Thoughts Prompted by Martin Scorsese's <i>Mean Streets</i> on Its Fiftieth Anniversary

Mean Streets (1973), Martin Scorsese's first masterpiece, adumbrates the style, themes, and subject matter of the great majority of his later works. Stylistically, its interplay of documentary, realistic, neorealist, and expressive elements looks forward to Goodfellas (1990), Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), Casino (1995), and Gangs of New York (2002). To give only one example, the long shot in Mean Streets that follows Charlie on his circuitous passage into a nightclub strikes one now as a warm-up for the much more elaborately orchestrated scene in which Henry and Karen Hill wind their way through the labyrinthine interior of the Copacabana in Goodfellas. And in both films, there are the same unstated moral implications in every movement of Scorsese's camera. Reminiscent of The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Goodfellas, Cape Fear (1991), Age of Innocence (1993), Casino, Kundun (1997), Gangs of New York, The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), Silence (2016), The Irishman (2019), and most recently Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), Mean Streets depicts an isolated and threatened community beset with conflicts from within and without. Sometimes that community is a family, sometimes a social class or labor organization or religious sect, sometimes a criminal subculture or tribe or ethnicity, sometimes a fraudulent financial corporation, but always, as in Mean Streets, the characters confront issues of faith, loyalty, mimetic rivalry, and betrayal. Typical of Scorsese's later works, Mean Streets employs diegetic as well as nondiegetic music, whether to complement and reinforce the forward thrust of the narrative or to evoke the mood of a historical period or contemporary milieu or to comment ironically on the characters and action: examples are too numerous to mention. The accelerating narrative rhythm at the conclusion of Mean Streets, issuing in random yet cathartic violence in the aftermath of the San Gennaro festival, marks the first instance of what would become a characteristically Scorsesean theme of the “festival gone wrong,” as revealed in the failure of religious or social ritual to maintain peace and order. In this context, one thinks of Taxi Driver, King of Comedy (1982), Goodfellas, Cape Fear, Casino, Kundun, and Killers of the Flower Moon. And finally, Mean Streets anticipates many of Scorsese's films in that it centers on the inherent conflict between Catholic or Christian morality on the one hand and that of the secular and criminal worlds on the other, a conflict played out in the divided, deeply troubled conscience of the film's protagonist, Charlie Cappa. This moral struggle appears sometimes quite overtly but more usually implicitly, without directorial sermonizing, in Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, Age of Innocence, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Irishman, and Killers of the Flower Moon.Charlie Cappa professes his devotion to Christianity as a religion not of mere formalism but of practical morality centered on acts of benevolence conducted, as he says, not in church but in the streets. He also professes his admiration for St. Francis of Assisi, whose praise of the beauty and goodness of God's creation inspired in medieval humanity a new appreciation of nature, which some scholars claim with probable justification to have helped to foster the painterly realism of the Renaissance. According to Michael Eula, however, Southern Italian Catholicism was marked by a terroristic rather than benevolent conception of nature and therefore embraced a purely pragmatic type of religion centered on contractual relations with saints who offered primarily physical rather than spiritual protection from witches, wizards, and the evil eye. Eula adds that Southern Italian religious morality was marked by the absence of categorical, that is universal, precepts such as the Irish clergy favored and sought to impose upon the resistant Southern Italians. One must therefore suppose that, to the extent that he admires St. Francis of Assisi, Charlie has absorbed (as did the younger Scorsese) the lessons of Irish Catholicism. This would also explain his presumed acceptance of the Golden Rule, which Jesus announces in the Sermon on the Mount and which obviously exemplifies categorical morality (sometimes compared to Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative). But there is an irony in all this, the least part of which, as Charlie's girlfriend Teresa remarks, is that he lacks a Franciscan feeling for nature, being thoroughly urban. The greater irony is that, as Teresa also remarks, Charlie runs numbers—a far cry from Franciscan sanctity. Still more incriminating, he has a mafioso uncle who has promised to turn over to Charlie a midtown restaurant after he has driven out the current owner through intimidation. In the event, the owner commits suicide, and the blood is to some extent on Charlie's hands. He is thus a mafioso wannabe, apparently hoping one day thanks to his uncle's patronage to be able to enter the “Honored Society,” while in the meantime dressing and comporting himself as if he had already been inducted.On initially reviewing Mean Streets, it seemed to me that a person as intelligent as Charlie would easily perceive the incompatibility of St. Francis and Al Capone. Momentarily it appeared as if his moral quandary had been concocted by Scorsese. And yet that quandary became credible upon reconsideration of the high reputation the Mafia has enjoyed in Italian American urban neighborhoods such as Charlie's Little Italy. Notwithstanding its depredations upon some of the local population, in the form of extortion, forced “protection,” and loansharking, otherwise known as usury, which Catholic theologians have excoriated for centuries, the Mafia was welcomed and respected for insuring the security of the locals while maintaining partly by force what Donald Tricarico refers to as a “market peace.” In Mean Streets, Uncle Giovanni exemplifies this peace-making function by banishing troublemakers from the neighborhood. Typical of the Mafia's attempt to come to terms with Catholicism, mob boss Joe Profaci not only made substantial donations to the Church but saw to it