Watching <i>Mean Streets</i> at Fifty

I find it interesting to reflect upon Mean Streets as it somewhat recently celebrated its 50th birthday as I was born two years before the film's 1973 release. For many, Mean Streets can be considered a “family movie,” which is intriguing for several reasons, including of course the multifaceted meanings of mafia family and biological family in the film and also how families across time and space respond differently to the film given its complicated gender and race politics. This is the topic of my remarks in this short pieceIn my brief essay, I would like to consider how racism, misogyny, and homophobia in Mean Streets circulate, are received, and are negotiated. In particular, I'll discuss how racism in the film speaks to complicated identity politics in the 1970s. Then, I will address the film's reception in terms of racial tension and gender inequities, drawing upon student reactions that I have accumulated in almost a decade of teaching the film to classes enrolling from 200 to 500 students. I'll conclude by discussing the dearth of reactions to the 50th anniversary screenings or the Criterion Collection's 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray release where I had originally assumed that commenters would underline Mean Streets's place in conversations around social and racial justice in the age of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter.Aside from discussions of Italian ethnicity, scholarship that engages with Mean Streets from the perspective of gender and race is not particularly abundant (with a few outlier examples I discuss in the final section). This is surprising given the film's racism, misogyny, antisemitism, homophobia, ablism, and sexism combined with its vast international appeal. Renate Siebert (1996) writes that in the mafia “a man's first duty is to not be a woman,” (22) as a mafioso must exorcise feminine qualities, perform virility, and repress emotion. This dynamic is clear in Mean Streets where masculinity is represented as a fragile construct all the while that, citing the Johnny Fontaine scene from The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), “acting like a man” is de rigueur. Further, “casual racism” abounds in the film—this is from Tom Santopietro's The Godfather Effect (2022). Although Santopietro is discussing The Godfather, his comments are also apropos to Mean Streets. Santopietro writes: “While The Godfather did enjoy great popularity in the African American community, it is a mark of the film's remarkable complexity that Puzo and Coppola never allow the audience to completely forget the casual racism displayed by the characters. Black audiences who cheered the Corleones’ murderous rampages were brought up noticeably short by the mob's nonchalant, racist Old World approach to drug dealing” (230). As I will discuss in the next two sections, some, more recent, audiences take issue with Mean Streets's racism, but this is not the case across the board. The film's racism is barely mentioned by critics and scholars.In several scenes in the film, racial and religious groups are referred to with racial or religious slurs. Frequently these slurs, particularly those against African Americans (which I consciously chose to not include in this essay), are meant to shore up the status of the Italian American family, in particular its male members. Racist expressions in Mean Streets (much like Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather and The Godfather Part II [1974]) speak to the racial politics in the United States at the time of the film's release while contributing to the complex process around “how Italians became white” at the expense of marginalizing other ethnic groups (Staples 2019).In 2012 at The Ohio State University, I created a course called “Mafia Movies,” and prepandemic I taught the course in a cineplex that sat 270 students—the course was always full. This was an amazing experience as we could view scenes from the films on the big screen as they were experienced when they were originally released. To this point, I recall Pellegrino D'Acierno's consideration of Mean Streets as “Cinema Streets” due to the abundance of mise en abyme and “self reflexive gestures” in the film (2019, 79). I originally designed the course to teach material chronologically, so I slated Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990), which covers the period from 1955 to 1980, on the syllabus before Mean Streets. Year after year, student reactions to Mean Streets were lukewarm at best—they echoed Roger Ebert's comment that Mean Streets can be described as “creaky”—which is one of the reasons I love to teach the film (2002). One year, due to a major storm, I had to cancel class on the Goodfellas day, and I rearranged the syllabus and taught Mean Streets instead with Goodfellas assigned as extra credit later in the semester. I was shocked by the extreme change in responses to the film. Students, for the first time, appreciated Mean Streets's score, settings, darkness, cinematography, acting, costumes, dialogue, narrative incongruities, bar fights, and the panther. Ever since, I have reversed the order on the syllabus knowing that Goodfellas had previously ruined Mean Streets for the class.1Over the last 14 years, student demographics in higher education have of course significantly changed, and these demographics have been reflected in enrollments for the course Mafia Movies. In looking through past rosters, about 70 to 80 percent of students identified as male, and I recall that students were principally white. The last time I taught the course in Spring 2021 (I no longer teach due to an administrative role), the course enrolled more students who identified as female than male. Over the years, Mafia Movies attracted increasingly more diverse students (diverse in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, and first-generation status). As student demographics have changed, it has been fascinating to see how student reactions have changed to Mean Streets. As seen in reactions to Twitter posts, TopHat Polls, assignments, direct emails, course conversations, and evaluations of teaching, hundreds of students refuse to tolerate the film's aforementioned “casual racism” and overt misogyny, homophobia, and ableism, which leads to some intriguing conversations, especially given that in the class a group of students always hail from Youngstown, Ohio, which has some serious mafia lore and is self-dubbed “Crime Town USA” (May 2013).For some time, I included on syllabi substantial trigger warnings for films like Mean Streets but also The Godfather, Goodfellas, and The Sopranos (1999–2007)—less so for the violence that students seem to tolerate but instead for these films’ inherent racism, sexism, misogyny, agism, ableism, and homophobia. In assignments I asked, as does my successor, that students acknowledge the inherent biases in the film and asked them to push further to explore, for example, the racial tensions, gender discrepancies, and political projects in the narratives.2I'll conclude by discussing the reception of the film's anniversary and rerelease. In this section, I'd hoped to look towards the established field of social network analysis, which allows scholars to look towards online networks to discover social relations between individuals and groups and to assess how interactions on social media effect or exert an impact upon “social behaviour, attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge” with respect to this foundational film (Prell 2012, 1). Instead I was left surprised by how little (barely anything actually) came up after thousands of clicks. After being invited to present at the Mean Streets 50th anniversary webinar, I spent the equivalent of days scouring the internet (articles, blogs, fan sites, and social media platforms) for any mention of #BLM or #MeToo and revisiting racism, homophobia, and sexism, and so on in relationship to Mean Streets's anniversary or rerelease.To my surprise, I only found two direct comments on the film's racism and one indirect connection to #MeToo (and none to #BLM)—and I would be grateful if any readers discover more references. With regard to the former, a 2023 article on the film mentions that Mean Streets is about “racism in the early 70s” amongst other topics (Verma 2023). Also, an article in The Guardian describes Charlie's crew as “boorish, racist lowlifes” (Bradshaw 2023). The direct reference to #MeToo, although only connected to one of the film's actors and not the film itself, is Robert De Niro's comments about why he found #MeToo so disturbing: “Maybe I'm naïve. It made me aware how prevalent it was. You hear about the casting couch, but I found it hard to believe people would behave so badly to get laid” (“Why Robert De Niro finds #MeToo ‘Disturbing’” 2019; although late last year his company was found liable for gender discrimination). And while not in response to the film's 50th anniversary, one insightful essay addresses Scorsese's films from the perspective of “The Woman Question.” M. Gail Hamner discusses Teresa's othering due to her epilepsy, Diane's marginalization as she is black, Sammy's ostracization as he is gay, and the stereotyping of Jewish women as sexually permissive. All of these narrative elements, the author argues, underline Charlie's anxiety about his “White male status” (2019, 133).Overall I found little material of substance on any topic relating to the film's rerelease. Most of what is available is out of the United Kingdom, and most 2023 reviews compare Mean Streets to The Godfather. For example, one critic wrote that Mean Streets suffered from “a degree of bad luck and unfortunate timing” (Friedman 2023). In contrast, as a quick Google search will reveal, there are many substantive reviews of and articles on The Godfather at 50. And outside of an updated 88-second clip of the famous Johnny Boy “Jumping Jack Flash” bar episode that does not include any marketing material, I also failed to discover a new trailer for the theatrical or Blu-ray rerelease, which was a key marketing tool of The Godfather's anniversary (“Mean Streets 50th Anniversary 4K Restoration” 2023).Steve Leftridge comments on the legacy of Mean Streets thusly: “Finding its place in the overall film canon, Mean Streets is a film that enjoys nearly universal admiration among the critical community, or at least it did when it first appeared, but it has, I've found, become fairly polarizing among those who watch it for the first time today” (2015). This quotation is from 2015; from my experience in teaching the film, Mean Streets is even more polarizing in light of #BLM and #MeToo.I find it quite interesting how racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism in Mean Streets circulate, are received, and are negotiated. At the same time, aside from discussions of Italian ethnicity, stardom, and The Godfather comparisons, scholarship that engages with Mean Streets from the perspective of gender, race, and sexuality is not particularly abundant—although colleagues in this special section have published significant scholarship on the film. I plan to continue tracking the reception of Mean Streets especially in light of the 2024 50th anniversary of The Godfather Part II. From my experience, teaching a film like Mean Streets in the era of #BlackLivesMatter in a red state in a blue capital city in an online space where students are incredibly divided on, for example, the impact of racial epithets, is also quite interesting for the paucity of scholarship on race and gender that I mentioned above, a gap this collaborative set of essays can begin to fill.