“I have to find out who the hell I am,” Martin Scorsese told GQ last month as the publicity cranked up for the release of Killers of the Flower Moon and the rerelease of Mean Streets on its 50th anniversary. It’s a fitting quote for the old master. One that seems emblematic of his movies and the people who populate them. Above all, Scorsese’s characters, particularly the men (his films are usually about men) are searching for an answer to that question.
Travis Bickle played by Robert De Niro is perhaps Scorsese’s best known character. “You talkin’ to me,” turns up in adverts and the mohawk, trenchcoat look is a Halloween costume of sorts. He couldn’t live a more mainstream existence; and yet Bickle is dismissed as a loner, an “incel” even. Not a menace to society but an embodiment of everything wrong with it. Bickle doesn’t lack purpose, he is waiting for an ultimate purpose to be handed to him. Just as I suspect many men are, stuck in totally free lives, unable to handle the liberty that comes with being a young man in the big city.
The drama in Scorsese movies is often derived from what happens when purpose either evaporates or is not forthcoming; players in the game begin to force things, unable to bend circumstances to their desired outcomes. Bickle decides to kill a senator. Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) in the Aviator succumbs to his OCD. Too often this means acquiescing to a life of crime – as Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) says in the glorious opening sequence of The Departed: “I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.”
More than avarice – the simple accumulation of money and cars is often left to Scorsese’s women – his men are desperate to escape the circumstances of their birth, be it the mean streets of Little Italy or the Bronx or 17th-century Portugal. Success does come, albeit fleeting. Scorsese understands that a lack of self-knowledge plagues many of his male characters. His movies are testament to the fact he understands that he is no exception.
Here are five examples of Scorsese beautifully deconstructing masculinity:
1 Mean Streets
Robert De Niro’s small-time crook Johnny Boy absolutely steals Mean Streets. He is mischievous, marvellous and masculine but the combination is ultimately his undoing, most notably in a scene where he taunts his creditor, Michael, with an unloaded gun. It is worth watching just for the rage behind De Niro’s eyes – a man who has nothing left to lose.
2 Raging Bull
Speaking of rage, De Niro gives perhaps the best performance of his career in this scene. Knowing that his world is in tatters, all he has left to box is his prison cell. When he whimpers in agony: “My hands!” it’s hard not to feel as low as LaMotta.
3 The King of Comedy
More De Niro. But this time in a completely different mould, a moustached De Niro records audition tapes for a talkshow spot in his mother’s basement. The irony is that, while he is willing to go to such extreme lengths for his shot at celebrity, simply getting out on the circuit and working on his routine is simultaneously beneath him and too frightening.
4 Bringing Out the Dead
In Bringing Out the Dead, Scorsese presents an entirely different vision of masculinity through a softer more gentile performance by Nicolas Cage. In this final scene, Cage meets love interest Mary Burke (played by an angelic Patricia Arquette) while still haunted by the death of a teenage sex worker he earlier failed to save. The results are mesmerising.
5 Silence
In an underrated performance, Liam Neeson’s Ferreira (pictured above) forces Rodrigues to renounce his faith by making him step on an image of Jesus. Often violent, and featuring scenes of humiliation, Silence is Scorsese’s ultimate paean to devotion and what happens when even the strongest will cannot overcome a stubborn culture.
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