Chapter 10 Martin Scorsese’s Screening Room: Theatricality, Psychoanalysis, and Modernity in Shutter Island
Stephen Mulhall
Even a cursory survey of the critical literature on Martin Scorsese suggests that a number of shared assumptions underlie its more local disagreements: that Scorsese’s imperial phase ended around the time of Casino (1995), that this non-accidentally coincided with the end of his long collaboration with Robert De Niro and the beginning of his equally long collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio, and that most of his subsequent non-documentary work manifests a loss of aesthetic force that reflects his personal transformation from excit- ing, experimental outsider to respectable member of the Hollywood establish- ment. The most recent edition of a book which contains one of the strongest critical accounts of Scorsese’s work makes these assumptions explicit:
[Since Kundun (1997)] Scorsese has … attempted to redeem himself as a commercially viable film-maker … The period of intense cinematic ex- perimentation seems to have ended with Goodfellas … He has …, in the process, adopted Leonardo DiCaprio as a replacement for Robert De Niro as his container for fictional characters. The difference in the on-screen presence of these two actors is interesting and reveals a lot about Scors- ese’s change in perspective on his work [sic]. Under his direction, De Niro is always full of a menace that threatens, and often succeeds, in spinning out of control [sic] … He is the director’s surrogate, not so much as a char- acter but as a force of directorial assault on the very basic conventions of film-making. The delirium of Scorsese’s early films is tied into the out-of- control delirium of the characters that De Niro and Scorsese create. This is impressed upon the films’ mise-en-scene, which in turn further defines the characters. DiCaprio is an actor of a different order. His characters are largely passive and slow to anger, where De Niro is agitated and ready to spring. DiCaprio seems always somehow hurt, not so much physically (although he takes massive punishment … in Gangs of New York, is almost killed in a plane crash in The Aviator, is shot to death in The Departed, and suffers wrench- ing hallucinations in Shutter Island) as emotionally. He is a recessive
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presence. Whereas De Niro’s body is always on display … – his body can be figured as the screen on which the film is projected – DiCaprio doesn’t have a body. He is a face only, often impassive, pained or quizzical, rare- ly angry, and not psychotic, though he gets close in his portrayal of … Howard Hughes and … Teddy Daniels [in Shutter Island]. But even here, he seems surprised by his behaviour instead of fomenting it or being a victim of it. De Niro’s characters seem always in need of restraint; Di- Caprio’s seem to need a push. De Niro’s characters seethe from within; DiCaprio seems always to be impersonating someone … [The Departed’s] closure leaves a void. The rat on the railing outside the window of Sullivan’s apartment is a sign of the small stature of the char- acters … Rats all of them, they do not rise to the tormented comic status of the characters of Mean Streets or Goodfellas. They are rather reflec- tions, pale in more than one way, of the mobster spirit that animated the earlier films.1
This revealing passage exudes an air of disappointment whose source is ex- plicitly acknowledged to be Scorsese’s distancing of himself from ‘the mobster spirit’ of his earlier films, from the menacing delirium embodied in De Niro’s seething, psychotic agitation. Indeed, the pleasure that Kolker seems to have derived from the transgressive violence of Scorsese’s early assault on the basic conventions of film-making, and so on his audience (hence on Kolker himself), is so powerful that it destabilizes both his grammar and his attempts to justify his nostalgia for them. For many of his (implicitly derogatory) characteriza- tions of DiCaprio as an actor (and so of later Scorsese as a director) are not only immediately qualified but decisively undermined thereby. He claims that DiCaprio tends to be hurt emotionally rather than physically, but then cites the extensive physical punishment inflicted on him in each Scorsese film in which he has appeared; he claims that DiCaprio is never psychotic – except in two of the four roles under consideration (and a good case could be made for the impending threat of madness in the other two); and he claims that where- as De Niro has and is a body, indeed one upon which his films with Scorsese are projected, DiCaprio is merely a face – despite the fact that in The Aviator, DiCaprio’s body repeatedly and literally becomes a screen on which film is projected. To cap it all, Kolker’s concluding dismissal of all the characters in The De- parted as small, pale reflections of the tormented, clown-like, macho gangsters
1 Robert Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 256–257, 260–261. Hereafter ‘CL’.