Mean Streets Research Articles

Civil Rights, Fascism’s Legacy, and Italian American Material Culture in Scorsese’s Mean Streets

This essay offers a material culture reading of Martin Scorsese’s 1973 film, Mean Streets, highlighting how the film narrates not only a small-time criminal gang in working-class New York City but a decidedly Italian American one, caught within a specific time and place. The film, emphasizing a neorealist style, is full of visual reminders of the ways objects—the things of everyday life—inform and reflect the lived experiences of an ethnic community, one that is alive, changing, and resilient, even as it may seem to possess, and almost embrace, a closed and stagnant sense of itself. In particular, I focus on what I refer to as “silent presences” in the film, especially around the Italian-American Civil Rights League of the 1970s and a legacy of Fascism. In so doing, I demonstrate how the characters’ layered prejudices and ethnic boosterism are in part defined by and defining the setting of the film in a manner that ultimately keeps those same characters away from assimilation in a time period when their neighborhood is changing. Focusing on the objects and materiality that structures the film’s setting helps illustrate how the characters react against change, against wholesale assimilation, retaining and reshaping Italian American identity along the way.

Italian Immigrants Culture in New York: A Comparative Study on The Godfather II and Mean Streets Through the Lens of Audiovisual Language

This study explores the dynamics of cultural integration, assimilation, and identity formation of Italian immigrants in American films in the 20th century. It makes a comparative analysis of two iconic films, The Godfather II and Mean Streets, through the lens of audiovisual language. Drawing upon the semiotics theory, mirror theory, and root theory, this research aims to analyze the dynamic changes in culture, economy, and emotions experienced by Italian immigrants. The study is anchored in three key aspects. First, it focuses on the identity politics of Italian immigrants in the United States, with a spotlight on second-generation immigrants. Unlike the first generation, they retain a strong sense of separation from their Italian roots, exhibiting few traces of a transitional identity arc. The second aspect revolves around the directors reconstruction of national history in a global context and its connection to the Mafias influence on economic predicament. Lastly, by looking into the narrative symbols in these films, this research continuously explores the emotional dynamics in the process of cultural integration.

Maria Ridda. Criminality and Power in the Postcolonial City: Mapping the Mean Streets of Mumbai and Naples

Maria Ridda. <i>Criminality and Power in the Postcolonial City: Mapping the Mean Streets of Mumbai and Naples</i>

Mean Streets: Power, ideology and the politics of memory

What determines whether contested places of memory are kept or officially removed in a democracy? To answer this question, we look at Francoist street names in Spain to identify the effect of party ideology on the manipulation of lieux de mémoire. Using a regression discontinuity design, we analyze 5,500 municipalities over a period of 16 years. We find that mayors of the main right-wing party are more likely to preserve Francoist names, whilst mayors of the main left-wing party are more likely to replace them. Upon replacing, right-wing local governments are more likely to choose new names leaning to the right than left-wing governments. Our findings illustrate that, even within a democratic framework, the public space can be shaped beyond citizens’ preferences in favor of the ruling power. Additionally, we show that parties can be important actors in qualifying what is to be remembered, imprinting ideological biases in the landscape.

MeXicana Fashions: Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction

MeXicana Fashions: Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction

Letters to the Editor

Letters to the Editor

More Human Than Human: The Exile in Blade Runner

More Human Than Human: The Exile in <i>Blade Runner</i>

Violence and Masculinity in Arthur Morrison's Tales of Mean Streets

Violence and Masculinity in Arthur Morrison's Tales of Mean Streets

Diurnal and Nocturnal Cityscapes in Miami Vice

Amid intense inter-network rivalry and the proliferation of cable, pay television and a nascent and competitive video industry, the major American Networks in the 1980s were faced with major challenges if they wished to continue attracting audiences and profits as they had during the 1970s. Miami Vice, which ran for five seasons on NBC between 1984 and 1989, was probably one of the most influential and innovative episodic series of the decade. Following Julia Kristeva’s assumption that urban space can be understood and analysed as a text, the present paper will therefore examine the role of the city of Miami as the show’s main character, before deciphering the possible readings of the diurnal and nocturnal cityscape in relation to the influence of noir and neo-noir films, which are traditionally associated with a city’s “mean streets”. Consequently, the present study will attempt to demonstrate how the show offers a vision of the post-modern city during the Reagan years, while pinpointing the crucial influence the series had on the networks’ future primetime episodic crime series as well as – more surprisingly – its impact on the city’s urban renovation.

