Martin Scorsese’s Sojourn as the Iconic American White-Ethnic

• In Event: 545 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtable Session.
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 04. Art and Politics

Abstract

Martin Scorsese is considered by many to be one of the most accomplished American filmmakers of the last fifty years. Few American filmmakers over this period have maintained as consistent an output of critically acclaimed films as Scorsese nor received as wide a critical reception. This essay looks at Scorsese’s public story – the collective narrative constructed across films, books, television, journals, and newspapers about Scorsese and his films. It is a story told by myriad story-tellers including not only a very open and talkative Scorsese, but also critics, journalists, artists, and others. What is striking in the nearly 50 years of story-telling is how consistent this public story has been. This essay looks at how his public story evolved from the 1960s “Ethnic Revival” myth of an unmeltable Italian-American Scorsese to the “Ellis Island Myth” of the successful European White Ethnic Scorsese. This paper show how Scorsese’s public story articulates in astounding detail the evolution of the White Ethnic Myth as critiqued by white studies scholars David D. Roediger and Matthew Frye Jacobson. It shows how Scorsese’s pubic story evolved from the Italian American as ethnic outsider to the White European Ethnic as defining the American Experience in what Jacobson class the “hyphen-nationalism” of the Ellis Island Myth. It demonstrates once again the absence of the history of white privilege in this myth in one of the most popular and critically acclaimed American artists over the last half century.

Author

• Paul D. Lopes, Colgate University