Desire for Life: Stanley Cavell, Martin Scorsese and the Gangster Genre

This article argues that cinema studies should return to Stanley Cavell's conception of genre-as-medium for its promise as a method for engaging with film genre philosophically. Through a reading of Cavell's film work and his philosophical work on questions of skepticism, visibility, and moral perfectionism, the gangster films of Martin Scorsese are read as articulating the ordinary and normative force of the life of a gangster on its subjects. Describing the desire for that life as the desire for power over how one is visible to others, this Cavellian reading of Scorsese's gangster films argues for the methodological utility of favoring limited corpuses of films as constitutive of genres as a basis for doing philosophical work with film.