“The Dark Path Back”: Investigating Holocaust Memory in Sara Paretsky’s Novel Total Recall

Abstract Women writers challenge the popular and critical entrenchment of male-authored literary detective fiction. A close reading of Sara Paretsky’s 2001 novel Total Recall demonstrates that the ongoing quest for social justice by her woman detective, V. I. Warshawski, is addressed through assertive women’s voices that have also transformed critical approaches to women’s crime fiction. In Paretsky’s novels, V.I. finds herself in a double bind reserved for women in both social and literary terms: having to prove her stability and effectiveness as a professional detective and as a reliable first-person narrator. Total Recall ’s investigations of contemporary corporate crime trace their origins to American slavery and the Holocaust: the novel transforms the generic mean streets of crime fiction into a transnational crimescape with a two-way trajectory between contemporary Chicago and Central Europe’s sites of mass murder. But instead of plotting a conclusion that declares triumph over such evil, the novel joins forces with historical accounts to investigate the staying power of legitimized oppression and the memory of its victims. Reading the Holocaust narratives embedded in Total Recall reveals a story of inhumanity so far reaching that it transforms Paretsky’s local Chicago crimescape into a global epic.

The Only Punishment

Does empathy and moral choice only require that we better understand things from the perspective of others? What if we could force criminals to get that better understanding? In this work of nature-of-punishment short story fiction, Rat has been sentenced to a government “brainwashing” facility. He regrets nothing, save having been caught. He comes from the mean streets, and sometimes that means doing horrible things to get by. As part of his punishment, the government forces him to live his criminal experiences three times. First, from his own perspective. Next, from the perspective of the person the crime was committed against. And finally, from a meta view that allows him to see how his actions, and the actions of others, fit into the larger repeating cycles, in the city. Rat emerges from the program with a new perspective and is ready to begin assisting the program with cleaning up the city.

Mean Streets: Tracking the Dispositives of Address(es) with China Miéville’s “Reports of Certain Events in London”

Abstract Miéville’s short story stands out for its perhaps experimental, perhaps old-fashioned form: the story’s first-person narrator adopts, in nineteenth-century fashion, the persona of an editor and presents both his own view on the ‘events’ in question and a number of mock documents he has allegedly been sent. Readers are encouraged to piece together the story elements – events and characters – from postcards, minutes of a meeting, memos, personal letters, and tables. Typographically distinct and juxtaposed rather than narratively linked, these text fragments suggest internal conflicts in a group of people who track rogue streets – streets that change their location spontaneously and wreak havoc on the geographical and the political order of cities. It is no coincidence that a mix-up of names and addresses is the starting point of the story; the story’s ending hints at the consequences of having or not having a fixed address. My contribution examines Miéville’s use of the short story form in the context of fantastic literature. Following suggestions of Miéville’s “The Conspiracy of Architecture” (1998), the foregrounding of formal and quasi-material aspects of organising and mediating knowledge is read as an engagement with the power/knowledge dispositives made up of discursive ordering principles as well as city planning and city geography.

