Scorsese's Scorcher: Nationalism as Gang Warfare

Left to the White House, Martin Scorsese''s Gangs of New York might not only not win any Oscars on March 23 but be pulled out of the competition altogether.
For the film, which has been nominated for ten Oscars, is a trenchant allegory of the violent birth pangs of nationalism. Coming as it does at a time when the US is determined to impose its brand of super-nationalism on the international community the film smashes its point home with the impact of a knuckle-duster in the face.
The metaphor is apt. For Gangs is an extremely violent film. The time is the mid-19th century. New York is still an inchoate city, a fragmentary dream of the great metropolis it will one day become. Its social geography is deeply divided. The affluent live in elegant mansions uptown. The span of a bridge away are the slums of the Five Points, festering with crime and vice. The unpaved streets of mud and slush are a primal swamp, a battleground where savagery is only another word for survival.
The two main combatants are Priest Vallon — a self-styled Roman Catholic clergyman who has an eight-year-old son — and the appropriately named Bill Cutting, a butcher both by profession and feral inclination. The Priest and his Dead Rabbits gang represent the new immigrants, mainly from Ireland, who have fled famine and persecution in the old country only to discover in the new world that the battles they sought to escape are ahead of them, awaiting their arrival.
For the immigrants, largely Catholic, are despised and hated by the earlier, mostly Protestant settlers, led by the Butcher, who — with no iota of irony for the indigene American Indians who had been so brutally dispossessed — call themselves Native Americans.
The film begins with a bloody, viscerally choreographed street fight between the Dead Rabbits and the Native Americans. The violence is up close and personal, the slash and thrust of face-to-face combat as orgiastic as the embrace of lovers. The hiss and slither of steel slicing flesh and sinew, the sigh of the knife pulled from the wound in a lingering kiss of farewell, arterial gouts of blood spurting crimson passion.
The corpse-littered field is left to the Butcher, a figure of implacable menace with a glass eye on which is embossed an American eagle, symbol of his fratricidal patriotism.
"The Five Points is like the five fingers of my hand which I clench to make into a fist," says the Butcher, laying claim with the help of vote-seeking politicians to his subterranean realm of thieves, prostitutes, pickpockets, opium dealers and murderers. But unknown to the Butcher, forces far larger than his personal destiny of violence have been set in motion.
The American Civil War between the industrial North and the agricultural South, with its dependence on slave labour, is a volcano waiting to erupt. War breaks out — a naked power struggle with the fig leaf of abolitionism — as the slain Priest''s son, now a young man, returns to avenge his father''s death.
Using the metaphor of gang warfare, Scorsese raises questions as jagged as bone splintering under a meat cleaver: Are nations nothing more than legitimised gangs? Is the death dance of the battlefield the inevitable precursor of the proud march of patriotism, the screams of the wounded and dying the anthem of hope and glory? What is the real instrument of validation, a moral principle or a knife thrust to the guts?
The Civil War, which consolidated and sanctified the American Union, is reflected in the murderous mimesis of the embattled gangs of the city. As the coffins of the slain soldiers are shipped north to New York, the decimated ranks of the Union army find fresh cannon fodder in the form of the immigrants from Europe and Ireland who step ashore on the promised land to be given simultaneously their citizenship and the draft order inducting them into the maelstrom of war. The rich can evade the draft, by paying 300 dollars a head for the privilege. Having nothing else to pay with, the poor settle their dues to the nation with blood and slaughter.
Finally they rise in a mob that streams out of tenements and stinking alleyways to run riot, three days and nights, looting, burning, lynching scapegoat blacks, until they are put down in ferocious reprisal by the militia. The Civil War has come to New York.
In the fetid reek of holocaust unleashed, the Butcher and the Priest''s son grope blindly towards each other, oblivious to all else, ardent for the ultimate intimacy of mutual annihilation, not Cain against Abel, but Cain consummating himself as both killer and victim. Forget the flags and the drums, Scorsese seems to say. Forget the trumpets and the trophies, the banners of chauvinism of the sports arena. This is the real thing. This is nationalism; this is tribal war.
I don''t know how Gangs will fare at the Oscars. Or what, if anything, the White House makes of it. Or, for that matter, the presidential palace in Baghdad. But neither the Butcher nor his arch-enemy, his archetype other, the Priest, would have any difficulty in recognising themselves in the real life scenario being scripted. And they''d have stepped out in joyous despair to meet each other again, secret lovers in an ancient suicide pact.