Scorsese’s Chinese Inclusion Act
Long before Martin Scorsese’s long-awaited epic, Gangs of New York, began to unspool at 30-plexes near you, the news was not good. Battle stories about Gangs left an inky ominous trail in publications ranging from Esquire to The New York Times, detailing the reshoots, re-edits, the struggles between Scorsese and producer Harvey Weinstein, the huge overruns of the already massive $83 million budget. From early reports, Gangs sounded a lot like Michael Cimino’s pricey boondoggle, Heaven’s Gate — an exorbitant, expensive, excessive, unwatchable mess of a movie about the violent making and unmaking of New York City’s 19th century streetfighting men.
It didn’t quite work out that way. Daniel Day-Lewis, playing the main villain of the piece, Bill “the Butcher” Cutting, won deserved acting awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle, and Scorsese recently took home a Golden Globe for direction. For a filmmaker who had the commitment to endure a 25-year development period, he seemed a little surprised.
Scorsese sets up his passion play against astonishing amounts of context, which we take as factual due to the film’s authoritative voiceover narration. However, when the filmmaker is interviewed, as he was on NPR’s “Fresh Air” last week, he says Gangs is basically an “opera” rather than a realistic account of the past.
Guess that explains away Gang’s Chinese female dancers, singers and prostitutes, something Scorsese’s already been taken to task for because their presence seems almost impossible in 1860s New York — thanks to racist immigration statutes. Still, I’m not so sure critics are completely right. The precursor to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Page Law — which was purportedly passed to stop the immigration of Chinese prostitutes and ended up severely restricting the immigration of all Chinese women and casting judgment on the morality of Chinese immigrants in general — was actually enacted in 1875, years after the 1863 Civil War draft riots that the film depicts.
Instead the weirdest thing about Gangs is that there are so many Chinese denizens, period. From what I understand, as late as the 1870s, a Chinese person was still considered radically exotic by New Yorkers.
So why are there so many Chinese people, symbols and motifs in Gangs of New York? Why is Bill the Butcher hiding out in an opium den, checking out silky floozies on traditional teak Asian four-posters, poking his knives into carved Chinese screens? Why does the film come to its climactic midpoint as a Chinese opera troupe stages a mock-sword fight?
I can take a stab at a few theories. Much has been made of the cultural diversity of the immigrants in Gangs. Naturally Asian immigrants can’t be left out of an immigrants’ saga like Gangs. It’s all about turf wars, and in some ways, there’s a provocative inclusiveness to Scorsese’s vision, from the African American member of an otherwise all-Irish gang to the Four Points landscape dashed with Chinese faces — even if those faces are mostly anonymous.
To me, Gangs also seems to have assimilated the influence of Chinese action/swordsmen movies. The huge leaps of imagination over historical accuracy, the cartoonish, almost over-the-top characters, and broad, dramatic narrative strokes may seem like sloppiness and camp to those expecting the gritty yet lyrical realism of Mean Streets and Raging Bull. But they’ll seem familiar to anyone who watches their share of Hong Kong swordsmen flicks. In that context, the film’s revenge tale, populated by warlords, is utterly familiar, if not completely hackneyed, as is its hybrid of sentimentality and violence, which can be seen as operatic, amplified or overblown — choose your adjective. Gangs’ acclaimed opening fight scene cuts on the blurred thrust of cleavers and knives with gestural camerawork and a choppy rhythm that complements the onscreen butchery and could come straight out of Tsui Hark’s more avant-garde movies.
I would go as far as to say that Gangs sometimes seems closer to the comic energy of Tsui’s Once Upon a Time in China than Sergio Leone’s stately Once Upon a Time in America. At moments, it comes off like a shout-out — or shout-back — to the many Hong Kong directors, such as John Woo, who have been influenced by Scorsese. Gangs may not go as far as allowing an Asian thug to run with Leonardo DiCaprio’s pack — onscreen assimilation goes only so far — instead, it almost appears to acknowledge that after the rise of Hong Kong cinema in the ’80s and its impact on Western audiences in the ’90s, it’s almost impossible to make an action flick that doesn’t reflect the Asian cinematic influence and iconography. And the specters of swordsmen flicks aren’t the only ghosts that haunt Bill the Butcher’s bloodbath: If Irish Americans think they had it bad, at least they were never subject to the only non-wartime federal law that excluded a people purely based on nationality. If that doesn’t deserve some fighting in the streets, worthy of a film epic by itself, then what does?
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