MOVIE CHRONICLE
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sent themselves infinitely, and by a rigid convention it is understood
that as soon as he wishes to rest on his gains, he is on the way to de–
struction.
The gangster is lonely and melancholy, and can give the impression
of a profound worldly wisdom. He appeals most to adolescents with their
impatience and their feeling of being outsiders, but more generally he
appeals to that side of all of us which refuses to believe in the "normal"
possibilities of happiness and achievement; the gangster is the "no" to
that great American "yes" which is stamped so big over our official
culture and yet has so little to do with the way we really feel about our
lives. But the gangster's loneliness and melancholy are not "authentic";
like everything else that belongs to him, they are not honestly come by:
he is lonely and melancholy not because life ultimately demands such
feelings but because he has put himself in a position where everybody
wants to kill him and eventually somebody will. He is wide open and
defenseless, incomplete because unable to accept any limits or come to
terms with his own nature, fearful, loveless. And the story of his career
is a nightmare inversion of the values of ambition and opportunity. From
the window of Scarface's bullet-proof apartment can be seen an electric
sign proclaiming: "The World Is Yours," and, if I remember, this sign
is the last thing we see after Scarface lies dead in the street. In the end
it is the gangster's weakness as much as his power and freedom that ap–
peals to us; the world is not ours, but it is not his either, and in his
death he "pays" for our fantasies, releasing us momentarily both from
the concept of success, which he denies by caricaturing it, and from the
need to succeed, which he shows to be dangerous.
1
The Western hero, by contrast, is a figure of repose. He resembles
the gangster in being lonely and to some degree melancholy. But his
melancholy comes from the "simple" recognition that life is unavoidably
serious, not from the disproportions of his own temperament. And his
loneliness is organic, not imposed on him by his situation but belonging
to him intimately and testifying to his completeness. The gangster must
reject others violently or draw them violently
to
him. The Westerner is
not thus compelled to seek love; he is prepared to accept it, perhaps,
but he never asks of it more than it can give, and we see him constantly
in situations where love is at best an irrelevance.
If
there is a woman
he loves, she is usually unable to understand his motives; she is against
killing and being killed, and he finds it impossible to explain to her that
1 I discussed gangster movies at greater length in an article called "The
Gangster as Tragic Hero"
(PR,
February 1948).
