idea ·Mean Streets (1973)

The jukebox is the score

Mean Streets has no composed score. Every note of music comes from a jukebox, a car radio or a window, and most of it is ten years older than the film.

audio
non-diegetic-sound
editing
format
atomic
music
scorsese

The model was a 1931 gangster film:

I was influenced by the way William Wellman kept popular tunes playing in the background, no score but source music. And that blend of different kinds of music became the soundtrack of Mean Streets and later Raging Bull.

— Scorsese on Scorsese, sos 45

Giuliana Muscio puts it technically: "most of the time the music is diegetic; that is, it comes from a visible or implicit source – the jukebox or the car radio" (smc 275). It is also old. These men are listening to "the music the characters prefer: therefore, instead of listening to the hits of 1973, they enjoy Johnny Ace or the Ronettes" (smc 274). The soundtrack is their adolescence, playing in their twenties.

Scorsese's reason is structural rather than decorative. In the neighbourhood, "suddenly a piece would come on and we'd stay with it for two or three minutes. Life would stop, so I wanted the film to stop and go with the music" (sos 45). That is how Mean Streets — Tony's bar can cut on a downbeat: the song is not commenting on the scene, it is setting its tempo.

Why it matters. 1973 is the year compilation soundtracks arrived: American Graffiti came out the same year, after Easy Rider (1969) and A Clockwork Orange (1971) (smc 278). But Graffiti uses its records as period wallpaper, and Scorsese uses his as memory and rhythm. Kent Jones, who saw the film at thirteen: "I had never heard music used in that way" (Kelly, afterword, unpaged). Pauline Kael, more briefly: "The music is the electricity in the air of this movie" (Kael — Mean Streets review (1973)).

What it cost. The Stones' "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and "Tell Me" took $30,000 (smc 265). Other rights holders surfaced later: "people came out of the woodwork years later and Warner Brothers would have to pay them" (sos 45).

A case for Audio and for the diegetic line in Non-diegetic sound, which this film barely crosses. Compare Herrmann finished the score and died that night: three years later, Scorsese hired the composer of Psycho and did the opposite.

Go on, then

scene Mean Streets — the opening A voice in the dark, a man who cannot stay asleep, and a Ronettes record that lands on the downbeat as his head hits the pillow. The film's argument and its method before the first title.
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 Taxi Driver — the shoot-out Three men dead in a stairwell, a camera that floats out through the ceiling, and an audience that cheered. Scorsese wanted a catharsis; he got applause, and it frightened him.
idea The chant is a metronome, not a spell Light as a feather works because four people lifting together carry 15 kg each. The rhyme's real function is to synchronise them.
idea You'll Never Know, then Mott the Hoople Two songs across one cut: 1943 crooning smashed into 1974 glam — the whole backstory of a life told in an audio transition.
scene Alice — the prologue Ninety seconds of counterfeit 1940s Hollywood, built at real 1940s expense, existing to be destroyed by one cut.