“My whole life has been movies and religion. That’s it. Nothing else.”
Martin Scorsese has never hidden his desire to explore spirituality through his films. He has confronted the question of religion in a very obvious way in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Kundun (1997) and Silence (2016). But the sacred and the profane are more obliquely examined right throughout his filmography, from the neo-noir redemption arcs of Taxi Driver and Bringing Out The Dead to the uber-stylised crime flicks that for many mark his stock-in-trade.
Scorsese releases his 26th narrative feature film – Killers Of The Flower Moon – later this year. Enough has been written about his films by now that it is nothing new to highlight the spiritual element to them (although many erstwhile cultural commentators would do well to read beyond the surface of his films).
But what can Scorsese’s singular focus tell us about the purpose of art?
While some directors, such as Wes Anderson or Edgar Wright, have made visual trademarks a bedrock of their identities, and others like Steven Spielberg or James Mangold have defied definition altogether, Scorsese lies somewhere in the middle, having instead made thematic commonality his calling card, a throughline that begins in Who’s That Knocking At My Door? and extends right through to his most recent works. That throughline could accurately be described thus: an exploration of morality as related to the presence/absence of religion in the life of the protagonist. As R. Barton Palmer declares in his essay ‘Scorsese and the Transcendental’, ‘it is hardly surprising that [an] ex-seminarian turned film director shows himself in his works to be a deeply committed moralist’.
Religion played a formative role in Scorsese’s young life, and judgement, as meted out by higher powers, is a major theme of Scorsese’s work, whether the means are divine or human. Indeed, Scorsese’s visual choices often invite us, the audience, to deliver that judgement ourselves. This can be seen in the climactic scenes of Goodfellas (when Henry Hill looks directly into the camera for his final courtroom address) and Cape Fear (when Max Cady turns to the camera, angled as if from the perspective of a higher being looking down, and speaks to ‘your honour’), as well as several other of his films in which a narrator speaks directly to us, attempting to justify their actions.
While Scorsese has often faced accusations of glamourising violence, his treatment of the characters who commit it invites a more nuanced take. While the wiseguys, lowlifes, stock-sharks and grifters of Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Casino, The Departed, The Wolf of Wall Street, Gangs of New York, The Irishman, Taxi Driver and even the TV dramas to which Scorsese has lent his name indicate a desire to illustrate the violence and greed of humanity, the constant presence of sacred and profane imagery demands a more moralistic judgement of those characters.
From the hellish red hues of Volpe Bar in Mean Streets to the confessional scene that forms part of The Irishman’s denouement, Scorsese never allows us to divorce the immorality we see on screen from the consequences to be faced, whether those consequences are deferred to an afterlife or brought to bear on Earth.
The current state of film debate and analysis – particularly on social media – precludes anything beyond superficial engagement with the ‘text’ of movies. Visual and textual literacy are often either absent or eschewed, leading to a multitude of commentaries on Scorsese’s work analysing it at the surface level only. Scorsese is therefore typecast as a mob-movie mogul, promoting toxic machismo and glamourising lives of crime and violence. These takes fail to recognise the scope of Scorsese’s vast filmography, ignoring the many non-mob films he has directed, his extensive contribution to documentary and his ongoing dedication to preserving films of all kinds for future generations.
However, they do hit on something, albeit unintentionally: Scorsese has carried a singular vision throughout his career. But it is not a fascination with the world of organised crime. Instead, it is a lifelong investigation of religion – or, if you prefer, morality – its absence, and what our beliefs about it can drive us to. There are few loftier questions to be asked than this, especially during an era in which, for many, the ends (more often than not: wealth, fame, accolades) are more than enough to justify whatever means are used to achieve them.
It is this willingness to devote oneself to a great question of humanity, rather than the style or the glamour or even the form of his films, that sets Scorsese out as a true artist. And as he crosses, perhaps, the River Styx in the Dantean version of his journey to the afterlife, he may just pay the mythical boatman, and think and think, with a smile, of Travis Bickle’s ticking metre as he drives his shadowy passengers through the steam and smoke of 1970s New York.
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James McLoughlin is a creative editor at New Critique.
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