New York City/Character New York

New York City/Character

New York City as a Character

Gangs of New York is unusual in the way in which it focuses on New York City's history, framing the city and its criminal underworld during the Civil War as a character unto itself. The inspiration for the Martin Scorcese-directed film is Herbert Ashbury's 1928 short but comprehensive selection of urban myths, the Gangs of New York, the narrative center of which the Five Points neighborhood -- the junction of three streets that was the representational spirit of one of the most poverty-stricken city neighborhoods in 19th-century America. In 1842, Dickens wrote about New York City's Five Points neighborhood in American Notes:

This is the place: these narrow ways, diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth. Such lives as are led here, bear the same fruits here as elsewhere. The coarse and bloated faces at the doors have counterparts at home, and all the wide world over. Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays. Many of those pigs live here. Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright in lieu of going on all-fours? And why they talk instead of grunting? (Dickens 2007).

Scorcese's film uses the city of New York and the violence that takes place within it as a sort of birth scenario of modern American society. From the very beginning of the film, Scorcese shows us a world that is barbarically full of chaos and foul occurrences everywhere. While the actual characters themselves are either completely fiction or a mish-mash of other characters taken out of their true time, the city itself feels like the most smartly constructed character, as it seems that Scorcese put more effort into creating a city that is a representation of the director's views on society at large. This world that Scorcese has depicted in the city is one that is marvelously cruel, intensely chaotic and completely imbued with his own musings on what he believes that period in time would have been like. The movie is completely modern and relevant today because it reflects on some of the same issues of race, class and ethnicity that we are struggling with today. While Gangs of New York depicts these issues set against the backdrop of Civil War era New York, which makes the film all the more disturbing, the issues that he is addressing are as ugly as the foul neighborhood of Five Points.