Framing the battle
The long narrative core of Martin Scorsese’s 166-minute epic Gangs of New York (2002) is bracketed by two highly stylized sequences — the first, a dystopian “once upon a time” inside a huge ill-lighted building, and the second, a cinematic dissolution of time in a Brooklyn cemetery.
In the opening sequence, Dead Rabbits gang-leader Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson) arms himself in a highly formalized ritual that could have been drawn from medieval romance or classical epic, after which he and the Dead Rabbits assemble within a chiaroscuroed cross-section out of Dante’s Hell, a murky cacophonous and moiling space innocent of specific time and geography. Nothing in the scene defines where this is, or when, not the clothes, not the weapons, not the diction.
Then Vallon and his crew rush through a tunnel and burst into daylight and time, into the Five Points section of New York City in the year 1846, into Scorsese’s narrative proper.
In the closing sequence, the young thug who narrates the film and provides its point of view, Vallon’s son Amsterdam (Leonard DiCaprio), and his tough pickpocket/burglar/hooker girlfriend Jenny Everdeane (Cameron Diaz), stand in the Brooklyn Heights cemetery in which Priest and his implacable foe, Bill “the Butcher” Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis), leader of the Nativists, are improbably (or ironically) buried in adjoining graves. Amsterdam and Jenny look at a New York skyline that in a few minutes of screen time morphs from the end of New York City Draft Riots of 1863 to not long before 8:45 a.m. on September 11, 2001.
The long middle
Inside that frame are the film’s three primary narrative segments, all of them gory: the 1846 gang fight in Five Points in which Bill the Butcher kills Priest Vallon; Amsterdam’s ambivalent relationship with Bill the Butcher, interwoven with gang violence and New York power politics; and the 1863 military suppression of the Draft Riots.
With a single exception there are no firearms in all the mano a mano and gang against gang violence leading up to Scorsese’s vision of the military attack on lower Manhattan. The exception is Jenny Everdeane’s small pistol, which is used by Amsterdam to put out of his misery a dying friend who has been brutally tortured and mutilated by Bill the Butcher. The same pistol is used a second time after the military violence has begun, by Jenny herself when she’s attacked by a howling mob of women at the docks.
Malefactors in New York had and used firearms in the years leading up to the 1883 Draft Riots, but Scorsese’s thugs find them of no interest or use. Before the naval cannon fire and the army musketry, and with that single exception of the mercy-killing with Jenny’s pistol, all the weapons in Gangs of New York are weapons that might have been used a thousand years earlier in the Old World the members of those battling gangs had left behind: knives, spears, swords, clubs, chains, fists, teeth.
Which is to say, Scorsese depicts violent men and women whose violence was personal and intimate, and they are displaced by an army with its muskets and navy with its cannons that was capable of killing indiscriminately and from afar. Not a bad filmic metaphor for the Civil War, which is the political fabric against which the central narrative of the film is played, but never shown, and for a pivotal point of Old-World America and Modern America, hand-made and mass-produced.
Scorsese has been faulted for inflating the amount of force used by the military in quelling the riots. He depicts navy ships firing exploding cannonballs into lower Manhattan, which never happened. He also depicts soldiers killing a lot of people and a crowd lynching a black man, which did happen.
I couldn’t count the victims of naval bombardment and army rifles in Gangs of New York, but it seemed many more than 150, which is the highest number of deaths I’ve seen recorded in print. But no one knows how many nameless and uncounted dead were buried in mass graves. Who knows exactly how many died in Vietnam or Cambodia or Serbia or Iraq any of the battles in central Africa? How many Native Americans were killed by settlers and the United States army? The proletarian and native dead are always undercounted.
So the fighting is exaggerated and stylized. So are all those westerns that have as a major plot device an encounter that never happened in the real west, the fast-draw gunfight. In the real west, the only people who said, “Draw” were art teachers. Being statistically on the money isn’t the business of epic. Who reads Homer for correct tallies of casualties at Troy or Chanson de Roland for the number of troops Charlemagne really had assigned to his rear guard at Roncevaux?
Gangs of New York is a film epic like Once Upon a Time in the West, The Wild Bunch, and Little Big Man, and it shares a major theme with each of those films: one world is in the process of being consumed by another and an entire way of life is about to disappear into myth and legend. That is why Scorsese’s soundtrack is full of traditional songs, many of them performed by traditional performers. The final music credits lists Alan Lomax’s field work more than any other single source. New York City folklorist Nancy Groce also gets a major credit.
