New York City/Character New York Essay

This world that Scorcese has depicted in the city is one that is marvelously cruel, intensely chaotic and completely imbued with his own musings on what he believes that period in time would have been like. The movie is completely modern and relevant today because it reflects on some of the same issues of race, class and ethnicity that we are struggling with today. While Gangs of New York depicts these issues set against the backdrop of Civil War era New York, which makes the film all the more disturbing, the issues that he is addressing are as ugly as the foul neighborhood of Five Points.

While Gangs of New York reenacts images from Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives (1997), such as the visual reference to "Bandit's Roost," an emblem of urban poverty, the city is an amalgamation of part truths and part Hollywood flair.The movie is fictional, but it does capture a bit of New York's essence of this period in American history, especially in the way that it illustrates the discrimination against the Irish immigrants.

While the character of the city tends to be trite in its representation, there are some complex ideas concerning racial and ethnic conflict in early American history. There are issues of racism, of class struggle, and of the division between the Anglo-Saxon Protestant "Nativists" and the Roman Catholic Irish immigrants in Civil War time New York. The issue of ethnicity is especially poignant because it resonates within society today.....