsese movies individually as well as collectively. There are two reasons for this. The first, something I say perhaps as a partial confession, reflects my early exposure to that cinematic paradigm known as auteur theory, famously dubbed as such by critic Andrew Sarris, borrowing on the work of French theorists, which considers the director of a film its author. The idea is that, notwithstanding the many vectors that converge on any given project’s outcome, it is nevertheless possible to discern clear patterns that reflect the director’s vision, literal and figurative, not only within a film but also across films in the course of a director’s career.⁶

Like all influential ideas, auteur theory is a historical product of its time. And like all ideas, insofar as they are ever useful as descriptions of reality, the fact remains that realities change. Scorsese grew up in a director-driven world, aspiring to enter the ranks of such people, as indeed he did. And yet even as he did so—in something of a historical accident, he arrived in Hollywood at a time when an industry in disarray afforded him and peers like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas opportunities that would not have been possible before or since—the world shifted again, and swerved away from directors as power shifted to other players, notably agencies, producers, and actors, on whom Scorsese’s ability to make movies increasingly depended. It is sobering to consider what his career might have looked like if, for example, Leonardo DiCaprio was not among his biggest fans: some of Scorsese’s most important movies might never have been made.

Which brings us to the other reason why it still makes sense to use a phrase like Martin Scorsese movie. Even if one assumes the director is not entirely in control of a project’s outcome, the ability—once one moves beyond mere survival in one’s profession, admittedly something few artists can take for granted—to choose projects becomes in itself a statement in its own right. This is not something limited to directors; I have, for example, charted the narrative trajectories implicit in the roles various movie stars have taken over the course of their careers and what it says about them and their visions of American history.⁷ When performing a similar analysis of Scorsese’s body of work, one discerns recurrent themes that surface in projects that at first might seem wildly different, whether they’re gangster movies, historical period pieces, or religious films.

This book uses one such recurrent theme, that of the American Dream, as a lens through which to understand particular Scorsese films, his body of work, and American culture as a whole. The Dream is something that a great many American artists have chosen (or perhaps have felt forced) to engage. In the case of Scorsese, the theme is not always obvious, in part because of the sheer variety of stories he has told, but also because Scorsese’s engagement with the Dream is not always conducted primarily on a narrative level. He once, almost dismissively, referred to his Best Picture–winning film The Departed as one of the few films I’ve had with a plot. And I did my best to destroy that plot. When pushed on this, he conceded, I shouldn’t say I don’t do plot. But I do tend to be attracted to stories that are more character driven.⁸ In Scorsese’s body of work, the Dream is often most vividly apprehended in a gesture, a remark, or an image rather than a story. So you have to pay closer attention than you otherwise might to see just how pervasive it is across so many of his movies.

Similarly, Scorsese has referred to the American Dream many times over the course of his life. But neither he nor the many scholars who have explored his work have done so in anything like a systematic way. The Dream has certainly been a means for him to understand his own life—he is, as much as any American who has ever lived, a poster child for upward mobility—but it is also an idea he has applied widely to a variety of characters and situations. One reason why Scorsese’s engagement with the Dream, however implicit, merits a book-length study is the complexity of his understanding of it. He’s no mere cheerleader; as he told Schickel, The American Dream, if you dream it intensely enough, will make you nuts.⁹ This is something he experienced firsthand during a dark period in his life during the late 1970s.

One last caveat. In the interests of clarity and brevity, this book will focus primarily on Scorsese’s feature films. He has been an extraordinarily prolific man, whose reach includes an impressive set of documentaries—Italianamerican (1974) is a gem of personal ethnography, for example, and The Last Waltz (1978) is widely regarded as the best concert film ever made, to cite only two of many examples. He has also dabbled in television, directing episodes of shows such as Amazing Stories (1985–1987) and Boardwalk Empire (2010–2014), a series that owes a heavy debt to Scorsese on the basis of its cast alone; he was also an executive producer for that series. But Scorsese has regarded himself first and foremost as a director of feature films, even as he has wedged countless other projects in between them. And this is likely to be the primary way in which he will be remembered.

Remembered: in an important sense, this book is an act of memory, because all works of history are themselves historical artifacts. I have referred to Martin Scorsese as a household name. But that’s unlikely to be true much longer, given the inexorable workings of time and mortality. However, there’s good reason to believe that his work will persist in collective memory—something that I believe should happen, and something to which I, in an admittedly small way, would like to contribute. There is an inevitably personal dimension to this. Scorsese’s films have been a backdrop for my own life: I’ve been going to see them as part of a lifelong habit of moviegoing, a ritual whose future is increasingly in question (one reflected in the making and release of Scorsese’s 2019 film The Irishman, to which I will return in the conclusion). As a native New Yorker with Italian and Catholic heritage, I also feel I have some familiarity with the cultural matrix from which he emerged, even as I can also believe, as someone who has been edified and enthralled by works of art by people from all walks of life, that Scorsese’s work resonates far beyond such demographic identifiers. Finally, as someone for whom the American Dream has also been a powerful idea that has shaped the course of my own life, I must responsibly recognize that it too is a historical construct whose validity and value are more than ever an open question, especially for those of younger generations who might like to believe in it but find that difficult or impossible to do. As such, this little volume may be little more than a document of a vanished world. But one never knows if, when, or how fragments of that world will flicker back to life—or on what kind of screen.

