Dickens, Griffith and Gangs of New York: The Belatedness of a Modern Epic

by Craig Tepper

Craig Tepper is a screen and television writer whose credits include an Edgar-nominated episode of Law & Order. He is also a past contributor to Film Quarterly and Film-Philosophy. He earned his B.A. at Cal and an M.A. in Film from SFSU.

'It makes no difference what men think of war, said the Judge. War endures... War was always here. Before man was, War waited…” Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

I

On video reviewings, it's easier to see how Gangs Of New York, absent the dolby surround roar and sweep of its chocked frames, left some viewers lost in its vast detail. There's an over-tight concision that cramps the multiple crosscut stories, as if Potemkin and Intolerance had been cut together and pared to a marketable running time. Judging its permanent achievement may have to wait a director's cut, but its extensive claims are sited on grounds of age-old contentions.

From the outset what film owes to literature, and its less obvious obverse, what literature, even before the movies, owed to cinema has been an open question. To paraphrase Judge Holden, the Satan-like central figure in Cormac McCarthy's monumental Blood Meridian: "Film was always here. Before book was, film waited for book. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner." A book, Herbert Asbury's 1928 work of pop sociology, Gangs Of New York, inspired the Scorsese film. He and writer Jay Cocks tell the same anecdote of simultaneously finding it on hand during a 1970 phone call that began Scorsese's long-deferred dream of turning the book into "a Western on Mars." (1) Asbury's obscure paperback was republished after Jorge Luis Borges, who became reknown in the 60’s, credited it in his AUniversal History of Iniquity. But further suspicion of the Cocks / Scorsese provenance is fueled by the fact that concealing a Borges’ connection not only removes any foreign ‘taint’, but it also gives their claim priority. This is no small thing in a work where American origins are everywhere the issue.

Indeed, the film opens on preparations for a battle. In dark, and close, Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson), chieftain of the Irish gang the 'Dead Rabbits', opens his eyes and stares into camera. It is 1846. The dry scrape of a razor rakes his beard as he shaves by candlelight.. Suddenly, he incises his own cheek and hands the bloody razor to his tiny son. "The blood always stays on the blade, Boy," he admonishes. Closing and casing up the baptized razor, he wears it like a cross. War here is a sacrament. Vallon now marches through a Bosch-like underworld. Battle-ready Irish tribes -- his 'Dead Rabbits' among them -- gather behind him like tributaries. Yet at the antechamber to the outside world, a shillelagh-wielding giant, Monk McGinn (Brendan Gleeson) blocks Vallon. Though War is a sacrament it is not above commerce. Only after negotiating to pay McGinn for each enemy he fells does he throw open the doors for the gangs.

Here we meet, like in the 'opening eyes' first image, another metaphor for vision. Startlingly bright, the gangs face a blasted waste, a grim, snow-covered plaza called 'Paradise Square'. At the heart of the Five Points, the poorest part of Manhattan, it's a vision of hell.

Outside, the motley Irish confront an older emigrant class, the 'natives', whose gentrified rags, accessorized with blue sashes, ape the society they are outcasts from. They're led with demonic swagger by Bill 'the Butcher' Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis). In a top hat and a melodrama villain's handlebar mustache, Bill’s baritone rasp commands a gutter grandiloquence. Telescoping cuts close on his left eye. Filling the frame is the emblem of the American Republic, a shield-bearing Eagle etched in frosty glass. It is an eye, we will learn, he removed himself as an act of self-punishment for an earlier shame at Priest Vallon’s hands. "Finest beating I ever took," he will reminisce. "My face was pulp, my guts was pierced, my ribs was all mashed up. And when he came to finish me, I couldn't look him in the eye. He spared me because he wanted me to live in shame. This was a great man." The Butcher's undying respect was won not by Vallon's act of mercy, but by its brutal wisdom. Shame, the inability to face one's defeats, one's enemies -- one's sinful, mortal nature -- significates the 'gaze' for the underclass. The averted eye is fatal; the avoidance of reality's hard truths unaffordable, self-loathing the iron bar to advancement.

But on this day a form of tribal class war, a pandemonium governed by some unseen code, is about to take place. "At my challenge, by the ancient laws of combat," the Butcher intones, "We are met at this chosen ground, to settle for good and all who holds sway..." The ensuing no-holds-barred mayhem is, however, gunless, a cutting-tool slaughter which ends abruptly at Priest Vallon’s fall. "Look. Look it here," the Butcher bellows obscenely over his victim, "Look who I have here under my knife!"

As the other combatants fall hushed, turned spectator on the blood-strewn snow, Priest Vallon's son clings to him. Taking the boy's head, "Don't look away," he orders, "Never look away.” He then demands someone (Bill, the boy?), "Finish it!" Promptly gaffing Vallon, Bill lays the bloody blade on his chest, a token to the underworld as McGinn approaches, breaking the scene’s ghastly spell to demand his pay. As the boy watches him reach under Vallon’s jerkin and snatch up a satchel the Butcher declares, "That's fair. A touch indelicate, but only right." Again, commerce we are to understand underlies the unwritten rules of conflict.

