SPOILER DISCUSSION

1. There are 10 songs that play throughout the film, and the method in which they play into the scenes demonstrates the deterioration of J.R.’s worldview. The first track, “Jenny Take a Ride”, plays during the opening fight sequence and serves as a cover to the violence, imbuing the otherwise terrible action with an upbeat energy that makes it more playful than it is.

The second song, “The Closer You Are”, plays when J.R., Joey, and Gaga go uptown to meet the “broad” mentioned in the bar. J.R. doesn’t want to go and begins to fight with Joey about the decision. Their argument crowds out the music. But Gaga wants to restore the “order” and asks for the radio to be turned up in an attempt to drown out the discord caused by the crashing of the two worlds that J.R. and Joey are respectively drawn to. The insulating function of the music is thus made explicit.

The third song, “I’ve Had It”, also plays from the car radio while J.R. and Joey drive along to another location. However, the music continues to play while the scene cross-cuts between this and a scene of J.R. and the girl enjoying themselves on a date on their rooftop meeting place. J.R. is able to traverse between the two worlds and the good feelings of the music invoke less discord. The song ends as the two have their first on-screen kiss.

Then, “El Watusi” plays while J.R. finds himself at a party with the gang. The party eventually devolves into chaos as the group finds themselves drunk and playing with guns. Chaos is present but becomes cast as playful once more. But then gun-shots intrude into the soundscape and become the focal point – there’s a disconnect that the music can’t cover up.

This cuts into the next scene where we see J.R. and the girl walking out of a showing of Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo; “Shotgun” begins to play and there’s a sense of unity in the music despite the minute interruption of the gunfire. Like the third instance of music, it seems that J.R.’s trying to unite the two “worlds” he belongs to. Yet, the moment doesn’t last as J.R. breaks into his discussion of “girls” and “broads”.

There’s a brief bit of silence- a second interruption after the guns – and his sex scene with a group of “broads” begins with “The End” playing in the background. The repeated disconnect in sound calls back to the second instance of music in the car and hints that the reconciliation that J.R. is attempting is far from being cohesive; it’s barely being held together.

This discordance explodes with the next song, “Don’t Ask Me to Be Lonely” which plays in the girl’s flashback recount of her rape. She describes the music being loud in the car – a callback to the second instance of music – and Scorsese starts to distort the soundscape, doubling the song and temporally staggering the two instances of it against one another. The music has now become uncanny, a terror, and J.R. is forced to recognize that his “cover” can no longer conceal the truth. Music can no longer hide his unsavory actions and the sin he contributes to.

This is made apparent when he goes to the bar with Joey and Gaga. “Ain’t That Just Like Me” plays; for a moment, it seems like the good vibes have returned once more as he drinks with his friends. Maybe the music can still do its “job”. But the scene repeatedly cuts to his recollection of the rape; his idyllic fantasy has broken down and the ramifications of what he’s endorsed and been a part of can no longer be ignored.

Finally, he goes to confession at the end of the film to find some solace and Scorsese demonstrates the absolute destruction of his worldview. Now both worlds, the holy and the sinful, cross-cut into each other with images of the mother, holy figures within the Church, the girl, her rape; “Who’s that Knocking” plays in the background as if mocking the situation that J.R. finds himself in. The music has slipped out of joint and can no longer be the refuge that J.R. used it as. He must change.

The last song, “The Plea”, operates as a kind of coda to the film and only begins playing once J.R and Joey separate and head their own ways. The song focuses on a “plea” to the “Lord” for “love” and lays bare the nature of J.R.’s desire, a prayer he could not successfully recite in the Church proper, thereby transforming the nature of music to one that allows communicative possibility. If it can change, so can he.

2.There’s a nice dichotomy established between the way they that J.R. and Joey see Gaga. The latter sees him as an “idiot” and calls him by his nickname for said reason. Meanwhile, the former sees Gaga as a good kid who needs a chance to grow up a bit. This contrast and the character relations serve as a nice jumping-off point to a similar dynamic in Mean Streets where Scorsese fully fleshes out the implications of these relations and the costs associated with these attitudes. However, the set-up here does establish J.R. as someone who can change – an important given the nature of the ending.

