Mean Streets: Small Time is Fun Time

I haven't seen all of Martin Scorcese's movies, which is my fault. But of the ones I have seen, this one stands out for, surprisingly, it's relentless humor that stems from its hyperbolic characters endlessly crashing into the invisible walls around them. A lot of the usual is present: New York, Catholicism, Italian-Americans, and the life of crime on the street. It's the last one that's most important. At the start of the movie, Harvey Keitel narrates, "You don't make up for your sins in the church. You do it in the streets."

Speaking of narration, Keitel doesn't quite get into unreliable narrator territory. Delusional narrator might be better, which I guess is unreliable in its own way, but Keitel as Charlie isn't what I think when I use the term. He's not hiding anything from the viewer, just himself. There's no buried secret or big plot twist. He's just often full of shit when he talks to you. Okay, yeah, he's unreliable, I give up. Scorcese (and his co-writer Mardik Martin) is probably just as unreliable, naming the film "Mean Streets" when the group of guys that walk those streets are insulated and removed from what you expect when you see the words Mean Streets combined with Scorcese (oddly enough that might be a reaction that stems from everything that Scorcese did after this, ie every other movie he's made). Let me draw my own parallel (as if everything before is Scorcese's crystal clear vision that I'm reading off Wikipedia). It's purgatory, one of Scorcese's often-called upon themes, now affecting the living.

All the characters are stuck in templates that associate with the streets. We have a lower Mob member (Keitel as Charlie), loan shark (Richard Romanus as Michael), and a bar owner (David Proval as Tony) on one side overlapped with a colossal screw up/debtor who slips in and out with all of them (Robert De Niro as Johnny Boy). We get to see the most of Keitel and how he relates and interacts with everyone. It's there from the start, where he talks about how meaningless the church is and is then immediately there alone. It might be meaningless, but he can't move on by cutting himself off or just accepting it. Charlie can't make a stand on his relationship with his girlfriend because it goes against the wishes of his uncle who holds the key to his upward mobility in the mob, despite having real feelings. Most notoriously he can't jettison Johnny Boy, who owes money all over town and is the personification of dead weight walking. Too bad that dead weight is hilariously entertaining and an outlet for him. But it's not just Charlie. The main group of four characters seem like teenagers playing gangster, dipping their toes in but making sure to get the hell out before anything serious happens. They have their petty conflicts and arguments, but then they're out messing around, off being in and around oddball trouble and skirting away from the cops.

But no matter how careful you are you can get sucked in or trapped. The characters seemingly are in a holding pattern, but little things cause them to break it. Since Charlie wants to appear serious and stay in the good graces of his uncle, he won't be seen not only with his girlfriend with epilepsy, who is disapproved of, but with Michael in front of his uncle, who's waiting for payment from Johnny Boy on debts. They're all pawns, but Charlie doesn't want to show his uncle his other buddies, because then he might realize he's just like them. For his part, Michael is willing to let the debts grow and grow and take Charlie's promises that Johnny Boy will get back on track. Charlie is unwilling to compromise on Johnny Boy to an asinine degree. Yet amidst all this is more running in place, goofballs who want to declare their membership entering through the side door. Charlie approaches one of the girls he fancies that dances at Tony's about being the hostess at the restaurant he's about to acquire (through no action of his own, by the way) and sets up a meeting with her at a place afterwards which he promptly jettisons while in the cab as he drives by. The guy can't even have a real affair! Tony has a tiger in a cage in the back room of his place. Not as a power symbol or anything, but so he can get in the cage and cuddle with the motherfucker! Michael accosts Charlie's girlfriend about Johnny Boy's whereabouts, knocking the groceries out of his hand before she runs him off. Oh, did I mention he picks up the groceries for her and puts them back in the bag?! These guys can't even shake down a woman for God's sake! All of this belies a point: Mean Streets is hilarious.

Some of it is clearly intentional, some maybe not. But I certainly found myself cracking up out loud much more than I would have expected, and the majority of it was non-cynical (a first?). Two scenes stand out. In the first, the four go to a bookie who hasn't paid the return on a bet he owes for Tony I believe (it might be an unnamed guy, I watched this four days ago and should've done this sooner, but I'm lazy/I suck). Everything starts out okay in a underground pool hall until Johnny Boy sets off a brawl. I'm almost lukewarm to call it that because the entire scene is ridiculously awkward, and not in a realistic manner. It's more like the fights I saw in high school, where people jumped around, avoided contact if at all possible, and blustered more than injured (except for that one time a guy I went to high school with repeatedly smashed a guy's head into a dumpster...he's a later Scorcese guy I guess). It also reminded me of a theater production, except it was choreographed by a drunk. And what happens? Everybody makes up when the cops show up and it's all good. The other is when something occurs (shaky ground, I think a shooting, which I'm going to get to) and everybody flees the scene, with two gay patrons from the bar forcing themselves into the car with the four others. While the former was stilted, this is plain comedy, with everyone being either nervous, appalled, drunk, horny, or a combination. I cracked up through this whole thing, until the two non-treehouse members get booted unceremoniously.

So we have characters stuck in the junior version of a hostile environment. They might be okay with it, but at some point someone is going to barely cross out of the safe zone. Except in a case where tension is building by inches, it explodes. Michael finally comes after Johnny Boy and then the blood finally flows, in a precursor to a scene involving two of the same actors three years later in Taxi Driver. But even when the blood flows and someone has actually done something, the ambulance is there to play us out. Because it's too late for all of them. The barriers are there, inescapable, and the streets are keen to insure the status quo. Oh, and that shooting? Everyone is in the bar doing nothing and David Carradine is drunk as shit laying on the bar. A random kid comes in and sits. Carradine rolls off and lurches into the bathroom, where he is promptly shot in the back by the kid. However, Carradine doesn't care. He assaults his attacker, following him out in the street until he tackles him with his dying breath after the kid empties all six shells from the revolver. Here we have a man tanked to the gills, who takes six bullets while he gives his last breaths trying to enact equal punishment on his attacker. He's committed, unwavering, and pushing through the worst of what the streets have to offer. He's everything that everyone else in Mean Street's isn't, what they do and don't want to be.