THE
LAST EPIC
Martin
Scorsese’s Gangs of New York begins in the bowels
of the earth, which is appropriate, because he is digging deep—perhaps
deeper than any filmmaker has ever done before—into the
American past.
As the movie opens, the Dead Rabbits, a legendary, Irish street
gang in pre-Civil War New York, is preparing for battle against
their “Native American” (i.e., Anglo) rivals. Down
in the cellars of the Old Brewery, the Rabbits sharpen blades,
sharpen teeth, pick up crude clubs. As the Bono soundtrack swells,
they march upstairs, kick open a door—and emerge suddenly
out onto a gorgeously stark, snow-covered Paradise Square, smack
in the middle of the Five Points, and what is more, America.
The
scene is thrilling. Before us on the screen is a forgotten people,
marching literally up from the depths of history. The Old Brewery
was just that, a vast, abandoned beer brewery that became a slum
unto itself, but in Scorsese’s depiction its basement bears
a more-than-passing resemblance to the Roman catacombs. His Irish
immigrants go up to battle with both a Gaelic cross, and a pagan
amulet, a brace of dead hares, swinging from a stick before them.
They are even led by a “priest,” the fictional gang
leader “Priest” Vallon (Liam Neeson) who wears a protective,
clerical-looking leather collar around his throat.
Surely
no filmmaker has issued such a brazen challenge to the verities
of American history, or to the history of its cinema. It is more
than coincidence, surely, that Scorsese’s immigrant troika—the
priest, the cross-bearer, the man bearing his obscene gang standard—replaces
here the old, Yankee-Doodle-Dandy flag bearer, and fife-and-drum
icon that goes back to the Revolution. The copy line of Gangs
is “America was born in the streets,” and we are made
immediately to understand that Scorsese means it, that by his
lights the real America, the one we know today, did not
really exist before the immigrants fought their way in.
In
many ways these opening moments are the best part of the film.
They are so powerful that they all but overwhelm the rest of the
movie, because they are all we really need to see. Scorsese does
provide another resonant, matching shot much later, when Leonardo
DiCaprio, playing Vallon’s son, returns from disgrace and
near death to nail a dead rabbit back up in Paradise Square. In
this resurrection he walks out through “Bandits’ Roost,”
a notorious alleyway near the Five Points immortalized by the
great photographer/reformer Jacob Riis, in his book, How the
Other Half Lives.
Riis
took two photos of the Roost. In the most famous one, which now
adorns the cover of the latest printing of Herbert Asbury’s
book, The Gangs of New York, it looks like the very wellspring
of urban dread. Idle men lounge along the alley walls, and stare
menacingly into the camera; one of them is carrying what looks
like a club, or even a shotgun. In the other, less-well-known
picture, the alleyway is transformed. There is a religious festival
going on, the Feast of St. Rocco, and a poignant, homey altar,
blazing with candles, has been erected at the back of the Roost.
This
is, in short, the yin and yang of the immigrant experience, and
Scorsese makes the most of it by having DiCaprio’s character
come out of the alley, walking toward where
Riis’s camera would have been. We are, for the first time,
seeing this world from the immigrant’s point of
view.
I
don’t know if a comparable shot exists in all of American
cinema. What’s more—as Scorsese, the formidable film
scholar, was undoubtedly aware—the pictures of Bandits’
Roost also served as inspiration for D.W. Griffith’s groundbreaking,
1912 two-reeler, The Musketeers of Pig Alley, the very
first gangster film. Scorsese, in other words, is taking on not
only the received history of America, but how that history has
been depicted, directly challenging the ghost of Griffith—the
earlier, false claimant of a “new birth” for America.
As
both these scenes indicate, Gangs of New York is a tremendously
ambitious film. It has even been said that—in the age of
digital—this may be the last, true movie epic. Certainly,
Scorsese’s decision to shoot the film at Rome’s Cinecitta
Studios has paid off. The look of the movie is fantastic, almost
hyper-realistic. The crude wooden buildings drive home the point
that much of antebellum New York was itself little more than a
frontier town, raw and violent, and open for the taking.
