This zine is a poem imagining a conversation between Vito Russo and Roger Ebert discussing Martin Scorsese’s 2017 film Silence.
I wrote a whole lot of context about the two of them / why they’re important voices on film to me / how they’ve guided my approach to Scorsese’s body of work. I considered making it part of the zine, but it’s like, a lot, and having the zine be just the poem with zero context is more elegant. But I printed this rough essay as an extra for Zine Club members, and I said I’d put it online too, so it’s going to live here.
If you want to read the poem as well I can’t remember what I priced this for at Boneshaker, but they’re really cool zines. The cover is printed on the backside of a piece of vellum so that the letters show up all ghostly, I’m really proud of it. The black sheet is construction paper, which made it slightly too big for any envelope I own, which was a problem.
Here is the rambling context / process note:
I thought about having some sort of author’s note in the back of this zine, because, like, it’s kind of a weird thing, there’s a lot I could say about it. But after further consideration I wanted the zine itself to be just the poem and nothing else, for the reader to bring their own context to.
But I still wanted to share some of my thinking/context with you. According to my notebook this poem was written July 10th, 2020. That’s peak pandemic summer. The pages surrounding it are mostly about the city of Minneapolis being on fire.
My big Scorsese thing was roughly October-December 2019, in which time I watched all of his narrative feature films. I wrote a whole zine about that experience.
I checked letterboxd to see what I was up to in July 2020, and on the 4th I watched Hamilton, on the 8th I watched The Little Mermaid, the 9th I watched Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and on the 10th I watched First Cow. What a day — I wonder what came first, this poem or watching that film. Watching First Cow was one of my highlights of 2020. I was waiting for it to be released in the Cities before everything shut down, and it took months for A24 to finally put it on streaming. Have you seen First Cow yet? First Cow is amazing. Anyway, I’ve distracted myself.
I was barely reading in the summer of 2020, but I checked my spreadsheet anyway, and it’s a good thing I did, because apparently on July 10th I finished reading Acquired Community by Jane Byers.
The notebook version of this poem has an epigram from that book, the lines:
“Another dead friend.
A new Jesus.”
from the poem “Transfiguration,” which is written as a conversation, about religion and the aids crisis and dancing. That summer I only read poetry, cookbooks, and fan fiction, my brain too fried for anything else. I hadn’t remembered that this poem was a conversation, or that I had read this book around the same time I was writing this poem.
Silence is Martin Scorsese’s 2016 film staring Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver as Jesuit priests who travel to Japan in search of a third priest (Liam Neeson) who may have given up his faith. I’ve watched it once, on November 6th, 2019. (I love that I can pull this kind of stuff off letterboxd, it’s such a meaningful record of my life.) Honestly, I don’t remember a whole lot of it beyond vibes. I was watching a lot of Scorsese at the time, and a lot of New Hollywood in general, trying to give myself context for Marty’s career.
My first week of November, 2019, in film:
11/1: Parasite (2019)
11/2: The Birdcage (1996)
11/3: Incident at Oglala (1992), Hostiles (2017)
11/4: Casino (1995), Shark Tale (2004), Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
11/5: Dolemite Is My Name (2019), The King (2019)
11/6: Silence (2016), K-19: The Widowmaker (2002)
11/7: Hustlers (2019)
Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood and Shark Tales were both rewatches. Hollywood was finally at the Riverview, so I saw it again with my dad. Shark Tales is an animated movie where Martin Scorsese plays a pufferfish. I’m obsessed with it. Have you seen Shark Tales? You gotta see Shark Tales. (You don’t gotta.)
It’s not suprirrisng that I can’t remember the details of Silence considering how many great (and mediocre) movies I was shoving into my head at the time. I was going to tell you more about some of them, but that’s a real tangent, and a lot to type, but know that my November 2019 also included Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Pedro Almodovar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and the Archers The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, three movies that are completely capable of rewiring someone’s brain through the power of cinema, along with EIGHT other Scorseses, and rewatching Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises. That will fuck you up!
But this isn’t really a poem about film, it’s only kind of about Silence, it’s more about two voices that made me love film, Roger Ebert and Vito Russo.
Roger Ebert, who I assume you’re familiar with, was the legendary critic at the the Chicago Sun-Times. Ebert was a great writer, a generous critic, and all of his criticism is up on rogerebert.com, which is wonderful, because you can search for basically any old movie and find out what he had to think about it.