The prologue thus sets the film's boundaries, its blood meridian, a world entirely other yet utterly familiar -- civilization's far limit. For what more primitive scene can be imagined, what further affront to human feeling than the murder of a parent before his child? Or what wilder appeal to martial order than what the Butcher now cries, "Ears and noses will be the trophies of the day! But no hand shall touch him!!" Its visual bravura alone declares the heights of Gangs' aspirations. Its narrative ambitions are no less vaunted. Here invoking the canonical source for all works with Satan-like central characters -- Milton's Paradise Lost -- the film extends its allusiveness by having Vallon's tiny son grab the knife, flourish it and run for the warrens. Sixteen years later the film will resume with his return to avenge his father's death, marking another work no less central to the Western Canon as a major source -- Shakespeare's Hamlet.

II

A screening of Peckinpah's 1969 Western masterwork, The Wild Bunch, is cited by writer Jay Cocks as having providing he and Scorsese with their initial inspiration. Scorsese recalls having been nothing less than "totally stunned, overwhelmed" by the film. It's a moment that echoes another in cinema history, one described in Eisenstein’s seminal essay on film’s relationship to the literary arts, "Dickens, Griffith, And The Film Today".

But before disclosing what the gaze of the American filmmaker might have caught sight of on Dickens' pages I wish to recall what David Wark Griffith himself represented to us, the young Soviet film-makers of the 'twenties.

To say it simply and without equivocation: a revelation. (2)

According to Cocks their earliest idea for Gangs is preserved in the prologue, to put the orgiastic slaughter that ends Peckinpah's film, "at the beginning." (Their residual excitement over the Asbury material was that -- except for a D.W. Griffith short, The Musketeers Of Pig Alley (1912) and Raoul Walsh's The Bowery (1933) (3) -- it was virgin territory.) It’s, however, a signature moment at the beginning of The Wild Bunch that Gang’s prologue clearly reprises. Racing into the desert after a horrifically botched robbery, Pike Bishop (William Holden), the outlaw Army squad’s leader, is confronted by one of his own mortally wounded men who demands he “Finish it, Mr. Bishop!” Reluctantly, but unsentimentally, Pike raises his Colt. The shot he fires still reverberates. Finding its artistic justification in the fact it simply portrays the uncaring forces of man, nature and history, one can trace two generations of unsparing cinematic savagery back to that uniquely jarring moment. It marks a beginning, the founding of a style of brutally dispassionate violence whose foremost practitioner will be Martin Scorsese.

In describing what he hoped to make as "a Western on Mars,” Scorsese was presumably characterizing the Asbury book’s exoticism, the alien argot and 19 th century criminal culture it details. But the adjective ‘Mars’ was well-chosen. Even then Scorsese was perhaps subconsciously directing future scenarists to his film’s prevailing deity – the God of War.

Immediately after the prologue, Scorsese deploys classic parallel montage. It’s the device Eisenstein credits Griffith with discovering in Dickens -- a "shifting of the story from one group of characters to another." (4) Scorsese's choice, however, may have proceeded as much out of necessity as homage. Eisenstein quotes a London journalist, "People who write the long and crowded novels that Dickens did... find this practice a convenience." (5) But other clues suggest Griffith and his legacy was also never far from Scorsese's thoughts.

But if Gangs succeeds at achieving a kind of higher montage through its crosscut stories, or fails, as Eisenstein declared in his essay Griffith's Intolerance had failed, never rising above parallelism, it will hardly be due to what he diagnosed as Griffith’s 'thematic and ideological error'. (6) Alone among the avowedly apolitical Scorsese's films, Gangs Of New York articulates a moral and political universe, albeit Darwinian, but one consistent with the worlds his characters have always inhabited.

For Gangs the challenge is more complex if straightforward. It takes on the dramatic difficulties famously ascribed to its vaunted literary models, Hamlet and Paradise Lost. It must synchronize multiple story and symbolic registers while maintaining a narrative that borrows the indefinite postponement of revenge from Shakespeare’s most difficult play and do it with an antagonist who, like Satan in Paradise Lost, becomes the film’s most compelling character.

III

After a fog-shrouded cosmic pull back from the Five Points, we zoom forward, returning sixteen years later to find young 'Amsterdam' Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio) emerging from a reformatory on Blackwell's Island. Tossing aside the bible he's been given as glasslike dark sheets rise to enfold its gilt lettering we cut to a nighttime fireworks display. In a blaze of red, Lincoln and the flag encircled by the words SLAVERY ABOLISHED is ignited. Meanwhile, Vallon's voiceover informs us it's 1863 and Civil War conscription has begun as Bill Cutting, older and more prosperous, strides belligerently through the smoky celebration with his toughs, among them McGloin (Stephen Graham), one of Priest Vallon's former lieutenants. His nativist sentiments are made plain: Bill hates Lincoln, the war and the Irish and Negro rabble (whether freed slaves or not) he sees about him and employs. A self-conscious visual motif alternating ‘dark water’ with ‘red fire’ imagery (the former connected to Amsterdam, emphasizing his aspect as the young, tempted Christ, and the latter associated with Bill the Butcher) is established here and in the scenes that immediately follow.

At the waterfront, by day, the Butcher's men hurl stones and insults at the droves of arriving Irish. Amsterdam, meanwhile, mistaken for one of his brethren, is met by Boss Tweed (Jim Broadbent) and his minions with handouts of bread and cries of 'Vote Tammany'. In a succession of lapping crosscuts, Amsterdam descends into the Old Brewery to retrieve the knife he hid there as a child as Tweed, at a hellishly red-hued Tammany Hall, tries unsuccessfully to interest the Bill in sharing the Five Points’ electoral and civic spoils.