Scorsese
loads his film as well with telling historical details. Here are
bucketshop bars that serve beer and whiskey sucked through a rubber
hose, straight from the barrel. Here is a genuine ratbaiting—a
sport that entailed betting on how many rats a trained terrier
could kill—and there is a legendary, gangland bouncer known
as “Hellcat Maggie,” who supposedly bit off men’s
ears with her well-honed teeth, and kept them in a jar by the
bar. Here is a volunteer fire company that breaks up a draft office
run by the U.S. Army, and sets off the worst riot in American
history.
But
what is so significant about Scorsese’s film is not
that it may or may not be the last movie epic but that it is the
first—at least the first to be made about this
other, secret history of America. Think about it. For all that
we relentlessly celebrate the immigrant experience, for all that
we pay lip service to our multicultural roots—when was the
last time you saw a serious film about urban, immigrant life in
the nineteenth century? An America this poor, this tempestuous
and rebellious and unformed has been depicted only in our most
nightmarish, post-apocalyptic fantasies—whose costumes and
gang loyalties Gangs also evokes.
To
many viewers the squalor and the violence of Gangs will
be stunning, even shocking. Others will debate the accuracy of
what they are seeing, but here the best dictum is that of Ned
Buntline, America’s first great dime novelist: “When
the truth meets the legend, print the legend.” Asbury’s
book is a secret history unto itself, a lurid, colorful collection
of gangland anecdotes that has been around since 1928, fascinating
even the likes of Jorge Luis Borges with what he termed its “barbarian
cosmologies.” Certainly the realities of that old America
are as astonishing as anything Asbury could make up.
Where
the book truly leads Scorsese astray is in his inability to imposed
a strong story it. The plot of his adaptation is a simple revenge
tale, and its one-dimensional characters repeatedly stand up to
make stilted, often incoherent speeches about America. The artist
seems overwhelmed by his love of ritual, the same devotion to
ceremony and myth that has served him so well in films from Mean
Streets to The Age of Innocence.
The
old New York demimonde was both more and less lawless than how
Scorsese has depicted it, but what’s worse is how he has
distorted crucial power relationships. The Irish did not wait
around for Leonardo or any other king to return to them; the whole
basis of their victory in the new world was collective action,
through the political machines that enabled them to take over
entire urban governments. New York’s politicoes controlled
the gangs—not the other way around—and the police
were something of a gang unto themselves, who singlehandedly held
the city in the Union during the Civil War draft riot.
The
draft riot is Gangs’ big finish, but it looks and
feels like something crudely tacked on. The whole rest of the
film has centered around the confrontation between the Irish and
the Nativist, “Know-Nothing,” anti-immigrant gangs,
battling for the soul of America in the most elemental manner
in the streets. The riot, by contrast, was more of a class rebellion
that turned into racist massacre, with the Irish both leading
the lynching of numerous African Americans and—in the police,
and the military units that were hurried back to the city—ultimately
crushing the revolt.
Scorsese,
to his credit, shows a quick scene or two of the attacks on New
York’s black citizens, but these are too fleeting to truly
register. Before this, moreover, the one, minor black character
in the whole movie has been a Dead Rabbit whose whole purpose
seems to be to signal who the good white guys are—something
that has become the worst sort of Hollywood cliché.
But
it would be all but impossible to sort out the full power relationships
in any film about this dense, immensely complicated period (which
is why, as any of us novelists will tell you, books are such a
superior medium.). Scorsese’s work is a triumph, simply
by ripping away the veil of our conventional history, and replacing
it with the brawling, bleeding, yearning America that was really
our national past.
He
makes the critical connections throughout the movie, both cinematic
and historical, and it is not only that his flimsy wooden houses
tie us to the cow towns, and the frontier. Daniel Day-Lewis’s
Nativist gang leader speaks in an accent and patois redolent of
both mid-twentieth-century New York and and modern movie gangsters—something
that is altogether appropriate, since our modern mob is descended
directly from the street gangs portrayed here. At the very end
of the movie there is an eerie shot of the World Trade Center
towers, shot prior to 9/11, and an even more evocative, and premonitory
shot during the draft riot when, after a catastrophic bombardment,
the DiCaprio and Day-Lewis characters stumble blindly about in
an enormous cloud of dust—the end of their world, at least,
upon them.
“…no
one will ever even knew we were here,” one of them eulogizes
sadly. They will now.
Kevin
Baker is the author of Paradise Alley (HarperCollins),
a novel set in New York during the draft riots.
©
Copyright The
Los Angeles Times
