scene ·Mean Streets (1973)

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.

audio
spoken-language
editing
non-diegetic-sound
format
character
close-reading
scorsese
music
voice-over

Observation

Black screen, and a voice: "You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it." Charlie sits up in bed in the dark, goes to the mirror, comes back, lies down. He does it again. On the third return his head drops toward the pillow in slow motion, and the drum figure that opens "Be My Baby" arrives with it, one cut per beat. The camera finds an 8mm projector; the beam turns on the audience; the credits play over home movies of christenings, the San Gennaro feast and the four friends on the street.

Three minutes, and the film has told you who is guilty, what he thinks will save him, and how the whole thing will be put together.

What the sources say it is

The voice is not Keitel's. It is Scorsese's, and he says so plainly:

My voice is intercut with Harvey's throughout the film, and for me that was a way of trying to come to terms with myself, trying to redeem myself.

— Scorsese on Scorsese, sos 48

And the record was chosen before a frame was shot:

In our neighbourhood you'd hear rock'n'roll playing in the little bars in the back of the tenement buildings at three in the morning, so that was 'Be My Baby', when Harvey's head hits the pillow. For me, the whole movie was 'Jumping Jack Flash' and 'Be My Baby'.

— Scorsese on Scorsese, sos 45

To Ebert he added that the cut to the beat "is all worked out in the script. That was all worked out, drawn in pictures" (Scorsese by Ebert, unpaged). This is not a lucky edit. It is the one thing in the film that was fixed from the start.

Connotation code by code

Spoken language

The opening line is a theology in four sentences, and the film spends two hours testing it. It rejects the confessional ("the rest is bullshit") in favour of works: penance done in the street and at home. That is the whole of Charlie's plan for Johnny Boy, and it will fail. Putting the director's voice in the character's head, rather than Keitel's, makes the claim confessional in a second sense. See Church and street in Little Italy.

Audio and editing

David Sterritt calls these lines enough to "remove any doubts about the deeply personal nature of Scorsese's first major film" (smc 97). Giuliana Muscio describes the cut precisely: the song is "matched with a jump cut of sorts on the three beats of the beginning of the song, as we see a sleepless Charlie's head falling on the pillow in darkness" (smc 276). The three wake-ups are jump cuts too, which Stefan Sereda takes as a statement of allegiance: they mark the film as "informed by French New Wave filmmaking rather than classical Hollywood continuity" (smc 375).

The record is the first sound after the voice, and it is a record from 1963, not 1973. The film's music is the music these men grew up on, which is why it sounds like memory rather than period dressing (The jukebox is the score).

Format

Here the scene hands over to the home movies, and to Axis of Action's playback page, which covers the title sequence as a lesson in form. One detail worth adding from Scorsese himself: "the whole picture's a home movie, you see" (Ebert, unpaged). Some of the footage is his brother's, from his nephew's christening, and the reel is labelled "Scorsese baptism" (smc 297). The projector shot also nods to Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (smc 46), which will matter again in Too much red.

Character

A man who cannot sleep, who checks his own face in the mirror, and whose inner voice belongs to someone else. Compare Travis Bickle's opening insomnia in Taxi Driver: "I can't sleep nights" is his reason for driving a cab. The two films start in the same bed.

Audience

A 1973 audience would have heard "Be My Baby" as an oldie, ten years gone. The effect is nostalgia with an edge: the song promises a romance the film is about to deny. Kent Jones, who saw the film at thirteen, describes the moment exactly: Charlie "falls back on his pillow, at which point the action shifts to slow motion over a twice-repeated echoing drum figure, and we cut to closer and closer views of his head as he falls, synced to the beat" (Kelly, afterword, unpaged).

A small dispute

The sources cannot agree on the gauge of the home movies: 8mm (Scorsese, to Ebert), Super 8 (smc 276), or a 16mm projector (smc 375). Scorsese bought the camera in Italy in 1970 and should know. Trust him.

Compare

Alice — the prologue — the next year, Scorsese opens again with a counterfeit memory and a song, then smashes it with a cut.
You'll Never Know, then Mott the Hoople — the same editor's instinct, used as a blade rather than a caress.
Taxi Driver — the phone call — the other Scorsese moment where the camera does something the story didn't ask for, and he admits you can see his hand.

Writing leads

Count the cuts against the drum pattern. Is it three cuts on three beats, or two with a hold? The sources describe it both ways.
Listen for where Scorsese's voice gives way to Keitel's later in the film. Sereda places the switch in the church scene (smc 377).

Go on, then

idea 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.
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 Alice — the prologue Ninety seconds of counterfeit 1940s Hollywood, built at real 1940s expense, existing to be destroyed by one cut.
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.
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.
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.