#MY LITTLE PONY BEATLES LETS FUCKING GO!!!!! love those guys

[ethanbobethan]

dancing around in circles until my little feet fall off

[bnrobertson1]

THOUGHTS ON “THE IRISHMAN” (BRNR #26)

My introduction to the peerless works of Martin Scorsese began as a quest for something somewhat different: softcore pornography. I was 12ish and while my dad never ponied up for the Cinemax/ HBO package, for some reason we kind of got Cinemax, or at least its static-filled approximation, on our living room TV. For an internet-less pre-teen disastrously crashing into puberty, this Cable company mix-up taught me the importance of enjoying life’s happy accidents.

Here’s how it worked: with my parents asleep and me left to my groaningly embarrassing druthers, I would pray to whatever deity sent me the scrambled Cinemax signal to also hook a bruh up with some tastefully shot augmented bosoms-focused programming. Mind you, this was before a Channel Guide let you know what you were watching, so sometimes you just had to approach watching like fishing, hoping that whatever this fuzz was would shape into someone getting freaky-deaky, and soon.

It was on one of these prideful nights that I encountered something I at first hoped was a Red Shoe Diaries episode starring the guy from No Escape*. He was with one of the crooks of Home Alone, someone who looked familiar but whose name escaped me, and some less-than-handsome guy who appeared to be wearing a really bad toupee. They were walking to a car and saying “fuck.” A lot. Then, after entering the car, the Home Alone actor nonchalantly shoved an icepick into the Toupee Guy’s head, afterwards commenting something along the lines of “Maybe that’ll shut him the fuck up.”

*A Ray Liotta-starring vehicle I TREASURED growing up, mostly due to its innovative violence.

I didn’t know I was watching Goodfellas, but I knew I was mesmerized. It was violent, it was funny, it moved quickly, it did pushed buttons in my nervous system I didn’t know existed. It somehow made the sting of not watching Shannon Tweed dry-hump a decorated general evaporate. Goodfellas simply crackled with life, even when almost indecipherable due to the static-filled presentation. There was a brute, beautiful honesty to it that the things I was getting exposed to simply lacked. My perception of what art was obliterated and resurrected in the course of about 45 minutes.

Flash forward roughly 24 years. The Irishman, Scorsese’s newest highly anticipated mob drama, hits theaters in a culture far from the one that greeted Casino or The Departed. Instead of the automatic praise that usually greeted Scorsese, a new environment questioned his cinematic contributions mostly due to the lack of representation of (a) minorities and (b) women. While some of these criticisms are fair if a little silly*, the simmering became a raging fire after Scorsese commented on his inability to connect to the movies of the Marvel Universe**.  

*It’s a bit like saying Te-Nehisi Coates hasn’t developed a full voice because he hasn’t written a Jane Austen-esque romp through Victorian England. Or that Lou Reed’s status as legend is flawed because he never released a yodeling album. Artists are allowed to have focus. It’s OK.  

**My only thought about the Scorsese vs. Marvel debate, as someone who quite likes a lot of the Marvel movies: They’re algorithms (albeit very fun ones), and Scorsese is 100% right. I also hope the people who are breathlessly defending Disney against America’s best filmmaker will one day have enough clarity to see that siding with an imagination-torching corporation against an independent artist just sucks.    

The most concise review* I can give of The Irishman is this: it’s the Scorsese mafia movie that pretends the Rolling Stones never existed. In fact, he seems to go out of his way to not mention them in one scene where De Niro’s narrator comments on Jimmy Hoffa’s popularity rivaling that of Elvis and the Beatles. While Casino and Goodfellas never approves of the mafiaso lifestyle**, it does show its appeal with slick music, dialogue, costumes, cinematography, actors, etc. Those films, especially Casino, have operatic narratives, clearly connecting them to millennia-old Roman myths.    

*I already failed. I realize this.

**This part seems lost on a lot of Scorsese haters. Joe Pesci’s Nicky Santoro is beaten to death after watching his brother suffer the same fate, and his Tommy DeVito is shot in the back in the head- does that really seem like a glorification of a lifestyle?

The Irishman is less indebted to Rock n’ Roll and epics as the Catholic church, or more specifically, Catholic guilt. This guilt weighs heavy on every frame. And this dive into Christitan scruples goes than the top-line perspective of “that’s bad and should be punished and that’s good and should be praised” of some of his other mob epics. There is no shooting of guns in handbags after truck hijacking. Or close-ups of hands in general. There is a hand-stomping scene, but it’s depicted in such a matter-of-fact way it is obviously not a heralded act*. The soon-to-be-curriculum cab demolition scene is scored by an ominous, brooding soundtrack, not the coked-up WHEES of Mick Jagger (or Harry Nilsson for that matter**). Instead, Scorsese’s focus is on bigger, more abstract themes, such as impermanence and the point of existence itself - questions that are frankly terrifying because the answers do not exist, much less reassure/ satisfy.

*Speaking of the hand stomp, many point to this and some of the stranger looking faces as flaws of the film. I’d argue that one of the film’s biggest themes is the fallibility of memory. It’s a striking juxtaposition to put your current self in the past, yet we all do it naturally. I also realize I’m a huge nut when it comes to Scorsese and maybe twisting myself crooked to defend all of his techniques.

**Maybe the best scene in all of film? 

The Irishman often feels like a mea culpa- a heart-felt apology for any damage Scorsese’s more flamboyant films may have done to the culture at large. The amazing thing about the film is how well Scorsese seemed to predict criticism without merely sycophantically answering it. You say my films don’t feature women enough? Well how about a film where the main actress has about 7 words*? That’s not to say the film is a preachy drag because it’s anything but. It’s still funny (sometime riotously so) and moves insanely quickly for a film 30 minutes longer than Casino. The acting is superb, as is the strikingly methodical editing. The first 2/3 of the movie feels like a Goodfellas or Departed- the last third, especially after the climax, feels paced like his Catholic meditation, Silence. “It is What is It is,” the film’s quasi-mantra, nicely sums up its feelings on impermanence, something that will probably affect us all, even Marty.

*It’s almost like Anna Paquin knows that the number of lines and contribution to a film are not always directly related.

But trying to paraphrase- or comment on- what The Irishman is trying to say is really missing the point. It’s a uniquely cinematic work that speaks a cinematic language. Written words are not suitable to mine its deeper meanings, only experiencing it, and meditating on it, does.

I could go on and on about the voluminous excellence of this film. Simply put, I love it. It does feel like ol’ Marty won’t be making anymore, but what a fucking fantastic way to bow out of the genre he revolutionized. He’s made five better than anybody else (Francis Ford Coppola excluded- kind of). And he ended it with such a reflective, brilliant exclamation point, he might have just proved himself the exception to the whole “impermanence” thing.

But while I’ll defend the intellectual merits of his works ‘til the day I can’t, I’ll always associate Scorsese with pornography. A little forbidden, a little dangerous, but capable of reveal orgasmic- and embarrassing- truths to those willing to forgo the comfort of societal norms and allow themselves to be illuminated by the flame of unflinching honesty. Grade: A++