grasso even a Muslim understands how this war will benefit his people,try not to do anymore "DEEP THINKING" you will hurt yourself!
Getting Into Gang War
By Salman Rushdie
Wednesday, December 25, 2002; Page A29 As the world prepares for war, two extraordinary portraits of human conflict are offered at movie theaters this Christmas. Peter Jackson's "The Two Towers," the second installment of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, and Martin Scorsese's "Gangs of New York" are superficially similar because of their mutual interest in battle; but they could not be more different beneath their bloodied surfaces, and the choice between their conflicting visions is one we may all shortly have to make.
Both films have been eagerly anticipated. Neither has disappointed. I do not speak here of their performance at the box office but of their qualities as what one used to call "cinema," which is to say, as art.
Like its precursor, "The Fellowship of the Ring," Jackson's picture is an improvement on its source material, if only because Jackson's film language is subtler, more sophisticated and certainly more contemporary than the stilted, deliberate archaisms of J.R.R. Tolkien's descriptive prose and, even more problematically, of his dialogue. (I am a big fan of the book version of "The Lord of the Rings," but nobody ever read Tolkien for the writing.)
One might say something similar about Scorsese's use of sources. Herbert Asbury's 1928 classic "Gangs of New York" has been transmuted in the film version into a poetic, visionary epic, a "birth of the nation" saga that seeks nothing less, as the New York Times reviewer comes close to suggesting, than to supplant the grand narratives of national origins created by D.W. Griffith and John Ford.
It may seem strange to compare Jackson's fabular Middle Earth wars among men, orcs, dwarfs, hobbits and elves with Scorsese's riots in the all-too-real Five Points district of 19th-century Manhattan, but both filmmakers share an interest in the cut and thrust of hand-to-hand fighting, of close conflict realistically depicted according to the "ancient laws of combat." Movie blood used to be known as "Kensington gore" after the upscale London street, but there's nothing posh or genteel about the gore offered here.
So much for parallels and surface similarities. Where the two films differ radically is in what they have to say about men at arms and about the nature of war.
"The Two Towers" -- how fortunate for all concerned that this title was not ready for release 12 months ago, in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the World Trade Center -- follows Tolkien in creating a universe of moral absolutes. Tolkien didn't like people calling his great work an allegory of the battle against Adolf Hitler, but the echoes of World War II, the last "just war," are everywhere.
The Dark Lord Sauron is the incarnation of evil, and his most potent (and very Wagnerian) weapon, the One or Ruling Ring, is made of and perfects that evil. All who come under Sauron's baleful influence become as thoroughly, homogeneously evil as their lord. The forces of good that stand against him -- and this explains much of Tolkien's appeal -- are, by contrast, extremely various: from Gandalf the wizard (the powerful good guy), Aragorn the Ranger (the heroic good guy), Legolas the elf (the cool good guy), Gimli the grumpy dwarf (the uncool good guy), all the way down to the little people, the hobbits or halflings, who will in the end save the day.
Scorsese's film offers no such extreme moral contrasts. As knife goes up against cleaver, club against skull, nativist against immigrant American, Protestant against Catholic, "good" and "evil" seem almost irrelevant. This is the amoral world of bare-knuckle power, a Darwinian cityscape in which only the fittest will survive. And out of that world, Scorsese reminds us, comes ours. This is a far braver, rarer vision than that of "The Two Towers," brilliant as the fantasy epic is. Gang war is neither holy nor just, Scorsese tells us, and, as one leaves the movie theater with his images dazzling the mind's eye, the thought occurs that maybe all wars are gang wars.
The films have opened at a time when all of us are trying to come to grips with the fact of an impending, controversial war, and many people, on both sides of the argument, are taking the absolutist line. The Bush camp's interest in "evil" and "evildoers" needs no further emphasis. But the Bushies are finding support in some strange quarters. To take just one example, the crazy rage of the writer Oriana Fallaci, directed without discrimination against every Muslim in the world -- "every Muslim, without exception, is a fundamentalist"; "they multiply like protozoa to infinity" -- is one example of what one might call the New Evilism that is busily painting the world in black and white. Oddly, opponents of the proposed American attack on Iraq often look like mirror-images of what they hate. According to these opponents, Western as well as Islamic, the United States is the tyrant, the Dark Lord, and all its purposes are vile.
The truth looks more confused, more amorally Scorsesean. Saddam Hussein is a murderous despot, but the present U.S. administration's assaults on fundamental freedoms call into question its right to be called freedom lovers. The overthrow of the present Iraqi leadership may be desirable, but many of the scenarios for the aftermath of that overthrow are undesirable, to say the least. America may be in less danger from Iraq than its leaders claim, and the war on Hussein may have more to do with breaking U.S. dependence on Saudi oil than anyone cares to discuss. Yet it is possible that this flawed war may end up creating a better Iraq for most Iraqis than could be achieved by any other means. In short, we may be in for a gang war on a gigantic scale, and yet, as in Scorsese's movie, that gang war, brutal, cynical, atavistic -- a war in which one man's hero is another's villain -- may paradoxically succeed in bringing a more modern world into being.
Ambiguity is out of fashion, however. We will be given a war of heroes against villains at all costs. After all, "The Two Towers" is a vast popular success, and "Gangs of New York" is doing no better than modest business. Perhaps when the time for the Oscars comes round, the academy will see fit to reward the more profound complexities of the Scorsese movie. But by March we may all be preoccupied by a greater, darker contest than the one for the Academy Awards.
Salman Rushdie is the author of "Fury" and other novels. |