There’d a documentary about him, Life Itself (2014), which I watched at some point before I started using letterboxd in the fall of 2017. It was filmed towards the end of his life, as he was dying from cancer, but still finding great joy in film. It tells his story as a person in recovery, which I think is important to understanding his relationship to Scorsese’s body of work, as is the fact that they grew up Catholic in a similar era.
Ebert took an early interest in Scorsese, reviewing Scorsese’s first film when it played at a Chicago film festival, before the name was changed or they made Scorsese add another sex scene to sell the movie. There’s a 2008 book that collects all of Ebert’s writing on Scorsese up to that point, bringing together reviews and interviews and profiles. I finished reading it on December 14th, 2019, and I think it’s the best book I’ve read on Scorsese. I really value Ebert’s perspective on Scorsese because Ebert recognizes the things they have in common — they’re of the same generation, they grew up Catholic, and they both struggled with addiction. He uses this common ground as a starting place for a conversation about how childhood faith influences filmmaking. As I worked my way through Scorsese’s filmography Ebert was my favorite guide, drawing my attention to things I might not have noticed on my own. It’s a small tragedy that we don’t have Ebert’s take on Silence, a project Scorsese had been working on for a long time, that Ebert would have been aware of before his death. Silence is in conversation with themes Scorsese had been interested in from the beginning on his career, and I’m sure Ebert’s view on this latest turn would be rewarding.
The other side of the conversation is Vito Russo, film theorist and aids activist. There’s a documentary about him, simply called Vito (2011), which I watched April 4th, 2018, and remember being a wonderful portrait. There’s also footage of him in both the good and bad ACTUP documentaries.
Russo wrote The Celluloid Closet, which is about how gay people weren’t allowed to exist in Hollywood movies unless they were pathetic or end up dead. It’s the basis of a documentary of the same name about queer presence in cinema, which I watched for a class my freshman year of college, and it changed my life. I wrote down the titles of every film they mentioned, and went out and watched them, and that’s why I am the way I am — a documentary I watched for school told me about Parting Glances, and now it’s my favorite film. The documentary isn’t as good as the book, but it’s still great. My favorite part is all of the people being like, “how the fuck did straight men make a Bound?” Well, it’s because the Wachowskis are actually lesbians, they just hadn’t figured that out yet.
The Celluloid Closet, the book, is a masterpiece. It’s incredibly clear well argued academic writing that manages to be accessible and have an identifiable authorial voice. Russo’s personality comes across on the page in a way that you almost never find in a book like this, which makes it wonderful. You can tell that this book was written by someone who’s gay, not just because of the perspective, but through the voice.
There’s a section in the back of the book where Russo lists off every movie with gay content and offers a one sentence take on them. The entry for After Hours is: “Martin Scorsese’s least homophobic film thanks to the intervention of Robert Plunket, the actor who played Mark, the lonely homosexual picked up by Griffin Dunne.” This is probably the first context in which I ever encountered After Hours (a great film that I need to rewatch — some days I might say it’s my favorite Scorsese?). The phrase “Scorsese’s least homophobic film” made a big impression. None of Scorsese’s other films have enough gay content to make Russo’s list, but by calling After Hours Scorsese’s least homophobic film Russo implies that all of his other work is more homophobic, and for something to be homophobic doesn’t there need to be some possibility of gayness? I suppose absence is a different type of homophobia, one that Russo critiques in The Celluloid Closet, but I don’t think that’s what Russo is pointing to.
One of Scorsese’s main themes is the ways that masculinity and heterosexuality fuck a person up. Toxic masculinity demands homophobia. The men in Scorsese’s most iconic films are not meant to be aspirational. Thinking they are is an incredibly common misreading. I respect Russo too much to think that he’s fallen for that take. My guess would be that he simply thinks toxic masculinity is a boring thing to represent, and that if your critique of toxic masculinity involves characters expressing homophobic view points that you know a significant segment of the audience is going to agree with, then it must be awfully easy for the audience to miss the whole critique — which is in fact what happens, that’s how you wind up with Travis Bickle fanboys, and the film Joker.
If I wanted to further this argument I would have to rewatch all of these movies, and this is a process note about a poem, not real film criticism, so we’re not doing that. What I’m interested in telling you has to do with how the phrase “Scorsese’s least homophobic film” lived in my head and influenced my viewing. I don’t know if it was a conscious thing, but it was there, just like there are gay people at the edge of Scorsese’s film. There’s this parking lot attendant (?) in The Irishman that is visibly gay, and that’s such an odd detail for a movie that’s about this very rigid masculinity. This character has maybe one line, but you see him, and you’re reminded that gay people exist. This is so interesting to me. Is this from the source material, or was it a decision Marty made? I could try to find out, but I haven’t, I’ve just wondered about it for close to four whole years.