3. The dispute between J.R. and Joey about going uptown neatly illustrates the crossroads the former finds himself at. His dispute cross-cuts between a date with the girl and leads to a pivotal point of contention. She asks him what he does occupationally and he’s unable to answer, most likely due to the shame he feels at doing nothing and lazing around with his friends who are up to no-good. The cut from his refusal to answer to the conflict he faces in the car with said friends emphasizes that he understands his complicity with a world that he disavows with her. Joey makes this disjunction exceptionally clear by calling out the girl for J.R.’s odd behavior and kicking the latter out of the car; the music from the car fades away as the sounds of the traffic come to dominate.

J.R. is forced to confront the reality of his situation; music begins to lose its power, and he finds himself stuck between two lanes of traffic going in opposite directions – a poignant image of the standstill he finds himself in the middle of. A choice must be made.

4.There are three separate instances that involve J.R. staring out from a tall location at the horizon. The first occurrence happens at the 22-minute mark after his fight with Joey in the car. The trio goes up a lift and see a blackness in front of them – the world of sin is a world of doom and can’t offer a meaningful future.

This cuts to a shot of J.R. staring out at the skyline with the girl while the two converse on a rooftop. There’s a vitality present in the scene as the two get to know one another – a clear contrast to the aforementioned moment.

The final instance occurs at the 53-minute mark during the Copiague trip. J.R., his friend (Harry Northup), and Joey end up hiking to the top of a mountain to look at a beautiful sunset. While the former two parties bask in the beauty of nature and feel a calling, Joey incessantly complains about the situation and only serves to detract from the grandeur of the moment. His presence is one that nullifies beauty elsewhere – J.R. can’t be with the girl as long as he’s surrounded by his “so-called” friends. He must choose which vantage point he wants to inhabit.

5.There’s an odd-choice at the 25-minute mark when the film decides to cut to Joey’s point of view, chronicling his degenerate behavior with a girl he’s seeing. Joey steals from this girl without a moment’s thought, chastises for her losing the money, and then lends her back her own money. While the scene nicely reinforces the depravity of the world of sin, the decision to cut to another point-of-view is a poor formal choice that takes away from the focus of the film: J.R.’s decision-making. This perspectival shift is also never repeated so it sticks out like a sore thumb.

6.While the Copiague trip ends with the sunset shot and finalizes the pattern mentioned in the fourth point, the build-up to said moment is agonizingly long within the context of the film, showcasing none of the kinetic editing or interesting character moments that make up most of the run-time. In a film that’s primarily based on mood and character subjectivity, a scene like this is particularly damning as it saps the energy and kills momentum. Part of me wishes this was at least cross-cut with an imagined date with the girl or something similar to reinforce how hollow J.R.’s choice to go on said trip is, but without that counter-point, the banality of the conversation and trek feel like a waste.

7. J.R. goes to a party with his friends and the camera nicely pans multiple times across the group gathered; each pan dissolves into the next, creating an energetic party mood that demonstrates the intoxicating effects of this order. Eventually, guns are brought out by the guests and they point them at one another in playful abandon. The sounds of gunshot replace the music and glass bottles shatter on-screen. This switch-up marks a shift from the party to the world of Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo, another Western featuring John Wayne.

Scorsese utilizes stills from the film along with the sound of guns as a way to tie J.R.’s ideation of the Western and its heroes to both the world that he interacts with; this is why the film is in between the parties with his friends and the date with the girl.

The girl mentions that the lead actress enthralled her and J.R. breaks into his discussion of girls versus broads; he decries the actress as a broad and questions her moral integrity as a result. The interesting point here is that the hero of the film played by John Wayne ends up with said “broad”; the juxtaposition of the idealized hero and the “whore” he ends up with throws a wrench into J.R.’s supposed normative evaluation and reveals how he sees himself; a “good” guy can do “bad” things without necessarily being bad like a “villain”- a line of thinking established in the duo’s first conversation about John Wayne in The Searchers. This contradiction is how J.R. is able to so easily slip between both worlds but the hypocrisy inherent to his thought will eventually be revealed to him, thereby forcing a change.

