Civil Rights, Fascism’s Legacy, and Italian American Material Culture in Scorsese’s Mean Streets

This essay offers a material culture reading of Martin Scorsese’s 1973 film, Mean Streets, highlighting how the film narrates not only a small-time criminal gang in working-class New York City but a decidedly Italian American one, caught within a specific time and place. The film, emphasizing a neorealist style, is full of visual reminders of the ways objects—the things of everyday life—inform and reflect the lived experiences of an ethnic community, one that is alive, changing, and resilient, even as it may seem to possess, and almost embrace, a closed and stagnant sense of itself. In particular, I focus on what I refer to as “silent presences” in the film, especially around the Italian-American Civil Rights League of the 1970s and a legacy of Fascism. In so doing, I demonstrate how the characters’ layered prejudices and ethnic boosterism are in part defined by and defining the setting of the film in a manner that ultimately keeps those same characters away from assimilation in a time period when their neighborhood is changing. Focusing on the objects and materiality that structures the film’s setting helps illustrate how the characters react against change, against wholesale assimilation, retaining and reshaping Italian American identity along the way.