Study Questions: Week Seven

"Are You Talking to ME?": Seeking Redemption on the Mean Streets. Angry Men and the Patriarchy in Decline.

Mean Streets (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976)

Mean Streets and Taxi Driver explore aspects of working-class ethnic life in New York. But these films seek to assimilate that life to cultural myths central to a larger American society, myths which are at the heart of most Hollywood film genres. Taxi Driver was derived from the Western, specifically John Ford's The Searchers (1956), while Mean Streets draws heavily on the gangster film and Film Noir, which have enjoyed great popularity over the years. By bringing together the long-established themes of genre films with the ethnic setting, Scorsese's films reflect the increasing tendency to equate ethnic communities with fundamental American values in the decades following World War II.

Mean Streets: You Don't Make Up for Your Sins at Church. You Do It on the Streets.

1. In the opening sequence of the film (before and during the credits) how does Scorsese use his camera both to call attention to the film as film and to present Charlie's (Harvey Keitel) ethnic heritage? Hoiw does it prepare viewers to understand his behavior in the story which follows?

2. What is the significance of the street festival in honor of San Gennaro , the patron saint of Naples,whose opening and closing days extablish the timeframe of the film's action? What is the importance of the religious imagery throughout the film. It is a reflection of Charlie's spiritual yearnings, an ironic comment on the life he lives, or both? Why? As a matter of fact, why do you think Scorsese never make specific reference to the saint being honored?

3. The central characters -- Charlie, Johnny Boy (Robert Di Niro), Michael (Richard Romanus) -- are introduced by subtitles. Why does Scorsese use this method? How doers he once again create a double effect: giving the movie a sense of doucmentary authenticity and interrupting the Hollywood style of realism?

4. The scene of Charlie and Teresa (Amy Robinson) making love in a hotel room ends with an abrupt jump cut to the statue of San Gennaro. How does the juxtaposition of images express Charlie's dilemma? What other jump cuts in the film serve the same dramatic function?

5. The film is not only shaped by the culture of Little Italy (even his mother makes a cameo appearance), it also draws on other films. In the course of the film, characters watch John Ford's The Searchers (1956), Roger Corman's The Tomb of Ligeia (1965), and Fritz Lang's noir thriller The Big Heat (1953). There are references to Back to Bataan (1945), Point Blank (1967), and Season of the Witch (1973), as well as a more obscure allusion to Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954). Each of these films are used to forshadow events, reveal character, and encourage the viewer to read Mean Streets as a film about film as well as a film about Italian-American life. Let's take two of these references the clips from The Tomb of Ligeia and The Big Heat and ask how they contribute to the films central themes. Consider the imagery of The Tomb: fire separating a dark woman who clearly resembles Teresa. Where else is fire imagery used, and how is it connected to Charlie's torments? What does the fate of the hero in Poe's Ligeia (the basis of Corman's film) have in common with Charlie? Later Charlie's Uncle (Cesare Danova) watches a scene from The Big Heat. How does the scene anticipate the end of Scorsese's film and link it to the film noir tradition?

6. What does Michael indroductory scene reveal about his character and competence? How, exactly, does Scorsese use visual images as well as dialogue to make this relevation? How does this scene set up the running joke about Johnny Boy making a "jerk-off" of Michael? And how does that joke help drive the film to its climax?

7. Throughout much is made of social and ethnic distinctions, with important references to Blacks, Jews, suburban WASPs, and gays. How are we to interpret these references? What does it say about the idea of America as a melting pot where everyone is assimilated to a common culture? What do these hostile attidudes say about the darker side of ethnic identity?

8. How does Scorsese use his sound track to express Charlie's many contradictions (between duty and desire, between the flesh and the spirit, between ethnic loyalty and his desire to share the American Dream)?

9. What is the significance of the Italian festival band playing the National Anthem and of Charlie's uncle having a picture of Robert Kennedy together with American and Italian flags on the wall of his restaurant? How do these images run counter to the ethnic divisions emphasized in the film?

10. How might Johnny Boy be seen as a mirror image of Charlie, both products of an older culture which cannot sustain itself in America?And finally, what are those tigers doing in the basement of Tony's bar? They are compared to William Blake's poem "The Tyger." How might this poem suggest that they symbolize the mystery of the lifves depicted in the film?

Taxi Driver: Are You Talkin' to Me! Well, There's No One Else Here.

1. To what degree can Taxi Driver be described as a "rescue narrative" (a familiar theme in American popular narrative from Mary Rowland son's story of her captivity in the mid-17th Century to the modern western and action film like Die Hard)?

2. What is the significance of Travis (Robert Di Niro) being a Vietnam veteran?

3. How does the relationship between Travis and Betsy (Cybil Shepard) raise issues of class and economic status?

4. How does the journal kept by Travis Brickle help us to understand his character? Think about his language, the imaginary life he describes to his parents, his assessment of events we see on the screen. Are there discrepancies between what happens to Travis and the way he describes them?

