‘The Gangs of New York’: the Mean Streets in History

Abstract

First a confession: I'm a sucker both for costume drama and a good romance. And I love a good adventure story. Loved 'Pride and Prejudice'; when Mr Darcy finally professes his love to Miss Elizabeth Bennett, I get tearful. Adore almost any Merchant and Ivory film. And I can handle violence, whether the cartoonish sort of 'Batman' and 'Pulp Fiction' or the realism of 'Saving Private Ryan'. So, 'Gangs of New York' should have been right up my alley. It was not. Frankly, I could tolerate the romance as a modern-day love affair. Cameron Diaz is easy to look at, and I suspect DiCaprio has his admirers. But the dramatic core of the film belongs to the anti-hero, Bill the Butcher, played by Daniel Day-Lewis. The costumes which I thought caricatured individuals were nonetheless evocative of the era, especially in the gangs' stovepipe hats and dead rabbits. And the cinematography made it all look beautiful albeit, borrowing from the title of a book about New York in the 1920s by the historian Robert Allen, it is a 'horrible prettiness'.' For the heart of the film is mid nineteenth-century New York as a place of unending gang warfare, violence seen as embedded in ethnic conflict, nativism and racism. And the embeddedness of ethnic and racial violence in the very fabric of New York City's history is not an inappropriate message to take from New York's history. It is also of a piece with director Martin Scorsese's other films depicting the violent streets and peoples of New York: 'Mean Streets', 'Goodfellas', 'Raging Bull' and 'Taxi Driver'. Scorsese on 'Gangs' makes the connection explicit: this film is 'the foundation from which those works emerged. And, yes, there's no doubt. This is based on history. There's no doubt about it. But it is still a film that is more of an opera than history'.2 Scorsese's operatic invocation is probably lost to audiences, however: they see a film, which announces itself as set in New York City in 1846 and in 1862-63. Gangs also takes its title from Herbert Asbury's 1928 history of New York, which 'now a major motion picture', is prominently hawked in bookstores to a devouring public in a new toney edition with a Foreword by Jorge Luis Borges. Finally, credits thank the popular historian Luc Sante, author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York. Audiences have every reason to expect and to wonder 'is it true?'3 Popular narrative films work with dramatic conventions in which the history is more in the conception than in precise recounting of 'facts' what is usually referred to as dramatic licence. Sorsese's own expressionist style, as Wendy Plotkin has noted, portrays 'essential reality through exaggeration