Beating off thugs, Amsterdam reclaims the knife and rises out to the square where one of the thugs, Johnny (Henry Thomas), who helped him as a child, now becomes Amsterdam's guide. Teeming with motion in depth -- one of the film's visual hallmarks -- we get a kaleidoscopic tour of the Five Points’ rogues’ gallery of gangs. Dazed, the boys bump into comely Jenny Everdeane, the fast-fingered 'bludget'. Played by Cameron Diaz with a blend of bold brass and slattern charm, she taunts tongue-tied Johnny -- "Well, aren't you two a couple of conversationists." "Maybe not," DiCaprio, in one of his best moments, says, sizing her up with a win, "But we're deep thinkers." The gentle understatement underscores the film's clearest triumph. Few if any can boast its sustained richness of spoken language. Beyond argot, there is speech with range and color, nuanced wit, thunderous bombast and insults of unrivaled vividness.

With the Jenny-Johnny-Amsterdam love triangle introduced, the last of the narrative's interlocking conflicts has been set. Yet the next scene where night fireworks kindle a building raises our suspicion it was originally part of the previous night’s abolitionist parade. Whatever the exigencies of Gangs' final edit, juggling multiple characters, stories and perspectives -- the wealthy uptown Schermerhorns, troopships unloading Union dead, Tweed and the Butcher's dueling city fire departments -- complicates a narrative already freighted with allusion. Each element, like the knife whose significance is key to the film's reworking of Hamlet, threatens to be lost in the welter of accruing symbolic registers.

The registers raised on Amsterdam's road to revenge, a road which entails his insinuation into the Butcher's favor, are a prime example. He becomes both adopted son, mentee to mentor as the Butcher was to Priest Vallon, and its opposite, rebellious angel, re-posing the essential question of the prologue: Was Priest Vallon God come to reclaim hell, or heaven’s usurper, Satan? Amsterdam's acceptance and later betrayal of Bill the Butcher also casts him as Judas to Bill’s Christ. Add to this Amsterdam's romantic rejection and eventual acceptance of Jenny Everdeane, the promiscuous pickpocket and you have Jenny as both Eve (spoiled by prior carnal knowledge of the Butcher) to his Adam, and Magdalene whore to his tempted Christ. The field of possible interpretations seems deliberately over-determined. Little wonder the Five Points plaza, "Hell's Gate” / "Paradise Square”, is to be read as both Hell and a pre-industrial Days of Heaven-like Garden of Eden.

The result is a film whose enigma structure, the Barthesian sense, has displaced suspense questions, the "what comes next", an expectancy audiences find compelling, in favor of a mythological whodunnit. Viewers are tasked with identifying and reassessing symbolic relationships. At one level, those relationships inscribe a metaphysical battle for priority. (For instance, how we decide which of these characters is God, which the Devil, depends on who came first.) It's a cosmological version of the perennial American conflict at the center of the story, the battle each native-born generation wages with each subsequent wave of immigrants. In transliterating that conflict, questions of identity and valuation (Who represents 'good', who 'evil'?) form the enigma structure and the film's thematic key. Priority becomes a central figuration.

IV

In A Map Of Misreading, Harold Bloom, the great expositor in our day of literary influence, particularly in terms of priority and belatedness, took special note of Paradise Lost. Elaborating the theory of poetry he set out in The Anxiety Of Influence, Bloom's insight is that in the crucible of creation strong poets only escape the powerful gravitational pull of their poetic precursors by strategies (ratios) derived from misprisions, creative misreadings of the earlier works. The 'misreading' (all readings are misreadings by Bloom's lights) allows the poet the necessary distance, an opening for a reinterpretation, a reimagining, a correction of the poetic material they have (and always will have) come upon belatedly and that threatens to otherwise hold them in thrall. In this sense poets don't choose precursors; they are chosen by the earlier works their work must inevitably stand in relation to. At the moment when the new poet is drawn closest to his precursor’s great work, a powerful exchange takes place that alters both the new poet and perhaps, eventually, even the precursor. This Bloom calls, after Freud, the Primal Scene of Instruction. The intent, the ambition of the successor poet is to transcend his predecessors by so fully appropriating and reworking their materials that they become entirely the new poet’s own. He calls this overcoming of them a “transumption”.

Milton's tactic in Paradise Lost for overcoming his precursors Bloom finds singularly instructive. Milton's aim, he says, "is to make his own belatedness into an earliness, and his tradition's priority over him into a lateness." (7) Milton does this by a strategy of allusive inclusion, "giving Milton the true priority of interpretation, the powerful reading that insists on its own uniqueness...and accuracy." (8) Looking at the passage in Paradise Lost where Beelzebub urges Satan to address his fallen legions, Bloom says "Milton's giant simile comparing Satan's shield to the moon alludes to the shield of Achilles in the Illiad... also the shield of Radigun in The Faerie Queen... Satan's spear evokes passages of Homer, Virgil, Ovid... The tree and the mast become interchangeable... and emblematic of the brutality of Satan as the Antichrist" (9) . A host of monstrous giants in Tasso, Virgil and Homer, notably Polyphemous the Cyclops, "all become late and lesser versions of Milton's earlier and greater Satan." (10) Milton's transumption, Bloom points out, is guided by a single near-contemporary reference at the opening of this passage. The reference, in fact, appears extrinsic (out of place): it is Galileo's telescope. The implication, the strategy, is to remind the reader Milton looks back. That he, like Galileo may be late, but by it is able to see more, and more accurately than his precursors. (Something like Galileo's telescope, I think, motivates Scorsese's much criticized closing shot to Gangs Of New York, the view of New York City with the World Trade Center still standing. It's meant to lend transumptive perspective to what has preceded. To remind us that we have a broader view than those whose lives have preceded ours. And to underscore our own witness to world-changing events.)

