The New Hollywood
era of American film saw a distinct change in the tone and values of films. Martin
Scorsese’s films during and after the New Hollywood era were innovative in
their use of camera, editing, and sound to create a subjective reality. Scorsese deliberately draws attention to the
camera and editing apparatus in his films to say something about a character’s
experience or psyche, but his films also subconsciously attack views of the
Hollywood ideology of the perfect male hero and the American Dream.
The
Hollywood American dream is a function of the dominant capitalist ideology; in
traditional Hollywood films, every American has the chance and power to follow
their dreams and succeed; any problems they have can be overcome, and any
obstacles can be beaten. The characters that live up to this standard are the
ideal potent man of action, whose responsibility is directly solve the problems
of the plot and save or protect others, and the ideal supportive woman, whose
domesticity gives the man something to protect and his reason for action. (Wood 670) The men of Scorsese’s films strive
to become this ideal man and get the ideal woman, but, even if they cannot see
it, it is obvious to the viewer that they fail.
However, the films
use both the characters’ rise and downfall to critique the ideal tropes of
protagonists, heroes, and society, which is expressed implicitly through the
camera and editing techniques as well as the casting of the films. The camera
and editing techniques in particular are significant because they call
attention to the camera and editing as tools that represent reality instead of
directly portraying it. Jean-Louis Baudry discusses the use of lenses to create
Renaissance-type perspective and the virtual image of cinema; a “normal” lens
for a certain size of film (ex. 50mm lens for 35mm film) recreates the
perspective of the human eye and how it sees reality, specifically the same
type of representation in paintings. A wide angle or telephoto lens, therefore,
is a distortion away from represented reality.
(291) Cinema also introduces camera movement, which marks the camera
both as the perspective of the viewer and as an object within the
cinematographic world. The camera itself becomes significant to what it is
shooting and film reality, revealing itself as an apparatus to the viewer. In
Scorsese’s films, the camera and sound editing are brought to the attention of
the viewer in order to mark certain moments in the film as subjective reality.
In Taxi Driver, the camerawork and sound
editing are essential to convey Travis’ fragile mental state. The most
noticeable instances are the camera directly representing his gaze, and the
camera is noticeable as an apparatus to convey subjective reality. The camera
primarily operates as Travis’ gaze; Scorsese and his cinematographer Michael
Chapman use subtle slow motion to mark the point of view shots as different
from the shots meant to represent reality, implying that Travis’s viewpoint is
noticeable different from the world around him. In one scene, the camera even
acts as an extension of Travis’ and the viewer’s feelings; during Travis’ phone
call to Betsy after their date, the camera drifts away from Travis to the empty
hallway below, as if it has secondhand embarrassment from the awkward
conversation.
Travis’ voiceovers
are explicitly used to convey his increasingly warped thoughts to the viewer,
but the use of voiceover is also significant as a break from standard reality. Like
the slow motion, the voiceovers stand out as non-diegetic sound; explicitly
they represent his thoughts, but the stress on their separation from the
diegesis creates a stark difference between the film reality and Travis’
reality. The film reality’s sound and dialogue exists entirely in the diegesis,
whereas Travis’ thoughts are completely outside it.
Travis’
psychological breakdown needs to be expressed in both explicit and implicit
ways because the core of his character is a subversion of the good American man.
Robert De Niro adopts a Midwestern accent to portray Travis as the average
upstanding middle American, and Travis is also an ex-Marine who served in
Vietnam. The middle American war veteran is an important subtype of the ideal
man; as a soldier, his combat is the most potent form of action and protection.
A soldier fights explicitly and directly on behalf of American values,
protecting civilians from the destruction of those values by outside, foreign
forces.
The war veteran
is usually a heroic, admirable character, but Travis warps the American dream
into a destructive, violent fantasy. The subtle changes in the editing and
sound are not just examples of Travis’ warped viewpoint, but also the warping
of the American dream onscreen. Scorsese wanted Travis’ experience in Vietnam
was necessary for his views of the world be become so black and white; he
states:
It was
crucial to Travis Bickle’s character that he had experienced life and death around
hm every second he was in south-east Asia. That way it becomes more heightened
when he comes back; the image of the street at night reflected in the dirty
gutter becomes more threatening. I think that’s something a guy going through
war, any war, would experience when he comes back to what is supposedly
‘civilization’. He’d be more paranoid. (Scorsese
62)
Travis wants to
be the ideal man of action; he says near the beginning of the film “All I
needed was a sense of direction, a sense of someplace to go.” But his choice of
action is violent and destructive. He sees everything in terms of black and
white, and so he holds the world to a standard that is unachievable. While the
battlefield simply has the ‘good guys’ and ‘the enemy’, New York has a much more
complicated spectrum of characters and motivations, an idea which Travis can no
longer understand.
