ABSTRACT
Martin Scorsese, director of rockumentaries The Last Waltz (1978), Bob Dylan: No Direction Home (2005), and Shine a Light (2008), 3 is known as much for his interest in and inspiration by popular music as for his commitment to auteurism, his belief in personal cinema. And in his fi lms that track the lives of male characters at the edge of law and society-Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967), Mean Streets (1973), GoodFellas (1990), Casino (1995), Gangs of New York (2002), and The Departed (2006)—these concerns are combined. These fi lms revisit and revise the Hollywood gangster genre to put dramatically heightened versions of the immigrant experience on screen, using popular music to narrate the lives of male characters caught between tradition and modernity, between tribal loyalties and mainstream America. As their Italian American and Irish American protagonists fi ght to survive, to stake their claim, and to achieve their versions of the American dream, fi ghts and murders, like song and dance sequences in the classic Hollywood musical, beguile the boredom of the everyday, delay hold the promise of narrative resolution. Scorsese’s “narrative orchestration of violence” is at once typical of the New Hollywood cinema as it emerged in the late 1960s and dependent on his experiments with the pop score. 4
THE TRIBAL MASCULINITIES IN WHO’S THAT KNOCKING AT MY DOOR
Violence has always been a pretty scary thing for me, but I’m fascinated by it, especially by the aimlessness of it. It’s always erupting when you don’t expect it.
