I dare guess you don't agree with Rosenbaum, Louis. I've not seen the film yet, although see it I shall. But I'd not be surprised if Rosenbaum has a point when he writes the film's 'blockbuster dimensions ... tend to overwhelm ironic subtexts and morose afterthoughts'. Producers can do that to a film, after all. Indeed, a significant slice of the history of US film might be characterised as that of writers and or directors necessarily taking the curse off hopefully durable subtexts and morose afterthoughts with seat-filling spectacle. After all, Spartacus could conceivably have pleased the socialists and homosexuals of the time as much as it did a McCarthy-infected and typically homophobic 'mainstream'.
Anyway, taking advantage of the notoriously tendentious and superficial 'history' to which so many Americans are subjected (virtuously heroic history-changing statesmen, frontiersman and entrepreneurs) to offer a gap-filling narrative that effectively transforms the whole picture has got to be the stuff of art, no? To explain the birth of the American Dream in terms of marginalised and objectified women, eloquently absent Amerindians, sectarian hatreds uncomfortably redolent of the very Old World in opposition to which the US defines, nay glorifies, itself, and the material dependence of propertyless young men on the predeccessors of Veblenian Robber-Barons (The Hands That Built America') - well, it all sounds like a potent counter-hegemonic tour de force to me. It's all about balance, of course, and Rosenbaum may have hit that particular nail on the head for all I know, but I'm even keener to see the film now than I was half an hour ago. What's your take? Cheers, Rob. Louis Proyect wrote: > > Blood on His Hands > > Gangs of New York > > Directed by > Martin Scorsese > > By Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader > > For almost the first two-thirds of Martin Scorsese's 168-minute Gangs of > New York, I was entranced. I felt like I was watching a boys' > bloodthirsty adventure story ... after > we've spent a good quarter of an hour watching massive crowds of Irish > Catholics and American "nativists" hack one another to pieces on a huge > foreign-looking turf identified as Manhattan's Lower East Side, each > group trying to eliminate the other ... The Irish Amsterdam > Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio) emerges from 16 years in the Hellgate House > of Reform and ingratiates himself with nativist William "Bill the > Butcher" Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis) ... the movie seems hollow and affectless -- as >if all the > spectacular bloodletting has drained the story of its raison d'etre ... The film >becomes downright > offensive during the final credits, over > which the U2 anthem "The Hands That Built America" plays. If these are > the hands that built this country, as the song triumphantly claims, why > don't we ever see them building something instead of slashing, smashing, > severing, gutting, burning, and mauling everyone and everything in > sight? ... Scorsese couldn't allude even once to Native Americans to throw some > ironic backlighting on the label? But who knows? Maybe some real Native > Americans got lost in the final edit. After all, when you're playing > big-money games of this kind, the thoughtful footnotes often get lost ...w
