By Ed Bayliss
“My whole life has been movies and religion. That’s it. Nothing else.”
(Martin Scorsese)
There exist three films in Scorsese’s portfolio that are explicitly tilted towards the lives of religious figures. This unusual trinity of films consists of The Last Temptation of Christ, Silence, and Kundun. The latter drifts from the bloody trials of Christianity into the meditative stillness of 20th C. Buddhist Tibet, perhaps providing a refuge for the three times divorced Scorsese and the guilt of his lapsed Catholicism.
In The Last Temptation of Christ, the titular Christ shockingly states: “I’m a liar. A hypocrite. I’m afraid of everything. I don’t ever tell the truth. I don’t have the courage. When I see a woman, I blush and look away. I want her…” While screening this film in 1988, the Saint Michel cinema in Paris was bombed and set alight. Scorsese’s rendering of Christ as a man wrestling with his own capricious animalism and a life scripted by a distant and unknowable God became indigestible for many.
The filmmaker’s most recent ‘religious’ film, Silence, took us on a heavily theological journey through Christian persecution in Japan. The central question asked is one of the literal ‘silence’ of God and its relation to theodicy. Slow and brooding, but ultimately rewarding, this contemplative film, I think, mirrors a director who has recovered some sense of religious direction.
What interests me most, however, is the veil of Catholic doctrine that falls lightly but definitely over Scorsese’s remaining films. I would like to expand upon what critic Roger Ebert has spoken of as “Redemption by Blood” and the centrality of blood itself to transformation – a fundamental tenet of Roman Catholicism. Scorsese lifts this Catholic mass inspired image, mangles it, and drops it into the avenues of the Bronx as he remarks in Mean Streets, “You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home.” For directors like Tarantino, violence is style, but for Scorsese, it’s sacramental.
Critic Barbara Mortimer has identified a specific character type in the Scorsese oeuvre, the “postmodern person”; someone whose identity becomes a “matter of impersonation”. Such characteristics can be seen in Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver), Jake La Motta (Raging Bull), and Charlie Cappa (Mean Streets); all of whom attempt cleansing and redemption through the spilling of blood.
For La Motta, a man who sees himself in the mirror but doesn’t know himself, the altar rails of the Catholic mass become the ropes of the boxing ring. The camera pans to blood dripping from the ring rope in an extreme close-up. Jake, having abandoned his wife and his brother, takes to bloodshed and endures physical punishment, a symbol of the sacrament, in a bid to effect a spiritual awakening of sorts. A passage from John’s Gospel closes the film resulting in images conjured which are very much in line with the act of redemption by blood.
Alternatively, Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, self-described as “God’s lonely man”, attempts to map himself as the hero of the narrative. At the climax of the film, we see Bickle stalk through a brothel wielding his Smith & Wesson handgun whose bullets rip through every man he comes across. We follow behind him as he is shot several times while blood, sacrificial blood, issues from all over his body. The words “Jesus loves you” are graffitied on the staircase wall as he ascends. Bickle sees himself as the postmodern-martyr; a title that necessitates death, so he attempts suicide, but his revolver is out of ammo. The ‘hero’ sits on a sofa, blood-soaked, with his head tilted upwards while closing his eyes acceptingly. Jodie Foster’s character collapses to her knees, weeping before Bickle, much like Mary Magdalene at the scene of Christ’s crucifixion.
Harvey Keitel’s character in Mean Streets seeks his redemption not in church but through sacrificing himself for his friend Johnny who is in debt to loan sharks. He admits: “Ten Hail Marys, ten Our Fathers, ten whatever … Those things, they don’t mean anything to me. They’re just words …” One can’t help but hear the pained voice of Scorsese through Charlie Cappa’s (nicknamed St. Charles) moral musings. At the concluding stages of the film, we watch Charlie’s efforts to drive Johnny and his cousin Teresa out of town as they are pursued by hostile ‘debt collectors’. Charlie crashes the car as he is shot in the arm and bleeds while kneeling beside the cleansing spray of a fire hydrant. This is, as critic Joel Mayward recognises, “religious cinema for non-believers.”
Scorsese has said that he “wouldn’t presume to be God’s point of view.” And so, ultimately, he accounts for the loftiness of Christ’s trial by bloodshed in terms of the hardships of the everyman in search of redemption.