Two Thousand Light Years From Home: Scorsese's Big Casino

Had to re-post this because it's too good to let slip away. I do not own this, all credit due to Gavin Smith and Film Comment.

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Two thousand light years from home: Scorsese's big Casino
Smith, Gavin. Film Comment32.1 (Jan 1996): 59.

Beginning with an explosion whose shockwaves expand across time and space like a narrative Big Bang, Casino is Scorsese's Gotterdammerung, a blistering and haunting last word on the culture of American violence, criminal enterprise, and civic life that he's mined since Mean Streets. Many commentators have held that Casino's impersonal, epic scale, baroque and overwrought narrative construction, and determinedly emphatic style are components of a multilevel critique he's never before attempted. True enough; yet at the same time Scorsese is bringing things full circle. Like the modestly scaled, personally expressed, and psychologically observed Mean Streets, Casino is a fundamentally introspective film that embroiders a classic tragic narrative of hubris and retribution with an episodic surfeit of incidentals, anecdotes, and asides. And its ultimate concerns are much the same as Mean Streets, in a much different register. Both films are about the price paid by those who serve the Mob, still vital in Mean Streets progressively more decadent and enfeebled in Casino.

Following what the films' titles literally signify, Mean Streets is about territory, GoodFellas about tribe, and Casino about a sacred place, or religion. With glib irony, Ace Rothstein (Robert De Niro) advances this reading in his introductory narration (Vegas is "a mortality car wash," the count room "The Holy of Holys"), but it's materialism that's this tribe's religion, and money, the root of all evil, its God. Scorsese's genius, here as ever, is his insistence on depicting the interior emotional, psychological, and spiritual landscapes of his characters in startlingly heightened terms. With his busiest and most tawdry visuals and most relentlessly assaultive style to date, Scorsese is grimly intent on materializing in sensory and dramatic form the spiritual economy of materialism--its emptiness, its sound and fury signifying nihilism. The film's tone of frenzied but depleting energy seems precisely calculated to evoke the moral condition not just of its characters but of an entire culture.

Whereas GoodFellas is Scorsese's least complicated and conflicted film, his most ironic, its characters' pursuit of the Good Life and its trappings almost naive, Casino is a far more ambivalent and troubled vision, depicting the acquisitive urge in all its savagery, ruthless manipulation, neurotic compulsion, and rush to destruction. And the stakes are higher than in GoodFellas: Casino's mobsters are the cynical architects of an already corrupt civilization's accelerated decline, exploiting a mythic American Dream the better to realize their own. Per Casino, late 20th century civilization has perfected Darwinism into a scientifically controlled industrial process, its managers as in thrall to its guiding fictions as their victims. How many of the film's arguments and conversations revolve around money. To his masters Ace is "a cash register," and nothing could be more apposite for a man who reduces people to objects, who can only imagine Ginger (Sharon Stone) loving him for mercenary motives. In lieu of wedding night consummation, we see Ace showing Ginger around their new dream home and the two of them stuffing cash into a safe deposit box--whose key occupies the narrative space normally reserved for the wedding ring. Amongst the film's more haunting images: Ginger curled up in mesmerized contemplation of the jewelry Ace has given her, her narcotic ecstasy insulating her more surely than the coke ever could. Here is an authentic glimpse of the spiritual vacancy of a life of things, a horror GoodFellas never quite admits.

And what of the curious immunity from retribution, conscience, and self-knowledge (let alone justice) that graces both Ace and GoodFellas' Henry Hill? Neither narrator has any philosophical regret--their primary allegiance is to survival. Hill is the simpler man--could he understand Mean Streets' Charlie? Ace could, but it wouldn't affect him. He's pure anemic cerebrality to Nicky (Joe Pesci)'s bloody instinctive appetite (they are separated halves of a single soul), but he's rife with neurosis and denial, which quietly skew his narration: its very reasonability and assurance smells fishy--and sometimes betrays Ace's pathological inability to recognize his own emotional and spiritual shortcomings. He's still clinging to his protective self-delusion when he says of his wife, "I could never reach her, I could never make her love me.... I always thought she should have gone for all that money (Nicky, who always makes his son breakfast and sobs at his brother's brutal death, knows more of love.) There's no discomposure in Ace's narration as some of the most painful episodes in his life unfold onscreen, because there's no pain. Casino's camera and De Niro's performance allow us to see a thwarted control-freak whose emotional repression encloses a psychopath-as-Organization Man.

