Mean Streets (1973)

directed by Martin Scorsese

Christopher Sloce 

Mean Streets cut me open.

The DVD came in a Martin Scorsese box-set of five, purchased at the Wal-Mart that sat atop the hill between small Wise, Virginia and Norton, Virginia. A girl bought it for me before we started dating, I guess to show interest in me. I couldn't really understand why she would, as she was older and more worldly than me, an atheist when I was a Christian. I watched it that Sunday before school, to get ready for the week.

Mean Streets is about a devout Catholic mob courier in Little Italy named Charlie, played by Harvey Keitel. He doesn't live a pious life. Most of the night he's spending time in a dim-lit bar with his even dimmer friends, or sleeping with his girlfriend Teresa (Amy Robinson), or doing mob activities. But he goes to church and he goes to confession. Yet when it comes to penance, he prefers to "do it in the streets.” He punishes himself by putting his hand up to burners to remind himself what hell must be like, and spends his nights in that dim-lit, red bar.

The movie doesn’t have much of a plot. The events that do happen happen around how much money his bozo best friend Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro, in a breakout role) owes to Charlie’s loan shark friends, which he proceeds to not pay back in frustrating fashion. In the end, Charlie and Teresa and Johnny Boy drive out of town after Johnny Boy insults his loan shark for being stupid enough to loan him money. There’s a drive-by. There’s blood. There’s a car accident. The movie ends.

Kafka once said, “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for?” When I was done with the movie, I came to. And I came to wanting to be anything but a Baptist. Anything but is a broad category, but I always found some answer. And it was for theological reasons that I wanted out of the Baptist church, so I first tried to fix theology with theology.

In the Baptist church of my youth, you were your own priest. The clergy class just delivered sermons and ran services. When you sinned, you went to no one. At night, supposedly, you prayed for forgiveness from your sins. I did it every couple of days. I did my best. I was practicing. I felt deeply that God, in his gift to the world that was his son, did it so to solidify life everlasting, not so that people would simply be dead.

Where I had to dissent was the wages of sin. I could not accept that the slate was cleaned off the minute you asked for forgiveness. God was not something I was ready to anthropomorphize. If you asked for forgiveness but didn’t mean it, then God would have to have some degree to which they could know you were lying; God would know what irony is and care enough to further punish you. Or, after a point, prayer could become half-hearted: you asked for forgiveness because you just did, not because you needed to. You were living a half-Christianity, a state of moral laziness with no interior principles. Or, to be short: if you still jacked off every time you wanted to, what kind of Christian were you?

I recognized my weaknesses. I wanted real punishment. I needed penance. I needed priests, men in the dark to talk to. I needed Hail Marys. I needed Our Fathers. I needed Latin. I needed therapy.  I needed Catholicism. Because I was born under the Protestant yoke.

And it was because nothing terrified me more than admitting what I was in the dark that I saw this as akin to Charlie's intonation, "You don't make up for it in the church. That's bullshit and you know it. You do it in the streets." I could walk in the streets feeling the prick of my religious guilt. Penance would work for me. But I was young and realized that for Charlie, it didn't. And that was the point of the movie. That Charlie got what he wanted: he made up for it in the streets, in loud and spectacular fashion. After that he'd be happy to take all the Hail Marys and Our Fathers he could. I thought with punishment as a threat I'd be a better Christian. What I didn't realize is that a whole religion tried that and it had mixed results. In typical teenage fashion I thought I was built different. And typical is what no teenager ever wants to be.

It’s ironic to now realize I connected with Mean Streets not as a well-rendered philosophical argument for Catholicism, but as a break for the territories, a final product of the struggle between Scorsese's temptations and his Catholic duties. The movie wasn't about my present. It was about my future. Martin Scorsese ran for film and stayed there. I ran for Catholicism. I was typical. I just wanted to be anything other than my parents.

As you can imagine, I didn’t become Catholic. My parents told me we go to church together as a family, so we did. It was actually the other thing I got out of Mean Streets. Burdened with a yoke as any eternal punishment, Martin Scorsese could make a movie. The shadow you were born under cannot be reasoned with or explained away. It can only be escaped or written about. As far as I can tell, I am still writing.

Christopher Sloce is a writer, zine-maker, organizer, and librarian from Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of Kentucky Meat Shower, a substack that provides ruthless criticism of culture, alienation, boredom, and despair. He has previously been published in Quail Bell, The Frankenstein Review, Jimson Weed, Lit.Cat, and Poictesme. You can find him at christophersloce.substack.com and on twitter @meatshowerky.