Before forcing J.R. to come head-to-head with his own glaring contradiction, Scorsese illustrates to the viewer the absurd nature of this logic by cutting to J.R.’s recollection/imagination of a sex-scene with a series of “broads”. Even though he was forced to include this scene by the producers ^[1]Schickel, R., & Scorsese , M. (2011). Turning Pro. In Conversations with Scorsese. essay, Alfred A. Knopf., Scorsese does a wonderful job incorporating it as a way to demonstrate the self-serving logic that J.R. extends to himself but does not extend to the girl.

When he first gets intimate with the girl at the 30-minute mark, the camera cuts over parts of her body and deconstructs the experience (speaking of the French New Wave, the scene’s construction feels reminiscent to how Jean-Luc Godard treats the body in Une Femme Marie and has a similar function), forcing J.R. to reckon with what it means to entangle with someone else in a passionate, genuine manner. There’s no easy unification and he interrupts the experience from becoming more intimate twice by explaining to the girl that he’s “old fashioned.” In other words, his moral framework prevents unity and he refuses to reckon with the nature of that paradigm to find a path forward, choosing instead to make the girl feel alienated from the situation.

The scene prominently displays the couple and their reflection, the latter composition of which features figures of the Virgin Mary in the frame just like the opening sequence which featured the latter figure and a reflection of an older woman cooking. Thus, the connection to the Madonna-Whore complex is fully instantiated; the girl can only be a stand-in for the world of “Good” if she remains virginal, pure – an ideal image like the Virgin mother herself.

The scene then cuts back and forth between the couple in actuality and their mirror reflection, breaking the 180-degree rule and demonstrating the divide in values between a real, non-ideal world and the idealistic image that represents the “good”.

In direct opposition, the scene with the broads is punctuated with Rock music, a form of protection against such moral contemplation and a lubricant that allows sexual proclivities to rein free. Despite featuring kinetic editing, the full bodies of those involved are clearly present within the frame and the camera luxuriates in the ecstasy of the encounter. There’s no need for thought here, no reason to morally condemn one way or another; sex with a broad is fine if one is a “hero”; they can do “wrong” things without being condemned. The ostentatious way the scene ends with J.R. blowing a full deck of cards on a woman lying in bed makes this resoundingly apparent.

Yet, J.R. cannot extend the same treatment to the girl when she recounts the awful manner by which was taken advantage of. Unlike his scene with the broad, the music during this scene is distorted and no longer comforting. This disunity is demonstrated in the editing. We cut between the rape scene to J.R.’s face and his changing perspective of the girl; her close-up smile becomes a haunting image and her mirror reflection is accompanied by a shadow in the frame. His idyllic image of her crumbles and he’s unable to accept what it means. Just like before, he can’t find a unity and rejects moving forward. He wants to dwell in comfort.

Scorsese doesn’t come out and say it, but it’s clear from the construction of the film up to the point that J.R. struggles here not just because of the realization that his ideal is no longer possible but because he sees his role in helping to generate the system that causes such damage. He “uses” broads and degrades them as less than worthy, viewing them as merely objects that can be used for intercourse. He uses music to cover up his feelings of discomfort and insulate himself from thinking about the problems he’s complicit in.

However, instead of recognizing his tacit participation as part of the problem and/or recognizing the girl as a “good” agent in spite of something “wrong” happening, he blames her for the situation; she becomes the scapegoat that breaks “his world.” If she hadn’t trusted her ex and gone with him, obviously she would have been safe. Her acceptance and authenticity, the facets of life she opened him up to and let him enjoy, thus become cast as the problem.

In a Nietzschean sense, J.R.’s “disavowal of the instinctual, the contingent, and the problematic” represents a retreat “into the Apollonian world.” There’s no solution because “life is inescapably compromised of order and disorder”, so the retreat into an idyllic, perfect, Apollonian order where good and evil are neatly demarcated and controllable only causes “ressentiment.” The “Dionysian” elements are thusly blamed for introducing chaos into the otherwise perfect system. The girl and what she offers is a stand-in for these elements; in the same way she offers chaos through harm, she also offers an opportunity for authentic relation.^[2]Saurette, P. (1996). ‘I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them’: Nietzsche, Arendt and the crisis of the will to order in international relations theory. Millennium: Journal of … Continue reading J.R. must find a way to accept her because his worldview is untenable otherwise.

