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Martin Scorsese’s Divine Comedy Also available from Bloomsbury: The Bloomsbury Companion to Religion and Film, edited by William L. Blizek Dante’s Sacred Poem, Sheila J. Nayar The Sacred and the Cinema, Sheila J. Nayar Martin Scorsese’s Divine Comedy Movies and Religion Catherine O’Brien BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Copyright © Catherine O'Brien, 2018 Catherine O'Brien has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Catherine Wood Cover image © Appian Way / Paramount / Rex Shutterstock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: O’Brien, Catherine, 1962- author. Title: Martin Scorsese’s divine comedy: movies and religion / Catherine O’Brien. Description: London; New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Includes filmography. Identifiers: LCCN 2017051481| ISBN 9781350003279 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350003286 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Scorsese, Martin–Criticism and interpretation. | Religion in motion pictures. | Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321–Influence. Classification: LCC PN1998.3.S39 O27 2018 | DDC 791.4302/33092–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017051481 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-0327-9 ePDF: 978-1-3500-0329-3 ePUB: 978-1-3500-0328-6 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters. Contents Acknowledgements vi List of Images vii Introduction 1 Part One Inferno: Visions of Hell 1 Hell on Earth 15 2 Sympathy for the Devil 39 3 Betrayal 64 Part Two Purgatory: The Three Story Mountain 4 Misdirected Love 79 5 Insufficient Love 100 6 Excessive Love 113 Part Three Paradise (Lost or Found?) 7 Encountering Jesus 127 8 The Compassion Connection 152 9 The Mystery of God’s Love 170 Conclusion 192 Bibliography 195 Filmography 205 Index 208 Acknowledgements I should like to express my sincere thanks to Lalle Pursglove and Lucy Carroll at Bloomsbury for their enthusiasm, dedication and highly valued advice. I also owe gratitude to Yoram Allon for his early encouragement and to Nelson Douglas for his very generous assistance. The wonderful colleagues and the unforgettable students (especially the ones who chose my ‘Screening the Sacred’ elective) in the Film department at Kingston University have been a constant inspiration and made teaching a very happy profession. My long-time friend and ‘cell mate’ Andrea Rinke has been an ongoing source of support and humour, in good times and bad. Finally, all my love and immeasurable appreciation go to Tom Ennis, who is beside me on our own pilgrimage of faith and makes the journey so enjoyable. With his invaluable help and patience, life is certainly a comedy rather than a tragedy. Scripture texts in this work are taken from the New American Bible with Revised New Testament and Revised Psalms © 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, D.C. and are used by permission of the copyright owner. All Rights Reserved. No part of the New American Bible may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the copyright owner. List of Images The author and the publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book. Figure 1.1 The statue of St Lucia in St Patrick’s Old Cathedral – an image of sainthood in Who’s That Knocking at My Door 19 Figure 1.2 Rodrigues’s hellish journey to Goto in Silence 23 Figure 1.3 The world of Stratton Oakmont: Heaven or Hell in The Wolf of Wall Street? 24 Figure 1.4 Charlie ponders on the fires of Hell in Mean Streets 27 Figure 1.5 The entrance to the Underworld in GoodFellas 35 Figure 2.1 The devil at work: Trippe toys with his prey in The Aviator 42 Figure 2.2 Max Cady: the avenging angel with evil intent in Cape Fear 54 Figure 2.3 ‘A warm welcome to the Inferno!’ in The Wolf of Wall Street 60 Figure 2.4 A poignant question in Cape Fear 63 Figure 3.1 Kichijiro: traitor or suffering soul in Silence? 72 Figure 4.1 The souls in Purgatory in St Patrick’s Old Cathedral in Who’s That Knocking at My Door 80 Figure 4.2 Charlie: an everyday saint among gangsters in Mean Streets 91 Figure 5.1 ‘If you love me, you’ll understand.’ Uncertain morality in Who’s That Knocking at My Door 103 Figure 5.2 ‘I’m not that guy.’ Repentance in Raging Bull 112 Figure 6.1 Catholic men with troubled lives in Raging Bull 118 Figure 6.2 Scorsese’s Paolo and Francesca: Newland and Ellen in The Age of Innocence 119 viii List of Images Figure 7.1 Earthly and heavenly mothers in Who’s That Knocking at My Door: the first shot that sets the tone 128 Figure 7.2 Confused identities in Boxcar Bertha 130 Figure 7.3 The agony in the Garden in The Last Temptation of Christ: humanity and divinity in conflict 144 Figure 7.4 ‘It is accomplished!’ The triumphant ending of The Last Temptation of Christ 150 Figure 8.1 A nightmare vision for the Dalai Lama in Kundun 162 Figure 9.1 The Joy of the priesthood – bringing the Eucharist to the Hidden Christians in Silence 175 Figure 9.2 On the way to Paradise: the Tomogi martyrs in Silence 177 Figure 9.3 The peace of repentance in Silence 189 Figure 9.4 The sign of faith in Silence 191 The third party copyrighted materials displayed in the pages of this book are done so on the basis of ‘fair dealing for the purposes of criticism and review’ or ‘fair use for the purposes of teaching, criticism, scholarship or research’ only in accordance with international copyright laws, and are not intended to infringe upon the ownership rights of the original owners. Introduction A statue of a Madonna and Child in a New York kitchen appears in the opening shot of Martin Scorsese’s Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967–9); and the final image ofSilence (2016) is of a handmade crucifix glowing in the flames of a crematory fire in seventeenth-century Japan. It is inarguable that there is a Catholic dimension to Scorsese’s filmography that can be traced from the Marian icon in his first full-length feature right through to his movie about Jesuit priests that was released around fifty years later. With due respect paid to the scale of the task, the following chapters engage with that particular cinematic trajectory and take seriously the oft-quoted words of the director himself: ‘My whole life has been movies and religion. That’s it. Nothing else.’ Scorsese was born in 1942, educated by the Sisters of Charity and received his religious instruction before the mood of aggiornamento that was heralded by Pope John XXIII’s instigation of Vatican II (the Second Vatican Council of 1962– 5), which was an effort to modernize the Catholic Church. Indeed, religion(s) played a role in the young boy’s life, even down to the fact that his father Charles earned pragmatic money by lighting the stoves for his Jewish neighbours on the Sabbath. Although a cradle Catholic himself, Scorsese does not recall his parents being particularly devout, although he once revealed that ‘there were cardinals, way back when’ on his mother’s side of the family (in Wilson 2011: 91). However, he clarifies that his mother and father ‘were working out how one lives a good life on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis, with responsibilities, and obligations and decency’ (in Martin 2016). Many critics muse over the detail that Scorsese was an altar boy at St Patrick’s Old Cathedral on Mott Street – the first Catholic cathedral for the diocese of New York (and now a basilica) – that was only one block away from his family’s home in Little Italy. In those days the Mass was in Latin and the altar server recited the responses. Fr Principe, a diocesan priest whose influence on the young Martin Scorsese is repeatedly acknowledged by the director himself, once explained the overwhelming effect of the dramatic liturgy on his protégé ‘in this very large church with this absolutely mind-boggling, beautiful sanctuary, 2 Martin Scorsese’s Divine Comedy with these magnificent statues and magnificent organ’ (in Wernblad 2011: 18). Scorsese talks about his interest in the drama of Holy Week, which he would eventually strive to capture in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988); and he has now adapted the novel Silence by Shusaku Endo (1923–96), a writer who has been characterized as ‘a Holy Saturday author describing the darkness of waiting for Easter light to break into our world’ (Fujimura 2016).