Given Bloom’s ideas it’s unsurprising then that Gangs is heavily allusive. Only by recognizing and absorbing its precursors can it realize its ambitions -- to retrace, reconfigure, and assume belated priority over its core material, the modern United States’ foundational story, the Civil War, and the national art’s original sin.

V

For Scorsese and Gangs the relevant precursor is D.W. Griffith, though not Intolerance, but rather Birth Of A Nation, Griffith's unreconstructed Reconstruction story. With its simplistic black and white racial and moral dichotomizing, its predatory 'freed' slaves laying siege to the flower of lilywhite Southern maidenhood, Birth Of A Nation remains American cinema’s original sin. It has never found adequate redress, and can’t while films and documentaries continue to be irresistibly drawn to the powerful, ennobling emotions they can evoke by presenting the Civil War as a Cain and Abel struggle between an idealized rural past and the North’s desire to end slavery and preserve our Union.

Roger Ebert recently wrote of Griffith and Birth Of A Nation: "'It is like writing history with Lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true,' President Woodrow Wilson allegedly said after seeing it... The words are quoted onscreen at the beginning of most prints... The quote is suspiciously similar to Coleridge's famous comment about the acting of Edmund Kean ('like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning')." Ebert goes on to point out that Wilson's secretary wrote a denial he ever said such a thing (11).

For Griffith the fact that theatre and literary sources were readily fungible to film's promotions was a warrant of the new medium as an art. A healthy lack of inhibition about appropriating material may explain another perplexity in film history, why a famous Griffith quote repeats the exact words Joseph Conrad used in his preface to Nigger Of The Narcissus (1897). Conrad wrote, "My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see." Lewis Jacobs in "The Rise of the American Film" (NY: Teachers College Press, 1939 pp: 118-119) attributed this utterance to D.W. Griffith. "The task I'm trying to achieve is, above all, to make you see." (It nests in an earlier citation in the same passage to Grau's The Theatre of Science, p. 86, 1914. (12))

Linguistics tells us it is highly unlikely that these quotes enjoy independent origins. Conrad’s quote has the advantage not merely of priority. At the time of its attribution to Griffith, the quote had currencybecause of the cinema. Moving picture images had, in fact, already inspired authors to a revisioning of their medium, and its precursors, years earlier. (13)

However, lack of authentication (see footnote xii) hasn’t dissuaded generations of film writers and teachers from keeping alive an utterance Griffith either likely never made, or simply borrowed. Shame, the inability to face reality -- one’s sinful, belated nature – was once part of cinema’s own “gaze” as a youthful, late-arriving art form. Like Amsterdam and Scorsese in Gangs, the cinema may also be in need of further reexamining its Primal Scene of Instruction.

The most damaging representation in Birth of a Nation lay in its depiction of black depravity in the wake of Reconstruction. Its scenes of drunken black legislators and harassed white womanhood gained sympathy for Jim Crow laws that survived late into the Twentieth Century. Consequently any corrective to Griffith’s racist 1915 masterpiece has to address Jim Crow where it began, which was not in the South, but in the segregated cities of the North even before the Civil War. (14) In setting its revenge drama within perhaps the North’s ugliest outbreak of anti-Negro, anti-federal and anti-war violence, the Draft Riots of 1863, Gangs of New York attempts to trump Birth of a Nation. It hopes to bring a broad audience to a view of the North’s own virulent racism, an urban form that would only later be codified in the antebellum South.

But to do so Gangsof New York must now resume its tale in belatedness. Bill and young Amsterdam come late to their story. Jumping ahead sixteen years, the vengeance apparently called for in the prologue now takes a bead on its target in a world irrevocably changed. In this sense the “stakes” of the story are at risk of seeming irrelevant.

When Amsterdam finally comes face-to-face with his father’s killer, the fiercely appraising gaze he encounters is not of the man he expected. Amsterdam comes to Satan’s Circus, Bill’s saloon, with Johnny to pay him a cut for a robbery they committed during the fire. But the iron-fisted crime lord keeps a shrine to Priest Vallon in a place of honor on the bar’s mantle. A yellowing newpaper account of their epic, year’s-ago battle at Five Points is his most cherished position. Bill’s respect for a worthy opponent, for a man who shared his code, a code of honor among outlaws, attests to Bill’s growing sense of belatedness, of nostalgia, of being a man out of time.

Even as events build toward confrontation, as Amsterdam gains Bill’s trust solely for the purpose of exacting his revenge, there’s a growing ambivalence. Tweed jabs at Bill’s soft spot for the past, exclaiming of the hordes of Irish disembarking at the docks, “That’s the building of our country right there, Mr. Cutting. Americans aborning!”

The Butcher: "I don't see Americans. I see trespassers, Irish harps who'd do a job for a nickel what a nigger would do for a dime and a white man used to get a quarter for..."

Tweed: "I know, I know, you're a great one for the fighting, Bill. But you can't fight forever… You're turning your back on the future."

