This is America: you don't make money, you're a fucking douchebag

Every shot is an idea—that’s how I think about it in my own work. A cut should come exactly at the moment where the audience has processed the idea. And as a matter of personal taste, I rarely like shooting that tries to encapsulate multiple ideas in a single shot. I’m not impressed in the abstract about long takes. Some filmmakers, of course, do use the long take to extraordinary effect, but that’s another topic.

Anyway, good editing is simply that every shot, i.e. idea, of the film is in the right order and plays out in the right amount of time for the audience to glean the right meaning from it, whether it’s conscious or subconscious, emotional or intellectual. Okay? I say this to prove I am an #authority.

The editing in The Departed is extraordinary, and that’s mostly what we’ll be talking about today. That’s right, friends and enemies, we have finally arrived in this #scorgayse series on our first of at least two Thelma Schoonmaker-centric posts.

If you happen to be reading this and do not know Schoonmaker, she is Martin Scorsese’s career-long editor, except for a handful of movies in the 70s when Schoonmaker wasn’t in the union but Scorsese was making union pictures. They did Who’s That Knocking at My Door? together and then they came back together for Raging Bull. She’s cut every one of his pictures since. And she is widely regarded in the editing community as the greatest who ever lived.

I feel like I’ve shortchanged giving synopses in these pieces, I take it for granted that people have seen them lol sorry. So, The Departed is about two young men who grew up in South Boston in the shadow of a large Irish crime syndicate, run by Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson); Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio—so precious here) plays a hothead cop with a record going undercover in the gang while Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), who has an immaculate record, is a member of the crime syndicate who has joined the police force as a mole. They are opposites—an imperfect good guy and a seemingly perfect bad guy—and they are trying to smoke the other out.

The sweep and scope of The Departed is exhilarating and exhausting. It has a rhythm and an energy to it that I don’t even know how to describe. Watching it makes me feel like I’m stoned while tubing down a river. The plotting is propulsive and relentless but the scenes themselves feel ethereal, almost out of reach, in a way. There was an interview on The Wolf of Wall Street’s press circuit where Scorsese said he constantly told Schoonmaker to “be ferocious!” I wonder what they talked about here.

There is an elliptical quality both between scenes and within scenes. I hate when I’m ahead of a movie I’m watching, but that has never happened while watching a Scorsese, because there is so much left out; we are really only given just enough to understand it and to feel it. The audience is constantly playing catch-up, sometimes multiple times a minute. Because of this, there is never a single moment in the film where the movie doesn’t have the viewer by the balls.

One cut I love is in the prologue of the film, Frank is buying groceries for young Colin (“You Johnny Sullivan’s kid? You live with your grandmother?”) The grocer puts down a couple cans on the counter; cut to the next angle, and Colin is picking the grocery full bag up. There was no bag out yet; the cans were not in the bag. But we don’t need it. And the parallel motions of putting something onto the counter and picking something up from the counter makes it feel like a single fluid moment, despite the fact it’s actually a jump cut. Schoonmaker does this time and again. If it’s not needed it’s not in the movie, and she finds a supremely satisfying way to cut together what’s left.

There’s also the scene where Billy and his court ordered therapist Dr. Madolyn Madden, which is the most insane name, played by Vera Farmiga, consummate their relationship. There has been sexual tension between the two in all of their previous scenes; they were already leaping across the line between the professional and the personal and we’re just waiting for them to do it at this point. Because of this, Schoonmaker is able to cut the actual moment of decision: one shot, they are standing at opposite corners of a room talking and the next shot, Madolyn is sitting on the counter and Billy is kissing her.

In both of these moments, there is just a fraction of a second where you are destabilized and your brain has to catch up. It’s subconscious but it’s real. There are dozens of moments like this in the film; I marvel at the way it’s put together. There’s nothing in the script that should suggest these jump cuts, but they each add a subtle punch. Schoonmaker is not tethered to the way a scene was written or shot. [Jack Nicholson voice]: keeps you on your toes. (I just made that up. Has he ever said that? Why can I hear it so clearly in his voice?)

Let’s also look at everyone’s favorite scene: the cocaine fantasia. Frank tosses a generous handful of cocaine into the air and it hits the ceiling and then we cut to the large punch bowl of cocaine by the bed. He flings another handful of cocaine onto the bed and tells his lady friend “You want some coke? There it is… don’t move til you’re numb.” and prompts her to lay face down on the cocaine bed. And then we dissolve to the same shot of cocaine falling from the ceiling again, and then we dissolve to Jack Nicolson’s coke addled face as dust swarms around him, which I believe is a superimposition of the shot of the cocaine falling over his face. It’s this magical winter wonderland moment, drug fueled bliss. Schoonmaker doesn’t rely on writing or performance to create meaning, only juxtaposition.

I could keep listing out moments in the editing that I love; I’ve listed out moments in the editing before like you wouldn’t believe. But I’ll end with some #thematicanalysis. The Departed is a movie about class. Both Billy and Colin grew up in South Boston—Billy’s mother, actually, was from an affluent family who disowned her when she chose to marry a Costigan. I find it interesting the way the movie expresses how class, quite a bit of the time, is about aesthetics. Colin is trusted by society because his hair is always gelled and his shirts are tucked in. Billy, on the other hand, has a record and wears saggy pants and has facial hair and tattoos, so he is immediately suspicious as a policeman—and believable in the gang.

Incidentally, this bears out the truth that many people didn’t like Donald Trump only because he was crass. They’d probably be “willing to find common ground with” with a fascist who looks like Justin Kirk on Succession. But that’s another article.

But in the end, Colin’s immaculate hygiene cannot save him. We see him at the end of the film, trying to pet some old woman’s dog in the hallway of his luxury apartment building. She makes a disgusted face. Take this THING back to Baltimore! Aesthetics can get you far, but society only lets you rise up so high.

The Departed is another dissection of the American Dream by Martin Scorsese: Frank says in the prologue of the film, “no one’s gonna give it to you, you have to take it.” But Scorsese shows that the underpinnings of class dynamics is more than just net worth. You can get rich, but you will never be accepted.