5. Why does Travis plan to kill the presidential candidate? Does Betsy have anything to do with his decision?

6. Are the election workers any more appealing than Travis? Why? Why not?

7. Travis is called "cowboy" by Scar (Harvey Keitel). What is the significance of the comparison? How does it call attention to the link between Travis and important American cultural myths? Did you know that Scar is the name of John Wayne's nemesis in ? What might be the significance of the connection?

8. What do you make of the conclusion of Taxi Driver? is real, a dying fantasy, a bit of both?

9. How does Iris in serve to emphasize the theme of redemption through rescue?

10. Could you describe Travis as an early embodiment of while male anger? Why is he angry?

11. What similarities can you see between Travis's fantasies and actions and those of the contemporary "Militia" subculture?

12. To what degree might the American celebration of individualism and personal autonomy at the expense of common community/societal values find a logical, even necessary outcome in the murderous rage which is dramatized in Taxi Driver?

13. In what ways are Di Niro roles in Mean Streets and the Raging Bull similar to his role as Travis? Why does Scorsese equate him with a peculiar American character? In what way might Travis be seen as an example of using an ethnic, working-class character at an American Everyman?

Raging Bull: Give me a Stage Where There's Bullhick And Rage. That's Entertainment

1. Why does the film begin with the scene in Jake La Motta's (Robert DI Niro) dressing room at a New York night club in 1958? How does this introduction the the film's protagonist influence a viewer's opinion of him?

2. Why has Scorsese chosen to shoot the film in black and white? How does it lend the film a sense of period (1941-1958)? How does it link the film to two popular film genres of that period (film noir and the boxing film)?

3. In an earlier film Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), Paul Newman plays the middleweight boxer Rocky Graziano, whose rise from the New York slums to the championship, is treated as a version of the American Dream. Supported by a loyal wife, Graziano transcends the corruption of the fight game to find success and happiness. The same American myth receives a fictional treatment in Sylvester Stallone's Rocky (1976) and its sequels. How does Scorsese use the genre conventions to paint a darker portrait of a boxer's life and the dream he pursues?

4. How does the visual imagery of Jake's first meeting with Vickie (Cathy Moriarty) -- especially the uses of blacks and whites, light and dark -- establish her as his ideal at the expense of her humanity? What specific images suggest that, as an ideal, she will never be attainable?

5. In what ways are Jake's attitude toward his profession and his treatment of his wife similar? How do both exemplify what his brother Joey (Joe Pesci) describes as Jake's "hard-headedness"? In what ways is his "hardheadedness" a version of the idea of individualism which is so highly prized in our society?

6. How do the sequence of fight sequences, the toll they take on his face and emotions, illustrate the costs of this individualism? How does the evolving relationship with his brother illustrate the same costs?

7. Why does Jake' discovery that he is part of a system -- no title unless he cooperates with Tommy Como (Nicholas Colasanto) -- break Jake, destroy his dream?

8. In two important scenes Jake suddenly switches from the raging bull to a child in tears, in the scene mentioned above and in the scene when he begs Vickie after attacking her and his brother. What does this sudden switch reveal about Jake' failure to become a mature adult? What does say about the myth of individual which he exemplifies?

8. Scorsese often favors long tracking shots in which the camera follows a character in a way which reveals (often without words) an important facet of that character. What do these shots of Jake walking from his dressing room to the ring tell us? A crucial tracking shot culminates his defeat by Sugar Ray Robinson. The camera slowly travels along the rope of the boxing and finally stops on a dripping gout of blood. What is the meaning of the shot, and what does it foretell of Jake's fate?

9. The climax of most boxing films is the protagonist's penultimate fight, but Raging Bull goes on to dramatize Jake's life as an ex-champ. What is the significance of these sequences, especially the scene in his Florida bar? Consider the events from his initial standup comic routine to the parking lot scene in which Vickie leaves him.

10. Alone, in solitary confinement, Jake beats the wall and cries, "Why? Why? Why?" What answer does the film offer to this question? Does the final scene in which Jake quotes from On the Waterfront suggest that he has found the answer? What might suggest that he has become a self-parody? Are we asked, at the end of the film to sympathize with Jake, or has he forfeited any sympathetic understanding?

11. Taxi Driver and, in more specific ways, Raging Bull are the products of Scorsese's ethnic heritage. But, at the same time, his central characters embody characteristically American cultural myths. How these larger themes serve to transform the Italian-American community into a symbol of America itself, much as Francis Ford Coppola did in The Godfather (1972), The Godfather, Part II (1974), and The Godfather, Part III (1990)? In what ways might using an ethnic community be regarded as an example of cultural assimilation?