Mean Streets: Power, Ideology and the Politics of Memory

Mean Streets: Power, Ideology and the Politics of Memory

Precedented

Precedented Matthew Luter (bio) The Feral Detective Jonathan Lethem Ecco https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-feral-detective-jonathan-lethem?variant=32205914079266 336 Pages; Print, $13.59 Though it may not look it at first glance, Jonathan Lethem’s The Feral Detective is a noir novel through and through. We see no mean streets of the big city, spending plenty of time on the mountain roads of rural California instead, and as many major scenes take place in the daytime as at night. But plenty of the old noir tropes are visible from the start: we open on a quick-witted young woman with nowhere else to turn, seeking out a mysterious private eye with a dark backstory and acting instantly on their palpable romantic chemistry. Before we know it, we’re in the heavily stylized territory of neo-noir detective fiction. In his style-defining 1972 essay “Notes on Film Noir,” screenwriter-director Paul Schrader defined noir not as a literary or cinematic genre, but as a collection of narrative and visual motifs that combine to define a distinctive tone. And chief among the cultural influences that gave rise to noir, Schrader argues, is “post-war disillusionment,” a reaction to the Depression and, immediately after World War II, the difficulty of acclimation to peacetime. Schrader characterizes noir as a response to national trauma, though he doesn’t use that term to directly. Disillusionment takes shape as “[t]he war continues, but now the antagonism turns with a new viciousness toward the American society itself.” But what does a noir novel have to say when the upheaval that creates the darkness as its core is not as evenly felt as the Depression or World War II? What happens when that distress isn’t even considered distressing at all by some of the novel’s characters, let alone over sixty-two million American voters? The trauma that animates The Feral Detective, as it opens a week before Inauguration Day 2017, is the bombshell of the 2016 presidential election, which has left narrator Phoebe Siegler reeling. A former employee of The New York Times who quit suddenly (and won the Internet for a day for it) after the newsroom’s then widely publicized meeting with the election’s eventual winner, Phoebe travels from New York to Southern California in search of Arabella Swados, a missing friend and recent college dropout who is also the daughter of her mentor. There she enlists the services of Charles Heist, the title investigator, whom the urbanite Phoebe accompanies through California deserts and mountains, far from the city landscapes she can navigate on her own. (In addition to The Feral Detective’s noir trappings, this dynamic also makes this the second Lethem novel, after Girl in Landscape [1998], to function as an extended riff on John Ford’s The Searchers [1956], a film that has long been a touchstone for Lethem —and, I might add, for Schrader.) Phoebe and Heist find Arabella, now living with “off-the-gridders” known as the Rabbits, a female-led group and rivals of a male-led similar group called the Bears. Before a schism, they were both part of a hippie commune; Lethem makes the two factions a microcosm of how entrenched polarization has replace the utopian promise of America. Heist, raised in the Bears until he left them as a teenager, returns to both sects on occasion to escort out any minors who wish to leave either group. Greeted as the apostate that he is, the Bears force Heist into a fight to the death against their current leader, a macho type with the arch-individualist name Solitary Love. Unable to countenance any longer an assault on her investigative and romantic partner, Phoebe intervenes, throwing off Solitary Love with the self-defense air-horn from her purse, giving Heist all the opportunity he needs to finish the job. Of course, in so doing, she essentially aids and abets a murder. In earlier noir novels, Lethem treated actual detective plots largely as entry points into playing with genre tropes — not that there’s anything wrong with that. Gun with Occasional Music (1994) attempted to see if detective fiction...

Domesticating gangsters? Home/work conflicts in South Korean family drama gangster film

Gangster films are largely an urban genre set in the mean streets of metropolitan ganglands. A significant proportion of South Korean gangster films depart from this spatial convention, however, setting their central family or romance plots in the domestic space of the apartment. This article addresses the question of why we find gangsters in domestic space in South Korean cinema and examines what the domestic setting ‘does’ to the gangster film. The Show Must Go On (2008) is discussed in detail to exemplify the ways that questions of masculinity, gendered family role performance and class anxieties are crystallized around domestic space. What emerges in this spatial shift is a new sub-genre, the ‘family drama gangster film’. This form combines elements of the traditional gangster narrative with family melodrama, producing tension between the conflicting obligations of the gangster towards gang and family. The article concludes that the family drama gangster film emerged as a response to a conjunction of socio-economic and film industry factors and became a vehicle through which conflict between competing ideologies of Korean familism is negotiated, mostly resolving in favour of affective familism.

The challenge of creating age-friendly indoor environments in a high-density city: Case study of Hong Kong’s care and attention homes

Aiming to find out whether the indoor environment quality (IEQ) of Care and Attention (C&A) homes in Hong Kong could meet the need of older people, this research conducted a field measurement and occupancy survey in nine C&A homes to assess their thermal, lighting, and noise environments according to both building standards and occupant satisfaction. The findings indicated that an operative indoor temperature of 24–27 °C in summer and above 23 °C in winter could be considered to mark a thermally comfortable zone. Noticeably, older people preferred a warmer environment in both summer and winter, while the measurement results showed that the indoor operative temperature was lower, and the humidity was higher than the comfort standard for summer, which was confirmed by the occupant survey. The mean illuminance level could meet the national threshold; interestingly, there was a negative correlation between age groups and their satisfaction of natural lighting in winter. The mean street noise level was between 74-75 dB, exceeding the maximum 55 dB for neighborhoods. The street noise level was significantly negatively correlated with residents’ satisfaction. The study made recommendations for regulating both outdoor and indoor environments for improving the elderly living conditions in high-density urban areas with hot humid climates.

