wish the goncharov fandom would talk more about how scorsese’s blending of mafia genre conventions with plot beats typical to a tragic structure poses questions about how goncharov intervenes in conventional notions of the modern tragic hero, or how the presentation of goncharov as somewhat akin to a messianic figure could tether the piece back to scorsese’s broader directorial concerns with christian sin and redemption that manifest across his body of work. but you all only care about shipping goncharov with andrey i guess 🙄
I KNOW RIGHT like im not super well versed in scorsese’s work and my engagement with Goncharov never went much farther than a fairly surface level analysis of contrasting how it drew from post v pre christian ideals of heroism as divorced from/connected to morality (eg, the odyssean notion of heroism as opposed to a messianic notion) as it manifests in the ambiguous ending that abruptly denies the audience of catharsis while questioning the assumptions we were given about the central conflict throughout the third act, but i can still tell it’s a work that sheds a lot of light on scorsese’s overall canon, so i was pretty disappointed when i came to tumblr and all the analysis was about the fucking anchovy scene
right, and like. if you’re going to talk about the anchovy scene then at LEAST talk about the ichthys motif … but you guys are just horny. as ever.
@killyfromblame ‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️
[tags reading: I say this as a gay person: shipping goncharov with andrey is so misogynistic. yekaterina and goncharov are so in love but the fandom only cares about male characters. yekaterina svetlana goncharova is such a complex and human character and you’re more concerned with andrey? all he did was show penis and die. i know this movie was subversive for how much penis it showed. but andrey’s penis scene was the shortest in the entire movie. end tags]
I mean. my reading of this–and the most cursory analysis of the visual cinematographic language used throughout their scenes will back this up–is that goncherina as a relationship existed to subvert the concept of “love” as sufficient or relevant in the landscape of economic violence that goncharov was constrained to act within and across. the myth-making business of heterosexuality is laid bare within these scenes–the sheer perfection of them (the acting out of being “in love,” the relentless symmetry of the shots, the consistent showing of a character bound within a frame) is not aspirational but stifling. the most subsersive connotation the film supplies us with, I would contend, is the similarity of these shots with some of the most ‘obviously’ violent in the film–thus connecting the quotidian violence of heterosexuality with the more salient violence of the streets. andrey’s presence is powerful because it appears so briefly–it offers goncharov a vision of a world outside, a world beyond (and yet, contradictorily, still tragically bound up within the world of the mafia).
now of course you could argue that it’s misogynistic that a woman represents a world of stifling order and repressed play-acting, while a man represents a (however ultimately fallacious) world of freedom and openness (and, yeah, the narrative’s takes on heroism, however subversive otherwise, are pretty uniformly male). but the fans are just responding to what they see in the text. and I think it’s kind of elitist of you guys to just assume that popular criticism (and fanworks and meta do represent popular criticism) must be misunderstanding or over-simplifying the text, rather than responding in the very ways that the text calls for response! the erotics of the anchovy scene do call back to the broader point considering the inevitability of tragedy, and this is what is consistently emphasized across fanfic and meta that references this scene. so why is an erotic response not an “appropriate” response? who gets to decide that?