Diction and space
The diction of the Butcher and Priest is absurd, anachronistic; they talk like characters out of 19th century translations of grand epic or medieval romance, but they’re fighting in mud over an empire that is populated by whores, pickpockets and coney-catchers. They live in filth and near-darkness. The Butcher is the epicure of the Five Points world. He talks about cuts of meat and often hands out a package of steaks or chops to people bringing him messages or performing minor services, but when we see him at dinner it’s never anything fancier than a fried steak, quickly seared on two sides, raw in the middle, nothing else on his plate or near it.
Bill the Butcher is absolute ruler of his territory, at least until the naval cannonade and enfilade rifle fire mows down just about everybody. A look at a map of mid-19th century Manhattan shows that his was a tiny territory indeed. He was a short walk from three waterfronts, yet his activities in the film never bring him near water. His territory, Five Points,
is New York City’s mythic slum. Named for the points created by the intersection of Park, Worth, and Baxter streets, the neighborhood was known as a center of vice and debauchery throughout the nineteenth century. Outsiders found Five Points threatening and fodder for lurid prose. Describing a visit in 1842, Charles Dickens wrote: ‘This is the place: these narrow ways diverging to the right and left, and reeking every where with dirt and filth. Such lives as are led here, bear the same fruit here as elsewhere. The coarse and bloated faces at the doors have counterparts at home and all the wide world over. Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays. Many of these pigs live here. Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright in lieu of going on all-fours? and why they talk instead of grunting?’ (From the Foley Square courthouse excavation project website: http://r2.gsa.gov/fivept/fphome.htm )
Scorsese contrasts the brutishness of Five Points with the arrogance of the swells, whose world he previously visited in The Age of Innocence (1993, also starring Day-Lewis): Mr. Schermerhorn (no first name is given for him in the film, but the Schermerhorns were a wealthy old New York family, and Peter Schermerhorn was a major 19th century shipowner), Horace Greeley(founding publisher of the New York Tribune and 1882 Democratic candidate for president against Ulysses S. Grant, most famous for the line, “Go west young man,” which had been uttered previously by John Soule of Indiana) , P.T. Barnum (impresario of the circus freakshow, famous for the line “There’s a sucker born every minute,” which in fact had been uttered by his competitor, David Hannum), and Boss Tweed (chief of the most successful American urban graft machine of the 19th century). All of them are both historical and legendary characters. They comment on the politics of the Civil War and New York City like a Greek chorus, sometimes in their opulent private quarters, sometimes as they wander in and out of the action—once literally on a tour.
These are people about whom much is known, or is thought to be known. Until relatively recently, history belonged almost entirely to those who wrote books and diaries and letters. Herbert Asbury’s The Gangs of New York (1927) is a compendium of loose history, local legend, bits and pieces from the daily press. It is a book that should be filed in the folklore rather than the history shelves. Perhaps the single place those historical and imaginative worlds can merge and be present with equal validity is within the imaginative space of film. In the film’s final sequence, Scorsese rapidly moves from the mythic world of his epic into something very close to real time.
Grave visions
In that closing sequence, Amsterdam and Jenny look across the river at the Manhattan skyline. He tells her that people will in time forget the battles in which they fought in Manhattan and will forget the two of them as well. As his voice drones on, weeds rise around their legs; their two figures become translucent, then transparent, then disappear entirely. Buildings similarly dissolve and skyscrapers take ghostly substance and then solid form in their place. The Brooklyn Bridge fades in to the left. The cemetery disappears and the film ends with a panoramic view of modern Manhattan from Brooklyn Heights as of any recent day up to 8:45 a.m. on September 11, 2001. The twin towers of the World Trade Center are among the last skyscrapers to arise and they are still there as the screen goes dark.