The Irishman dir. by Martin Scorsese

Reviewed by: The Irishman dir. by Martin Scorsese Christopher B. Barnett The Irishman, Directed by Martin Scorsese . New York: TriBeCa Productions, 2019. 210 minutes. The Irishman , Directed by Martin Scorsese. New York: TriBeCa Productions, 2019. 210 minutes. In a recent essay, Gerard Loughlin argues that Martin Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead (1999) exemplifies the filmmaker's tendency to revisit and to rework previous concepts. Just as earlier Scorsese films—especially Taxi Driver (1976) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)—centered on a "lonely man, obsessed with the suffering of both himself and others," so does Bringing Out the Dead feature the trials and tribulations of Frank Pierce, a paramedic working the graveyard shift in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan. 1 In fact, as Loughlin explains, the cinematic and thematic parallels are so striking that Bringing Out the [End Page 58] Dead is best thought of as "a palimpsest, a text written upon another, partly erased text, where some of the first still shows through." 2 In this way, the film engages both past and present. It both remembers and reveals. Thus, Loughlin quotes the English essayist Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859), who first developed the concept of the palimpsest: "Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet in reality not one has been extinguished." 3 One might take a similar approach to Scorsese's latest release, The Irishman (2019). On the surface, it is a new film, based on Charles Brandt's book, I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran and Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa (2004). A Delawarebased attorney, Brandt came to befriend Frank Sheeran, an aging mobster with links to the Bufalino crime family as well as to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Prior to his death in December 2003, Sheeran confessed a number of crimes to Brandt, including the alleged murder of Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa in 1975. Brandt's subsequent tell-all eventually made its way to Scorsese, who was already revered for gangster films such as Mean Streets (1973), Goodfellas (1990), and Casino (1995). After a number of logistical snags, Netflix agreed to finance the film in 2017, and shooting began later that year. Retitled The Irishman, and featuring longtime Scorsese collaborator Robert De Niro as the title character, the film premiered in September 2019 to wide critical acclaim. So, if The Irishman is a palimpsest whose surface can be abraded to reveal deposits underneath, what exactly do we find? A number of suggestions might be tendered here, though the faded yet still recognizable textures of Goodfellas are most clear. Not only are both films narrated by midlevel mafiosos—Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) in Goodfellas, Frank Sheeran in The Irishman—but their stories trace the rise and fall of their respective criminal families. Moreover, The Irishman reprises some of Goodfellas' most distinctive cinematic techniques. Scorsese announces this intention with The Irishman's opening scene. Backed by a vintage doo-wop hit ("In the Still of the Night" by The Five Satins), a Steadicam tracking shot slowly winds its way through the Pennsylvania nursing home where Frank is living out his final years. Nurses move in and out of the picture; residents sit quietly, drinking coffee or playing cards; a statue of Thérèse of Lisieux [End Page 59] looks on with detached serenity. This is a quiet place, where the past is recollected and the future all too certain. In and of itself, the nursing home scene is a striking preamble to The Irishman, but it is also a facsimile of arguably the most famous sequence in Scorsese's oeuvre. Relatively early in Goodfellas, Henry takes his date Karen (Lorraine Bracco) to the Copacabana nightclub in Manhattan. A Steadicam tracking shot follows the couple as they make a VIP entrance through the club's winding corridors and kitchen. Scorsese sets the scene to "Then He Kissed Me" by The Crystals—a song that conveys Karen's attraction to Henry's influence and standing. Here, it seems, is the good life, where the past is irrelevant and the future whatever one wants it...

