The Men of Scorsese
It was in more than one way that fictional character Charles Foster Kane shared a verisimilitude with real-life media mogul William Randolph Heart (even if it was a hostile parody of the man), and it seldom feels like in any other universe, things would be different. A man so full of pretenses, disconnected from the reality of others and yet around whom others act as satellites, surely distends beyond the bounds of pure celluloid fiction. I don’t know if director Martin Scorsese found any of his own inspiration within the classic of Citizen Kane, but he is just as inclined to base many of his films on the lives of real men, such as Howard Hughes, Henry Hill, and Jake LaMotta.
Howard Hughes was played by actor Leonardo DiCaprio in 2004’s The Aviator as an intractable man, a larger than life character in the truest sense of the term. Hughes was attracted to aviation as a filmmaker and engineer. One may say that he ruled the air through sheer force of will, contributing to the war effort his expertise in the construction of war machines. The poster of the film dictates a suitable description of the man: “Some men dream the future. He built it.” And yet for Howard Hughes, and for Charles Kane, it was not just the future they were constructing: it was their own inward-facing, amniotic worlds, where relationships are built, not earned, terms dictated, feelings collated with precision, all in the service of their own glory.
And so, in the world of Howard Hughes, it must have seemed as if the same drive and obsession that governed his success could also be employed to exert unbounded control over his own fate, as if it’s a spell he casts over himself, like a kind of “master of the universe” right out of Bonfire of the Vanities, attempting to domesticate the forces that instead shaped him, such as circumstances and luck and aberrant conduct.
Occupation was merely a means to a better place, a way of commanding the attention of others; he fashioned himself as the center of his own universe. Much of it might have been earned – watching Hughes turn irrational intensity and bloody-mindedness into pure invention and achievement was like watching a plane just barely avoid the sparks and heat of a crash landing as it pulls up into a triumphal soar – but his struggle against the cold, natural forces that shaped his life might as well have been the thrashing of prey in water.
Scorsese also employed these same themes in Goodfellas, the story of Henry Hill (played by Ray Liotta), who was an American gangster in the 60s and 70s; the gangster lifestyle is perhaps a more apt metaphor for respect, decadence, and volatility. Henry Hill describes himself via narration as “a somebody in a neighborhood of nobodies,” contemptuous of those who did not share in his dreams. Respect for Henry Hill meant exclusive access: one of the most famous scenes in the entire film is when he absconds from the front line of the Copacabana and escorts his girlfriend through the back entrance, as the camera trails behind him unbroken, beguiling and quixotic in its attraction to the respect he commands.
Media mogul was just as felicitous of a metaphor for Charles Kane, as one who could control the perception of others through headlines; to Charles Kane, devotion is malleable, and power is a suitable replacement for love. “You can’t do this to me,” Charles Kane tells his wife, Susan, as she is about to leave him. In Kane’s universe, she exists only within the folds of his mind, as someone who he merely experiences, never outside of his own senses, a dim figure serving his need for reverence and appreciation. The way in which Kane allowed her to indulge in opera singing was not a gift to her – his actions were not based on any effect they had on her – but a gift to himself. He hoped to dictate the terms of her devotion. The men of Scorsese films seem to suffer the same rampant insecurities, as if that moment in the sun is the only quality they have to offer. Their fear is intensified by the nonreciprocal transience of power, predisposed always toward themselves. Their control is precipitous and short-lived.
The ideal lover of Howard Hughes, just as it was for Charles Kane, is a woman who merely lives in his shadow. Scorsese pays an inordinate amount of screen time to the relationship between Howard Hughes and Katharine Hepburn. Hepburn was a strong and independent woman, the kind who would feel an immediate attraction to the mystery and power of Hughes but eventually reject the man’s growing influence.
These men, of course, inescapably pilfer and burn their own relationships and marriages. Such is the case for Jake LaMotta (Robert DeNiro in Raging Bull), a boxer from Brooklyn whose contemporaries included Sugar Ray Robinson and Billy Fox. LaMotta considers women as something to be valued but not valuable in the way that a soul is valuable. To describe LaMotta, Roger Ebert refers to Freud’s Madonna-whore complex, in which some men treat sex as dirty and only worthy of women they cannot love. LaMotta reasons that by having sex with his wife, she must be promiscuous. He accuses his brother (in real life it was a friend) of sleeping with her. In the ring, he disfigures the face of a boxer who his wife casually refers to as good-looking. The audience never discovers if his accusations warrant any merit, but surely he succeeds in pushing her away.
LaMotta sought his absolution in the ring, where brute force ruled over tactics. Scorsese developed an eye for the violence of boxing – it can be said an almost tender touch for the viscosity of the sweat and blood – and the prurient intimacy with which the searing filaments of light bulbs and camera clicks captured the action. Scorsese used a similar motif in The Aviator, although in the opposite direction: the sudden burst of ionized gas and speeding electricity in flash bulbs repelled Howard Hughes from the public view and deeper into the dark psychological condition of his mind. In his solitude he became progressively more obsessive-compulsive, washing his hands with a cathartic zeal.
LaMotta sits in his dressing room at the end of Raging Bull, fat and far removed from the days of his boxing career, reciting lines that are to be delivered to a waiting crowd. “I could have been a contender,” he says flatly. Surely this is a reference to the famous scene featuring Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront. Robert DeNiro could have delivered a better Marlon Brando impression, but here he demures. LaMotta is a broken man, passive and resigned, his very character axiomatically opposed to the way in which Brando’s sheer unbending presence filled the scenery. In Brando’s famous scene, he blamed his brother for the boxing title he never had. As he stares into the mirror, is LaMotta finally blaming himself? Perhaps he realized that his domineering behavior was inherently self-destructive.
Henry Hill is more self-conscious and yet self-deluded. He is aware of the corrosive element of his work, but he assuages the fear of recidivism by convincing himself that he will only get caught if he wants to get caught. Once that delusion wears off, he is left with only one course: having testified against his former cohorts, he enters the aegis of the witness protection program and lives peacefully in a docile and unpretentious home. And yet he misses the thrill of the gangster lifestyle, even if his eventual course had led him down the path of self-destruction. He had left that world behind but was unrepentant and intransigent.
Anybody who knows the life of Howard Hughes is inherently aware of his psychological breakdown; he never got the chance at a second life. Howard Hughes risked his entire fortune on the film Hell’s Angels and soared to a greater triumph, becoming more powerful than ever. He again risked everything he had in the creation of a plane that never saw action during World War II and wasn’t even likely to fly. The only triumph is that it did. Recursively he turned near disaster into victory, meanwhile struggling to control the dark psychological problems that tormented him in his hermetic solitude. Unable to restrain his own thoughts and words, he was forced to relinquish the very control that he sought. The last moments of the movie come after his last big triumph, as Howard Hughes stares into the mirror of a bathroom, his words looping like a tape recorder. “The way of the future,” he says over and over, referring to his airplane operation. But as history attests to, he was to have no more triumphs.
Scorsese has made many different kinds of films, but occasionally he returns to the idea of the man who is thrown out of his own self-made, rotting paradise; perhaps a paradise that exists only within his mind, contaminated by an even greater necrosis of the soul, attenuated and diseased like a spiritual form of Alzheimer’s. For these kinds of men, there really is no future.
>Written by d/visible contributor Jacob Stutsman.
