The Safe Danger of <i>Mean Streets</i>

As compared to Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo's The Godfather, released the year before, Mean Streets (1973) presents a gritty, deromanticized, in-your-face representation of life in Little Italy that even today is difficult to watch. With its jarringly realistic aesthetics of place, New York's downtown neighborhoods (many of the interior shots were filmed in Los Angeles) appear both welcoming and ominous. The entangled plots involving Charlie, Johnny Boy, and Teresa are intricately linked to a shifting concept of safe and dangerous space and engage with religious, class, and racial representation.My interpretation of Mean Streets is informed by the work I did as codirector of the Bronx Italian American History Initiative, an online oral history project founded in 2016 and based at Fordham University, which interrogates Italians and Italian Americans about their personal memories and then collects and analyzes them. In the individual interviews, settings such as neighborhood blocks, schools, and churches become historical referents that present fertile space for analyzing social and interracial exchange that center around the subjective experiences of life of Italian immigrants in one New York City borough. Space and place become contested sites and contact zones for class and racial tensions that continue to pervade contemporary American society and its personal and collective imaginary (LaPenta and Reich 2020, 2022).Scholars who examine the construction of Italian and Italian American ethnic identities in the United States have often taken on analyses of the relationship between immigrants and their new, urban spaces (Baily 1999; Gabaccia 1984; Sciorra 2015). Throughout the 20th century, these urban ethnic spaces—once called “colonies,” sometimes “communities’’ and eventually “Little Italies”—constituted dynamic locales that, though always mixed and continually mixing with other urban populations, nonetheless preserved and renewed current and former residents’ connection with their (real or imagined) homelands.According to Donna Gabaccia, the phrase “Little Italy” first appeared in an 1886 article in the New York Times (Gabaccia 2007); previously, newspaper articles utilized combinations of the modifier “Italian” with “colony,” “community,” “quarter,” “district,” and “neighborhood.” Moreover, those references did not refer to the Manhattan Little Italy of today in the area near Mulberry Street but rather East Harlem (Orsi 1985). Gabaccia argues that the term entered public consciousness via the popularity of Little Germany, a theme park that opened in 1881 on Glen Island near New Rochelle, a city that sits on the northeastern Bronx border on the southeast coast of Westchester. With Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives (1890) as guidebook, urban explorers could enjoy the “safe dangers and pleasures” of Little Germany and then Little Italy, experiencing a European mini-trip without leaving the country.In a study that investigated the historical naming of Little Italies in Upper and Lower Manhattan, Gabaccia similarly showed how the areas mostly inhabited by Italian immigrants came to be known as spaces of “safe danger,” where members of the city's wealthier and whiter social elite could venture to experience Italian culture and to observe the mostly impoverished and almost always foreign-born “other” first-hand (Gabaccia 2006, 16–19). Riis and other writers adopted a visual and moralizing rhetoric to advocate for social reform. The idea that these spaces contained “safe danger,” however, simultaneously created a spectacle of Italians and the conditions of urban poverty or moral depravity in which they resided.In Mean Streets, this notion of safe danger is internalized: the threat to the characters’ identity is both from without (the world outside their enclave) and within (Johnny Boy). The film's four opening, overhead shots of the San Gennaro festival create a Luna Park (amusement park) setting, what Ervin Kosta (2014) has called the ethnic theme park. The scene cuts to a man shooting up heroin in a toilet, followed by his violent eviction from Tony's bar where much of the film will be set. This juxtaposition of idyllic celebration linked to an Italian picturesque heritage, complete with authentic music and soaring cinematography, with an ultimate symbol of moral, urban decay sets up the first of many contact zones that permeate the film.Cinematic representations of urban spaces are charged with multiple and changing meanings and constitute one form of the “contact zones” that Mary Louise Pratt (1991) has defined as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in context of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (34). While Pratt applies the notion of contact zones in a significantly different setting, that of the 17th-century Spanish occupation of Peru and its representation in an indigenously authored text, one can rely on her ideas to show how texts engender knowledge production and exchange in the contemporary context of the 21st century: that is, the multiple ways in which representations create their own contact zones.The film dramatizes the characters’ internal and external struggles that are mapped onto a neighborhood permeated by changing sexual mores and greater racial complexity. These spaces, like Tony's bar, are both safe and potentially violent because neighborhood boundaries, particularly New York neighborhood boundaries, are always porous. Tony's tiger cubs are the ultimate symbol of that tension, as is Charlie's relationship with Diane, the African American dancer: he is free to engage with and fantasize about her in the bar, once out of the safe danger he remains paralyzed. Several of the film's exterior and interior locations illustrate this tension between safe spaces and contact zones. When characters step out into the neighborhood, they are no longer “safe”: Michael's ill-fated deal on illegally acquired lenses on the West Side Highway, the gay “peril” in the car as they escape the shooting, and ultimately Johnny Boy's violent death. The safest space is of course the church: it is a place where Charlie goes for respite and contemplation. The fact that he believes that he must make up his sins “on the streets” ultimately dooms him to failure.Yet these boundaries are constantly shifting, and while one tries to escape, or one one wants to escape, still there's pull back. With regard to place and the on-location shooting of exteriors, these are not recreated as they were in The Godfather. They're not aestheticized; they're rough, they're gritty, they play into that sort of tension between safety and danger.