Having earned a place “under the dragon’s wing,” Amsterdam casts an uncertain glance back as Bill turns him away from Tweed’s jibing, asserting, “It’s not our future.” Bill knows his Bowery gangs, the vividly named Plug Uglies, Shirt Tails, and Daybreak Boys are rapidly becoming irrelevant to the new order. Behind them Tweed oversees these new immigrants being granted instant citizenship in exchange for immediate enlistment. It’s a transaction made necessary by the North, which has allowed the rich to pay their way out of conscription.

Appropriately, Gangs’ corrective to Birth of a Nation doesn’t re-vilify the South. The liberal uptown Schermerhorns are portrayed as socially unwitting as Tweed and Officer Mulroney (John C. Riley) give them a guided tour of the Five Points. Their abolitionist views prevailed, we will come to see, not because the industrial North was morally receptive, but because its appetite for cheap labor gave it every incentive to dismantle the anti-competitive, “free labor” system of the South.

VII

Shortly after Tweed's jibing, Amsterdam leaps to his feet at a performance of Uncle Tom's Cabin. As Bill and his cohorts jeer Mopsy he turns aside an assassin's bullet. Recalling Birth Of A Nation's famous Lincoln assassination, a scene so venerable it's at times mistaken for the event itself, Scorsese's scene seems an uncanny foreshadowing of it, a death foretold. Seeing Bill grazed, Amsterdam, in a fury. seizes the gun and kills the Irish gunman.

The maelstrom of self-loathing that results from slaying a kinsman in defense of his father’s murderer drives Amsterdam into Jenny Everdeane’s arms. His moral superiority dashed, he wakes from a troubled sleep only to start at a nightmare sight. There, in a rocking chair, bare-chested, bloody American flag draped around his wound, sits Bill the Butcher Cutting, Jenny’s former lover. But for all the vision’s Grand Guignol, Bill, with his American Eagle glass eye trained on them, is a beneficent presence, drunkenly watching over them. There to express his gratitude, Amsterdam listens, stunned as Bill now holds forth, delivering his most profound tutelage, the lesson of shame he learned at the hands of Amsterdam’s father, Priest Vallon, in the beating that cost Bill his eye.

Gangs ’ cosmological whodunit arrives at its apotheosis when Bill leaves the room and Jenny wakes to find Amsterdam struggling with conflicted feelings. "Who are you?" she demands in exasperation, for his identity crisis, his confusion of loyalties and purposes, at this point now mirrors the film's own. The question itself proves transformative. Rising, Amsterdam storms out into the night to take up hurling the knife that killed his father.

The pivot on which Gangs now reverses earlier symbolic assumptions is the annual celebration of the nativists' victory over the Irish gangs at Paradise Square. In accord with his father's order to never look away, that “When you kill a king, you don’t stab him in the dark. You kill him where the whole court can watch him die,” Amsterdam steps from the crowd and hurls his knife as Bill ritually quaffs a fiery glass of whiskey. Alerted to his plan by Johnny, Bill miraculously deflects the knife and proceeds to mercilessly beat the young traitor. Sparing his life, he disfigures him, marking his cheek with the point of a red hot blade. Though the Butcher's brutality makes the revaluation equivocal, in one register the enactment recasts young Vallon as the rebellious angel Lucifer who God, the Butcher, has spared and cast out.

As for Amsterdam as Hamlet, we and he are asked to rethink his role. This Hamlet's father was not, in fact, poisoned. Defeated in combat, the knife that should have accompanied Priest into death ("He may have need of it to cross to the other side" the Butcher had suggested) was wrested from him by Amsterdam. If this Hamlet's ghost troubles the night it is the son's doing. Amsterdam/Hamlet has, apparently, not properly understood his teaching.

VIII

Perhaps not accidentally that critical moment in the prologue where Amsterdam is instructed by his father, Priest Vallon, fits in all its particulars the event Bloom finds definitive for precursor poets and their ephebes (their poetic successors), the “Primal Scene of Instruction.” The setting in which the powerful core truth of the precursor is passed on (i.e., “read” and, invariably, misread), Bloom observes, “becomes ever more primal as our society sags around us.” (15) – It’s a truth literally enacted in the Butcher’s grotesque midnight Scene of Instruction and underlined when he leans forward to Amsterdam and ironically vouchsafes that “Civilization is crumbling.”

A further lead from Bloom may [repetitive/unnecessary]help us to follow the Scorsese film’s logic:

Milton’s Satan may stand as representative of the entire canon when he challenges us to challenge Heaven... Any teacher of the dispossessed… will serve the deepest purposes of literary tradition and… his students when he gives them possession of Satan’s grand opening of the Debate in Hell...

With this advantage then
To union, and firm Faith, and firm accord,
More than can be in Heav'n, we now return
To claim our just inheritance of old... (16)

Satan’s call contrasts with Bill’s opening battlecry -- “To settle for good and all who holds sway over the Five Points” -- while echoing Milton. The enigma of the prologue, the curious sense of collusion between enemies in Priest’s ambiguous command to “Finish it!” resonates forward.

Amsterdam, having failed to dispatch the Butcher, outcast and disfigured, has to once again face his father’s final words and revise his understanding of them. As Jenny nurses him in the warrens he’s visited by Monk McGinn. Priest’s desire, McGinn explains, was to secure a corner of America for his “tribe,” and, he wonders aloud, if perhaps eventually “more.” (This aside will prove Monk’s finer tuition.) Then why, Amsterdam angrily demands, did McGinn rifle his dead father’s pockets? Fetching out what he took, McGinn unveils the cased razor. Transforming McGinn’s act of greed into Amsterdam’s misreading of it, the blade ("The blood always stays on the blade, Boy.”) reappears as magically endowed. A charmed deliverance, he takes it as a sacramental token of his original instruction. Revising his understanding, he now sees it as emblematic of a dual mission -- not mere retribution but Irish unity as well.