The end of the film, which reveals that in the
aftermath of his massacre, Iris has returned home and he has become a local
hero, is a parody of the usual heroism of the male lead in Hollywood films.
Travis is a perversion of the man of action, but he is still rewarded for his ‘valiant’
efforts with fame, acceptance, and Betsy’s admiration. Ironically, screenwriter
Paul Schrader wrote the shootout scene as Travis’ attempt to die with honor,
hence why he attempts suicide at the end.
(Scorsese, Scorsese on Scorsese 63) Taking that into account, by living,
Travis actually has failed his quest; he intended to commit suicide or be
killed. The typical Hollywood success is actually Travis’ failure.
Raging Bull’s Jake La Motta also
attempts and fails to be the good American man; his only successes occur in the
boxing ring. He ruins both his relationship with both of his wives and his
brother by being jealous, controlling, and violent, and he’s aware of it. He
feels extreme anger both at himself and others; he has internalized worries of
inadequacy and failure as a man, which he then transforms that anxiety into
suspicion and rage at others. He holds Vicki to ridiculous standards, exploding
at her when she idly mentions that she heard a rival boxer was good looking and
constantly suspecting her of cheating with everyone she meets. At the same
time, he realizes that what he does is wrong, and seeks redemption by being punished
in the ring. (Miliora 86) Because of his
violent nature, the only place where he is productive is in the ring, where his
rage can be put towards a purpose. His place is in the ring, not in a house. He
has a control of himself in the ring that he knows he never has in the outside
world; when he is forced to throw a fight, he ends up ashamed, crying after the
end of the bout.
The
boxing scenes deviate radically from reality. Unlike the relatively
conventional editing of other scenes in the film, the boxing scenes are
markedly different in the cinematography and sound. The camera switches
radically between wide shots and close-ups of the fighters and their bodies,
bending and twisting the apparent size of the ring. The close quarters shots
are claustrophobic, often cutting off the bodies of the boxers except for where
the blows hit, and the atmosphere is hazy, like a hot-road mirage. The audience
often disappears; creating a black void outside of the ring, only broken up by
the boxers, the ring, and the lights of the arena. The sound of the crowd is
often either silenced, leaving the boxers in there is one shot where the force
of one punch from Jake sends the camera whirling around until it end up on the
other side of the ring. As he knocks Robinson out of the ring, the framerate
drops, shoving the camera into Robinson as Jake looks on in slow motion.
Even
the sounds are altered to distort the reality of the ring. Robinson’s final
beatdown of Jake is accompanied, after a long silence, with the wind and thunder
of a powerful storm as he rains punches on Jake. Other sounds include animal
screams, melons breaking, and many other unsettling sounds which Frank Warner,
who made the sound effect, refused to divulge
(Scorsese, Scorsese on Scorsese 83). The diegetic sounds are also either
altered or enhanced; each sound of a punch is exaggerated, the cheering of the
crowd melts into screams.
The use of black
and white instead of color separates the red of blood from the idea of blood.
Scorsese decided to go with black and white because he felt that the red would
be too distracting from the images, especially after a comment from Michael
Powell that his films tended to be too red. (Scorsese on Scorsese 80) The
abundance of blood without the red forces the viewer to focus on the volume of
blood without the shock value of the color. This distinction is important
because the sound editing, camera movement, framing, framerate changes, makeup,
and blood effects are all enhanced to emphasize the brutality of Jake’s world without
the implied judgment of violence that would come with the blood red.
In
these scenes, the camera almost never leaves the ring; the only time it does is
when the point of view switches from Jake and Sugar Ray inside the ring to Joey
watching Jake’s demise on television. This departure is important because, for
the first time, the brothers are separated during a major bout, and we see the
ring from a levelheaded perspective. Otherwise, the images in the ring, the
haze and the slow motion and fast motion and camera movement represent the
warped world of Jake La Motta; this punish and be punished world is far from
objective reality, but it is the only reality in which he can succeed.
The
protagonists of Goodfellas completely
twist the image of the ideal American man. They work, they marry, they provide
for and protect their families, but as gangsters, they embody everything that
the American dream isn’t. Henry Hill is drawn to the mobsters in his
neighborhood because of their influence; they make the rules, do what they
want, and flaunt their evasion of the law. Jimmy Conway in particular is an
inspiration; he’s only in his twenties when Henry meets him, but he already has
the clout and fame of an established gangster. The gangsters seem much more
successful than Henry’s primary role model, his father. While his father, who
is bitter about life and beats him, is far from the ideal male role model,
Henry craves more than the average life, and the mobsters have the allure above
his working class world at home.
