idea ·Mean Streets (1973)

The hand in the flame

Charlie holds his fingers over a flame three times in Mean Streets: a votive candle, a match, a kitchen grill. It is his private theology, and it recurs in Taxi Driver.

mise-en-scene
acting
iconography
character
atomic
religion
motif
scorsese

The film's theory of sin is a burn:

It's all bullshit except the pain, right? The pain of Hell. The burn from a lighted match increased a million times. Infinite. And you don't fuck around with the infinite. There's no way you do that.

— Charlie's voice-over, as transcribed in [[Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese|the Companion]], smc 377

So he tests himself. Ebert calls it "the most famous shot in the film": after refusing the priest's "Ten Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers", Charlie "holds his hand in the flame of a votive candle before the altar, testing himself against the fires of hell" (Scorsese by Ebert, unpaged). He does it again with a match in Tony's bar, and a third time at the grill in his uncle's kitchen, where it "causes him to sweat and grimace in pain" (smc 380).

Stefan Sereda notices the ambiguity: "the film is ambiguous as to whether Charlie plays this game to make manifest his spiritual pain or to flirt with temptation" (smc 378). David Sterritt hears Joyce in it: the line about the match sounds "like the priest who terrorizes Stephen Dedalus" in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (smc 98).

It comes back. In Taxi Driver, Travis holds his fist over a gas flame. Ebert makes the link in the same breath as the overheads: see Overhead shots are the priest's-eye view. Same director, same gesture, a different man: Charlie is testing whether he can bear hell; Travis is testing whether he can bear anything.

A case for Mise en scène and Iconography: a prop (a candle) and a gesture (the hand) turned into a motif by repetition. See Church and street in Little Italy.

Go on, then

context Church and street in Little Italy In the neighbourhood Scorsese grew up in, the two powers were the wise guys and the priests. Mean Streets is a film about trying to answer to both.
scene Mean Streets — Tony's bar Charlie walks into a room lit like hell in slow motion; later Johnny Boy walks in on the downbeat of 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' with a girl on each arm. Two entrances, one room, and the camera's opinion of both.
scene Mean Streets — the back room Charlie tells Johnny Boy he has to pay. Johnny Boy tells him a story about a poker game, a raid and a man called Joey Clams, and loses the thread himself. Everyone agrees it's the heart of the film. Nobody agrees who wrote it.
film Mean Streets (1973) Four young men in Little Italy, a debt nobody will pay, and a would-be saint who keeps putting his hand in the fire. Scorsese's first film in his own voice, made in Los Angeles for almost nothing.
film The Craft (1996) Four girls at a Catholic school in Los Angeles form a coven, get everything they asked for, and discover that the film has a moral. The teen movie the 1990s kept trying to make about female anger.
context The returning veteran, 1976 Taxi Driver never says the word Vietnam after its first ten minutes. The war is in the jacket, the scar and the insomnia — and the film's authors disagree about whether it is there at all.