IX

Declaring open rebellion, Amsterdam resurrects the banned “Dead Rabbits” by symbolically hanging one, and Bill sends Officer Mulroney, Priest’s former crony, to snare the lad. Alert to treachery, Amsterdam leaves him crucified at Paradise Square. These grisly events are merely the opening salvos of the violence to come as the film builds to its climax.

Using Catholicism to unite the Irish, Amsterdam next cuts a deal with Tweed, promising votes in exchange for McGinn’s election as sheriff. The Butcher marshals his forces, and in a stampede of repeat voters both sides flood the polls. Out of ballots, Tweed reassures his workers, “It’s not voters who make elections, it’s the counters.” (It’s one of two darts squarely aimed at the sacred cows of post-9/11 America: The questionable legitimacy of the 2000 Presidential election and the NYFD shown here leading the anti-government riots).

Elected sheriff, McGinn is meat cleavered and bludgeoned to death by the Butcher, an outrage that brings his and Amsterdam’s personal and political grudges to a head. As their gangs gather to face off once more at the Five Points, the draft is instituted and angry citizens storm draft offices all over Manhattan. Crosscuts show no district safe, negroes assaulted, police stations stormed. (In an ironic iconic reference to Potemkin’s Odessa Steps sequence, Scorsese follows looters up past a marble lion baluster in the Schermerhorn home.) On the verge of anarchy, federal troops march in. When a stunned mob fails to heed dispersal orders, Union soldiers open fire. As shock gives way to terror, the soldiers, still firing, wade forward over cobblestones awash in blood. Meanwhile, at the Five Points the battle, already a footnote, is about to commence when federal ships in the East River fire on the city and score a direct hit on Paradise Square.

Their gangs scattered, Bill and Amsterdam literally rise from the ashes. Either shrapnel or the razor handle (we never see Amsterdam wield it) protrudes from Bill’s gut. On their knees, they lurch at one another. Stabbed, Bill, like Priest Vallon, seems almost to welcome it, uttering the film’s final primal enigma as he staggers from their mortal embrace. “Thank god I die a true American.”

The Butcher’s last words resonate, deliberately leaving open a number of interpretations. Not the least would seem to be that in a nation of immigrants one only truly becomes an American in “dying,” in the sacrament of battle. Bill’s legacy, that he was the son of an American soldier killed in the Battle of New Orleans, has been his nativist touchstone.

More subversive are two other interpretations. One is that to "truly" die an American is to die at the hands of the next generation, of a son, if only symbolically. It’s been long noted that powerful intergenerational allegiances are a uniquely American phenomenon. A fledgling nation whose brief history is marked by waves of immigration, migration and technological advance, change may be the country's sole unifying characteristic. “Precursors” and rivalrous “successors” may be a model of poetic transmission that’s, in fact, particularly American. This might explain, for instance, why Bloom's theory of poetry and the Oedipal formulation it derives from are “ideas” thought to bear an American stamp. Their very controversy, in this view, is evidence of their hold on the American imagination.

Yet another interpretation of Bill’s obiter dicta, perhaps the most sinister, is that to die a "true American" is to die a martyr to that ideal, whether embodied by slogans like “America for Americans” or more noble ones like ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. American ideals here, whether they be Bill the Butcher's or the "progressive” abolitionist Schermerhorns, are martyrs to the same forces. Forces of order, market forces imposing their discipline on subjects have determined America's winners and losers these last hundred and fifty years, the United States having been the leading edge of their worldwide deployment during that time.

Delivering readings in multiple registers, the ending of Gangs Of New York also revises the much bruited-about ending of Hamlet. The equivocal way the film dispatches Bill the Butcher is equivalent to having Fortinbras and his invading army disrupt and decide the dueling scene. The federal cannon shots that blindside the battle at Five Points emphasize Amsterdam's Hamlet-like failure to lead. Revenge, personal animus, has once again blinded him to the interests of his tribe, to the import of events in the world.

In so doing Gangs again defies conventional narrative expectations, refusing to clarify events and answer questions the audience has been provoked into caring about -- the who, why and wherefore of Bill the Butcher's death. To moot their importance is to court disaffection. But however much the film may have suffered from commercial abridgment and its own unwieldyness, there can be little doubt that the literal ‘fog of war’ in which Bill dies was intended. Obscuring the end to Gangs' central revenge story keeps faith with the film’s basic aesthetic choices. It confirms its canonically ambitious, if risky, commitment to a complex and allusive ambiguity.

Perhaps most uncharacteristic is this final intrusion of the ‘historic’. Having large, 'impersonal' events foreground Scorsese’s story might be seen as no more than a bow to the conventions of the epic. But to have those events weigh on the outcome is unprecedented, not only for Scorsese, but for any American film epic -- as if Gone With The Wind had concluded with Rhett or Scarlett's death in the Battle of Atlanta. The choice makes History itself the film's subject. With shots of murderous firemen angrily axing negroes and electoral theft portrayed as routine, one can only properly describe Gangs Of New York as simply, in the best sense, Unamerican.

