The face of Satan. Also the director of Hugo.
The argument that's made about Scorsese films quite often is that his films make criminality look too cool and thus encourage the very thing they're supposed to be condemning. He's pushed the envelope in terms of violence and crime and language in film, and been criticized for it, but he's said that he believes audiences can get the message that criminality is wrong by watching the film, and that they're smart enough to understand the message for themselves.
How true is this?
Well, I'd argue it's essentially true, but also kind of complicated.
DiCaprio and co. about to make a crooked sales pitch in Wolf of Wall Street
The first big problem is marketing. Films have to market themselves as exciting, and that frequently means you can end up with the opposite message of the film being displayed in the marketing. I'd argue, for example, that Wolf of Wall Street's marketing did more to encourage the irresponsible playboy image than the film itself, 'cause the film itself had several notable scenes of him going off the rails, but none - of - the trailers had that! The nature of the marketing is you can't have the whole product, so you just lie and show the most attractive parts. And from there, we can say an image of evil or irresponsibility or criminality is projected into the consciousness. But that's not the same as saying the film itself did that.
De Niro, Pesci, and Liotta posed to commit a murder in Goodfellas
The second point is, some subjects are probably inherently VERY difficult to conventionally condemn. It's been argued that there's no such thing as a true anti-war film, 'cause there'll always be SOMEONE in the audience who sees all the violence and thinks it's cool, and I'd argue that applies to crime films as well. Look at all the criminals who imitated The Godfather and Scarface. Those are both tragedies, but clearly that's not enough! That's not to say an anti-X film is impossible; I'd argue that Eastern Promises and Das Boot both come a lot closer to reaching that than a lot of others; but it's very difficult. You have to accept there's a degree of accuracy that will always be a bit off.
Casino is in many ways the "first draft" of Wolf of Wall Street in terms of spouse relationships and "legitimate" crime
And point the third is, if we're totally honest, Scorsese films do always feel like they spend most of their runtime showing how cool criminality is. But the truth is, that's how he's made these films popular. There's a million films about criminal careers going off the rails, and we haven't heard of most of them, because they were probably pretty boring. Excitement allows the films to reach wide audiences. And from there, he genuinely does show that crime doesn't pay in the end, so he's kind of honey-trapping all audiences - luring them in with a shiny exterior only to reveal an unpleasant reality underneath. So he's really doing what most people accuse him of NOT doing!
There's a whole bunch of discussions that could be had about this, but the baseline statement worth saying is that while Scorsese is by no means some moral exemplar or an example of most ethical filmmaking or anything, he's not actively pro-crime. And his grasp of story and tragedy has arguably conveyed the ugliness of criminality a lot better than most of his peers, so you can hate him if you want, but he's by no means a moral deep end in the entertainment world.
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There's more that can be said about this subject, but that's all I'm gonna say for now. Discussion welcome
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