Scorsese's First Masterpiece: <i>Mean Streets</i> at Fifty

The literary historian Douglas Bush wrote that John Keats's sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer” was his “first masterpiece” (his italics), “his one great early poem” (1966, 24, 32).1 Nothing Keats had written thus far approached it in artistic power, and it was several years before he surpassed it.There is something special about an artist's “first masterpiece,” which I am calling Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973). It was not always referred to as such. For a long time the film served as a prelude to Taxi Driver (1976). Mean Streets, wrote Roger Ebert, is “an early film by a director who was still learning, and who learned so fast that by 1976 he would be ready to make Taxi Driver, one of the greatest films of all time” (2008, 271). Yet in each succeeding decade, Mean Streets has risen in status to a point where it is now, like Keats's poem, standing out above everything around it. Pauline Kael wrote that, on one hand, the film “never loses touch with the ordinary look of things or with common experience” (The New Yorker 1973, 157); on the other, it is a “true original” and “doesn't look like an American movie” (Kael 1976, 168–69); “if it were subtitled,” it could pass for a European arthouse film (173). After Mean Streets, Ebert told Scorsese that he “had a chance to become the American Fellini in ten years” (Bose 2022). By Scorsese's own admission, the film shows his debt to Italian neorealism, in particular Federico Fellini's I Vitelloni (1953) about the future artist who had to escape his provincial Rimini and his tight circle of friends.2 The more recent Fellini film whose lessons Scorsese was in the meantime absorbing was 8½ (1963), also semi-autobiographical, with daring cuts, an edgy expressionism, explosive pace, and a Nino Rota soundtrack. In 8½, Fellini took his stylistic experimentation to the furthest verge, and it had an enormously impactful influence.3In Scorsese's quest for spiritual peace, his films are like so many stages on a long journey. I want to focus on one of the principal themes of Mean Streets, “the difficulty, the crisis, of believing,” which he explores from a semi-autobiographical viewpoint through his surrogate Charlie Cappa (Harvey Keitel) (Scorsese 2016, v). Charlie is a wannabe mafioso and a practicing Catholic who has begun to rethink its practices. The film's opening shot is sheer blackness during which is heard a voice-over by Scorsese himself: “You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.” Charlie rises from bed in a cold sweat. The voice-over was not his conscience but someone out of the darkness speaking to his conscience with a wake-up call. As in the nightmarish opening of the Inferno, in which Dante finds himself in a dark wood and first realizes (mi ritrovai, I “came to” or “re-found” myself) that he is lost, Charlie becomes consciously aware of the depth of his spiritual crisis when he literally wakes up from a nightmare gasping for air and the streetlight falls through the blinds on to his body.Can Scorsese come any closer to his main character? He cowrites the screenplay, he directs the film, and he names Charlie after his father Charles and his mother whose maiden name was Cappa. As Jimmy Shorts, the hitman in the film, Scorsese plays his assassin manqué. He reaches within Charlie's deepest consciousness to speak to him, a kind of realism degree zero. In this opening scene, Charlie examines his face in a mirror so long that, comments Vincent LoBrutto (2008), he seems to peer into his soul. Then he returns to bed but not to sleep; his eyes stare blankly into empty space, as if to continue to meditate within his soul (LoButto, 136). The soundtrack of the Ronettes's “Be My Baby” strikes up, and we cut to the San Gennaro festival, sketches of small-time hoods in Charlie's inner circle, and Tony's (David Porval) club bar drenched in red light.If the depth of Charlie's self-knowledge always remains in question, he knows with certainty that he is on the wrong path and that he should suffer for it. After listening to Charlie, Tony says “you wanna be saved,” presumably as opposed to the other wannabes. The line is said without emphasis, a throwaway line to indicate indifference, enabling a viewer to measure the distance between Charlie and his friends. Some illumination on what is at stake comes from an early scene in church, a typical Little Italy Catholic church with an altar richly decorated by floral displays, old wooden confessionals, and colorful plaster statues of the saints.While kneeling at the communion rail to say penance, Charlie hears the second Scorsese voice-over, “Lord, I am not worthy to eat your flesh, not worthy to drink your blood,” which Charlie lip-syncs “not worthy to drink your blood.” His repetition sounds flat and mechanical; the voice-over is now in Charlie's own voice. How, he questions, can he pay for his sins contritely, week after week, with 10 Our Fathers and 10 Hail Marys? “Those things . . . don't mean anything to me. They're just words. Now that may be okay for the others, it just doesn't work for me.” This form of penance seems all too formalistic, routinized, and evasive.4 “If I do something wrong, I want to pay for it my way.” In pre-Vatican II American Catholicism, the legalism, the neo-puritanism, the censure of natural impulses—all this, after his fashion, Charlie calls into question: “It's all bullshit, except for the pain, the pain of hell, the burn from a lighted match increased a million times . . . infinite. Now you don't fuck around with the infinite.” (The Lord, whom he addresses, may ignore his indelicacies because of his honesty and sincerity.) Charlie holds his fingers over a tray of burning votive candles. “The pain in hell has two sides: the kind you can touch with your hand; the kind you can feel in your heart, your soul, the spiritual side; and you know, the worst [sic] of the two is the spiritual.”By the time Charlie finishes this proposition, which is an advance in self-understanding, the scene has shifted from the almost empty, silent church bathed in light to the crowded club bar, darkly lit in shades of infernal red, where noisy voices shout over one another, and topless dancers open the show. Impeccably dressed, Charlie holds forth as a mannequin mafioso as he teaches his friends a trick that “a priest taught me”: putting his finger in the fire of a lighted match. They seem utterly uninterested: “Got any other tricks?” asks Michael, another wannabe (Richard Romanus). “Yeah, I'll show them to you when I learn this one.” Now the bar noise rises