The 'historical' revisioning of our understanding of Gangs which occurs in these final scenes invites a similar review of Scorsese's entire career. Drawing attention to the crushing power of larger social forces, the film emphasizes the futility of gang feuding, the disservice it does the poor and disadvantaged. The theme of tribe and vendetta, of misdirected primal energies is at the core of Scorsese's best work. Often unseen, the hot breath of Darwinian capitalism has always lurked beyond his frame, always driven and devoured his Manichean hero/villains. From Who's That Knocking and Mean Streets through Raging Bull, Taxi Driver and Goodfellas to Casino and The Age of Innocence, his neutral stance toward sociopathy and criminality is given a sharper focus, a transumptive perspective. Gangs suggests that neither indifference nor an amoral worldview alone has permitted Scorsese to thrill-ride with the likes of Travis Bickle and Johnny Boy. It’s as much a moral asceticism, a refusal to condemn losers in landscapes where real choices are an accident of birth. Priest's last command to "Finish it!" contained McGinn's reading of his wanting "more”, more than merely giving his Irish gangs a corner of this new land. Amsterdam was being asked to put a finish to internecine conflict.

X

"It was a week before the city was finally delivered. My father told me we was all born of blood and tribulation and so then, too, was our great city. But for those of us what lived and died in them furious days it was like everything we knew was mightily swept away." -- Amsterdam Vallone, Gangs Of New York

Burying his father's razor across the river to these words of elegy, Amsterdam and Jenny move off, Edenic outcasts. Undergoing a century-and-a-half-long timelapse, our final image -- the New York skyline, the World Trade Center towers still standing -- acknowledges the film’s own latecoming, all that was "mightily swept away" between its conception and realization. Like Bill and Priest’s grave markers in the foreground, the film memorializes the displaced and forgotten. But what world-shaking events erase, Amsterdam’s elegy says, history writes over. Not just the souls of them "what lived and died" are lost, but their knowledge, what was learned of can't be passed along either.

It's a grim view the site of the World Trade Centers towers endorses. In the Schermerhorn billiard room, Horace Greeley tweeks Tweed just prior to the riots. "It's never trouble getting one half the poor to kill the other as you're so fond of saying." Bill Cutting's monocular view, glass eye sealed with the American eagle, was blind to this. Amsterdam glimpsed its self-destructiveness, but in his rage at Bill's slaughter of McGinn, he, Bill and the men they lead are catastrophically blindsided by the war machine that grinds them under.

Likewise, Gangs, too, attempts to unblinkingly face its roots, both “cinematic” and 'literary', Griffith and Peckinpah, Shakespeare and Milton. But in the ash and dust, the florid loquacity of its Satanic central figure, the visual hyperbole and prevailing deity, Mars, there is more than a passing likeness to another contemporary work -- Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. Scorsese is frequently mentioned as the director who could most ably translate the highly praised novel’s crepuscular vision. Whether or not it influenced Gangs, McCarthy's work deserves remarking in this context. First, as it marks a new twaining in the confluence of the literary and cinematic, the first 'canonical' literary work whose primary precursors are films. Published in 1985, it seeks transumptive priority over a distinct corpus of late 60's and 70's Westerns. The films, all set in arid desolation, share isolated, brutal heroes who embody their landscapes' inexorable law of survival. These include most notably Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, and TheBallad of Cable Hogue, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and Bring Me The Head Of AlfredoGarcia, but equally Sergio Leone's Man With No Name trilogy among notable others like High Plains Drifter and El Topo.

Bloom contends the strongest poets succeed late in their careers in capturing and retaining priority over precursors by the oddest and most cunning of revisionary ratios. This strategy untilizes extreme internalization to produce a style in which the "tyranny of time is almost overturned and one can believe, for startled moments, that they are being imitated by their ancestors.” (17) At times, Blood Meridian elicits something similar. Peckinpah, Leone, Siegal and Jodorowsky return, but in McCarthy's colors, speaking in his voices. Bloom describes this as "the triumph of having so stationed the precursor, in one's own work, that particular passages in his work seem to be not presages of one's own advent, but rather to be indebted to one's own achievement."

This ratio dubbed Apophrades, or the Return of the Dead, emerges late in strong poets able to confront the imminence of death. Unsurprising then that a note of elegy rings back across Scorseses's Martian Western. Major elegies don't express grief, Bloom observes, so much as their composer's creative anxieties to which "They offer therefore in consolation their ambition.” Gangs Of New York is nothing if not the aging psalmist of Manhattan, Martin Scorsese's most ambitious work. "Or," Bloom says, "If they are beyond ambition... then they offer oblivion." (18)

The words that conclude Gangs Of New York turn us from ambition, Amsterdam's and Scorsese's, to an undetermined future. “It may be that one strong poet’s work expiates for the work of a precursor,” (19) Bloom suggests. Whether this film and Birth Of A Nation stand in such relation only time will tell. For the principal work of canon-formation is nothing more than the selection of what will continue to be studied and taught and remembered. Perhaps then the film's final words echo Scorsese's own anxieties, how for all an artist's toil and struggle, they, too, in the end remain the fools of fortune and the caprices of time.

"...But for those of us what lived and died in those furious days it was like everything we knew was mightily swept away. And no matter what they did to build this city up again for the rest of time it would be like no one ever knew we was here."