At
first look, his ambition is acceptable; he’s a hardworking kid who wants to
start making money early, which pleases his father. He’s living the dream of
upward mobility, out-earning his father when he’s still a teenager. Henry’s
entry into the mob world is a foreshadowing of the perversion of the American
dream that is the running theme of Goodfellas; his ambitions are almost
admirable, but as a gangster, his ambition turns into entitlement, which
becomes more important than following the law as a good American would.
Henry
justifies anything that he, Jimmy, or sometimes even Tommy does as if they
deserve it simply for being gangsters. They live in tacky, decadent houses; the
first thing Henry tells Karen they’re doing once they get out of jail is that
they’re moving into a bigger, gaudier house. The three of them become drunk
with power; Jimmy steals not because he has to, or to sell them, but simply
because he can, Tommy flies into rages, knowing that he can get away with it,
and Henry rides along with them. The Air France heist is a perfect example of
the rewards that inflate their egos; even though they have to give Paulie his
cut, they still stole $420,000, and as Henry notes, they didn’t even use any
force. His wife Karen explains the allure of the gangster life: “He was an
exciting guy. It was really nice. He introduced me to everybody. Everybody
wanted to be nice to him, and he knew how to handle it.” Just like Henry, she’s
intoxicated by power, even when that power is violent, like when he pistol
whips the man who assaults her. After they are married, she sums up the
gangster mindset;
After a
while it got to be all normal. None of it seemed like crime. It was more like Henry
was enterprising and that he and the guys were making a few bucks hustling
while the other guys were sitting on their asses waiting for handouts. Our
husbands weren’t brain surgeons, they were blue collar guys. The only way they
could make extra money, real extra money, was to cut a few corners.
She justifies their crime by interpreting
it as active ambition; her husband and his friends aren’t breaking the law,
they’re just trying to make a living, whereas everyone else who follows the law
is either privileged enough that they can make the money anyway, like the brain
surgeons, or they’re passively waiting for someone else to do the hard work for
them. Henry isn’t a gangster; he’s a regular man of action.
The
mobsters bring this surface ideal into the family as well. Henry and Jimmy
settle down with wives and children, and Tommy’s mother urges him to do the
same. On the surface, they work to provide their families a place to live and
nice things. However, they also all have mistresses; Henry even spends extra
money to buy his mistress Janice an apartment as extravagantly gaudy as his own
house. When Karen finds out, Henry is urged by Jimmy and Paulie to make up with
Karen and return to her. They don’t care if he actually stops seeing Janice and
remains faithful to Karen; it’s just important that he keeps the appearance of
the close-knit family.
Unlike Taxi Driver but similar to Raging Bull, the camera in Goodfellas stands out as an apparatus.
Tracking shots are used to portray the overwhelming allure of power that the
characters feel; the most important ones are the introduction to the network of
mobsters and Henry and Karen entering the Copacabana. The introductory shot at
the Bamboo Lounge swivels around the tables, booths and bar, with more
characters that the viewer can keep track of introducing themselves or
acknowledging the camera (as Henry); the viewer is overwhelmed by the prospect
of having to remember all of these characters at once, but Henry can handle it.
He’s a part of this overarching network of gangsters, and it’s just another day
hustling for Henry Hill.
If the
introduction to the Bamboo Lounge is intended to show off Henry’s power to the
viewer, the Copacabana shot is meant to dazzle Karen as well. This time, Henry
is the one addressing the people he sees; he’s not looking in on the mobster
network anymore. He’s the connected one, the one who can get the best table set
down just for him, who receives a bottle of champagne on behalf of a friend. Henry’s
power is so impressive that the camera is no longer his perspective, it follows
his every move.
Goodfellas also uses zooms and push ins
to attempt to enter the mindset of the characters, although unlike Travis and
Jake, the gangster mind isn’t usually completely revealed through the camera.
Jimmy in particular is hard for even the camera to read; the most important
push in of the film is the slow push in on Jimmy as he watches Morrie in the
bar. Watching for the first time, the viewer can’t pick up that this moment is
when Jimmy decides to whack Morrie, but the camera movement emphasizes the
subtle changes in his face as he smokes a cigarette, marking this scene as
important. Henry is much easier to read, especially after he starts using
cocaine; during his last hit on his last day of freedom, the camera shoots
straight into his face. While Jimmy plays his cards close to his chest and
stays in control of the camera, Henry’s camera pushes in so fast it goes out of
focus for a moment. Henry’s control over the camera is rapidly slipping as he
loses control of his situation.
