[PEN-L:33463] Re: The ideological implications of Scorcese's latest film

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

At 12:16 PM -0500 12/28/02, Max B. Sawicky wrote:
> But its use is not limited to protecting the wealthy.  It is also to
> establish order.

Visually, though, the film doesn't dwell upon the establishment of
order very much.  After the riot and its suppression, the film
creates a vast scene of mourning, an endless row of bodies after
bodies laid on the street, illuminated by candles.  Amsterdam finds
the body of Jimmy (his black friend) among them and pays his
respects, and then he visits the grave of his father, next to which
is the grave of Bill the Butcher.  After the public and private
scenes of mourning, an image of the skyline of New York in the
nineteenth century appears, quickly dissolving into first an early
twentieth-century image, and then a pale twenty-first-century image
of the much transformed and yet same city of New York.  The idea is
that all the groups -- nativist Anglos, oppressed Irish, and even
more oppressed blacks -- were sacrificed for the creation of the
spectral city.  The order thus created is not communicated to the
audience as the familiar foundation of intimate everyday life that we
personally experience but as a ghostly vision seen from afar, as the
camera pulls back from scenes of mourning and the city is pictured
from across the water, as if viewed from the eyes of those who cannot
afford to live in Manhattan or those who have yet to arrive at
America.  Then the screen fades to black, as if the order for which
all paid dearly cannot last for long.

At 12:16 PM -0500 12/28/02, Max B. Sawicky wrote:
> I would say the progressive implication is that an appreciation of
> that cost is a rebuke to jingoism and the assortment of ideological
> superficialities that delude much of the public.

The film certainly does not make flag-waving easy, as it has Bill the
Butcher literally and symbolically drape the flag on his body.  It is
also interesting that Bill is played by the British actor Daniel
Day-Lewis at his most theatrical, as if to call attention to the
artificiality of rituals of American nationalism.

At 12:16 PM -0500 12/28/02, Max B. Sawicky wrote:
> I agree Johnny Depp might have been better in the lead, tho he might
> be too old by now.

Depp did a fantastic job in _Donnie Brasco_, which has the same
themes of the son overcoming the surrogate father to whom he feels
ambivalent attraction and the great private costs of establishing the
public order whose worth is in question and which remains tied to its
criminal underside.  It is true that he may be too old, alas.  As a
matter of fact, if Daniel Day-Lewis were twenty years younger, he
would be just right for Amsterdam, too.  In _My Beautiful
Laundrette_, he was simply amazing.
--
Yoshie

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