higher: his real “penance,” Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro), makes an ostentatious entrance to the Rolling Stones's “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and threatens pandemonium.Johnny Boy is clad in the loose, baggy clothes of the postwar period and wears a flipped-up fedora, totally out of date by the mid-1960s and early 1970.5 At the outset, he hands the hat girl his pants, not his hat or his overcoat; he is the world turned upside down. One could say he acts like a clown, but he is neither a clown nor a “holy fool.” Rather, he plays at being the “outsider's outsider,” poking fun at his fellow wannabees, “always looking for attention and trouble” (LoBrutto 2008, 144). Michael wonders why Charlie spends so much time with this loud, shameless “jerk-off” who owes money to Michael and half dozen other people and shows no sign of repaying it—on the contrary, he squanders “their” money in front of them, on clothes, drinks, and women. Charlie defends Johnny Boy and tries to explain why he has taken him under his wing: he is his girlfriend Teresa's cousin and therefore “almost family,” and he wants to teach Johnny Boy self-discipline so he can collect his protection money and pay his debts. Moreover, Charlie's uncle Giovanni (Cesare Danova), an important mafioso after whom Johnny Boy was named, warns Charlie not to spend time with him: “Honorable men go with honorable men,” he says sententiously. It is a case of Sophoclean irony that only we the audience know the deeper reason for his concern. He has made Johnny Boy his cross to bear: “Lord, thanks a lot for opening my eyes. We talk about penance, and You send this through the door.” Charlie promised to take his punishment “my way” and this is it: “We all play by the rules, well, don't we?”In one more scene, Charlie has an opportunity to explain his sense of what Christian conduct should be. He walks with Teresa along the beach, a border, a liminal zone prompting expansive thoughts and a heightened level of awareness. Teresa wants to escape Little Italy by moving uptown; Charlie refuses to go. He feels at home on the mean streets, he likes “the neighborhood and those guys.” He does not like the sea, the sun, the beach, and rural nature; instead, he likes spaghetti and clam sauce, Dante, St. Francis of Assisi, chicken with lemon sauce, John Wayne, “and you.” Dante signifies filial piety to italianità and its great representatives; nothing in the film points to his having read a line of the epic poem. He has just scorned landscape nature in favor of urban life; his Francis is not “The Canticle of the Sun” but “The Prayer for Peace.” The main reason he will not leave Little Italy is his pledge of responsibility for Johnny Boy. It makes him vulnerable when he talks about it. Teresa protests that her cousin's behavior is “insane,” so why bother with him; he responds, “Terrible. Who's going to help him if I don't. What's the matter, nobody tries any more, nobody helps all the people.” Teresa interrupts him, “You help yourself first.” “You're all wrong,” he cries out, “Francis of Assisi had it all down. He knew.” Teresa, however, has the last word: “Saint Francis didn't run numbers.” It probably never occurred to him, morality being about the family and personal relationships.The ending is quick and chaotic: the heated exchanges between Michael and Johnny Boy eventually boil over when Johnny Boy threatens him with a gun, while Charlie watches in silence at the bar. Charlie realizes he must get Johnny Boy out of town by nightfall, and Teresa insists on accompanying them. The three of them sit in the front seat; Charlie drives, talking to himself, this time out loud, with satiric understatement: “I guess you could safely say that things haven't gone so well tonight. But I'm trying, Lord. I'm trying.” Things suddenly get much worse: Michael is tailing their car and has brought Jimmy Shorts along to do the shooting.6 He wounds Johnny Boy in the neck and Charlie in the hand, causing him to lose control of the car that crashes into the fire hydrant. It explodes in a geyser of absolving rain, as Charlie crawls out and kneels holding his hands together. Teresa and Charlie are taken away in an ambulance, while Johnny Boy bleeding from the neck stumbles down a side street where a police car awaits him. The end is left open, and no one dies.Charlie's Christianity centers on a hands-on faith in serving others. It cannot be called pragmatic because prudence implicates self-interest and, according to St. Francis’ prayer, only in giving does one receive. He enjoys the San Gennaro festival; he probably likes the pageantry of the Church and those iconic plaster saints. Yet he lacks the lontananza of his uncle Giovanni, he is too good-natured; and though his uncle will reward him with an uptown restaurant, he will stay stuck as a small-time hood and never go anywhere in “the business.” He might not even reach old age for crossing a don or failing to deliver. LoBrutto suggests that he might escape Little Italy, as Scorsese did (2008, 152)7; probably not. For certain, he will remain one of Scorsese's dark shadows.That is as far as Scorsese goes towards resolving his spiritual crisis in Mean Streets, summed up in Charlie's “I'm tryin,’ Lord.” When one speaks of a “first masterpiece,” however, one implies that there were others that followed. Mean Streets was Scorsese's third feature-length film. In the next 50 years, there would be 24 more of them, almost one every two years.8 Not that all of them are masterpieces or about spiritual crises, though even where the interests in these films lie elsewhere, a number of their themes—violence, loneliness, self-hatred, loss of community—bear on the subject. From Mean Streets, Scorsese's thematic treatment branches out in several directions. Probably the thickest of these branches runs through Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Cape Fear (1991), Bringing Out the Dead, and ending in two of his most recent films, The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and Silence (2016). These two films are poles apart; The Wolf of Wall Street is the demonic inversion of the mystical Silence; acquisitive where the other is giving; loud and manic where the other is quiet and intensely controlled. They show the ingenuity of the director in seeing sin and suffering, and redemption, from so many sides. Like one of the Old Masters, whom he increasingly resembles, Scorsese needed many canvases to make “a complete magister vitae [a rule of life] as the poetry of the ancients did” (Lowry 1932, 124), one that gives answers to the question: how to live.