The Habits of Cornered Rats

AMERICAN GRAFFITI AND Mean Streets are ten years apart in setting, 1962 to 1973, but they have some remarkable similarities. Both produced in recent months, both by young directors, both personal statements, both the finest films of the year. But the likeness stretches further, to the atmosphere of each. There is a desperate energy in these movies that's walled in by the oppressiveness of the settings. The characters move with a blind urgency like trapped rats--they have nowhere to go. And the film-makers can do nothing with the material but dig deeper.

The teenagers in George Lucas' Graffiti are a generation bursting out of its skin. In a small town and a '62 world there's no road for their rock and roll anxiety to follow: they jump in their drag racers and drive back and forth on the strip, letting off steam. Teetering at the brink of a world not quite ready to release the new energy of a frontier mentality, the kids have a brief moment of loud, confused frenzy before they go to Vietnam or settle in the suburbs.

There's the same sense of confinement in Martin Scorsese's brilliant new Mean Streets--the stifling air, the discipline that allows the filmaker a paradoxical liberation. Living with the streetcorner Mafia in New York's Little Italy, Mean Streets' desperation is more brutal, more pulsing and more immediate. People in Lucas' world scurry because a change is about to come; in Scorsese's vision the sky is going to fall in.

CHARLIE, the central figure in Streets, is a mob underling who collects "payments" for his uncle, the local boss. Harvey Keitel's countenance has the tight-bunched look of Charles Bronson, but it is more than tough. The face shows weathered tension burying pure fear. You see him first kneeling at the altar, dwarfed in the dizzying bowels of the Catholic church. It is after confession, and Charlie is clealy no ordinary sinner, looking grimly pained as he repeats his dozen Hail Marys. The interior monologue begins: "They're just words, it's all bullshit, it's not for me," etc. The cliches are telling--in reality he is tyrannized by the church, tormented by guilt, terrified of hell. He thinks he's fighting back, but his gestures are meaningless.

Later, he's in Tony Volpe's bar, as usual, staring at the black topless dancer, utterly at home. And again he muses to himself: "She sure is a fine-looking woman. But she's black. I suppose there's no difference, though," etc. More cliches, and again an inevitable losing battle with the tyranny of his small world. His racism is a natural extension of the strict law of street and family.

IT MAKES SENSE for Charlie to speak in cliches, for he is a caught personality. He's caught in the social conditions which shaped him and form the landscape of the screen--but he's also caught in another kind of double bind, a more universal one. This you empathize with instinctively, and Mean Streets doesn't take long to shoot the landscape into your blood.

You can't see how Charlie could have acted in any other way: Ostensibly the film sets him up as the only animal in the jungle who still believes in "helping" others. There is his friend Johnny Boy (Robert de Niro, in a dazzling performance), who's crazy from debt, floating free, drowning and thriving on it. He shoots out windows and blows up mailboxes for kicks, and treats people the same way--trying to see how far he can go.

Charlie mediates between him and Michael, a petty crook full of ambition but lacking Charlie's family connections. He mimics George Raft, and is sulky and dangerous when he thinks he's being crossed. Charlie appears to have some compassion for both, just as he appears to have some understanding of his girlfriend's (Teresa, the film's only unconvincing portrait) epilepsy. Associating with these people hurts Charlie's "career", because he has to stay in good with Uncle and the traditional ideal of "honorable men." On the surface, then, he stands out as heroic.

But, as Johnny Boy tells him, Charlie is really a "fuckin' politician." He's not sacrificing anything. The streets have ripped him apart, and the only mode of survival he's got left is weak and snivelling.

CHARLIE IS A cliche-monger, a master of the canned phrase--even when talking to himself. He compulsively wants to be liked by everybody because he so hates himself; he'll betray anyone when he's drunk or behind closed doors. His bar talk is full of clinging, self-conscious poses--the manner that the most pathetic clowners acquire in adolescence: They learn to copy bravado, but are sensitive enough to see its hollowness. They end up parodying themselves. Charlie's caught between outside pressure to conform to what traditionally held the neighborhood together, and peer pressure; between the pillars of his heritage and the way of life seductively decaying around him. He emerges vain, hypocritical and childish, sinning with scared, hellish abandon and giving only enough of himself to be self-serving. People finally have to suffer in order to save him, but he is imperturbable in his self-righteousness to the end, telling God, "Things are rough on me I know, but I'm trying, Lord, I'm trying."

Everybody's doomed in this world view, so life is giddy, fast-paced and self-destructive. And always--on the streets, in the womb-like bars--violence is rippling under a tiger's skin of desperate holding-on. A party for a newly-returned Vietnam Vet ends, predictably, with the medalled soldier sitting alone, a wallflower. It takes an instant for him to explode into savage confusion. Men are shot, quiet for a second, and then they go wild. The audience is always poised for this, and it helps drive the film.

Internally, too, the characters are furiously trying to keep things from popping out of their skin. Their ping-pong verbal exchanges--all wrist-action--are fast and funny and ultimately uncommunicative. These people don't talk, they bounce word-pellets off each other. Everything ricochets with the angle of conditioned response, an idiom of cliche, more like music than words--a high-pitched constant background. Their tough, jabbing control in conversation speaks of boys who have grown up together, pulled farther apart and more jealous of each other as they go along. Indeed, we get a connecting sense throughout the film of what they were as children, who played what role before the cruel hierarchy of the streets yanked them apart and into themselves. They've seen a great deal by now, and they're too thick-skinned to absorb words any more.

THEY ARE splitting at the seams with their own inner dialogues. They create imaginary friends. They go en masse to the movies. They talk to themselves. Tony Volpe has a young tiger hidden in the back room under a sheet. It's totally out of character, but he loves it, hides it, and starts babbling about William Blake when he sees it. The others laugh at him, as they do when Charlie lets slip his private conversations with God. Embarrassing moments like these lunge out from beneath the film's membrane as brutally as the violence does. They're both violations of a stern status quo.

Mean Streets doesn't bother too much with conventional metaphor. A film like Last Tango in Paris derived its emotional impact from compression: a wide range of the experience of Paul and Jeanne was condensed into moments of expression (sex acts, for example) which operated like a prism, and at the movie's best, whole characters' lives were refracted and born again in rawer form. Tango was weakest, in fact, when it tried to fill in the details.

Mean Streets discards this method. When Scorsese builds up the pressure there's no release: there are no orgasms to let off the steam, and the violence lashes out like a lizard's tongue--it never changes anything, and the high tension prays relentlessly on an audience. The bursts of voltage are supplied by the setting: a needle in an arm, a siren, a scream, a Fat City sequence of a man waking alone ringing with hangover and dreams burning off fast, shrill urban music--devices like these make up for hours of narrative padding or careful ambience-building. It's a modern movie language.

MOST OF AMERICAN GRAFFITI, like Mean Streets, takes place at night. There's a closed specificity of tone, and Lucas wants to put his teenagers in perspective: the world is going on elsewhere. Even though there were no adults in the picture, you knew they were out there, and that they were different from the kids on the strip. Charlie, Michael, Tony and Johnny Boy are not the only ones on the mean street: the older mafioso glide elegantly and watch TV; the bums have kindly, lost smiles; crowds throng around the neon crosses at the festivals. Bizarre or not, they've found quiet ways to cope.

But in the four major characters you see the mangled self-images before they've hardened into permanent, placid cripples. In their own unconscious way they're all fighting for their freedom. But they are cornered rats, and Mean Streets gives us the animal's final moves--the disbelieving laugh, the snarl, and the last gasp of panic.