A post-WWII America historiography purveyed through the exploits of a silent generation aged mob enforcer, Martin Scorsese's The Irishman is undoubtedly one of the filmmakers most ambitious endeavors. Using the filmmaker's familiar mob-based narrative structuralism as an artifice for examining American culture and the shifting dynamics which take place within it, Scorsese's depiction of Post-WWII America finds machismo embedded into any notions of progress. Through the lens of its main protagonist, Frank Sheeran, a mob hitman, the film depicts the debilitating nature such crude dynamics place on the individual and the culture at large. Machismo is presented as a blinding force, a primal intuition which subverts reflection or introspection, serving as a perfect accomplice to the vicissitudes of power which ultimately seek control through authority and the disruption of collective consciousness. Such intrusive forces ultimately subvert and disrupt the empathetic nature of the human condition, and in the case of Frank Sheeran it leads him to a place of alienation from those he loves the most - his family. Frank is a character who is completely blinded by the man he has become, corrupted by this lifestyle in which pride, strength, and aggression are rewarded. This corrosive way-of-life leaves him completely alienated in the end, with his daughter being the whole fulcrum to the emotional and arguably thematic arch of this story - a character who grows up in the shadows of such violence and aggression. Beautifully portrayed by Anna Paquin, this character represents the empathetic nature of the human condition; She represents purity and innocence, and her fear of her father quickly grows into outright disdain, incapable of accepting her father's mindset - one sculpted by such notions of machismo and power. In a sense, Martin Scorsese's The Irishman is the filmmaker's magnum opus, an accumulation of his various gangster films that feels particularly salient due to its introspective mapping of post-War Americana.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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