Study Questions: Week Seven

The True Horror and Seeking Redemption on Mean Streets

The Shining (1980) and Mean Streets (1973)

Both these films are as much a comment on film genres (here the horror film and the gangster film or the film noir). The Shining locates the heart of horror not in an alien other but within the heart of an American family. Consequently, these films demand an attention to detail and to filmmaking technique seldom required by familiar genre films. Mean Streets, uses the conventions of the gangster and crime genres to explore the hero's dilemma of being caught between an older ethnic culture and the assimilating forces of modern America.

Two very different but often interrelated themes might be described as the defining characteristics of Martin Scorsese's most successful films. One is his exploration of ethnic identity, specifically the Italian-American community he grew up in. From Mean Streets and Italianamerican to Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995), in documentaries like Italianamerican he explores this community, and many more of his films reveal its cultural and spiritual influence. Equally important is the variety of ways in which his films reveal themselves as the product of other films. He often, as in the opening of Mean Streets, draws attention to the process of filmmaking, draws on the work of John Ford's The Searchers (1956) in Taxi Driver (1976), and experiments with a variety of film genres (including a remake of Lee J. Thompson's Cape Fear, 1962).

The Shining: Honey, I'm Home!

1. What is revealed about the Torrance family in the opening sequences (before they leave for the Overlook)?

2. How do the settings (and the way they are filmed) during Jack Torrance's (Jack Nicholson) interview with Ulman (Barry Nelson) contribute to a sense of foreboding and danger?

3. Note the manner in which Kubrick uses background images to comment on the nature and/or fate of the characters. For instance, what is the significance of Danny watching the Roadrunner cartoons? In what ways might Danny's (Danny Lloyd) situation be compared to the Roadrunner?

4. How are we to take the supernatural elements in the film, particularly those that seem to warn of dangers to come (i.e. the bloody elevator, the Grady twins, the woman in the bath)? Are they to be taken literally (as Dracula in vampire films), or are they images which indicate the states of mind of the characters?

5. Why did Jack injure his son (before the film opens)?

6. What is the significance of Jack's manuscript? What is the relation between his writing and his increasingly violent impulses? What does it say about Jack's dream of being a writer, and artist?

7. What is the significance of his meetings with Grady (Philip Stone)? Although Grady was real enough, is his encounter with Jack to be taken literally or as a way of seeing into Jack's mind?

8. Likewise, what is the significance of his encounter with the bartender at what seems to be a party taking place in the 1920s? What do you learn about Jack's feelings toward his family? Is he really drinking, or is he regressing into fantasy?

9. Why is Wendy (Shelly Duval) so passive? How does her behavior (consider her conversation with Danny's doctor) make the family more vulnerable to Jack's violence?

10. How does Jack get out of the refrigerator room? Is this one incident where we are to take the supernatural literally? Is there any other incident which insists that the ghosts are real? Or are the conventions of the horror genre a red herring drawing viewers from the true horror. Which is . . . ?

11. What is "the shining"? Consider Hallorann's (Scatman Crowthers) encounter with Danny and his decision to return to the Overlook to help him.

12. What is the significance of the photo which shows Torrance in a group of Scott Fitzgerald-like characters?

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 dpouble 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 (1972), 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?