Martin Scorsese grew up in New York City, in Little Italy, not far from Greenwich Village. In the 60s gay bars like the Stonewall Inn were owned by the mafia. The overlap of these worlds exists in Scorsese’s film Mean Streets (1973). I’ve seen Mean Streets once, on October 8th 2019, the day this all started. I had really bad cramps, and Joker had just come out, and all of the talk was about how indebted it was to early Scorsese, and I decided that this was a blind spot I was finally going to see to. On October 8th I watched Taxi Driver and Mean Streets, and then on the 9th I watched Raging Bull, the three Scorsese movies that were streaming on netflix at the time. And that could have been it, but then on October 16th I watched Bringing Out the Dead (1999) because a podcast I like was talking about it, and that movie is so weird and brilliant, and I was like, if this is the minor Scorsese that nobody really cares about then I need to watch all of them.
But alright, Mean Streets. I saw it once, and I don’t remember the details, but gay people exist in the movie. I think just for a moment, there’s a moment of violence between the film’s protagonists and some queers who are drinking at the same mafia owned bar. Something like that. I’m not going to look up exactly what it is right now. The moment is some sort of homophobic violence that isn’t condemned by the film. But it’s not really a film that condemns thing. And what I remember years later is the fact that gay people existed in this world, something that was accurate to the milieu, that would have gotten left out of most hollywood films. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not. I get why Russo would consider the film homophobic, but taken in the context of Scorsese’s entire body of work, it’s… I don’t know. Interesting. Something I think about a lot.
I think one think that links these two critics — besides being brilliant, two of the best people who have ever written about film — is the way I am constantly coming back to their opinions. Ebert’s archive is extensive, and I’ll turn to it when I see an older movie and want a second opinion on it. If I see an older film with gay shit in it I’ll see if it’s on Russo’s list. I am constantly checking in on what they had to say. And of course there are so many films that neither of them wrote about that I wish I could see what they would have made of. They both died before they should have. Russo in 1990 of aids, Ebert in 2013 of cancer.
There’s a note on my phone last edited on October 25th, 2019:
Top 5 films I wish I could read Vito Russo’s thoughts on:
- The Living End (1992)
- Brokeback Mountain (2005)
- Love, Simon (2018)
- Call Me By Your Name (2017)
- Carol (2015)
Silence doesn’t make the list because Silence is by and about straight people, and if I could talk to my ghost-hero I wouldn’t want to waste his time with straight people. I like that top five, but might switch out 4 and five for BPM (2017), and new this year and fresh in my mind, Ira Sachs brilliant Passages (2023).
I didn’t have a similar list for Ebert, but it’s really easy to make one.
Top 5 films I wish I could read Roger Ebert’s thoughts on:
- Silence (2008)
- The Irishman (2019)
- Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
- Joker (2019)
- The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
This is just the four narrative films Scorsese has released since Ebert’s death, and then Joker, a movie I hate, where the only vaguely interesting bits are stolen from Marty.
Now that you know who both of them are, and why they’re important to me, I suppose I could try to explain why I put them in conversation for this film. But like, that’s what all of this was. They’re two voices that live in my head, Silence is a film that I don’t have a strong grasp on, an instance where I wish I could have their insight. But I can’t. So I made something up. I wrote a poem. I think it’s one of the better poems I’ve written, but also I know all opinions on poetry are subjective. This poem was a conversation I thought about for a long time before I finally sat down and wrote it. There weren’t many changes from my notebook to the zine. The main one being turning Russo’s side into lapslock text — something like that couldn’t exist in the notebook, my typical handwriting being a horrible mishmash of lower and uppercase letters.
I think that’s everything I have to say. This is more than 2.5k words, I’ve rambled on enough. I didn’t put any of this in the zine because I thought the poem could stand on its own. This is its own thing.
Top 5 films I’d recommend watching after reading this poem/zine/explainer:
- BPM (2017)
- Vito (2011)
- Life Itself (2014)
- Kundun (1997)
- Shark Tale (2004)
(jk, don’t watch Shark Tale. Watch The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943))
zines by B. Rose 