Martin Scorsese, Thelma Schoonamaker and protagonist morality.
Martin Scorsese and Thelma Shoonmaker have edited films together since Raging Bull (1980). They have a unique working relationship and have a very particular way of editing films.
Martin Scorsese makes a few different styles of films.
The fast flowing life story:
‘Goodfellas’, ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’, ‘Casino’, ‘The Departed’.
The more serious narratively straight story:
‘Taxi Driver’ or ‘The King of Comedy’, ‘Raging Bull’ or ‘Bringing out the Dead’.
He also makes more prestigious, less ambitious mainstream films:
‘Hugo’, ‘The Aviator’, ‘Kundun’ or ‘The Gangs of New York’.
He makes other films that are sloppier yet never-the-less successful exercises in genre:
‘New York, New York’, ‘Cape Fear’ or ‘Shutter Island’. I am going to discuss the ‘fast flowing life story’.
‘The fast flowing life’ story usually attempts to make us sympathize with a protagonist whose life is very different to our own. We are introduced to a character that is living a life that might seem shocking to us. In ‘Goodfellas’ it’s Henry Hill. He is driving along a road, a thumping in the car forces him to pull over. We then discover that a man is trapped in the trunk. Henry’s companions violently murder him. In ‘Casino’, Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein sits in his car and is apparently killed in an explosion. In ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ Jordan Belford is throwing a little person against a dartboard as he screams in an animalistic fashion, he then goes on to boast in an extremely distasteful way about his lavish lifestyle and habits. How did these people end up here living such different lives to our own?
We are immediately thrown into a stream of memories narrated by the protagonist usually without remorse. The editing jumps straight into the earlier days of the characters lives, when they were young and ambitious. The editing throws us straight into the deep end. We are introduced very quickly to the characters and their situations. The scenes are chaotic, realistically shot and snappily edited. We are shown minor details and before we can figure out the location we move on to the next scene. The scenes do not begin and end in a traditional manner but flow like a montage. We are not given establishing shots in the traditional sense, we are given snap shots of the characters lives in incidents and are asked to interpret the meaning ourselves. This creates a flow of images and incidents that reveal the manner in which the characters were slowly seduced by the glamour and excitement of the lifestyles they wished to be part of. Usually this happens in a moral vacuum where the characters were sealed off in an amoral world. This is where form and content meet. The characters are usually morally ambiguous yet by starting at the start and then moving us quickly through their lives we are made to travel with them, never overly questioning the choices they made, we are made to identify with them and become seduced by the excitement of their lives, the filmmaking is so slick and fluid we are made to feel excitement through the films fast pace and energy. These films don’t have traditional scenes with a begining and end, they flow one to the other overlapping at times, almost like memories. This could be almost abstract, like a Tarkovsky film, but instead you are always grounded by the use of music and voiceover.
The films seem informal and fluid but in fact they adhere to a strict structure. We don’t know what moments in our lives will be informative and neither do the characters in the film. They remember the incidents narrating them as they happen. Martin Scorsese is so sure handed that he even introduces multiple narrators without it feeling overstuffed or confusing. Usually the films carry us along so quickly we have jumped years without even noticing, scenes overlapping one another music playing from one time jump to the next without stopping to catch breath. All the while music is played, diegetic music will become incidental and vice versa and carry from one scene to the next, carrying us from one era to the next without us really noticing. The music is the lubricant carrying us from one sequence to the next. The films are like a river carrying us in its current from one point to the next.
The characters are living the dream. They usually display enormous greed and hubris, arrogantly showing their wealth and power to us and we enjoy the excitement of their lives vicariously. We are not asked to sympathize with them but we are shown how exciting their lives are and how they got to this point, we can relate to them easily. This is done with power of editing bringing us to this point without giving us a chance to really overly question the actions of the characters. We are shown the beginning scene again this time with an understanding of how they got to this point and then we move beyond it. Then towards the end of the films an unforeseen detail seeded earlier in the film (usually a the stupidity of a minor character) ends the reign of the protagonist.
We see a montage sequence of the house of cards collapsing, usually to one piece of music overlaid over the entire montage. We are carried through the film with fluid editing to the excitement of the protagonists life all the way to his downfall. We are then shown the downfall and then the consequence. This is usually the protagonist looking pathetic, in a normal life trying to exist like the rest of us or like a “snook” as Henry says in ‘Goodfellas’.
‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ ends on a slightly different note. Although the days of cocaine and prostitutes are behind him Jordan Belford had found a new way to dupe the public. He has realized that in some small way most people want the excitement of money and fame and he asks us to sell him a pen. The films ends with the audience reflected back on themselves as though to say, we are all the same we are all greedy, that’s why he was able to exploit the system because we are all greedy. This editing flow carries us through the lives of an undesirable protagonist it allows us to empathies with that character and wonder, if I had had their life would I have ended up where they are? The chances are that if you were excited by the lifestyle the film has depicted then the answer is maybe?