The Gangs of New York

First a confession: I’m a sucker both for costume drama and a good romance. And I love a good adventure story. Loved ‘Pride and Prejudice’; when Mr Darcy finally professes his love to Miss Elizabeth Bennett, I get tearful. Adore almost any Merchant and Ivory film. And I can handle violence, whether the cartoonish sort of ‘Batman ’ and ‘Pulp Fiction ’ or the realism of ‘Saving Private Ryan’. So, ‘Gangs of New York ’ should have been right up my alley. It was not. Frankly, I could tolerate the romance as a modern-day love affair. Cameron Diaz is easy to look at, and I suspect DiCaprio has his admirers. But the dramatic core of the film belongs to the anti-hero, Bill the Butcher, played by Daniel Day-Lewis. The costumes – which I thought caricatured individuals – were nonetheless evocative of the era, especially in the gangs’ stovepipe hats and dead rabbits. And the cinematography made it all look beautiful – albeit, borrowing from the title of a book about New York in the 1920s by the historian Robert Allen, it is a ‘horrible prettiness’.1 For the heart

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Criminology · Media studies · Period (music) · Political science · Politics · Racism · Sociology · Cinema and Media Studies · Gender Studies · History · Law · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · South Asian Cinema and Culture

• Crime and violence on the margins of society

  Open Access•B Cayli, Baris Cayli Messina•Sociology Compass•2024

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