Jim Cullen

Hastings-on-Hudson,

New York

December 2020

A Martin Scorsese Feature Film Chronology

Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967)

Boxcar Bertha (1972)

Mean Streets (1973)

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)

Taxi Driver (1976)

New York, New York (1977)

Raging Bull (1980)

The King of Comedy (1983)

After Hours (1985)

The Color of Money (1986)

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)

New York Stories (Life Lessons segment, 1989)

Goodfellas (1990)

Cape Fear (1991)

The Age of Innocence (1993)

Casino (1995)

Kundun (1997)

Bringing Out the Dead (1999)

Gangs of New York (2002)

The Aviator (2004)

The Departed (2006)

Shutter Island (2010)

Hugo (2011)

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

Silence (2016)

The Irishman (2019)

Martin Scorsese and the American Dream

CROSS PURPOSES: Scorsese on the set of his 2016 film Silence, based on the novel by Japanese writer Shūsaku Endō. Scorsese’s entire career has been marked by an effort to grapple with the tension between his parochial upbringing and the global reach of his talents and ambitions. In many of his films, characters navigate between tribal and wider worlds in the pursuit of their aspirations. (Photofest)

Introduction

The Provincial Cosmopolitan

The American Dream is the great myth of U.S. history—and a powerful magnet for its greatest thinkers, doers, and artists.

A couple of quick definitions. First, the term myth is used here in the anthropological sense, as a widely held belief whose empirical validity can be neither proven nor disproven.¹ Second, while the American Dream is a complex and variegated concept, the conceptual base underlying all interpretations of it is one famously articulated by Henry David Thoreau in Walden: If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.² In this formulation, desire becomes destiny in a nation constituted for the pursuit of happiness.

Which is not to say that the otherwise ornery transcendentalist was, or is, right: for every Thoreau insisting on the Dream’s validity, there’s a James Baldwin asserting that the American dream has become something more closely resembling a nightmare.³ The power of a myth resides in the arguments it provokes. It’s common, nowadays, to assert that the Dream is dead or dying. But the frequency with which such assertions are made also suggests the degree to which the question continues to matter, as well as how hard it is to really determine the time of death—or its cause.

In terms of common parlance, the term American Dream is less than a century old; it’s only been since the 1930s that it has become widespread. (Tellingly, it did so during the Great Depression, a time when its survival was in doubt.)⁴ But from the very beginnings of the nation’s history, the collective quest to realize individual aspirations motivated the adventurous Virginian no less than the abstemious Puritan, both of whom understood the unique opportunities afforded by the English conquest of the North American continent. The person who embodied the concept most vividly at the moment of the nation’s creation was Benjamin Franklin, a Boston printer boy who reinvented himself as a Philadelphia renaissance man. His archetype, first manifest in the shrewd persona of his alter ego, Poor Richard, coursed through a series of heirs that included the escaped slave–turned-activist Frederick Douglass, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, entrepreneur Madame C. J. Walker, and inventor Thomas Edison, among countless others.

But for much of the nation’s history, the Dream has blazed brightest in the imaginative realm of literature, personified by a string of fictional figures who live in the nation’s collective memory: Louisa May Alcott’s Jo March; Theodore Dreiser’s Carrie Meeber; Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlett O’Hara; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby. The Dream is the great engine of countless plots for characters confronting obstacles to its realization from multiple directions. It’s an irresistible literary theme, and it seems fair to say that all major American writers staking a claim to greatness have wrestled with it at some point in their careers.

But in no arena of national life has the Dream been more vivid than the movies. To a great degree, this is intrinsic to the medium of film, which so often casts a dreamlike spell over viewers that is at once surreal and lucid. The earliest masters of the genre—Georges Méliès, Fritz Lang, Luis Buñuel—captured the former, but it was in the United States, especially in the climate of interwar Hollywood, that the tactile and material dimensions of the art form were most fully realized. Its often sumptuous clarity was all the more dazzling for its seemingly democratic quality, the notion that ordinary people could achieve worldly success vicariously—and, just maybe, otherwise—on a transcendent scale. This notion animated MGM musicals, larger-than-life westerns, and the civic allure of Frank Capra movies, dubbed Capracorn by critics but no less beloved for that.⁵ By the end of