McFarland & Co
211 pages
with photographs
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McFarland & Co |
"All my films are personal. I put myself on the screen"
--Martin Scorsese
"Rupert Pupkin is Travis Bickle in comedic garb and without the blood." Think that statement is a stretch? Not so, if you're aim is to psychoanalyze the Scorsese persona as author Maria Miliora successfully does in The Scorsese Psyche on Screen: Roots of Themes and Characters in the Films. The study examines the films of Martin Scorsese and how they reflect his life experiences growing up in the street culture of New York's Little Italy, his family's immigrant background, and his relationship to the Catholic Church. The result is a revealing expose on the legendary director.
Since Scorsese spent years in therapy—he actually thanked his therapist in the credits of Mean Streets—it seems fitting that a book would finally be written by someone who has a private practice in psychoanalysis. Until now we've only seen topical examinations of the violence and religion in his films, yet this book offers insights to his fantasies, values, opinions and anxieties and how they are magnified by the characters: Travis, Rupert, Jake LaMotta, Paul Hackett (After Hours), Charlie and Johnny Boy (Mean Streets), Henry Hill (Goodfellas), and Amsterdam Vallon (Gangs of New York).
Miliora gives special attention to the two films Scorsese has wanted to make since 1972: The Last Temptation of Christ and Gangs of New York. The themes in these films deal with sin and redemption reflecting Scorsese's own turmoil with Christianity, and in the case of Gangs, there is an explicit link between Scorsese's history and relationship with his own father. The book also that gives detailed summaries and themes of all his films and a longer section that goes in depth in terms of narcissism, male sexuality, demigods, rage, violence, and Scorsese's view of women.
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Travis
Bickle isTaxi Driver's narcissist loner, |
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King of Comedy: Rupert Pupkin (right) kidnaps his idol, Jerry Langford (played by Jerry Lewis) |
But the richness of the book lies in the clinical-based examination of Scorsese men on the screen. Miliora's observations on Travis Bickle are one of the best treatise you may ever read in a film commentary book. Using general psychoanalytic concepts she focuses on several of the screen personalities who are phallic-narcissists. While many books on Scorsese stress the violence of Travis and Jake LaMotta (Raging Bull) as emanating from societal origins, Miliora examines extreme narcissistic rage as the catalyst. She writes, "After Betsy's humiliating rejection which Travis experiences as a betrayal, he literally snaps, or fragments, and becomes totally enraged . . . He feels injured by her refusing to talk with him, disdaining him as it were, and her prior idolized state is turned on its head. She becomes, in his disturbed mind, entirely bad like the rest of his external world. She has acquired this change in status, actually the opposite of the former, because she rejected him."
Rupert Pupkin (The King of Comedy) is less malevolent but is nevertheless emotionally disturbed. When he is rejected by his celebrity idol Jerry Langford (as Travis Bickle is rejected by Betsy), Rupert "feels a massive sense of narcissistic injury, humiliation and rage." Miliora's comparison of the two characters is striking. "Both characters are loners and perceive themselves as losers," she writes. "Both are severely obsessed—one with dirt, the other with celebrity. . . . Each reacts to his respective injuries with humiliation, shame and narcissistic rage. . . . In depicting these violent men in his films, Scorsese seemingly was giving vent to his own rage about the frustrations and injustices that he felt he had suffered in his life. He knew from his own experience the ‘killing feeling, the feeling of really being angry,' and perhaps by depicting these extreme emotions on the screen, Scorsese was quieting his own." These men operate at an immature level and are easily injured by slights and criticisms just as Scorsese has reacted to situations in his own life, a fact he has admitted to in numerous interviews.
There is a special exposition of The Last Temptation of Christ as it relates to his view of religion. "Once an altar boy and an aspiring priest within the Catholic religion, Scorsese internalized the values and images associated with the life and passion of Jesus Christ. Apparently he came to see Jesus as a man who had struggled with the same temptations that all men have. Eventually, Scorsese transferred his religious passion to a secular passion for making movies that would express his experiences, his beliefs, and his conflicts, films that Scorsese hoped would have meaning."
In a sense, Scorsese did become a priest, he's a high priest in the Church of Cinema. From the pulpit of the big screen, he touches and influences a far wider audience than any he could have ever imagined reaching in a church. The themes of his films derive from his roots (from an immigrants' ghetto to the grand opera of St. Patrick's Cathedral) and there are autobiographical elements in every one of them that reveal his attitudes about masculinity, aggression, violence, music, religion, and women as Madonnas and whores.
Despite a weighty price of $39.95 retail for 211 pages (7" X 10"), it's a pleasurable time spent exploring Scorsese's dark side. Through a trained analyst's eye, we feel as if we've been sitting next to Scorsese on the psychiatrist's couch all these years. We are voyeurs eavesdropping as Scorsese bares his soul, his innermost fears and his anxiety to us, and we will watch more closely now when we view Scorsese's psyche on the screen.
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