Notes

1. Miramax, Gangs Of New York, press notes, pg. 6

2. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form A Meridian Book, 1965, pg 201, copyright 1949

3. The Baltimore Sun, January 1, 2003, "Scheme team: Screenwriter Jay Cocks and director Martin Scorsese thought big when they hatched their ideas for 'Gangs Of New York.'" By Michael Sragow,

4. Film Form, pg 205

5. Film Form, pg 205

6. Film Form, pg 243

7. Harold Bloom, A Map Of Misreading, 1975, Oxford Univ. Press, pg 131

8. A Map Of Misreading, pg 132

9. A Map Of Misreading, pg 133-5

10. A Map Of Misreading, pg 135

11. Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, March 30, 2003

12. Robert Grau, The Theatre of Science; a volume of progress and achievement in the motion picture industry, New York, London [etc.] Broadway publishing company, 1914 )

The suspect 'original' Griffith quote lacks not only a citation but a clear context: "Asked at this time by Robert Grau... whether... a knowledge of stagecraft was necessary to.. motion picture direction, Griffith replied: No, I do not...the stage is a development of centuries based on certain fixed conditions... The moving picture... is boundless in its scope...The conditions of the two arts being so different, it follows that the requirements are equally dissimilar... Griffith perceived what so many producers have since often forgotten: in the theatre the audience listens first and then watches; in the movie palace the audience watches first and then listens. "The task I'm trying to achieve," said Griffith, "is above all to make you see." The sudden appearance of quotation marks in Jacobs' text seems to indicate they are Jacobs' interpolation from some other source. In any case, the quote itself is inapposite applied to film, the word 'see' stripped of denotative significance. Seeing the filmed scene, after all, is constitutive of movie watching.

13. Here, for example, is Hugh Kenner from Gnomon: Essays On Contemporary Literature, McDowell, Obolensky, 1958, pg 145 : “Conrad and Ford -- it is becoming commonplace to observe -- accepted from Flaubert the view the novelist’s job is to find words, sentence by sentence, for... the light of a torch making the letters of an inscription leap out,” Hugh Kenner wrote in the 1950’s, and that Ford, Conrad’s collaborator, had “retransmitted the discoveries of Stendhal and Flaubert.” These were “(1) the adequation of language to the thing perceived... (2) the importance of making every episode sentence and phrase function--carry forward... ("progression d'effet"); and (3) the principle of juxtaposition without copula of chapter with chapter, incident with incident.” This last, juxtaposition without copula, Eisenstein took to be cinematic “above all.” Film Form, pg 239.

“The whole tendency of 20th-century fiction was to become more...'cinematic'... began with the attempts by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Maddox Ford to elevate ‘showing” over 'telling'.” From James Naremore, The Death & Rebirth of Rhetoric, Senses of Cinema, the Society for Cinema Studies Conference 2000

In light of this it is instructive, even now, to examine a scene from Flaubert’s Sentimental Education (1869):

“The spectators in the stands had climbed on to the benches. The others, standing in their carriages, followed the jockeys” manoeuvres through field glasses; they could be seen as red, yellow, blue and white dots moving past the crowd which lined the whole circuit of the Hippodrome... At a distance their speed did not appear to be exceptional; at the far end of the Champs de Mars they even seemed to slow down, so that they advanced only by a sort of gliding motion... However, coming back quickly, they increased in size; they cut the air as they passed; the earth shook; pebbles flew; the wind, blowing into the jockey’s jackets, puffed them out like sails; and they lashed their horses with their whips as they strained toward the winning post.”

Flaubert’s hero, Frederic, sits among the carriages beside the Hippodrome. As it begins to rain they scatter in a descriptive listing that parallels Eisenstein’s famous exampling of Oliver Twist.

“.. the berlin made off in the direction of the Champs-Elysees in the midst of the other carriages -- barouches, britzkas, wurts, tandems, tilburies, dog-carts... In the meantime the downpour grew heavier. Umbrellas, parasols and mackintoshes were brought out; shouts of 'good afternoon!” - 'How are you keeping?” - 'Fine!” - 'Not so bad!” - ‘see you later!” were exchanged from a distance; and face followed face with the rapidity of magic-lantern slides (italics mine). Frederic and Rosanette said nothing to each other dazed as it were by the sight of all these carriage wheels continually revolving beside them.”

In the first passage, Flaubert establishes a fixed position view that conveys the wonder of perspective, the geometrically progressive explosion of sight and sound. Beyond the catalog of ‘shots” Eisenstein teases out of Dickens with their 'quickening tempo” and 'interweaving… aural elements,” Flaubert’s prose consciously interposes 'optics.” Note the “field glasses.” His language quickens, expands and 'pans” away with the horses. The second paragraph goes further. It explicitly enacts moving images, internalizing them as part of the vertigo of modern life, of a modern self-understanding.

Flaubert is an advance on Dickens. From our belated, broader view, we see what Eisenstein couldn't, that film had already inspired novels, even before the birth of the kinetoscope, whose visual qualities anticipated much later technical developments. This contextualizes Griffith’s quote, his 'borrowing.” In an interplay across time made possible by the imagination, film had already brought into being a literature technically in advance of his Dickensian model. Griffith was already taking back what would only later appear to belong originally to film.

14. The Strange Career of Jim Crow, C. Vann Woodward, Oxford University Press, 1966, pgs. 17-21

15. A Map of Misreading, pg 40

16. A Map of Misreading, pg 40

17. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, Oxford University Press, 1973, pg 141

18. The Anxiety of Influence, pg. 151

19. The Anxiety of Influence, pg. 139

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