Recently, I had the chance to watch a movie I had wanted to see for many years but had never managed: Martin Scorsese’s The Gangs of New York. I was aware of several critics classifying the film as a “lesser” Scorsese work,but I was surprised to see that, regardless of the artistic result, which by the way I very much liked, the movie brought forward fundamental issues in a very poignant way.
Let’s take it from the beginning: is the Gangs of New York another Scorsese mob movie? Yes and no. It is a movie about organized crime and its relations to the corrupt political establishment, violence, prostitution, lives ending abruptly all the time as if they had zero value. But this Scorsese movie goes beyond. Apart from its historical context, it makes a statement, among others, about class conflict, immigration, national identity, racism and the feeling of belonging somewhere.
Indeed, Scorsese has delved successfully into New York’s colonial splendour in an earlier movie, based on the excellent novel by Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence. In both movies, the background is New York City in the 1860s to 1870s, but the lives of their protagonists couldn’t be further apart, even if there were just a few blocks dividing them. We catch a glimpse of the world of the Age of Innocence in the Gangs of New York: it is where Cameron Diaz’s Jenny Everdean grifts for a (still miserable) living; it is there that, when the Draft Riots erupt, the mass breaks into the aristocrats’ mansions, plunders them and threatens or even kills their inhabitants.
This is the backdrop when another mortal gang clash is about to begin, at the finale of the movie. Amsterdam Vallon has sworn to avenge his father; Bill Cutting is ready to bestow retribution to Amsterdam for the betrayal of his trust and friendship. But this clash is never meant to start: the mass disperses under the bombing of the 20th Independent Battery of New York Volunteer Artillery. Amsterdam and Bill are covered in ashes with the latter dying a while later after he is hit by a shell blast and subsequently stabbed to death by Amsterdam.
Scorsese’s statement on the conflict of classes is closely intertwined with the ever-recurrent social issue of immigration. As Coppola had done in The Godfather, Scorsese returns the well-known theme of the arrival of European immigrants’ to New York City. In The Gangs of New York we follow Irish immigration closely. We follow people that are heading from abject poverty to abject poverty plus criminality in their new lives. In addition, the historic juncture is critical: the moment the Irish immigrants set foot in their new homeland they are drafted to fight in the Civil War. And, to top it all off, they will receive a far from warm welcome by the Nativists.
But the inability of societies to adapt to change is not a social phenomenon we have left behind in the 19th century. As the author already mentioned above puts it, “In a nation torn apart by the debate over illegal immigration from Mexico, it is no surprise that the representation of Irish immigrants in Gangs of New York holds a special relevance to modern audiences.” Societies are highly intolerant to injections of new blood, even if they seem to have adequately defined and resolved fundamental but puzzling issues such as national identity; even if this new blood is running in their own family: with sincere surprise and disgust, I found out recently that the Greek neo-nazist and anti-immigration organization “Golden Dawn” has opened up a new chapter in New York City. This chapter is made up by “Nativists” of a sort. Their selective memory shuns out the lives of their grandparents, who arrived in America in ragged clothes, were held on quarantine on Ellis Island and were sharing packed and filthy rooms paying Five Cents a Spot for a night’s lodging.
In the end, what The Gangs of New York teach us is that the world has learned something out of this experience. The US model of presidential democracy, building on the legacy of the Revolution, with all its flaws, has set an example of how to deal with complex issues such as national identity, multiculturalism, equality before the law. No-one has said it better than the director himself: “The country was up for grabs, and New York was a powder keg. This was the America not the West with its wide open spaces, but of claustrophobia, where everyone was crushed together [...] It was chaos, tribal chaos. Gradually, there was a street by street, block by block, working out of democracy as people learned somehow to live together. If democracy didn't happen in New York, it wasn't going to happen anywhere.”
The film is characterized throughout by a scenery of abject poverty. For us non-Americans, but for Americans as well I guess, it is hard to imagine New York City in such a way. The social conditions that the film describes resemble more a Dickensian novel, than what we have in mind as life in the Big Apple: the catacombs and the ethnic clothing, the clashes between fire brigade squads and between Municipal and Metropolitan Police came as a total surprise to my European mind, used to view the 19th century American East Coast under the prism of historic figures like Lincoln and the world of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, all sprinkled with lots of New England splendour.
