Scorsese’s gods of the streets: From ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ to ‘Silence,’ faith is rarely far off in his films
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March 05, 2024
Anthony Smith, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Dayton -
The Conversation
A widely circulated still from the set of Martin Scorsese’s latest film, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” shows the director sitting in a church pew. Next to him is Lily Gladstone, who plays the role of Mollie Kyle, an Osage woman whose family is targeted as part of a broader conspiracy by white Americans to steal the tribe’s wealth, to the point of marrying and killing its members.
In the photograph, Scorsese appears to hold rosary beads, a common devotional object for many Catholics. Mollie is Catholic, so the rosary makes sense as a prop. But as a scholar of religion and film, I’m struck by how it calls to mind the director’s own complex Catholicism and its imprint on his decades of filmmaking.
Scorsese stands in a long line of Catholic American filmmakers, stretching back to the 1930s and 1940s – one that includes Irish Americans John Ford and Leo McCarey, and Italian immigrant Frank Capra. At a time when Catholicism still seemed foreign to many Americans, those directors helped normalize the faith, making it seem like part of a shared American story.
Yet in his films, Scorsese has taken a much more personal approach to exploring Catholic faith and experience. He doesn’t feel the need to defend the religion or burnish its image. His movies are steeped in Catholic sensibilities, but embrace painful questions that often accompany belief: what it means to hold on to religious commitment in a world where God can seem absent.
From altar boy to auteur
Scorsese has often spoken of his Catholic background. Born in New York City’s Little Italy, he went to Catholic schools and served as an altar boy at St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, which appeared in his early masterpiece “Mean Streets.” Scorsese even began seminary training, but he quickly realized the priesthood was not for him.
Yet the church proved influential. Scorsese has described St. Patrick’s as a spiritual alternative to the violence in the streets around his neighborhood. A priest introduced the young Scorsese to classical music and books that widened his cultural horizons.
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