Suddenly, everything is Scorsese. The not-so-invisible hand of the director raised in the New York neighborhood of Little Italy handles, rather than just inspires, all the cinema that is released. Scorsese is in the syncopated editing of punches in The Smashing Machine, by Ben Safdie, reminiscent of Raging Bull. Scorsese is present in the adrenaline-fueled rhythm of One battle after another, by Paul Thomas Anderson, following the pattern patented in Goodfellas. The Scorsese of After Hours breathes in the uninhibited and unbiased cinema displayed in Requiem for a Dream, by Darren Aronofsky. The corrosive Scorsese of The King of Comedy fuels that great dark comedy that is Eddington, by Ari Aster. And Scorsese is, indeed, Scorsese in every second of the five-part mural series premiered by Apple TV+ directed by Rebecca Miller, where Scorsese speaks and speaks. He speaks live and speaks through the extensive collection of interviews given throughout his life. He speaks through family photos, the voices of childhood friends, memories of collaborators, and, of course, through his cinema heavily influenced by John Cassavetes as well as Orson Welles, Elia Kazan, Michael Powell, or the countless films analyzed, restored, or recovered by the devoted cinephile that he is, indeed, Scorsese. Everything is Scorsese.
"I imagine," reflects director Rebecca Miller on the other side of the zoom, "that from time to time, and much less frequently than we tend to think, there are authors who invent something. Shakespeare invented the term 'eyeball.' Before him, that periphrasis did not exist. Scorsese incorporated his soul into the profound knowledge of the history of cinema that he possesses. And that is why I believe his films never go out of style. He has achieved a very emotional cinema, but not at all sentimental. Much is said about the graphic and explicit violence in his films, but, in truth, what is relevant is the internal violence. What makes him eternal is precisely that unbreathable tension in each of his shots from his first short films (or even from the naive storyboards he made as a child) to The Moonlight Killers."
Mr. Scorsese, that is the title of the series, reviews the life and work of the filmmaker, but, and this is relevant, as he would in a film of his own. At times, the director becomes a character of himself and exhibits himself as violent, euphoric, failed, full of energy, and finally, as the man with bushy eyebrows, wise, calm, older, and indifferent to himself that he is now. We see him as a child, sick with asthma, in his feverish learning time alongside Roger Corman, in his cocaine years, in the moment he thought he would die, in his coronation as "the mafia movie guy," in each of his crises of faith... We see him, tender and attentive, caring for his wife Helen Schermerhorn, afflicted with Parkinson's. We always see him different and always Scorsese. We see him live and in person, and we see him through his longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, through his longtime musicians, Robbie Robertson and The Rolling Stones, through his inseparable longtime colleagues Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day Lewis (who happens to be the director's wife), Spike Lee, Steven Spielberg... And we also see him through the eyes of the daughters from each of his four marriages and, why not, we see him through the eyeballs, as Shakespeare would say, of the real neighborhood thug from which the character Johnny Boy (De Niro) in Mean Streets emerged.
A curiosity. In his cinema, low-angle shots abound, subjective shots of someone looking out the window at what is happening outside. That is indeed the master shot of a child with asthma condemned to be a spectator from the seclusion imposed by the disease of a world that is alien to him and, at the same time, belongs to him. Brilliant is the collection of scenes always from the eyes (or should we say eyeballs?) always surprised of Scorsese.
The most delicate and tense moment in this landscape of Scorsesean visions arises when Scorsese himself confesses, after the success of Taxi Driver and right after the cocaine-fueled orgy that the shootings of New York, New York and The Last Waltz became, that he wanted to end it all in the most radical and existential sense. "Most of me wanted to die," he says. "Why?" asks Rebecca Miller behind the camera. "Because at that moment, I couldn't do my job anymore. I felt unable to create," he concludes somewhat melodramatic, but one would say sincere. As sincere as violent in his stillness. "The truth is that moment left me speechless. I didn't really know how to continue," the director recalls in retrospect. "Live, it's like in his films. The level of honesty is unmatched by anything, not by modesty or shame," she adds.
The most revealing and, in its own way, controversial part of Mr. Scorsese always revolves around violence. There is a specific event that may be identified as the Rosebud that determined everything. Scorsese recounts that his childhood passed happily in what he does not hesitate to describe as Eden in Corona, Queens. There, families, almost all of Italian origin, lived in a bubble away from the noise and, indeed, the violence of bustling Manhattan. Until something changed everything. His father, Charles, a textile district worker, got into a street fight with the landlord. "No one knows exactly why... But I do remember precisely that someone pulled out an axe," says the filmmaker without giving more details. In the end, everything was resolved, there was no blood, but the Scorsese family had to move. They were literally expelled from paradise. Violence threw them into the violent Elizabeth Street in violent Little Italy. Violence for violence, perhaps the director who best and most violently portrayed the roots of violence itself had just been born.
"When Raging Bull was released," Miller takes the floor, "a journalist asked him about the violence in his films. It's an interview from 1970. He responds that violence is nothing more than a symptom of an illness. And when the reporter insists and asks him about what ailment it is, he answers: 'The loss of oneself, violence is the result of the loss of the soul.' And Miller continues: "Violence in Scorsese is intimately related to his Catholicism. He always identifies with the sinner, hence the torment that each of his characters exudes as expiation of his guilt, his sins, his corrupted and lost soul. Scorsese always identifies with the sinner, and all his compassion is towards him."
The filmmaker, as is well known, wanted to be a priest and even entered the seminary from which he was eventually expelled. Once again out of paradise. "I simply discovered the outside world in an explosive era of rock and roll, the fight for civil rights...," he says as the only explanation for his not-so-holy defenestration. His faith presides over all his work from The Last Temptation of Christ to Silence passing through Kundun until reaching the untitled future film about the life of Jesus. And alongside it, inseparably, once again, violence. Violence on and off the screen. When The Last Temptation of Christ was released, extreme right-wing religious fanatics labeled it as satanic. "Today I saw the devil in person," a spectator is heard saying. And in its own way, the explicit violence tainted with incomprehension and intolerance that Christ himself suffers in the film is what, with some distance, the same film endured. And even he himself.
Isabella Rossellini (his third wife whom he married in 1979) recalls the near-death experience of her ex-husband back in 1978 and his destructive temperament in the late 70s. "He could demolish a room," she says. She remembers the mornings when he would wake up angry, muttering "to hell, to hell" over and over again, and for each memory, she smiles. Time heals everything. "Work first and therapy later took care of taming so much anger," she states. But there were more episodes of unrestrained behavior with no more faith than the one that burns. Just after the filming of Taxi Driver, Columbia demanded the director to edit the entire final bloody sequence. Jodie Foster vividly recalls how much her director enjoyed the meticulous reconstruction of the disaster.
"He was excited about how the blood was made," Foster says. "When he was going to blow the guy's head off, he put small pieces of styrofoam in the blood so it would stick to the wall." "We had a great time," adds Scorsese. But it couldn't be. They couldn't release it with an X rating for adults. Scorsese lost his composure and, gun in hand, headed to the studio ready to burn the film. If anyone was going to destroy the film, he preferred it to be him. Brian de Palma and Spielberg remember the episode. They both burst into laughter. Nothing happened in the end. Years later, during the filming of Gangs of New York, an argument between the director and producer Harvey Weinstein ended with a desk flying out the window. And that's it.
"I think what best sums up Scorsese's character and even his life is an old conversation with Gore Vidal," Miller comments. At one point, the director himself told the writer that in the neighborhood where he grew up, you could only be two things: a priest or a gangster. "And it was Vidal who told him: 'And you became both at the same time'".