In at least 3 hearty paragraphs, discuss White Heat, as well as the characteristics of the gangster genre and its role as an art form. In your discussion, bring in another gangster film you've seen on your own (The Godfather, Goodfellas, etc.). Your discussion should be in relation to the Warshow article I handed out on Wednesday and the idea of the gangster as an individual. I want to see at least 2 quotes from the article in your discussion. Don't forget, your film textbook has a great section on gangster genre.
Due: Monday May 21.
The gangster genre serves a specific purpose as an art form. It disguises a current of opposition. Robert Warshow wrote in an essay of his that “America, as a social and political organization, is committed to a cheerful view of life.” The gangster genre disguises the “sense of desperation and inevitable failure which optimism itself helps to create.” This is quite obvious in the gangster genre. Their stories usually revolve around the gangster himself and his world of illegal pleasures. The gangster is usually unhappy and never satisfied with what he has and has an un-ending lust. This provides a very clever way to put in a sense of desperation and inevitable failure, because this is about the bad guy and the bad guy always gets his. The audience has this uneasiness during the film, because this is the bad guy. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t succeed. Things are worse when the audience gets to know the gangster and feels for him. Also, the gangster always has a sense of desperation around him. He needs this money, the cops are after him and he needs to get them off his trail, or one of his boys can’t be trusted. He is never fully happy and never will.
ReplyDeleteWhite Heat is a great example to back these ideas up. Cody is very unstable and has a very unhealthy relationship with his mother and is most likely the reason he is the way he is. When he has his headaches he crawls on the floor and groans and looks and sounds like a helpless animal. His mother’s help make it go away. The first time in the film this happens, Cody is heavily shadowed with his face deep in the bed and his mother messages it away. His mother seems to loom over him and it shows the power she has over him. He craves her attention and she is the only one he fully trusts. His mother always said “You’re on top of the world Cody” and at the end of the movie he yells “I’m on top of the world ma!” and blows himself up. He is heavily shadowed and small on screen. This represents his instability and vulnerability. This was due to his mother’s death and betrayal by a cop who took the place of his ma when she died. The audience feels bad for Cody. He craved attention from those close to him and when they were gone or betrayed him, he couldn’t handle it well. He was psychotic, but since the audience got to know his story and attach themselves to him, they felt bad and sad. Some of them probably identified with Cody and feared that they might become like him. Warshow wrote that the gangster “… is what we want to be and what we are afraid we may become.”
Bonnie and Clyde is another example, but for different reasons. Bonnie and Clyde are two regular people, so the audience will identify with them quite easily. The quote about that the gangster is what we want to be and what we’re afraid of becoming could not apply to anything better than it does to Bonnie and Clyde. This is because Bonnie and Clyde turned to crime due to hard times (the depression). There is a scene when Bonnie and Clyde go to a farm and learn that the farmer and his family had to sell it to the bank. Clyde shoots the sign stating that the bank owns it and lets the farmer take a shot. They are in the foreground and the sign is in the background. This is symbolic of the disapproval of the bank’s actions and lets the audience know the hard times everyone’s going through. They are taking action into their own hands. Bank takes from them, they take from the bank. The viewer has faced hard times before and feels convicted, because they have most likely pondered doing something illegal to make their life easier and they feel they could have done when Bonnie and Clyde did. They feel ashamed at this realization.
ReplyDeleteThe gangster genre does a great job disguising a current of opposition. It succeeds tremendously due to the gangster himself. He is bad, so this feeling of desperation and failure are okay, because he is bad. Also, the audience begins to identify with the gangster and this makes them wonder if they could have been like that. The disguise becomes better when the gangster(s) is killed, because it then satisfies the status quo of society (that life is grand and happy). This is because the bad guy gets his and bad things happened to him because he was a bad guy. This is evident in the violent deaths that each of the gangsters had. Cody exploding and the bloody death of Bonnie and Clyde after getting shot about one hundred times. The disguise is now complete since people felt this desperation and sense of failure, but then they can say to themselves that “It’s because he was bad” and ‘still have a cheerful view of life.’
The gangster film exists as a genre mainly for the reasons which Warshow described in his essay, "The Gangster as a Tragic Hero." They act as an antithesis to America's committal to "a cheerful view of life" by "expressing that part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and the demands of modern life, which rejects 'Americanism' itself." As well, the genre provides escapism for the viewer because the gangster is "what we want to be and what we are afraid we may become." The genre typically has many frequently used plot tropes. Many of these tropes appear in White Heat and GoodFellas.