This destruction of the easily, demarcated “Apollonian” order is made explicit as the girl leaves the apartment. Scorsese utilizes a triple-edit to showcase that “black” and “white” readings of the world are no longer possible. She leaves and closes the door and J.R. is surrounded by a black background while the door “thuds”. The next shows her leaving but surrounds J.R. by a white background and the door “thuds” again. Finally, the film cuts to a shot of the rape and a final “thud” plays, connecting the three moments as one.

8. J.R. is unable to overcome this fracturing in his subjectivity and desperately longs for the time where he held the girl in his arms. He sits isolated in the frame; an overhead shot reinforces his alienation. Then he reaches out and the film cuts to a shot from the past, or perhaps a recapitulation of the past as an idyllic dream he wishes to be part of again; he kisses the girl and the two are united in the frame.

But he’s unable to overcome the gap between his ideals and the world as is and is left shattered by his final confrontation with the girl.

He leaves the apartment fully dejected and ends the scene by throwing a bottle against the wall; this callback to the breaking of the glass earlier attempts to mimic the “gunshots” of the cowboy qua hero who remains locked in the “Apollonian” order of ideals but is (literally) cut short as it ends in an instance and fails to replicate the image as the sound of guns and the presence of the “Western” is missing.

9. The film ends with J.R. going to confession in a last-ditch effort to find solace in the face of the pain he faces. Yet, far from comfort, he finds himself haunted; the images of his idealized worldview fragment come back as specters that torment him and meld with the Edenic figures that no longer offer him consolation.

In the first major movement, he sees himself reunited with the girl. They approach one another but the short segment is shot from both of their perspectives and breaks the 180-degree rule signifying a discordance. He gets into the confessional booth and sees himself and the girl coming closer to one another. He is cast fully in silhouette, his identity is in a transitional period, and he sees himself and the girl kissing in a “double cut”. The toll of the Church Bells can be heard as he tries to pray.

The idyllic call for the past crumbles as scenes of sin pervade the screen; shots of the girl’s rape, J.R.’s dalliance with the “broads”, and images of the divine intermingle with one another. Order can longer be ascertained. There is no peace to be found as of yet, no easy solutions.

The camera tracks from through the pews to J.R. looking forward, cuts to an image of Jesus on the cross, and the final song plays – a sick reminder that the comforts of the past are no longer present for J.R. The film “breaks” and rapidly shifts between the aforementioned images – Edenic and sinful- as J.R finds himself caught in their torrent.

In between this montage, Scorsese cuts to a “triple-edit” of both the tracking through the pews and a shot of J.R. kissing the crucifix in the confessional chamber – chronology breaks apart. The former “triple-edit” ends with J.R. kissing the divine, but he ends up cutting himself on the figure of Christ and bleeds from his mouth; these effects aren’t seen afterwards suggesting the wound is of a surreal nature – his psyche is what’s been injured. It’s ambiguous as to whether J.R. is bleeding as a sinner or being washed by the blood of the lord; he must reckon with the world once more with no clear answer.

Suddenly, the music cuts out, a slapping noise can be heard, the girl stares towards the camera and screams “Please”, and the camera pulls out from the image of Christ on the cross; the abject terror of the situation overwhelms the music and J.R. is just left with the horror of the situation. It’s an absolutely wallop of a resolution to the montage.

Then, we cut a freeze-frame of Joey and J.R. in front of a building and we’re certain that the latter is going to try and escape back into his former life even though the comforts associated with it are no longer within reach. Instead, the duo departs the frame and leave in opposite directions; then, the final song aptly titled “The Plea” starts to play. The lyrics directly call back to the nature of J.R.’s earlier prayer in the church. He’s no longer outwardly praying but his words ring through the song which plays despite the lack of action on screen.

The camera pulls out and hangs on the vacant location – a counterpoint to the opening movement that swung from a woman cooking to the aforementioned duo. But this time there’s no pivot to a “divine” figure. Yet, the song referencing the “divine” continues to play – music has seemingly changed functions and operates as a form of communication instead of insulation. If there is a “divinity”, it must be found in the “real world”. Thus, while not exactly the most feel-good ending, the finale suggests the possibility that J.R. can move forward and change his orientation to the world much like the music has.