[Reader-list] Getting into gang war By Salman Rushdie

[Harsh Kapoor]

Washington Post
December 25 2002
 
Getting into gang war
 By Salman Rushdie

As the world prepares for war, two extraordinary portraits of human 
conflict are offered at movie theaters this Christmas. Peter 
Jackson's "The Two Towers," the second installment of the "Lord of 
the Rings" trilogy, and Martin Scorsese's "Gangs of New York" are 
superficially similar because of their mutual interest in battle; but 
they could not be more different beneath their bloodied surfaces, and 
the choice between their conflicting visions is one we may all 
shortly have to make.

Both films have been eagerly anticipated. Neither has disappointed. I 
do not speak here of their performance at the box office but of their 
qualities as what one used to call "cinema," which is to say, as art.

Like its precursor, "The Fellowship of the Ring," Jackson's picture 
is an improvement on its source material, if only because Jackson's 
film language is subtler, more sophisticated and certainly more 
contemporary than the stilted, deliberate archaisms of J.R.R. 
Tolkien's descriptive prose and, even more problematically, of his 
dialogue. (I am a big fan of the book version of "The Lord of the 
Rings," but nobody ever read Tolkien for the writing.)

One might say something similar about Scorsese's use of sources. 
Herbert Asbury's 1928 classic "Gangs of New York" has been transmuted 
in the film version into a poetic, visionary epic, a "birth of the 
nation" saga that seeks nothing less, as the New York Times reviewer 
comes close to suggesting, than to supplant the grand narratives of 
national origins created by D.W. Griffith and John Ford.

It may seem strange to compare Jackson's fabular Middle Earth wars 
among men, orcs, dwarfs, hobbits and elves with Scorsese's riots in 
the all-too-real Five Points district of 19th-century Manhattan, but 
both filmmakers share an interest in the cut and thrust of 
hand-to-hand fighting, of close conflict realistically depicted 
according to the "ancient laws of combat." Movie blood used to be 
known as "Kensington gore" after the upscale London street, but 
there's nothing posh or genteel about the gore offered here.

So much for parallels and surface similarities. Where the two films 
differ radically is in what they have to say about men at arms and 
about the nature of war.

"The Two Towers" -- how fortunate for all concerned that this title 
was not ready for release 12 months ago, in the immediate aftermath 
of the fall of the World Trade Center -- follows Tolkien in creating 
a universe of moral absolutes. Tolkien didn't like people calling his 
great work an allegory of the battle against Adolf Hitler, but the 
echoes of World War II, the last "just war," are everywhere.

The Dark Lord Sauron is the incarnation of evil, and his most potent 
(and very Wagnerian) weapon, the One or Ruling Ring, is made of and 
perfects that evil. All who come under Sauron's baleful influence 
become as thoroughly, homogeneously evil as their lord. The forces of 
good that stand against him -- and this explains much of Tolkien's 
appeal -- are, by contrast, extremely various: from Gandalf the 
wizard (the powerful good guy), Aragorn the Ranger (the heroic good 
guy), Legolas the elf (the cool good guy), Gimli the grumpy dwarf 
(the uncool good guy), all the way down to the little people, the 
hobbits or halflings, who will in the end save the day.

Scorsese's film offers no such extreme moral contrasts. As knife goes 
up against cleaver, club against skull, nativist against immigrant 
American, Protestant against Catholic, "good" and "evil" seem almost 
irrelevant. This is the amoral world of bare-knuckle power, a 
Darwinian cityscape in which only the fittest will survive. And out 
of that world, Scorsese reminds us, comes ours. This is a far braver, 
rarer vision than that of "The Two Towers," brilliant as the fantasy 
epic is. Gang war is neither holy nor just, Scorsese tells us, and, 
as one leaves the movie theater with his images dazzling the mind's 
eye, the thought occurs that maybe all wars are gang wars.

The films have opened at a time when all of us are trying to come to 
grips with the fact of an impending, controversial war, and many 
people, on both sides of the argument, are taking the absolutist 
line. The Bush camp's interest in "evil" and "evildoers" needs no 
further emphasis. But the Bushies are finding support in some strange 
quarters. To take just one example, the crazy rage of the writer 
Oriana Fallaci, directed without discrimination against every Muslim 
in the world -- "every Muslim, without exception, is a 
fundamentalist"; "they multiply like protozoa to infinity" -- is one 
example of what one might call the New Evilism that is busily 
painting the world in black and white. Oddly, opponents of the 
proposed American attack on Iraq often look like mirror-images of 
what they hate. According to these opponents, Western as well as 
Islamic, the United States is the tyrant, the Dark Lord, and all its 
purposes are vile.

The truth looks more confused, more amorally Scorsesean. Saddam 
Hussein is a murderous despot, but the present U.S. administration's 
assaults on fundamental freedoms call into question its right to be 
called freedom lovers. The overthrow of the present Iraqi leadership 
may be desirable, but many of the scenarios for the aftermath of that 
overthrow are undesirable, to say the least. America may be in less 
danger from Iraq than its leaders claim, and the war on Hussein may 
have more to do with breaking U.S. dependence on Saudi oil than 
anyone cares to discuss. Yet it is possible that this flawed war may 
end up creating a better Iraq for most Iraqis than could be achieved 
by any other means. In short, we may be in for a gang war on a 
gigantic scale, and yet, as in Scorsese's movie, that gang war, 
brutal, cynical, atavistic -- a war in which one man's hero is 
another's villain -- may paradoxically succeed in bringing a more 
modern world into being.

Ambiguity is out of fashion, however. We will be given a war of 
heroes against villains at all costs. After all, "The Two Towers" is 
a vast popular success, and "Gangs of New York" is doing no better 
than modest business. Perhaps when the time for the Oscars comes 
round, the academy will see fit to reward the more profound 
complexities of the Scorsese movie. But by March we may all be 
preoccupied by a greater, darker contest than the one for the Academy 
Awards.

Salman Rushdie is the author of "Fury" and other novels.