Casino's retrospective narration commences with Ace's apparent annihilation by car bomb, and a credit sequence in which his soul hurtles down through an apocalyptic void of neon and fire to the strains of a Bach choral piece, establishing the film's preoccupation with the spiritual malaise of modern civilization in the face of eternity. (That fireball generates the film we watch, it is the film's Big Bang, offsetting the Creation/Garden of Eden imagery Ace's uses, describing Vegas as "Paradise on Earth) To index his characters' proximity to imminent damnation, Scorsese plays off cinematographer Robert Richardson's signature burned-out highlights and hotspots against the garish neon of Vegas and, in certain scenes, purifying shafts of white light and spectral luminosity. In the aftermath of Nicky's vicious beating of a bystander who has insulted Ace in a dimly lit bar, horizontal shafts of white light all but skewer the characters, and cigarette smoke rises in the foreground as if these men are already smoldering in hellfire; its fleeting wisps are reinforced by the ghostly echo of "Satisfaction" on the soundtrack, linking the insanely disproportionate violence to the insatiable search for gratification.

Countering the narration's cozy, ingratiating frankness, the film's sweeping cranes, corkscrewing booms, and overhead shots convey a sense of detached withdrawal or descent from Olympian distance into worldly delirium to scrutinize the behavior of these ant-like schemers. An establishing shot atypical of Scorsese's visual vocabulary opens the scene of Stone (Alan King) convincing Ace to take the Tangiers job--a brief overhead of the casino/hotel complex hundreds of feet below. This visual register reasserts a God-like metaphysical perspective. Casino's strangely schizoid tone, at once distanced and frantic, flippant and straining, objective and eew] gross, reflects this dialectical strategy--pitting the visuals and the voiceovers against each other in a contest of rhetoric for the viewer's sympathies, for the right to final cut of this history, at least in this life.

Meanwhile, the film's painstaking mapping of a 1984: totalitarian system of spies, spotters, and Eye in the Sky closed-circuit cameras ("In Vegas everybody's got to watch everybody else") and Ace's compulsive need for, and eventual downfall by, surveillance suggest a malign imitation of Divine omniscience--and by extension, of the Movies. Casino's Vegas--man's creation--is a carefully constructed spectacle that doesn't just exploit, it parodies the American Dream. Ace plays God, performing miracles with money, satisfying his fetishistic need to observe employees and public alike with rigid vigilance. Naturally he first sights Ginger on a surveillance monitor, and later remarks, "My greatest pleasure was watching my wife Ginger work the room:' a telling admission of dissociative, masochistic voyeurism, of (self-)deception as perverse pleasure-spectacle. The film's most gratuitous-seeming atrocity-Tony Dogs's eye popping out of its socket as his head is crushed in a vise--literalizes the violence done to (movie-)watching by Ace's regime of perverse spectacle. The reductio ad absurdum of all this is the humorless Ace's transformation of himself first into showbiz impresario and then juggling talkshow host, personifying the entertainment industry's ubiquitous mediocritizing force--and prompting Nicky's apt comment, "You're making a big *beep* spectacle of yourself." The Jerry Lewis of King of Comedy could have played Ace.

Ace clearly embodies the archetypal secular Jewish interloper/assimilator, represented at an extreme, as is here, in the chameleon-like survivor whose blankness permits a self-protective adaptation to immediate surroundings (think Zelig, Miller's Crossing, or Europa Europa; or Roth and Bellow). As the film progresses, Ace accessorizes himself with the trappings of Vegas--a trophy wife and home, an increasingly pretentious and ludicrous assortment of props (cigarette holders, color-coordinated outfits, oversized spectacle frames). Having ensured his indispensability through an empirical mastery of gambling (using the detachment of his outsider status to study and calculate), he consolidates his security through complete (i.e., clinically paranoid) control of his environment.

