Martin Scorsese's America

by Ellis Cashmore

For over four decades, Martin Scorsese has been the chronicler of an obsessive society, where material possessions and physical comfort are valued, where the pursuit of individual improvement is rewarded and where male prerogative is respected and preserved. Scorsese has often described his films as sociology and he has a his storytelling condenses complex information into comprehensible narratives about society. In this sense, he has been a guide through a dark world of nineteenth century crypto-fascism to a fetishistic twentieth century in which goods, fame, money and power are held to have magical power.

Author of Nurture of the Beast and Beckham, Ellis Cashmore turns his attention to arguably the most influential living film- maker to explore how Scorsese envisions America. Greed, manhood, the city and romantic love feature on Scorsese's landscape of secular materialism. They are among the themes Cashmore argues have driven and inform Scorsese's work. This is America, as seen through the eyes of Martin Scorsese and it is a deeply unpleasant place.

Cashmore's book discloses how, collectively, Scorsese's films present an image of America. It's an image assembled from the perspectives of obsessive people, whether burned-out paramedics, compulsive entrepreneurs, tortured lovers, or celebrity-fixated comedians. It's collected from pool halls, taxicabs, boxing rings and jazz clubs. It's an image that's specific, yet ubiquitous. It is Martin Scorsese's America.

Genres: Nonfiction

200 pages, Paperback

First published October 6, 2009

About the author

Professor Ellis Cashmore is visiting professor of sociology at Aston University, in Birmingham, England. He was formerly a professor of culture, media and sport at Staffordshire University’s Faculty of Health Sciences, which he joined in 1993. Before this, he was professor of sociology at the University of Tampa, Florida; and, before this, lecturer in sociology at the University of Hong Kong.

Cashmore’s Elizabeth Taylor: A Private Life for Public Consumption is published by Bloomsbury. Among his other recent books are Beyond Black: Celebrity and race in Obama’s America, and Martin Scorsese’s America. His Celebrity/Culture is in its second edition.

Reviews

[David Sterritt]

“Martin Scorsese’s America” by Ellis Cashmore is a thematically organized study of Marty’s takes on various American phenomena – success, money, masculinity, the usual – as they appear and reappear over the course of his career. Cashmore is good on matters of violence, greed, and gender, but he’s a careless writer and clutters the text with quotations from a motley mix of reviewers and academics. Useful as an overview, but better books on Scorsese aren’t hard to find. (I wish it were stronger because it’s in the same Polity series - America Through the Lens - that published my “Spike Lee’s America” a few years ago.)

[Daniel Li · Rating 4 out of 5]

read in waterstones. fine maybe my love mr scorsese is sexist :( nobody's perfect

[Ralph Burton · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books about the greatest of filmmakers. The introduction's comparison of Scorsese to Amerigo Vespucci had my jaw dropping -- spot on. In contrast to the Marvel fans who view the Great Man as Mr White Vanilla making Vanilla White films (somehow it's not racist for them to erase Scorsese's Italian identity), the various essays here make a great claim for Scorsese as a ethnic American filmmaker. I disagree, however, that Scorsese is a conservative filmmaker. I always viewed him as very left, his pro-union politics in The Irishman, his anti-eighties allegory in Goodfellas, his reactionary study in Taxi Driver; it would be a damn mistake to consider him as Reaganite, even Eisenhower-Republican.