ReplyDeleteIn White Heat, Cody Jarrett's "activity is actually a form of rational enterprise, involving fairly definite goals and various techniques for achieving them." This is exhibited in the final scenes of the film where he and the people in his gang attempt to rob a chemical plant, as well as the scenes in the film where the theft is planned. In the end of the film, he "is doomed because he is under the obligation to succeed" -- he does his best to make sure that he's never caught or killed by the policemen chasing him. In the end of the film, he dies a victorious death that he himself creates, as a result of his need to succeed in accomplishing his goal in any way possible and to escape the police. As well, White Heat utilizes the idea of the importance of the mother to an almost absurd extent -- Jarrett continues to consult her on his actions even after she is dead and he seems to be obsessed with her.
In both GoodFellas and White Heat, "the quality of irrational brutality and the quality of rational enterprise become one." Extreme violence is often mixed into the "businesses" in the film, usually without much warning. In GoodFellas, Henry Hill is "the man of the city, with the city's language and knowledge, with its queer and dishonest skills and its terrible daring, carrying his life in his hands like a placard, like a club." Other tropes of the gangster film that appear in the film are that of the main character (Hill) quickly rising up in the world of the gangsters through his associations with others, the neglected housewife who is not used to the world of the gangsters, and the extreme importance of family in the lives of the gangsters.
The final scene of White Heat acts as an allegory for Jarrett’s life as a gangster. As he climbs the stairs of the oil drum, he is shown in a low angle shot; the mise-en-scene is a metaphor for Jarrett’s “steady upward progress” which will soon be “followed by a very precipitate fall” in his final stand against the police. The light at the beginning of the staircase represents Jarrett’s rejection of “Americanism” and the “accepted notions of the public good” to become an outsider-“what we want to be and are afraid we may become” in the darkness at the top of the drum. “The gangster’s whole life is an effort to assert himself as an individual” and so Jarrett must die alone. As the last remaining member of his gang tries to give himself up to the police, Jarrett himself shoots him down. At this point in his life, Jarrett has never been more alone. He’s lost his mother and his gang and been betrayed by Fallon who’d served as a replacement for “Ma”. Jarrett “dies because he is an individual”-there is no one left to protect him. In a final act of defiance, he causes his own death rather than allowing the police to kill him.
ReplyDeleteJarrett’s success is due to the fact that he is utterly alone. He treats his gang roughly and appears to have no emotional ties to anyone save Ma and Fallon. He rejects society and chooses to live as an outlaw. Because he exists to live and die alone and to repudiate the happiness society claims to offer, he represents the “sense of desperation and ultimate failure which optimism itself helps to create”.
In “Casino”, Martin Scorsese applies many of the principles of the gangster film to the world of legalized gambling. “Brutality itself becomes at once the means to success and the content of success” since it’s suggested that Ace is rewarded for his cruelty and dishonesty, cheating the government for financial gain and brutally murdering his best friend. He is the product of “the city” with its “queer and dishonest skills” and he is concerned only for himself. Much like in White Heat, Ace has a materialistic and duplicitous wife and few real emotional ties.
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ReplyDeleteWhite Heat is a quintessential gangster film from 1949. It fulfills Robert Warshow's classification of gangster films as "modern [tragedies]" - the film's protagonist, Cody Jarrett, ends up cornered and exploded in the finale. The film follows the traditional story arc seen in gangster films from the Godfather to Goodfellas, in which the protagonists become caught up in the seeming success of their crimes, only to become victims of their vaulting ambition. Cody Jarrett's plan to break into a chemical plant is destroyed by the mole who infiltrates his gang. This is comparable to Henry Hill's rise and fall in the world of organized crime in the film Goodfellas.
ReplyDeleteRobert Warshow classifies the gangster as an archetypal character that is universally relatable. "The gangster speaks for us," Warshow writes, arguing that the gangster appeals to the section of human consciousness that resents the demands of day-to-day living and all it entails. For this to be effective, the gangster must be an empathetic character. Cody Jarrett certainly qualifies - he is portrayed as a flawed human with some good in him, a man who feels rejected and betrayed by the world at large. Cody taps into the part of the psyche that is naturally distrustful of society, and desires to live outside of it.
Fulfilling the "tragedy" arc, Cody ultimately faces his downfall. Cody is forced to face all of his flaws in the "explosive" finale - from his ambition as a gangster, to his human side that trusted the undercover cop who had infiltrated the gang. Cody bonded with the cop because he saw him as a friend in a life bereft of them. This further aids to make Cody empathetic as a character - the viewer ends up feeling as betrayed by the cop as Cody does. This is what makes White Heat - and the gangster film genre at large so powerful: the viewer feels empathetic for characters who conventionally would not be seen as deserving.