Ace's born-survivor cynicism must strike a chord with movie directors who have to live by their wits in a hostile, deceptive landscape that fosters misanthropy and paranoia. In that spirit, Casino cites two celebrated movie misanthropes, Billy Wilder and Stanley Kubrick. From Wilder, Scorsese lifts Sunset Boulevard's device of the sardonic posthumous narration, only to overturn it. Kubrick's influence is more pervasive--the approach to character exemplified by Barry Lyndon, the two-act structure and near-parodic formalist repetitions of Full Metal Jacket (both films that were met with the same lukewarm Is-That-The-Best-He-Can-Do? critical reception as Casino). But Casino particularly engages with 2001: A Space Odyssey, and not just in its sense of cosmic distance and impersonal taking stock of human civilization.

Ace is Casino's HAL 9000, "a cash register" by any other name. His videocamera omniscience rivals that of HAL, who lip-reads Bowman and Poole's private pod conference more successfully than the Feds do Nicky and Frank (Frank Vincent)'s; and Ace's mania for control inevitably jeopardizes his mission surely as HAL's does. In the early sequences Scorsese visualizes Vegas as outer space. A shot of Ace and Nicky driving down the Strip at night is composed so that they resemble astronauts in a capsule. Scorsese's desert landscapes rightly evoke the Western, but also 2001's Dawn of Man setting. Casino's one explicit acknowledgment of Darwinism--Nicky speaks of Ace "looking for weak dealers the way lions look for weak antelope"--directly invokes the leopard picking off one of the ape-men. And if the bathos of launching Ace's TV variety show with the fanfare of Strauss's "Sunrise" (aka "Prelude to 2001") is too obvious, it's a stroke of brilliance that the willful savagery of the slaying of Nicky and his brother with baseball bats is inspired by the climax of the Dawn of Man section, where an ascendent ape-man clubs to death the leader of a rival tribe with a bone. Kubrick's cynical dawn of civilization becomes Casino's final, appalling summation of humanity's spiritual progress.

Casino's introductory sequences are particularly Kubrickean in style (as are its Strangelove War Room casino interiors). They emphasize the impersonal, self-propelled agency of the casino's absurd social apparatus over the role of any individual, and indeed the film's inverted structure (another Kubrick trope?) elaborates for some time on the minutiae of process and structure before it finally settles on the story's central trio. The reality of the machine takes precedence over human interest.
Within its two-act structure, Casino seems conceived with repetition as a primary organizing principle. The car bomb opening is recapitulated twice, and in the second act the action resolves itself into an hysterical, nightmarishly endless loop of emotional and physical violence, by turns excruciating and banal, as the film freely alternates between parodic and melodramatic registers. Ace and Ginger's corrosive soap opera cycle of screaming rows, furious comings and goings, and temporary reconciliations precisely captures the aimless futility and monotony of the bickering dysfunctional relationship. At a stylistic level, the film's recapitulating rhetoric serves to reinforce a ruling paradigm of cause-and-effect (while attempting to exhaust its own vocabulary in the process), piling up tracking shots that connect initial actions and eventual payoffs, and expositional montages that reiterate the hierarchical principles of the Vegas social foodchain. Both devices find their ad nauseam convergence as the camera observes Dominic spitting into sandwiches and wrapping them, then tracks them as they are delivered to two waiting cops.

The film's structural turning point, the marker of the downturn in Ace's fortunes, is the firing of Don Ward (John Bloom, aka Joe Bob Briggs), which sets in motion the collapse of everything Ace has built. Following Ace and Ginger's unconvincing resolution to attempt to rally their marriage (in a scene notably marked off from the rest of the film by its baroque, burnished visual style and canted frames), Act 2 begins with a recapitulation of the count room procedures, the rot having already set in. The second half of the film functions as an echo chamber, revising certain incidents from the first. The safe deposit key Ace gave Ginger becomes a beeper; the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" is now warped into parody by DEVO's demented New Wave cover version; Nicky's taunting of the bar victim--"You hear a little girl?"--returns to haunt him as he himself weeps pitifully at his brother's murder; the image of Ginger alone with her jewelry finds its logical fulfillment in the grim pathos of her lonely and sordid death in a motel hallway.

