The Idea of Martin Scorsese’s Career Brought Me to Tears

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: Getty; Video: Giphy

When Bob Dylan dropped a 17-minute track about the JFK assassination during the pandemic, I teared up listening to it. My feeling at the time, in the throes of 2020, was that the song was a masterpiece — to such an extent that I became momentarily angry at a family member for reacting to it with a thumbs-down emoji. Four years later, I can’t say that “Murder Most Foul” has stayed in my rotation, but that initial listen epitomizes a regular pop-culture occurrence for me: the experience of getting emotional when an older artist returns to familiar creative ground and somehow manages to make something new and singularly them.

It’s a feeling I get most often when watching the work of an older filmmaker, and last year was riddled with that particular brand of emotional landmine: From Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron to Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon to Michael Mann’s Ferrari, 2023 was the year of octogenarian legends drilling further into the themes they’ve spent their lives excavating. In Ferrari, there’s a moment when Enzo Ferrari’s wife, Laura, throws the death of their son in her husband’s face during an argument, prompting him to explode into a rant about how he tried to engineer a solution to the illness, to outsmart the disease by controlling the inputs and outputs of Dino’s body. The scene has an emotional thrust of its own, but it hits harder when considered alongside the rest of Mann’s work, because what could possibly be more Mannian than a tightly wound man desperately trying to impose cold logic onto something as incomprehensible as a child’s death? Unlike a Michael Mann protagonist, I shed a tear.

While that phenomenon has a well-established spot in my personal canon of “things that make me cry,” I recently discovered a new variation on it while rewatching 1973’s Mean Streets, which Scorsese made when he was only 30. It was during a fight scene that does not seem to outwardly qualify as a tear-jerker: A brawl breaks out among a dozen or so young aspiring gangsters in a New York City pool hall because someone gets called a “mook,” and no one else can agree on what exactly a “mook” is. (“I’m a mook? What’s a mook? You can’t call me a mook.”) A single punch gets thrown and all hell breaks loose, with every guy in the bar rushing toward the action. The Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman,” which was previously playing on a jukebox in the corner, takes over the soundtrack while Scorsese’s shaky handheld camera chases after various characters as the fight spills across the bar. Amid the fracas, I was surprised to find myself welling up.

Within the movie’s tragic coming-of-age arc, the scene does carry a certain poignancy: This is, ultimately, a playground fight, where everyone is awkwardly slapping and hitting each other, as if unsure of how to play the role of “gangster.” (“I got a bad hand!” Harvey Keitel’s Charlie whines when he’s about to get hit, as if mercy rules apply.) These guys will face real consequences soon enough, but for now, a fight can still end with both sides sharing a drink. That impending loss of innocence could drive a viewer to tears, I suppose, but what I experienced was closer to what my co-worker Alison Willmore has called a Spectacle Cry, in which a scene makes you cry not because of its emotional appeal, but because it bowls you over with, as she puts it, the sheer “majesty, ambition, or craft of what you’re seeing.”

The pool-hall fight scores points in all three of those categories, and I can only conclude it made me cry because watching it feels like catching a glimpse of the next 50-plus years of Scorsese’s career. It’s all there in only his third feature film, from the petty gangsters who are quick to violence to the Motown needle drop to the ability to make Robert De Niro look like the coolest guy alive, even when he’s spiraling out of control as Johnny Boy and doing goofy faux kung-fu moves on top of a pool table. The scene vibrates with the energy of a young, scrappy filmmaker, and the movie around it feels stuffed to the seams with ideas, as if Scorsese desperately packed them all in there in case he never got another shot at directing.

Of course, he’d go on to spend the next half-century exploring questions of mortality and how supposedly God-fearing men lie to themselves to avoid confronting their own guilt, and he’d find countless ways to make De Niro look cool (and not so cool) along the way. But to watch Mean Streets now is to observe something fundamental in Scorsese’s artistry — it’s seeing the start of a through-line that’s traceable across the last five decades of pop culture. The knowledge that Scorsese already had the template in 1973 for a lifetime worth of great, singular work is almost too much to handle. And there I go, tearing up again just thinking about it.