FILM CHRONICLE
also, and primarily, a creature of the imagination. The real city, one
might say, produces only criminals; the imaginary city produces the
gangster: he is what we want to be and what we are afraid we may
become.
Thrown into the crowd without background or advantages, with
only those ambiguous skills which the rest of us-the real people of
the real city--<:an only pretend to have, the gangster is required to
make his way, to make his life and impose it on others. Usually, when
we come upon him, he has already made his choice or the choice has
already been made for him,
it
doesn't matter which: we are not per–
mitted to ask whether at some point he could have chosen to be some–
thing else
than
what he is.
The gangster's activity is actually a form of rational enterprise,
involving fairly definite goals and various techniques for achieving them.
But this rationality is usually no more than a vague background; we
know, perhaps, that the gangster sells liquor or that he operates a num–
bers racket; often we are not given even that much information. So his
activity becomes a kind of pure criminality: he hurts people. Certainly
our response to the gangster film is most consistently and most uni–
versally a response to sadism; we gain the double satisfaction of partici–
pating vicariously in the gangster's sadism and then seeing it turned
against the gangster himself.
But on another level the quality of irrational brutality and the
quality of rational enterprise become one. Since we do not see the
rational and routine aspects of the gangster's behavior, the practice of
brutality-the .quality of unmixed criminality-becomes the totality of
his career. At the same time, we are always conscious that the whole
meaning of this career is a drive for success: the typical gangster film
presents a steady upward progress followed by a very precipitate fall.
Thus brutality itself becomes at once the means to success and the con–
tent of success-a success that is defined in its most general terms,
not as accomplishment or specific gain, but simply as the unlimited pos–
sibility of aggression. (In the same way, film presentations of businessmen
tend to make it appear that they achieve their success by talking on the
telephone and holding conferences and that success
is
talking on the
telephone and holding conferences.)
From this point of view, the initial contact between the film and
its audience is an agreed conception of human life: that man is a being
with the possibilities of success or failure. This principle, too, belongs to
the city; one must emerge from the crowd or else one is nothing. On
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