The film's abstract critique of materialism and determinist cause-and-effect formalism imply its corresponding microcosm of modern capitalism's economic system of exploitation and control. The film's first hour methodically documents the mechanisms and processes by which Ace ensures a steady flow of money and a regulated social order, demonstrating the means by which organized crime, like any business enterprise, generates revenue and perpetuates control with the State's complicity. Or as Ace puts it: "It's all been arranged just for us to get your money."

Addressed to Casino's audience, this key line puts into play an ambivalence about the movie business that works its way through the film. The film's examination of spectatorship grows out of this, and from the start it is subordinated to Ace's wider objective of control: "I'm here to run it my way--no interference Scorsese's films are always alive to meta-cinematic possibility. If GoodFellas' Henry Hill was "a movie star with muscle," Ace is a director auteur with power over life and death. With a bottle of Mylanta in his office, he may be Scorsese's jokey self-portrait, voicing the credo of control freaks everywhere: "You don't do it yourself, it never gets done The sequence in which Ace spots and entraps a pair of card cheats demonstrates his flair for mise-en-scene, the casino interior transformed into a set for Ace's choreographed production number. Later, Ace's bad publicity, negative reviews, fights over money, and increasingly strained relations with the bosses back East (who seem almost as powerful as MCA's Lew Wasserman) all speak to the pressures and delicate balancing act of filmmaking. Ultimately Ace is in an impossible position.

To be fanciful for a moment: If Scorsese must live up to being routinely described as contemporary American cinema's greatest director on the one hand and delivering Universal another GoodFellas on the other, his predicament might mirror Ace's. On one level, Casino isn't about gangsters, or even gangster movies--its about the making of a gangster movie. Or: taking a cue from the film's much-criticized virtuoso pop & rock soundtrack, which suggests a kind of Greatest Hits aesthetic, another way of considering Casino might be less as a complete text than as an anthology or medley of excerpts from its own formal, rhetorical, and narrative material-Scorsese's perennial preoccupations orbiting the obligations of genre and commerce.

In Casino the Gangster Film faces challenges from and incorporates elements of the Western, the Musical, Fifties melodrama, and Sci-Fi-it's as if Scorsese's film stands for The Movies in general. This perhaps sanctions the film's fascinatingly parodic reflex, inherent in Las Vegas itself and frequently flirted with and latent in the psychic anguish of the Scorsese oeuvre. Casino's absurd repetitions and flights to travesty (as if in illustration of the dictum: History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce) are echoed in the parodic headlock indicating camera style of certain scenes (e.g., panning from bag to drop box and back in the count room), not to mention such devices as joke titles (BACK HOME YEARS AGO), subtitles when Ace and Nicky talk in code, and the posed, idealized introductory shots of the main characters (the mob bosses back East framed in a Last Supper tableau vivant). The soundtrack's no-expense-spared use of kitsch pop songs like "Nights in White Satin" may originate in the same impulse, but the sons transcend their pop contexts to achieve remarkable pathos, as with the unbearable yearning heartache of Nilsson's "Without You" when Ginger snorts coke in front of her daughter, or the soaring poignance of The Animals' "House of the Rising Sun" over the climactic wave of killings.

Scorsese has always been obsessed with breaking down and reinventing cinematic language, and Casino may be his ultimate experiment in Broken Film. The film's reckless, overloaded exposition parades broken rules and berserk visual mannerisms (whip pans, speed shifts, dizzying tilts, freeze frames) and neologisms (like the triple jump-cut dissolves when Nicky first meets Ginger) that constantly threaten to topple the movie into pure hyperbolic gesture. These are less objective correlatives for the destructive impulses of the film's characters than manifestations of Scorsese's own sense of moviemaking--or movie business--crisis. His BFI/Channel Four/Miramax Personal Journey Through American Movies begins by considering the classic question of creative control (clips from Sullivan's Travel and The Bad and the Beautiful) observing that the "Iron Rule" is that "Every decision is shaped by the producer's perception of what the audience wanted." Critics have interpreted Casino's wanton disregard for cinematic decorum and classic screenwriting values, and its pushing of formal control beyond breaking point, as symptoms of a great director going through the motions. On the contrary, they express Scorsese's if anything too-intense engagement with and abstraction of his material.