This is the backdrop when another mortal gang clash is about to begin, at the finale of the movie. Amsterdam Vallon has sworn to avenge his father; Bill Cutting is ready to bestow retribution to Amsterdam for the betrayal of his trust and friendship. But this clash is never meant to start: the mass disperses under the bombing of the 20th Independent Battery of New York Volunteer Artillery. Amsterdam and Bill are covered in ashes with the latter dying a while later after he is hit by a shell blast and subsequently stabbed to death by Amsterdam.
Expectations were being built up towards this battle, the replay of the opening battle, where the reckoning and retribution was meant to happen; but this climax never comes. Or at least not in the way we would expect it. This clash, that seemed so utterly important in the Five Points microcosm, riddled with criminality and misery, is overwhelmed by something much bigger: the conflict of classes.
As is very wisely stated in a relevant article: “The Gangs of New York suggests that questions of ethnic identity in America will inevitably be overcome by more powerful questions of race and class, as the film demonstrates through the eruption of the Draft Riots and how they ultimately render the ethnic gang wars insignificant.” Gangs, mobsters, masses, Irish and Nativists alike, all were to be drafted to fight in a war they barely understood, sympathized with or wanted; all went down with the shell blasts.
Scorsese’s statement on the conflict of classes is closely intertwined with the ever-recurrent social issue of immigration. As Coppola had done in The Godfather, Scorsese returns the well-known theme of the arrival of European immigrants’ to New York City. In The Gangs of New York we follow Irish immigration closely. We follow people that are heading from abject poverty to abject poverty plus criminality in their new lives. In addition, the historic juncture is critical: the moment the Irish immigrants set foot in their new homeland they are drafted to fight in the Civil War. And, to top it all off, they will receive a far from warm welcome by the Nativists.
In the reactions of the Nativists to the massive flow of Irish immigration, we see once again the same old story of racism and resistance to anything new, of conservatism that hampers people from realizing the historic changes going on and vehemently opposing realities that are sure to unravel around them. The Nativist ideals of the day are impersonated by Daniel Day Lewis’s brilliantly vicious Bill Cutting. Bill Cutting thinks of “Americanness” as a bond of blood - his father had fought in the Revolution against the British Empire, therefore, to him, only citizens that have contributed to the birth of their nation can claim to be American. People who just arrived? Send them back to Ireland.
But the inability of societies to adapt to change is not a social phenomenon we have left behind in the 19th century. As the author already mentioned above puts it, “In a nation torn apart by the debate over illegal immigration from Mexico, it is no surprise that the representation of Irish immigrants in Gangs of New York holds a special relevance to modern audiences.” Societies are highly intolerant to injections of new blood, even if they seem to have adequately defined and resolved fundamental but puzzling issues such as national identity; even if this new blood is running in their own family: with sincere surprise and disgust, I found out recently that the Greek neo-nazist and anti-immigration organization “Golden Dawn” has opened up a new chapter in New York City. This chapter is made up by “Nativists” of a sort. Their selective memory shuns out the lives of their grandparents, who arrived in America in ragged clothes, were held on quarantine on Ellis Island and were sharing packed and filthy rooms paying Five Cents a Spot for a night’s lodging.
But change always becomes self-evident in the end, even though it has first been ridiculed, fiercely and violently opposed. What politician “Boss” Tweed says to Amsterdam, "I love the Irish, son, but higher than alderman you shall never climb," seems ironic since less than a century later, the first Catholic American of Irish origins occupied the highest office. It was the same ironic smirk I had on my face while watching certain scenes of Lincoln: “Who among us is prepared to give Negroes the vote? What shall follow upon that? Universal enfranchisement? Votes for women?” 21st century reality in the Western hemisphere would give many of these 19th century fellows quite a shock. I sincerely hope that, 100 years from now, conservatives of our age would be subject to the same sort of shock.
In the end, what The Gangs of New York teach us is that the world has learned something out of this experience. The US model of presidential democracy, building on the legacy of the Revolution, with all its flaws, has set an example of how to deal with complex issues such as national identity, multiculturalism, equality before the law. No-one has said it better than the director himself: “The country was up for grabs, and New York was a powder keg. This was the America not the West with its wide open spaces, but of claustrophobia, where everyone was crushed together [...] It was chaos, tribal chaos. Gradually, there was a street by street, block by block, working out of democracy as people learned somehow to live together. If democracy didn't happen in New York, it wasn't going to happen anywhere.”
