Identity in Cinema and New York

 Jacob Raymond

COM 126

Professor Sapphire

11-29-20

                    Identity in Cinema and New York City

After watching Mean Streets (1973), Annie Hall (1977), and Do The Right Thing (1989), it is reasonable to conclude that these three films have their own sense of representing self identity. Through these three films, they all took place within different aspects of New York City to draw on how these narratives reflect on the normal world as well as how each round and flat character is portrayed and exhibited within these stories. The films also addressed some of the anchor points of self-identity through three important sociological perspectives. These three concepts are the perception of race and color, the individual's ethnicity, and the idea of religion as seen by audiences or real world people during their respective time periods. In other words, here is how these three films approached the concept of identity within 1970s and late 1980s New York City.

    First, the Martin Scorsese film Mean Streets was released in 1973. The film was made in response to how the director grew up in Little Italy and describes his experiences within the mainframe area, which sets the stage for the movie, which depicts New York as packed, gloomy, and full of littered sidewalks. Although the film heavily follows members of an Italian mafia, we see religion through the practice of Catholicism by Charlie Cappa, an Italian-American who takes his religion seriously when he fails to seek redemption for his sins within the public Church. The film also shows this Catholic religion with a shot of a statue of Jesus on top of one of the buildings. Charlie also serves as the main religious character figure when he suppresses conflicts with Johnny Boy in the mafia and passes his hand through a flame, wondering about the fires of hell itself. Mark Cousins highlights this form of religious grace through Paul Shcrader’s films in the documentary, The Story of Cinema, Pt. 9. Through Paul Shcrader, Cousins explains that his two films “American Gigolo” and “Light Sleeper” show the main characters being spiritually empty. He then borrows the ending of the 1959 film “Pickpocket” to show an incursion of heavenly grace through these troubled characters. Italian ethnicity is demonstrated mostly through Johnny Boy, who serves as a visual example of Little Italy Life. Robert De Niro uses Johnny Boy to build his style and vocabulary by watching movies, which leads him to create personal passions that are only expressed through violent outbursts. In brief, Mean Streets invites its viewers to what life in Little Italy is like as well as how Italian-Americans portray their identities within the United States during the 1970s.

    Four years later, New York was then shown in a different scope away from crime and the depressing environments at the time. In Annie Hall, Woody Allen romanticizes New York into a story about finding the purpose of love through his character, Alvie Singer. In the film, New York’s Upper East Side was represented as a symbol of positivity for Alvie because it reflects on his personality altogether as he tries to find the true meaning of love in his life. The film is notable for Allen’s use of direct address narration as a way to talk to the audience about what Alvie is thinking during the film. Although New York was shown with a more calmer environment, the perspectives of religion shift into what people think about Jewish religion. One example is that Alvie gets called a “Jewie”, which is stereotypical for the character. The film also bashes Jewish religion with Annie’s mother saying that “Jews are people who just make money” and Alvie being depicted as a Jew during a dinner at Annie’s place, wearing a long beard, a Jewish cap, and a black dress that makes Alvie a standout depiction of Jewish identity. In the end, Annie Hall is best known for using the elements of comedy to inform the audience of the negative perceptions of Jewish identity.             Going into the late 1980s, Spike Lee created one of the most controversial films of its time. The 1989 film Do The Right Thing follows Mookie, a black pizza delivery boy working for his Italian pizzeria owner named Sal in a black neighborhood in New York City. In this film, New York is depicted as poor with racial tensions brewing among its characters, mostly between Italian-Americns and their neighboring blacks as well as the presence of police officers patrolling the areas. Because of these tensions, this film contrasts with Annie Hall while sharing some similarities with Mean Streets in how identities are portrayed through ethnicity. Racial identity is also a driving point for this film because of how the characters connect with each other going towards the end, such as the confrontation of two ethnicities between Buggin Out, Radio Raheem, and Sal over the “Wall of Fame”, which only shows famous Italians and no black figures through American history. But most importantly, identity is questioned through Mookie’s actions during the riots in terms of both loyalty and well being on where the individual personally stands in racial issues that brew in the United States when he throws a trash can into the pizzeria to save his boss from possibly getting killed by the rioting crowd. In the end, New York served as a focal point for racial identity within cinema.

    These three films have all been diverse in their own ways in terms of how they portray identity within New York City. Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets shows us that Italian-Americans express their Catholicism through the roles they play in serving the Italian mafia within Little Italy. Annie Hall on the other hand shows us that New York can be romanticized into a love setting for people who are trying to figure out what love means to them, while Woody Allen shows that Jewishness is usually alienated except in New York, where he mocks these stereotypical approaches of Jewish religion in both a jokingly and satirical manner in cinema. Lastly, Do The Right Thing highlights the connections between different ethnicities in the sense of racial tensions that brew between its characters within a poor black neighborhood in New York, which also unfortunately reflects on the recent acts of racism today thirty one years later through the form of both peaceful and violent protests of racism. In conclusion, these three films used New York City to express varying perspectives of both social and ethnicity identities and how they were portrayed by different actors within different time periods.