The movie so violent Martin Scorsese found it borderline orgasmic: “So to speak”
Let’s be honest, nobody wants to visualise Martin Scorsese having an orgasm. Unfortunately for anyone who doesn’t want to conjure that mental image, he’s got three kids, so it’s happened at least three times. Then again, he loves cinema so much that it might have even happened unprompted a couple of times.
It might sound borderline sacrilegious to suggest that one of the greatest directors in history has found himself so enthralled by a motion picture that he’s in dire need of fresh underpants by the time the credits come up, but when you adore movies as much as he does, it definitely can’t be ruled out.
Of course, there’s a specific form of filmmaking that’s designed to elicit that response, but the veteran would much rather revisit one of Michael Powell’s many classics than run his eye over the shot composition, blocking, and lighting used in Taxi Driver: A XXX Parody, which is a real thing, by the way.
Mercifully, he was speaking somewhat hyperbolically, so you don’t need to wash those eyes out with soap. Weirdly, he was talking about violence when he made the comparison. Not just any blood-soaked feature, though, but one that reshaped the entire notion of onscreen brutality, and left audiences equal parts aghast and amazed by the claret being splashed on all four corners of the silver screen.
Reflecting on dramatised violence and his relationship to it with The Observer, Scorsese mused that “one can understand the violence in films as a sort of heightened aesthetic experience” if they took their cues from Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. A classic in every sense of the word, the filmmaker focused on realism when dropping bodies, and the Raging Bull architect had never seen anything like it.
“The violence in that picture comes as a shock to the system,” he said. “And part of the shock is the allure of it, the terrible beauty, the orgasmic release, so to speak. It’s extremely stylised, but somehow, it reflects the effect and the exhilaration of real violence, the kind of exhilaration that the soldiers involved in the My Lai massacre probably felt. The Wild Bunch came out of the Vietnam era, and it really spoke to all the confusion, outrage, and horror we were feeling as a country.”
Only Scorsese could, or should be allowed to, pivot from calling something “orgasmic” to reflecting on Peckinpah’s 1969 masterpiece as one of mainstream Hollywood’s first Vietnam War parables, and, as usual, he’s not wrong. If the average viewer was seeing violent conflict on the news every day, why couldn’t he put something similar on the screen?
Turning the conventions of the western upside down, The Wild Bunch moved as far away from the format’s ‘Golden Age’ as possible by blurring the lines between good and evil, heroes and villains, and survivors and survival, with the machine-gun assisted massacre reflective of how new forms of warfare will always be more destructive than what came before.
His points are salient, even if it would be better to never think about Martin Scorsese saying “orgasmic” again.
