Essay On Archetypes In Gangster Movies

Gangster archetypes: the gangster, the best friend, the canarian, the moll, the mother are some of the key factors that make a gangster movie. This is, according to Hughes, something that any gangster film has to have in order to be a gangster film (215). All these archetypes are carefully defined and are rarely significantly changed. But the archetype of a gangster did get changed through history, and most significantly with the introduction of The Godfather (1972), which alongside many other changes, moved the only dominant figure above the gangster, from the mother, to the father.

This changed the way the gangster looked towards the macho style of gangster, it gave him a definitive male gaze. But this is not the way it has always been. The importance of the mother archetype was always existant and sometimes immense in the era before The Godfather in movies

such as White Heat (1949) and The Public Enemy (1931) (Hughes, 240).

This is also very present in Scorsese's films Mean Streets (1973) and Goodfellas (1990) where their influence over their sons can be seen very nicely. Then we have another archetype, the moll which is again, unchanged until The Godfather II (1974) where the main female character, Kay Adams, leaves Vito Corleone, which arguably changes her role from the typical „image of woman as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man“ (Mulvey, 1975) to a character which is no longer subordinate to the male protagonist. The other molls never escape their archetype and are a typical romanticaly depicted female character which are there in a role of the

„signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.“ (Mulvey, 1975) This is also very present in Scorsese's gangster cinematography, since he, as an avid fan of classical Hollywood cinema, and especially the gangster genre, made the archetype of the mole a very important one for the movie, and therefore gave it a small modern twist, but a twist still very much in the patriarchal direction.
The ultimate goal of my seminar paper would be to define if the gangster, especially in Goodfellas and Mean Streets, and also some of the more classical gangster films, has a female gaze which is hidden behind gangster clothes and guns, and the fact that Scorsese produces movies in a way that, according to Kolker, he „Determines our point of view and our emotional and intellectual attachment to the film. We are therefore, scarcely allowed any separation from what the central character is seeing.“ (218). And since we connect to the main character, it is very hard to objectively see the real nature of the character, without at least, seeing the movie more then once.
This topic is very relevant to me bacause i had a final paper on the subject of Martin Scorsese's gangster film, which lacked some of these aspects, and due to the lack of knowledge especially about the notions of spectatorship, power and knowledge I wasn't able to implement the given material on an adequate level, which I aim to correct here. This is important for others because it should offer them a fresh perspective on movies which are today regarded as very important in popular culture, and to show the mechanisms which directors used to control our gaze and determined our emotional and intellectual attachment to the film, which is, according to Kolker, something that a good director always does (217).