The editing of
Henry’s final day also stands out as a sign that Henry has lost control; the
beginning of the film uses smooth shots and carefully placed freeze frames, but
at this point, the camera movements become much jerkier, cuts between shots are
more frequent and abrupt, and the freeze frames completely disappear. The loss
of control over the camera movements and editing mirrors Henry’s loss of
control until he finally decides to testify as a witness against his friends. In
the last scene, the editing is the most realistic than it has been in the entire
film, but Henry’s not happy about it. His life is normal, the camera is normal,
and so even though he’s safe from the mob and settled in an idyllic American
house in an idyllic suburb, he’s still unhappy.
Scorsese’s most
recent film, 2010’s Shutter Island,
returns to both the camera techniques and themes of Taxi Driver. Before the reveal that Teddy Daniels is actually the
psychotic patient Andrew Laeddis, the camera and editing leave several hints
that what the viewer is seeing is not entirely accurate. Similar to Travis
Bickle in Taxi Driver, Scorsese uses
slow motion to mark Daniels’ gaze at the patients as he enters Shutter Island
and abrupt whip pans which move faster than a person’s gaze can move. The
editing is also subtly disconcerting; in the first scene with Dr. Cawley, the
shot-reaction shots are edited choppily, and the camera breaks the 180 degree
rule more than once, disorienting the viewer’s position in the scene. The sound
bridges are also cut extremely abruptly, barely covering the transition from
one shot to the next. In the following scene, when Teddy and his partner search
Rachel’s room, some of the camera angles are low enough that the actors’ heads
are cut out of the frame.
The reveal and
ending of the film, where Andrew chooses to be lobotomized rather than face
that he killed his wife, subvert the viewer’s expectation for a climactic
ending. The viewer has been asked to identify with Teddy for the entire film,
to distrust Dr. Cawley and Dr. Naehring, and, because of the thriller genre, to
believe in the government conspiracy that Teddy is investigating. Instead,
right when the tension is coming to a head, everything stops to completely deny
everything that the viewer has believed in. The following scenes and shots are
longer with smoother editing, a severe change from the choppy editing earlier
in the film, and every interaction Teddy / Andrew has with other characters in
the film is thrown into question. The subtle editing earlier in the film
becomes more noticeable to the viewer, who, upon rewatch, is torn about the
gaze presented earlier in the film. As Teddy enters Shutter Island, the viewer
takes the slow motion views of the patients and guards as accurate; the smiles
of the patients are assumed to be creepy, and the steely glares of the guards
look extremely suspicious. Once the viewer knows the twist, these assumptions
must be discarded; the patients smile because they already know Teddy as Andrew,
and the guards glare because they resent that a patient suddenly has the run of
the island. The abrupt whip pans and sound bridges which initially are
subconsciously unsettling now point to Andrew as an extremely unreliable
narrator; is it a style choice, or does Andrew not remember what happens
between the cut?
The casting and
conspiracy plotline also point to a critique on distrust of foreigners and Cold
War paranoia. Dr. Cawley, played by the British Ben Kingsley seems immediately
obstructive to Teddy’s investigations, which makes the viewer believe he has
something to hide. Max von Sydow’s introduction as Dr. Naehring immediately
paints him as an outright villain; he is revealed in a tracking shot that
curves around him and is immediately contrasted with the Nazi soldier that
Teddy remembers from a flashback. This shot is recreated in a dream sequence,
where Naehring is replaced by the imaginary “Andrew Laeddis”, the villain of
Teddy’s story. The audience assumes that this juxtaposition means that Naehring
is untrustworthy at best; when he tries to drug Teddy, it appears as an attempt
to incapacitate him and prevent him from revealing the truth about Shutter
Island. Instead, Naehring is trying to subdue a dangerous patient who he
believes is out of control.
Like Scorsese’s
other films, Shutter Island also
deconstructs the ideal of the war veteran and the perfect nuclear family. Dr.
Cawley describes “Teddy Daniels” as a war hero whose wife was tragically
murdered. This construct is the Old Hollywood upstanding man, an ideal that
Andrew Laeddis wants to but cannot fit into. As Andrew, he became an alcoholic
and ignored his wife’s mental illness even after she burnt down their
apartment, far from the perfect American couple. Even as Teddy Daniels, hearing
the Mahler piece that Dr. Naehring plays reminds him of Dachau, where he
watched an SS officer slowly die, as well as witnessed the execution of the
remaining SS officers. As he looks over the fallen bodies, they are shot
similarly to the piles of bodies from the concentration camps. As both Teddy
and Andrew, he comments on the violence and brutality of war; the soundtrack
becomes more threatening as Teddy describes the firing line before the guards
are killed, and he comments “It wasn’t warfare, it was murder.”
