Martin Scorsese makes violence an art

For Martin Scorsese, it hasn’t all been about breaking heads. Cast a glance at the man’s credits and you’ll find music (“The Last Waltz,” “No Direction Home”), comedy (“After Hours”), history (“Kundun,” “The Aviator”) and gentility (“The Age of Innocence”). You will even find religion (“The Last Temptation of Christ”).

Yet perceptions often die as hard as made men in the trunk of a car. When most cinephiles think of Scorsese, they think of violence, elevated to a saintly level. At once operatic and visceral, the action usually comes in shocking and bloody staccato bursts, like they often do on the unforgiving streets of Scorsese’s favorite turf. Nobody takes a shovel to a skull or empties a revolver into a scumbag quite like Marty.

His new work, “The Departed,” will only add to Scorsese’s reputation as an impresario of controlled mayhem. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon and Jack Nicholson, it revolves around a police investigation of Boston mobsters. While it is a compelling and effective crime thriller, suffice to say that it’s less a cerebral “All The President’s Men” type of whodunit and more like Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” set in Southie barrooms.

But in his usual masterful way, Scorsese integrates the artery-spilling into the fabric of the narrative. Rather than be gratuitous, Scorsese’s violence is once again organic to the story-telling process. It just so happens he has become renown for telling stories rife with blunt-force trauma.

It all started with Johnny Boy
While it wasn’t his first effort, the film that put him on the radar was 1973’s “Mean Streets,” which also introduced the world to a young and incendiary Robert De Niro. It was the volcanic anger of Johnny Boy (De Niro) that served as a symbol of the frustration experienced by those growing up in Little Italy with little reason to believe life would ever consist of anything more than small-time deals among two-bit hoods. It would form a bridge upon which Scorsese could take those themes and expand them with slightly larger budgets.

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Although opinions vary as to which among his films is his best — “Raging Bull” and “Goodfellas” usually seem to get the most acclaim — it was “Taxi Driver” that still stands as perhaps the perfect melding of bold, visionary director and incandescent script. Paul Schrader wrote it from his gut, drawing upon a time when he was consumed with isolation and loneliness himself after a broken relationship. The producers who discovered it and decided to make it needed some convincing at the time to allow Scorsese to direct it, but “Mean Streets” smoothed the path.

Travis Bickle is the quintessential Scorsese companion — a Molotov cocktail of rage, looking for a plate-glass window to crash through. Violence is promised throughout the film, and in the third act it is delivered in one of the most nightmarish sequences in movie history. It isn’t disturbing in the manipulative way some horror films play with fears, but rather it feels terrifyingly real because the character is so expertly drawn as a loner on the brink of mental collapse that when it finally happens the result is almost worse than what our imaginations had anticipated.

For Scorsese, “Mean Streets” opened doors, but “Taxi Driver” opened eyes.

“Raging Bull,” again with De Niro in the lead, was the next signpost on Scorsese’s journey. It featured an altogether different kind of violence. The boxing sequences were bone-jarring, but they were staged for heightened visual effect rather than for shock value. That film was marked by the emotional violence perpetrated by boxer Jake La Motta upon those around him, especially his brother Joey (Joe Pesci). And it was as raw and upsetting in its way as Travis Bickle’s final stand at the brothel.

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