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Huh. Maybe I should go see Titus again, then. Or better, read it, since I won't get a stage version which hasn't been affected by the culture we're in.
...the experience of the gangster as an experience of art is universal to Americans. There is almost nothing we understand better or react to more readily or with quicker intelligence...the gangster speaks for us, expressing that part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and demands of modern life, which rejects "Americanism" itself.
The gangster is the man of the city, with the city's language and knowledge, with its queer and dishonest skills and is terrible daring, carrying his life in his hands like a placard, like a club. For everyone else, there is at least the possibility of another world - in that happier American culture which the gangster denies, the city does not really exist; it is only a crowded and more brightly lit country - but for the gangster there is only the city; he must inhabit it in order to personify it; not the real city, but the dangerous and sad city of the imagination which is so much more important, which is the modern world. And the gangster - though there are real gangsters - is also, and primarily, a creature of the imagination. The real city, one might say, produces only criminals; the imaginary city produces the gangster: he is what we want to be and what we are afraid to become.
Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience.
For Warshow, the gangster is a product of the Depression, the period where America was forced to confront the possibility that mere hard work would not always assure your American dream. Sometimes, the world just came back at you with disaster. The fictional response to this was a number of shapes who lived outside the conventional world, who defied the rules. The gangster stood head and shoulders above other men, stood out, one way or another. In order to be successful, he was prepared to do anything to anyone. He narrativised himself ("Mother of God," says the dying Rico Bandello in 'Little Caesar', "is this the end of Rico?") and made a stand against a world which did not care, a system of crushing odds. For his crimes, and for his standing out, he had to be cut down, lest he become part of that oppressive landscape from which he rose.
Divorced from his architecture, moved into the future, you have a character who will not quit, won't back off, and will do anything, who is somehow laudable even as he is reviled. Naturally, one looks for situations where this attracted and cathartic evil might not have to suffer the gangster's ultimate fate - just execution.
...[The gangster] appeals to that side of all of us which refuses to believe in the "normal" possibilities of happiness and achievement; the gangster is the "no" to that great American "yes" which is stamped so big over our official culture and yet has so little to do with the way we actually live our lives.
Ibid.
The city is a place of confusion and corruption in American film, and protagonists must frequently refresh themselves by taking a trip to either Washington, to engage with the political heritage (the Constitution, the Washington Monument etc.) or the heartland, where the soul, rather than the intellect, is healed. The creature of the heartland is the Cowboy, ultimately a man of repose, without ambition, yet possessed of qualities of his own:
...he can ride a horse faultlessly, keep his countenance in the face of death, and draw his gun a little faster and shoot a little straighter than anyone he is likely to meet. These are sharpley defined acquirements, giving to the figure of the Westerner an apparent moral clarity whci corresponds to the clarity of his physical image against his bare landscape...
Ibid.
The Westerner has no ambition, he simply is - a natural force, responsive, powerful. Where the gangster is out of control, and likely pre-emptive, the Westerner is unshakable.
There is no suggestion, however, that he draws his gun reluctantly. The Westerner could not fulfill himself if the moment did not finally come when he can shoot his enemy down. But because that moment is so thoroughly the expression of his being, it must be kept pure. He will not violate the accepted forms of combat though by doing so he could save a city.
Ibid.
The Westerner does what he has to do.
Arguably, it is the merger of these shapes - the Westerner's control and his purity, which requires that he shoot second, and the Gangster's rage and lack of control, his unpredictable, scattershot fury, which produces the Wrong Bastard. The transformation of the Westerner's calm into the Gangster's vengeful, shotgun deadliness produces a fearsome opponent: one who will wait until a line is crossed, then engage in a conflict which is total, without restraint, and pure in its execution.
I'd say there was always a hermeneutic reinsertion in the arena of media and society. Each feeds shapes into the other. America reinvents itself with each generation; it is, at root, a nation founded on words, on the American Way, on an ethos, rather than a history of land and conflict and kings. So the movies are more important than they might be elsewhere - and have become so; there's nowhere else in the world where the movies wield such power, as we know.
Gotta go - hope that's interesting stuff to chew on. |
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