rock n' roll are both expressions of revolutionary instincts, and that they are as inherently destructive as they are creative. This simple device - brutal outbreaks of violence combined with an upbeat soundtrack - has been taken up by both the mainstream cinema at large and by many individual `auteurs', all of whom are in Scorsese's debt - Stone and Tarantino coming at once to mind. The climatic violence of the film, and its masterly, melancholy, almost dreamlike epilogue, constitute the film's best sequence: a montage of the various characters, doing what they do, while Johnny Boy staggers off clutching his neck wound, and opera plays on the soundtrack. The violence is shocking above all because it seems unnecessary, arbitrary, even if also (because Scorsese has prepared us) wholly inevitable. Michael has Johnny Boy shot (Scorsese plays the assassin who kisses his gun before firing) out of sheer petulance, simply because he can. He's playing all the ruthless gangsters from all the Hollywood movies he's ever seen, he's fulfilling a form, upholding a clich; it's a vicious, petty act, one that makes death no more meaningful than a pool-room brawl, and murder no more than a childish, random expression of vanity. Mean Streets, shows us the confusion that small men make between heroic or noble acts and silly, vain imitations of the movies (and other fantasies that play upon us). The fact that Johnny Boy does not die but is probably mortally wounded adds rather than detracts from the horror and the despair of these final images. Also, that the one innocent, Johnny Boy's cousin and Michael's girlfriend Theresa (Amy Robinson) is perhaps the most severely wounded - we only see her bloodied arm poking through a hole in the windshield.Mean Streets suffers perhaps from a lack of a unifying vision - it is fragmented, like the world which it describes, and it might be fair to say that it's closer to a great documentary than a great drama. But this ...
