Hello, friends and enemies,
I hope you have been well this spring. I have been very busy running a major motion picture studio so I have been doing less writing. But that changes now.
Uniquely, some would say bravely, I think Martin Scorsese is the greatest filmmaker who ever lived. In any country, in any era. He has a new feature film, Killers of the Flower Moon, debuting at the Cannes Film Festival in less than a month, and the movie will be in theaters and then on the illustrious streaming service Apple TV+.
I have been threatening for years that I would write about every one of Martin Scorsese’s pictures and, well, I am going to follow through. I am going to write about every one of Martin Scorsese’s pictures. #scorgayse2023
Here are my rules for myself:
I will post a new piece a week so that hopefully I get through them all by the release of Killers.
I will limit myself to films that had a general theatrical release. Scorsese has been prolific with television as well, primarily with documentaries. I’m just too busy for those.
I will not go in order, because I am impulsive. This isn’t really a rule, I’m just letting you know.
If I find any of these rules confining, I will break them. I will ultimately do what I want. If I find I’m getting repetitive regarding major themes and stuff, I may stop the project entirely! Who can say what tomorrow will bring?
You, my readers, will accept my authority on this. This rule will not be broken.
Even though I will not be going in order I am going to start, here and now, at the beginning, with Martin Scorsese’s first feature film, Who’s That Knocking at my Door.
Towards the beginning of Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, the protagonist, JR (Harvey Keitel in his first feature film credit!), tells his besties that they should go up to the Village to get a drink. They’re already in a bar, which one of them runs, who responds, “Why don’t we just drink here, I gotta go sit with a bunch of fairies in the Village?” JR doesn’t press the point but that was, in fact, exactly what he wanted.
The machismo posturing of Scorsese’s characters has been a source of endless fascination for me, because it creates an undercurrent of queerness across his work. Yay! This, of course, is not to suggest that any of the characters would necessarily identify as LGBTQ, but to me, they are LGBTQ. JR is not a Kinsey 6 but he is probably not a Kinsey 0 either.
All of Scorsese’s protagonists, starting here with JR, are caught between the masculine and the feminine. They are more naturally inclined to the feminine but push themselves toward the masculine, because they think they should. The opening shot of the film is a close-up of a statue of the Virgin Mary holding the Baby Jesus, as an explosion of pop music blasts on the soundtrack. Scorsese’s real life mother, Catherine, is then seen in the background of the statue serving a warm meal to a gaggle of children. (Who are they? lol)
Immediately, the film cuts to JR and his posse, the boys on the block, boys being boys, bros being bros, beating someone up as boys do, a sudden burst of violence that would become one of Scorsese’s trademarks. The harsh juxtaposition of these two scenes is the first conflict between the feminine and the masculine, not to mention the conflict between the spiritual and the secular, in a career that would be comprised almost entirely of those two conflicts.
And while the conceit of that juxtaposition is, in this case, a bit facile (he was literally 24), the young filmmaker’s style was nearly fully formed. Who’s That Knocking at My Door? was a storming of the gates of American independent cinema, a signal that the studio system that dominated distribution for generations was officially over. When the film made its debut at the Chicago Film Festival in the fall of 1967 (mere days before Scorsese’s 25th birthday), young critic Roger Ebert sounded the alarm louder than anyone else and the two made each other’s careers with Ebert’s review. How fun is that.
Scorsese would go on to explore his themes and concepts in deeper and more original ways, but in his early twenties Scorsese was already gripped by the ways the performance of masculinity destroys the American man. One of the centerpiece sequences of the film shows the boys partying in an apartment; the scene is entirely slow motion and the sound has been removed in favor of an Italian pop song. Everyone is really Doing Partying, until one of the boys pulls a gun on the youngest member of the group, Sally Gaga (and his name was Sally Gaga!). Everyone howls with laughter, except for young Sally, who looks terrified out of his mind. It is a striking, scary scene that we never return to in the narrative, because it is of no consequence; it is merely another night of hanging out. The Boys!!
When JR isn’t hanging out with his friends, he is on the prowl for tail, which I really relate to. He doesn’t have a job and lives at home with his parents. Hanging out and chasing women are the only two things that fill his days. He meets a beautiful young woman on the Staten Island Ferry (a character called only “Girl,” played by Zina Bethune) and flirts with her by pestering her about The Searchers, a movie she doesn’t remember until he badgers a memory out of her, or at least the claim of a memory which she conjures possibly just to get him to stop annoying her. Then they start dating, yay!
Despite the way he interacts with his friends, JR certainly sees himself as one of the good guys. Scorsese contradicts this when JR won’t sleep with his girlfriend before they are married, but then he fucks some random lady that we will never see again.
Here, Scorsese’s undercurrent of queerness takes its fullest form in this picture: the camera lingers on Keitel’s body as opposed to the woman he is sleeping with. Yes, the woman’s body is shown nude, but in a matter of fact way; she is an object—literally so, since we never see her outside of this scene and she has no dialogue—but her body is not coveted by the camera the way that Keitel’s body is. There are quick shots of Keitel’s eyes, his mouth, his chest. Then, there is a slow pan from the top of his torso down to the bottom along with his body hair trailing to his belly button (again: yay!). If there is any eroticism in this scene, it is due to the presence of the male form, not the female.
While the accumulation of these scenes already illustrates how Scorsese is critical of his protagonist, the ending of the film hammers it home. After JR’s girlfriend reveals that she was once raped, he blames her and leaves her. Later that night, he and his buddies bring two girls (described as “broads,” as opposed to women, from the Bronx) to have a party. The men seduce the women, and while they are at first willing participants, their desire to each have a turn becomes predatory. When the women are not willing to take part, the men force them, and they gleefully terrorize these women, an act in which JR happily joins.
JR goes back to his girlfriend and at first it is unclear whether or not he sees a connection to her experience and his. However, the film ends with JR going to confession to unburden his guilt. Keitel’s performance makes it clear that does see this contradiction, that his playacting as masc has affected his personality, or perhaps, rather, that it has brought something out that was always there.
JR throws himself at the feet of a statue of Jesus, and nothing happens. There is only the void awaiting him. The Bergman’s Winter Light of it all. JR will never reconcile the warring points of view in his soul and nothing will absolve him of his wrongs when the right side loses the war.
A common refrain among Scorsese’s admittedly few detractors is that they don’t (or don’t want to) feel empathy for his deeply flawed protagonists and today I just want to say [Vanessa Hudgeons voice] I get it; like, I respect it. I’m not going to talk about that today with this film but I just want to state that I am not ignoring that angle. I simply need to save some things to talk about lol.
This felt very long. Even removing the housekeeping at the top. Did you think it was too long? Pls let me know xx
this is how I win. very excited for this project!!
Very brave of you to call Marty the best filmmaker of all time (you are correct). Great piece of writing! Excited to read the rest.