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January 31, 2003
New
York Expert Czitrom Gives Gangs of New York Failing Grade
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Daniel
Czitrom.
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Martin Scorsese has
commanded the attention of the film world with Gangs of New
York, a lavish, $100-million epic that tells the story of
an Irish immigrant named Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio)
who seeks revenge for the death of his father at the hands of
gang kingpin Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis). The story is
set in Civil War-era New York in a neighborhood known as the Five
Points, depicted in the film as a place of wretched poverty and
pervasive violence. As Amsterdam and Bill the Butcher head toward
their inevitable, final confrontation, the Five Points roils under
the draft needed to replenish the ranks of the Union Army, finally
erupting in the Draft Riots of 1863. A. O. Scott of the New York
Times called the film a "brutal, flawed, and indelible epic
of nineteenth-century urban criminality."
Among those who took in the film on its opening day was Daniel
Czitrom, professor of history at Mount Holyoke. Not just another
armchair critic, Czitrom figured heavily as an expert in New
York: A Documentary Film, a recent multipart documentary on
the city, and has done extensive research and writing on famed
social reformer and photographer Jacob Riis, whose 1890 book How
the Other Half Lives exposed the conditions of New York City's
slums. Czitrom is currently writing a book titled Mysteries
of the City, a narrative history of turn-of-the-century New
York focusing on the politics and culture of the city's underside.
David LaChance, CSJ writer and College media relations associate,
caught up with Czitrom one morning to learn about his impressions
of the film.
Here's your opportunity to grade Martin Scorsese on his
history report. What did you think of Gangs of New
York?
To me,
the movie was fundamentally disappointing on two levels: as a
drama and as a historical vision of New York's past. The main
problem is that the movie is all trees and very little forest.
Scorsese and the filmmakers spent enormous amounts of money and
energy in re-creating lower Manhattan in the 1850s. The look of
the movie is breathtaking—the re-creation of the Five Points,
the costumes, the streets, the buildings, all of that feels really
authentic. But Scorsese's understanding of what's important in
New York history, American history, is where things went off-kilter.
And I suspect that the main reason is that the source material
itself is so problematic.
The movie was based on the book of the same name, written in 1927
by Herbert Asbury. What do you find problematic about the book?
Asbury was not a historian, he was a journalist whose book relies
upon essentially a lot of old newspaper clippings that he recycled.
There's a long tradition of what we call "sunshine and
shadow" journalism, which emphasized the gap between the
wealthy and the people who are living in abject poverty, as well
as sensationalizing the lives of the poor. Asbury is very much
in that tradition. The problem is that it presents such a picaresque
and distorted view of New York life that it has very little relationship
to New York history and particularly to a deeper understanding
of how the city works. A lot of the book is just not true.
Why would an intelligent filmmaker like Scorsese choose
such a compromised source? Certainly there are other, better books.
I think Scorsese is probably more interested in mythology than
history. The lens through which Scorsese views all human experience
is that of codes of loyalty. If you think about Mean Streets,
Raging Bull, Goodfellas, even the documentary about the Band,
The Last Waltz, all of these movies are informed by Scorsese's
vision that life is organized around the codes of loyalty that
people have with their mates. It's a tribal vision, and the Asbury
book plays into that vision. The other part of this is that people's
character, people's behavior, people's lives are shaped by and
in some cases defined by these tribal loyalties, and the action
is usually centered around what happens when there's tribal warfare.
That certainly dominates Gangs of New York, as it did many
of his other movies.
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There's plenty of conflict in Gangs of New York, particularly
between the Protestant Nativists led by Bill the Butcher and the
gangs of Irish Catholic immigrants. Was life in the Five Points
really that violent?
In all Scorsese's films, there is a deep current of violence,
imminent violence. But there is a level of violence in this film
that is so over-the-top as to undermine what he was trying to
do. Were there gang wars in nineteenth-century New York? Sure.
Were they violent? There's no question. But they weren't
Braveheart. The opening scene, the gang conflict in which Amsterdam
sees his father killed by Bill the Butcher, is crazy. I think
that that kind of superexaggerated violence is a big part of what's
wrong with books like Asbury's Gangs of New York and that
whole tradition that would essentially reduce these people to
animals. By focusing so tightly, even obsessing on the Irish Catholic
versus Protestant native conflict, Scorsese missed a lot of the
big picture.
What was the Five Points really like, then?
It was the worst slum in North America at the time, a poor, working-class
neighborhood that had been attracting immigrants, largely Irish
immigrants, for decades by the 1860s. What were most of the people
doing in the Five Points? Were they biting each other's ears
off, or beating each other with brass knuckles? I think not. Most
of these people were trying to make a living. Against all odds,
a fair number of these people were able to accumulate small bank
accounts, and in some cases to learn a skill and pass it on to
their kids. I don't want to romanticize it, but my point
is that Scorsese's vision, particularly all the violence,
plays into a long and deep current in American cultural history
that depicts the poor immigrant, the working-class ethnic, as
essentially subhuman.
Are there other ways in which Scorsese "missed a lot of the
big picture?"
By virtually excluding the question of race relations, particularly
in the closing scenes about the draft riots, I think Scorsese
really abdicates any claim to any clear understanding of the history
of the city. Because the draft riots as much as anything else
were race riots. African Americans in New York represented the
most visible symbol of the cause of the Civil War, and Lincoln's
announcement of the first draft in U.S. history came shortly after
the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation. There were
exaggerated and fantastic visions that a lot of New Yorkers had
of a horde of freed slaves coming north to compete for jobs and
services. Somehow, in this movie, the whole question of black-white
relations, and the very deep animosity, physical conflict, and
violence—the draft riots as anti-black pogrom—is largely
ignored.
Gangs of New York is not a documentary but a drama. If, as you
suggest, Scorsese has chosen to present a distorted view of history,
shouldn't he be able to do that in the interest of telling
a good story?
You could say people would fall asleep if it gave a deeper understanding
of New York's history, but I don't think so. Whether
you're talking about the works of Shakespeare or
E. L. Doctorow or others who have successfully written stories
set in a specific historical moment, historical drama can be effective
only if it has characters who feel like real people, and that's
more than just what kind of shoes they wore and what kind of clothes
they had on. There's a feeling about this movie that they
were determined to push what I would call the mythological elements,
the stereotypical elements, the sensational elements, as far as
they could. I think the result is a missed opportunity for one
of our preeminent filmmakers.
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