that the jewels that had been stolen from a local shrine were safely returned and the thieves duly punished. Under such circumstances it might be possible for Charlie to convince himself that the Mafia represents a force for good, particularly if a lucrative restaurant were thrown into the bargain. And yet there is a stronger reason for the failure of Charlie's conscience to recognize the moral contradictions in his conduct. It lies in the mind's ability to compartmentalize incompatible ideas so as to ignore or deny their incompatibility and thus for even the most active self-lacerating conscience to deceive, that is, lie to itself. In this context, one can do no better than to quote a stanza from a song of Bob Dylan's that owes its relevance in this context not to its import alone but to the close resemblance between Dylan and Scorsese as analysts of human depravity, which in turn helps to explain why Scorsese himself has produced a major documentary on the poet-singer. The stanza, from the song “Long Black Coat,” reads: “Preacher was preachin,’ sermon he gave, / he said every man's conscience is vile and depraved. / You cannot depend on it to be your guide, / when it's you who must keep it satisfied.” The title of Christopher Ricks's long study of Dylan, much the best thus far written, is Dylan's Visions of Sin (2004). One could justly encompass the entirety of Scorsese's work under the same thematic.At the risk of generalization, the social ethic of Christianity can be summed up under the Golden Rule, which says that you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The core of the religion thus lies in the Imitatio Christi, with Christ as the virtually unapproachable, indeed inimitable model of perfected meekness, fellow-feeling, benevolence, and compassion. That only a few Christians such as St. Francis of Assisi have received the stigmata of Christ is but one indication of the difficulty of meeting his spiritual standard. In taking Christ as a model, worshipers would inoculate themselves against the vainly egoistic and sometimes violent personal rivalries that arise as a consequence of mimetic and acquisitive desire. From this perspective, the Mafia in the conduct of its members as in its professed self-conception stands for anti-Christianity. One sees this in Mafia initiation ceremonies, in which the inductee is required not only to burn a holy card bearing the image of a saint but also to swear allegiance above all else to the Mafia family, which lives by a rivalrous code of masculine honor and prepotency and whose claim upon the inductee is so complete that he must, as a stipulation of his entry into his adoptive Mafia family, be willing to murder a member of his actual family if ordered to do so. Devoid of conscience, and thus incapable of remorse, and so sensitive to the least seeming offense to his honor as to be unwilling to tolerate a fly on his nose, as has been said, the typical mafioso is a terrifying engine of material appetite and antisociability. His everyday orientation to the world consists of a bullying belligerence born of nihilistic disdain and utter indifference to the feelings of other people, whom he intimidates with a practiced arrogant swagger and menacing looks. Again at the risk of generalization, the psychological profile of the typical mafioso centers on two traits. Above all there is menefreghismo, deriving from the phrase me ne frego, which means “I don't give a damn” and which sums up the mafioso's contempt for humanity apart from the Mafia. At the same time, such disdain is inextricable from the sentiment of lontananza, from the Italian lontano, meaning distance or absence. It implies detachment, a pathological remoteness from the noncriminal world that the mafioso preys upon—its values, feelings, proprieties, and decencies.Yet it would be a mistake to think that, among criminal groups, the Mafia enjoys a monopoly of menefreghismo and lontananza. Rather, such attitudes and behaviors appear to be characteristic of dedicated criminals of all ethnic and racial backgrounds, whether lonewolves or members of criminal organizations. Commenting on the African American underworld, of which Francis Ianni has also written, Michael Levin observes that the hallmark of what might be called the “bad black” is a remorseless disregard of the Golden Rule, as witness his unrelenting pose of swaggering intimidation and utter indifference to the suffering he inflicts. Speaking more generally of hardened criminals, criminologist Jack Katz in his Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil (1988) not only rejects environmentalist explanations of super-criminality but reveals the twisted metaphysical aspirations that typify such malefactors, who well exemplify what Rene Girard would term deviated transcendence. As Katz discovered, the hardened criminal chooses a life of crime not because of environmental factors such as poverty, familial disorder, and the usual suspects but out of a deep inner need and identification. His aloofness from society, his threatening and punishing social behavior, these serve notice to his prospective victims that he is not of their world but rather inhabits a distant, forbidding, indeed transcendental realm of violence that the ordinary layman could never hope to enter or even comprehend. And it is in that distant realm, willfully divorced from human emotions, that the inveterate criminal enjoys the conviction of his superiority over the rest of humanity. Such a person combines menefreghismo and lontananza in a single behavioral formula that Katz sums up in the phrase: “I am not here for you.”Undoubtedly the Italian as well as the Italian American criminal underworlds have yielded an especially rich harvest of menefreghismo and lontananza. To mention only a few instances, Levin's and Katz's findings apply unmistakably to the antisocial gangsters of Goodfellas, so disdainful of the world of crumbs and suckers; the poker-faced detachment and cold-bloodedness of Uncle Giovanni in Mean Streets; and the less successful posturings of such Mafia wannabes as Michael and Charlie in that film. The dark sunglasses that Charlie wears at the opening, as he stands, interestingly enough, on the steps of a local church and in the company of a Catholic priest, are typical markers by which the mafioso, or would-be mafioso, advertises his