The device or trope of the filmic present morphing into the viewer’s present has been used several times in recent years: the camera-eye looks at a significant scene in the film and it morphs into something later in time. At its most banal, nothing changes but the architecture, as in Tai-Pan (Daryl Duke1986), a corny made-for-tv film, in which undeveloped landscape across the bay from the hero’s perch becomes modern Hong-Kong. The device can be a footnote to the narrative. Barry Levinson’s Bugsy (1991), for example, ends with a small plane going up in rain clouds in 1940s Las Vegas and coming out of the clouds to a nightscape of the Las Vegas Strip in 1991, proving that Bugsy was a man of vision all along. A few lines of type could have done the same thing. The device can be nostalgic, as Scorsese himself at the end of Casino (1995) with Bermuda-wearing tourist and family groups pouring into the joints that only a few frames earlier were populated by the crooks and high rollers we go to Scorsese movies to see. And it can be ironic: in Cradle Will Rock, (l999), Tim Robbins dissolves a late-Depression Broadway funeral for the WPA into Disney Times Square of the day.
Scorsese is not only one of the accomplished living filmmakers, he is also the most aware of film practice and history. He has taught film. He has made two highly-regarded documentaries about film. He is president of the Film Foundation, dedicated to film restoration and preservation, which he founded in 1990 along with Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Sydney Pollack, Robert Redford and Steven Spielberg (they were joined later by Robert Altman and Clint Eastwood). He was instrumental in establishing the Library of Congress’s important American Film Registry.
And he ends Gangs of New York with a film trope that has become almost commonplace. Why would he do that? Is it an easy and sentimental ending or is there something in the morph that is integral to the narrative that just took 166 minutes to unfolded?
The film was ready for release in late 2001 but Miramax shelved it for nearly fourteen months to distance it from the September 11 terrorist attacks. In all that time Scorsese could have tweaked and tuned anything in the film he liked. He could have ended the film before the World Trade Center was built or after it had come and gone. Gangs of New York is reported to have cost $100 million. Tuning the ending would have been peanuts.
But he chose to keep his original ending: that moment, now past, when the World Trade Center was complete and healthy. That moment just before 8:45 a.m. on September 11, 2001, when a different vision of Manhattan’s skyline blazed into the American consciousness.
The Tower’s Manhattan
The World Trade Center changed the configuration of lower Manhattan and dominated its skyline for 31 years. Those two huge narrow boxes shifted the entire balance of the city. And then, one clear Monday morning, they were gone, and the city set about finding a new balance, redefining itself one more time.
It won’t be long before people will look that skyline and at that space at the south end of the island and will not have even a momentary sense of something missing, a sense anyone who lived in New York in those years or who had a television set in 2001 will never be without. Their sense of the missing towers will be like our sense of past structures when we look at any place where something important happened and something else now is: paleolithic Troy under that hill in Hissarlik at the mouth of the Dardanelles, say, or the apartment houses in Brooklyn where Ebbitt’s Field used to be and the Dodgers used to play.
Other structures are now where the two towers were: a tall building, a train station, a memorial. Even though the memorial names the space for what it was and what happened there, it is something else, something different. Change is an active event only for the people inside of it. For those who come later, change is a historical fact like any other.
If you want to experience the past as the present the only place you can do it is in the work of artists capable of giving it breath: great historians, great novelists, great filmmakers.
Ending Gangs of New York with a skyline before the World Trade Center was built would have been a film still back in history, a film in which the prediction of Amsterdam was still in process, but not yet into our time, a film that stopped in the middle of the previous century, a film that left out something we all knew should have gotten into the picture. We would have looked at that shot and thought, “He copped out. He didn’t want us thinking about something nasty.” Ending with a skyline that showed its rise and then absence would have given the film an ending in which the action of the film was itself indeed over, in which nothing was left unfinished.
But ending just before the only change in the New York skyline most of us saw (again and again) enacts what Amsterdam just told Jenny, and it keeps us in the narrative when the screen goes dark. The destruction of the World Trade Center is the most spectacular vision in our recent experience of the transience of the apparently substantial. Stopping the film there brings us into the mythic New York action of the previous 165 minutes. You think Amsterdam is just standing there in this Brooklyn cemetery running his mouth? How can you when you’ve seen exactly what he’s talking about, out beyond where the film ends, out here, in our time.
That final sequence makes us part of their story, at once inside and outside Scorsese’s myth. It brings his myth into real time, and us into the mythic narrative. His film, which begins in the chthonic—literally, a cave beneath a terrible building, in which terrible people prepare themselves for terrible battle—ends with us leaving the darkness of the theater, back on the street, in our city and in our time and in our own story once again, no more free of what we’ve learned in Scorsese’s film than are Amsterdam and Jenny free of what they just experienced as we watched. Nor would we wish to be.