His paranoia about Shutter Island also
critiques the use and treatment of soldiers; both Teddy and Andrew became
alcoholics after coming back from the war. For Teddy, his untreated addiction
was a strain on his marriage, but for Andrew, it is much more destructive; he
drinks to forget the violence of war, but also ignores his wife’s deteriorating
mental state, refusing to get her help. In addition, part of the conspiracy
theory Teddy sets out to expose is that the experiments in the lighthouse are
used to create “ghosts”, supersoldiers with no feelings, memories, or pain.
The last and most
explicit social commentary is on the stigma and treatment of mental illness. While
Taxi Driver never formally diagnosed
Travis, Teddy Daniels is confirmed as mentally ill. His paranoia reflects the
stigma of mental illness; the hallucination Dr. Rachel Solando mentions that
nobody would believe her or Teddy once Dr. Cawley and Dr. Naehring pronounce
him as delusional. Teddy is running away from acknowledging his illness and the
stigma that comes with it by denying it, while at the same time critiquing that
the mentally ill are ignored once diagnosed. The stigma of the mentally ill is
also discussed by Dr. Cawley in a speech earlier in the film;
Do you
know the state of the mental health field these days, gentlemen?...War. The old
school believes in surgical intervention: psychosurgery, procedures like the
transorbital lobotomy. Some say the patients become reasonable, docile. Others
say they become zombies. [The new school believes in] psychopharmacology. A new
drug has just been approved called Thorazine, which relaxes psychotic patients,
you could say tames them…I have this radical idea that if you treat a patient
with respect, listen to him, try and understand, you just might reach him…What
should be a last resort has become a first response; give them a pill, put them
in the corner.
Cawley is attempting to reach Teddy
without drugs as a last resort from the barbaric lobotomy procedure. His
description of lobotomy patients as zombies is just like the supersoldier
“ghosts” that Dr. Solando tells Teddy about; both Teddy and Dr. Cawley are
anxious about the morality of subduing patients instead of listening to and
understanding them. Ironically, the end of the film ends with Teddy getting the
lobotomy; even knowing that he has the prospect to heal, he cannot handle the
stigma of having a mental illness, and so he chooses to be subdued rather than
understood.
Arguably, the
interpretation of the themes in these four movies could be directly attributed
under auteur theory to Scorsese, and not the apparatus. After all, John Caughie
defined the mark of an auteur as unconscious intentions created by the merging
of director personality and text. (126)
Under that theory, the apparatus is only Scorsese’s extension of his
unconscious will. Even though three out of the four films discussed are
adaptations from books, the fact that Scorsese chose those books to adapt, or
chose Schrader’s script to shoot, mark them with his will. But the implications
are not the same; looking at it from an auteur point of view, the common themes
would be gangster hero, masculinity, and religion, but these films also fit
into an ideological category which is different from the common themes of the
films.
Ideologically,
these films all subvert Hollywood American values, as already discussed above,
though they do not openly attack them. Instead they show how easily those
values are twisted, ignored, misunderstood, or tarnished, which falls into a
category of ideological theory. (Comoli and
Narboni 757) From the apparatus / ideology point of view, the
subconscious themes are reacting to the American Dream and heroism, which is a
subtle but important distinction.
Works Cited
Baudry, Jean-Louis. "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic
Apparatus (1970)." Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory
Reader. Ed. Philip Rosen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.
286-298.
Caughie, John. "Introduction (Auteur-Structuralism)." Theories
of Authorship: A Reader. Ed. John Caughie. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1981. 123-130.
Comoli, Jean-Luc and Jean Narboni. "Cinema/Ideology/Criticism
(1969)." Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. n.d.
752-759.
Goodfellas. Dir. Martin
Scorsese. 1990.
Miliora, Maria T. The Scorsese Psyche on Screen: Roots of Themes and
Characters in the Films. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland &
Company, Inc., Publishers, 2004.
Raging Bull. Dir. Martin
Scorsese. 1980.
—. Scorsese on Scorsese. Ed. David Thompson and Ian Christie.
London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1996.
Shutter Island. Dir. Martin
Scorsese. 2010.
Taxi Driver. Dir. Martin
Scorsese. 1976.
Wood, Robin. "Ideology, Genre, Auteur." Film Theory and
Criticism: Introductory Readings. 1977. 668-678.
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