mysterious and intimidating remoteness from the everyday world. One must admit, however, that the gangsters in Raging Bull and Goodfellas carry if off a lot better than does Charlie Cappa. As for Michael, his strained effort to maintain a look of aloofness and imperturbability in the midst of a barroom brawl toward the end of Mean Streets is all of a piece with his other criminal ambitions. Again consistent with Katz, but contrary to Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreale's dubious claim that the aspiring young gangsters in Mean Streets are forced into criminal careers as a result of the anti-Italian prejudice they encounter in attempting to enter mainstream society, Scorsese's gangster films offer no environmentalist excuses for his protagonists’ criminality to which their own character and personality impel them. Katz's studies also afford the best explanation I have yet encountered for the gravelly and guttural speech exhibited and in some cases no doubt affected by Mafia bosses and capi, the classic example being Don Vito Corleone. As Katz notes, master criminals often speak that way so as to produce the impression that their voice emanates from those mysterious depths of the criminal's inner being into which the ordinary person cannot hope to penetrate.The question naturally arises as to why such behaviors as these have arisen in Italy and more especially Southern Italy, the Sicilian and American Mafias being the best known examples. The answer lies probably in the impaired or defective socialization that has characterized some parts of the Italian peninsula during recent centuries of national disunity and misgovernance, often by non-Italian rulers, and that have been manifest in deficiencies of both civility and civic To be attempt to Italy with in the later the of the in the and Italian and is in attempt to the of the in of the and As and the was in the conduct of and Giovanni which to the of both the and the if one on Italy from the the is As often as the on the of of all they also notice in many a and in behavior, and a absence of of at indeed to the of or many themselves only with their personal or familial would probably have such of civility and social to the absence of a and of social greater of and the best on Italy, Italian to the of a single code of social conduct such as national and a national might have In their the Italian was all too to his own in with but to have been too on his The of menefreghismo in Italy is in the that during to his of the as their in the of the social have in on the of community and the civic both in Italy and Italian in some cases with on of which for all its in the social have a for the of menefreghismo and must the of that these behaviors only among Italian or Italian American as Scorsese well they also appear within the ethnic in the two best examples are the and the of and of the that not but the during the of music, Scorsese in That at a of the with on an the which into an Italian American such as would to Mafia In Raging Bull, on the of to his a of or at According to as Italian of the what they saw as his ability to over on the mainstream thus his contempt for they were by his toward as he a of the and In the of some in during the of the a impression of both his distance from and his disdain of his and the same can be said of his and with the Mafia. The pose of and detachment from ordinary feelings, or on who are to these all typify Mafia and to the “Honored through a deep identification. in the he in a Mafia in honor of gangster at in the he with of the and in the he himself to be at the in the company of and other Mafia his if no might be as an of his in with the Mafia of the whose is a way of more that One sees in the of the would rather have been a Don of the Mafia than a of the Reminiscent of the mafioso, menefreghismo and lontananza were within but if to the of for it is that Scorsese was two a on the with or in the this not it would have with both and the Mafia within the context of Scorsese's of Italian American It would also have its of Martin at least partly on the of in the of in which menefreghismo and lontananza as two of The and that he affected on and as a a remoteness and imperturbability one could have from so an his with the Mafia to have been far less than what one in one can that up to his greater of The what does it to as were and the of The as to the would to from the African American its of more or less the same of behavioral an remoteness from a swaggering pose of intimidation and threatened and a disregard for the Golden Rule, which says that one must do unto others as one would have them do unto you. The of which the Italian American menefreghismo and lontananza, are well by Dylan, Scorsese's in a song from his which to the Christian The stanza reads: which one is your own or / which one is your own or / You only the all the Golden with their between and to two of and both of which are and in Dylan's and Scorsese's of is some however, as to whether as compared to his as his in menefreghismo and lontananza. As has often been was in no a that is, the type of personality that, by with the an and as a of its own The is that much the impression he was and from this perspective, his menefreghismo was He was in to from the social world while over his to the impression he was in so. The such during major in the when he And so one social menefreghismo, was driven out by in to one should the absence of menefreghismo and lontananza from the best of his for or at which an and of his posturings and for which he among the best of characteristically and detachment from both his and more particularly his is known to have to one of the few between and who were otherwise on It in the during the as in which and in the At one as the two on Martin a into the in a and contempt for his yet no doubt of a aloofness toward his was by and did not to so. there were to menefreghismo and lontananza. The King of his Martin was the the King of Martin in as the of lontananza, a psychological and behavioral that and even the is is attempt on part to the and implications of menefreghismo and more particularly to out and to its in the troubled and criminal of Italy. thus a first made by in his on the Italian national character and later by that as a the are to subject their way of life to but rather to as if it were a of