The Camera That Loves the Sin

Watch the Copacabana shot in GoodFellas: the camera follows Henry and Karen in one unbroken take down through the kitchen and into the club, the Crystals on the soundtrack, the world parting to receive them. It is one of the most seductive sequences in American cinema, and that is precisely the problem it exists to create. Scorsese's signature — the gliding, swooping, suddenly violent camera married to a wall-to-wall pop soundtrack — is not decoration. It is a machine for making you feel the appeal of the thing the film is about to condemn. The needle-drop and the tracking shot put you inside the high before the film shows you the cost.

He has been running this engine since the start, on the streets of Mean Streets and the sidewalks of Taxi Driver, where the camera prowls with Travis Bickle's coiled energy until you share a loneliness you should be frightened by. It reaches its purest cruelty in Raging Bull — the only thing in Jake LaMotta's life that has grace is the camera inside the ring, the place where he does damage — and its most seductive in Casino and The Wolf of Wall Street, films so kinetic and pleasurable that some viewers mistook them for celebrations of the men they eviscerate. That misreading is the risk Scorsese chooses to run, every time, because the alternative — filming sin from a safe moral distance — would be a lie about how sin actually works. It does not feel like sin from the inside. It feels like the Copa shot.

This is the Catholic engine under the kineticism, and it is the thing that makes Scorsese more than a brilliant stylist. He was raised on the idea that temptation is attractive — that grace and damnation run through the same charged body — and his camera is built to put the audience in the confession booth: complicit, having enjoyed it, now made to watch the bill come due. The voiceover (Henry's, Travis's, the wise-guy's) is the sinner narrating his own fall, certain he is the hero of it. By The Irishman the same camera has slowed to an old man's funeral pace, the energy drained out, the bill finally, unpayably, due. The kineticism was never the point; the withdrawal of it was always coming.

You can hear the influence everywhere, but the deepest inheritors took the whole engine, not just the moves. Paul Thomas Anderson built Boogie Nights on Scorsese's tracking shots and needle-drops and the same rise-and-ruin arc. The Safdie brothers' Uncut Gems is the Scorsese engine stripped to pure anxiety — a camera and a soundtrack that won't let you breathe, riding a man's appetite straight off the cliff. The imitators who took only the cool moves — the slow-motion entrance, the rock cue — made music videos. The ones who understood took the moral trap: that the most honest way to film a sin is to make the audience want it first.

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The line: Mean Streets → Taxi Driver → Raging Bull → GoodFellas → Casino → The Wolf of Wall Street → Uncut Gems → The Irishman

This line crosses:

• The Ten Years the Directors Won — Scorsese is New Hollywood's great survivor; Mean Streets and Taxi Driver are that movement's beating heart, and he carried its license forward for fifty years.
• The Decade the Outsiders Got In — Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights, the most direct transmission of the Scorsese engine to the next generation, is a child of both lines.

Read through: Roger Ebert, Scorsese by Ebert · Richard Schickel, Conversations with Scorsese.

A note on the argument: Scorsese's kinetic camera, needle-drops, and Catholic preoccupations are documented record. The framing of the style as a moral trap — the energy that thrills being the energy that damns, the audience made complicit before the bill comes due — and the reading of The Irishman as the deliberate withdrawal of that energy is this essay's argument.