[PEN-L:33540] Re: The ideological implications of Scorcese's latest film

[Kendall Grant Clark <kendall@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>>>> "yoshie" == Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx> writes:

  yoshie> At 10:20 AM -0600 12/31/02, Kendall Grant Clark wrote:
  >> But, no, it's mute about the degree to which such white riots were
  >> typically called forth (McKoy calls this 'ululation') by whites
  >> (perhaps especially by business leaders and other elities,
  >> particularly by white newspapers), as happened in the Wilmington NC
  >> (1898) riot (which McKoy analyzes at length) and in the Atlanta
  >> (1906) and Tulsa (1921) riots (which she does not analyze).

  yoshie> I've already said that _Gangs of New York_ is underdeveloped
  yoshie> concerning the relation between blacks and whites, but I don't
  yoshie> think that it is necessary to put the burden of representing how
  yoshie> white riots in general -- beyond the NY draft riots of 1863 --
  yoshie> typically began upon one particular film.

No, that's a fair point; I offered that not so much as a criticism of GNY
but as a comment upon the "race riot" phenomenon generally.

          It is better
  yoshie> to criticize _Gangs..._ for its representation of the NY draft
  yoshie> riots (e.g., its omission of white politicians, newspapers,
  yoshie> churches, etc. spreading the demagoguery that emancipated slaves
  yoshie> would take the jobs of white workers, the burning of a black
  yoshie> church and a black orphanage, etc.), its inability to explain
  yoshie> the friendship of Amsterdam and Jimmy, etc.

That's in part what I did (or tried to do), Yoshie, but I also mentioned
that those acts of "ululation" were a common feature of white riots in the
post-Reconstruction period, a point I thought relevant to the conversation
here. I think it's fair game to criticize Scorcese for having made the
kind of film he made, rather than another film covering the same terrain
from the point of view of, say, Jimmy. But that is a different kind of
criticism than one which focuses on defects in the film he *did* make.

  yoshie> I disagree that race riots _benefited_ all whites.

I didn't say that (I intentionally wrote "benefited whites", not
"benefited all whites").

          Race riots
  yoshie> were tragedy not just for blacks but also working-class whites
  yoshie> who couldn't overcome racism and therefore failed to improve
  yoshie> their conditions.

That's a contested reading, too, of course. I tend to think of the role of
Irish and other "potential" whites in race riots as proving that they were
willing to *not* make common cause with blacks and were willing to
undertake the burdens of white supremacy and privilege, in the hopes that
they might become white themselves. (Whether the consolations of whiteness
were sufficient to overcome the burdens of belonging to an exploited class
is a separate question; that being taken as white was meant to *be* a
consolation seems fairly clear.) Noel Ignatiev makes this point very
convincingly.

  >> And the creepy, sentimentalist U2 song at the very end obscures the
  >> degree to which the 'hands' which 'built America' were the hands of
  >> Chinese press gang laborers and African American slaves, both of
  >> which are represented in Scorcese's film:  never (or rarely) as
  >> active agents of history, but only as passive slates upon which Irish
  >> or nativist gangs (or politicians) foist and enact their desires (for
  >> exploitation, sexual amusement, entertainment, and so on).

  yoshie> For the film to represent blacks and Chinese as the center of
  yoshie> their own history, the point of view character has to be other
  yoshie> than Amsterdam.

I have no problem criticizing Scorcese for making a film in which *all* of
the primary characters are (to one degree or another) white since the
subject matter is incredibly rich with other possibilities. Further, once
he chose to make the film about Amsterdam, that didn't necessarily have to
come at the cost of making the Asian and black characters into paper
cutouts.

          The film doesn't simply represent the Chinese
  yoshie> as screens on which nativists and the Irish enact their desires.
  yoshie> As Amsterdam plots his revenge, he enlists cooperation of the
  yoshie> Chinese gang, and his voice-over narration mentions that the
  yoshie> Chinese had their own reasons to hate the nativist gang.

That played, for me, very incoherently. I don't recall any Asian character
ever, for example, *speaking* in the film. Nor could I discern -- and I
think, as Slate pointed out, this could be Harvey Weinstein's fault for
making Scorcese cut 45 minutes from the film -- *why* Amsterdam approached
the Asian character for assistance in killing Bill, nor what assistance
the character was meant to provide.

          If the
  yoshie> audience can't imagine what they are, that's the audience's
  yoshie> fault, not the director's.  To repeat, however, the film could
  yoshie> have done a much better job of exploring what blacks thought
  yoshie> about the nativists and the Irish.

I certainly agree with that.

  yoshie> More generally, the very fact that Scorsese felt it necessary to
  yoshie> have just one point-of-view character in an epic results from a
  yoshie> limitation of the conventions of Hollywood Cinema in general,
  yoshie> which tend not to make full use of what cinema as a particular
  yoshie> medium can do, having it approximate the novelistic conventions
  yoshie> instead (in this case, bildungsroman).  In fact, it is not at
  yoshie> all necessary for cinema to have a clear point-of-view
  yoshie> character.  It can easily do what such modernist novelists as
  yoshie> John Dos Passos only dreamt of doing, and then more, especially
  yoshie> representing collective subjects -- crowds in motion
  yoshie> -- in a way that is impossible for any other media.

Sure -- a perfectly legitimate aesthetic criticism which I tried to
politicize above by suggesting that, even if Amsterdam were the center of
the film, that didn't constrain Scorcese from developing substantial
non-white characters. Perhaps that's beyond Scorcese's interests or
abilities as a director, which is a point worth making too.

Kendall Clark