Shunting from Dakar to Casamance

Shunting from Dakar to Casamance Colin Channer (bio) i A father takes it as his job to order:rank the powers in the house so the man o’ yard could slicethe crotons with the cutlass how he gauged it, but couldn’t dark hiskhaki-wearing self onto the porch; there, the woman who did pressingeased a drink to sun from shelter through the grillwork’s diamond gaps,sumptuous cold water or bebridge but always in glass—for plasticit was certified held germs so all like fi-him outside mouthcan’t wet-wet people plastic things. So glass it was or Panther-tastingwater from the hose. So rank began with who was mostland-close even in a house like ours, [End Page 23] no great design to it: a box of slabsschemed out on old horse farm and a bygone orange grove where slaverykept imagination ligatured to bias more than law. My father’s skinwas pale-beige-watered Scotch. My mother’s blood was part Maroonshe used to boast. Should kids be embarrassed bythe grown-ups they become? To us mid in class and toneour mother’s brag said yes, I was inked wicked, had a storywith an opening in the bush. Phantom’s Skull Cave in comics.Drive-in newsreels’ sunk eyes, zinc ribs, bloat, tuft hair.Guerillas or gorillas at war. She top-ranked my father, whomshe called in public “dunce police,” and when he was demoted furtherthrough divorce she just straight-ruled. Her white tunic made her handsome,her laughter lit dispensaries and [End Page 24] brought mint coolness to damp wards,but home she ran it like a capo: charismatic, loving, then would punchyou if you fucked up like a thug. If she caught you in a lie she’dcall you to the night porch, you’d gauge the cutlass-ordered crotons’silhouette, the argyle pattern grill then out of air that slow bloom mentholmarking where she slumped. You trembled when she started:“Mr. Bitch . . .” ii How it goes with me—sea callsand I go to it, not obedient— with the taut awareness of the archerwho’s heard fusillade, bluster call of notes, or when the cellist looks up,sees conductor’s eyelids droop, and titivates the bow. It’s a string thing,this hurt, tendon-wound not muscles bound; and what draws it out of me a little isthe big resilience, ocean of whatever color cutting itself again and againsalt already rubbed into the wounds. [End Page 25] A posture comes with this witness.Spine believes it is its doing but my tendons know. Sometimes they lieto the ligaments so when I see a boat way out I feel if I had the pomegranateswitch I used to knot with sisal as a boy, something sonorous would drainfrom a body flung to deck shocked by whittle arrow on the far skylineshocked as I was when she’d summon and for fuck-ups forgottenlicks would fletch my ass. iii When I leave her after visits and wehug in Stamford’s near-sea cold I’m startled always that she’s small,by her skin’s flatness— versus memory, a confusing timbre,lost sheen tone. The lobby of her pricey condo is awash with all the fooleryrising tidal every time we meet. She always says I love you, a habitpicked up on the way to 85. I’m always struck by change and aging.On the long drive up the coast [End Page 26] through towns with hope hollowedlinked by some took-for-granted bridge, I regard with pleasure that endures:the tall blond grass of autumn; in winter, fields that float on fog and snow;summer and the Boston-bound Acelas on the metal Malecón between the highwayand the beach; spring’s floral glory, all New England variegated likethe crotons ordered by the man o’ yard to euphemize the fence. I consolemyself sometimes with “pictures,” her lingo carried over to my home:Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York, Scorcese-odes to...

From Decadence to Degeneration: The Big Sleep, its forceful plot, and a femme fatale 'still in the dangerous twenties'

Tasked with naming an exemplary decadent artist, scholars often turn to Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). In his epigrams, essays, plays, and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Wilde calls for an ‘art for art’s sake’ that underscores a broader assault on nineteenth-century lifeways. As his 1895 trial on gross indecency demonstrates, however, British society refused to accept aesthetics as a domain accountable to beauty alone or to condone the new masculine identities that his work championed. A modern novel, Dorian Gray anticipates both refusals, insofar as it shows the protagonist’s pursuit of sensation to be intensely compelling while warning that his decadent experience, however wittily expressed or secured by wealth, carries with it the potential for physical degeneration. Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939) has long been treated as a terse, hardboiled novel by readers, and rightly so. Its mean streets—built up from the example of Dashiell Hammett—would therefore seem to be far removed from decadents like Wilde and the airy experiments of The Yellow Book. But Chandler (1888-1959), a Chicago-born American who came of age in turn-of-the-century London, is no stranger to the decadent movement; and his dark realism recalls Wilde’s project by depicting a set of characters whose lives of static privilege compel a descent into a criminal underworld. For Dorian Gray as well as for the Sternwood family, then, decadent experience leads to dissolution, and dissolution—however much it might resonate with social critique—compels personal and narrative degeneration. In the reading of The Big Sleep that follows, I return decadence and the science of degeneration to interpretive prominence so that the force driving Chandler’s strange double plot and its femme fatale’s criminal designs may be conceived anew.

A Cinematic Education: Remembrance of Films Past, or Mind over Medium

Abstract This article examines seven American films (Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show; Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets; John D. Hancock’s Bang the Drum Slowly; Frank Perry’s Last Summer; Sydney Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?; Terrence Malick’s Badlands; and George Roy Hill’s Slaughterhouse-Five) from the perspective of the first time the author saw them versus the perspective of today. What I discover is that I do not feel, or think, the same way about the films in question. In the process of making this discovery—of gaining, as it were, a cinematic education—I explore not only the subjectivity of memory but also the subjectivity of (film) criticism; the changes that have occurred in movie viewing over the years, which themselves have affected perception; and the place of the cinema in one’s life—past, present, and beyond.