More than perhaps any other major filmmaker, Martin Scorsese has grappled with the idea of the American Dream. His movies are full of working-class strivers hoping for a better life, from the titular waitress and aspiring singer of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore to the scrappy Irish immigrants of Gangs of New York. And in films as varied as Casino, The Aviator, and The Wolf of Wall Street, he vividly displays the glamour and power that can come with the fulfillment of that dream, but he also shows how it can turn into a nightmare of violence, corruption, and greed. This book is the first study of Scorsese’s profound ambivalence toward the American Dream, the ways it drives some men and women to aspire to greatness, but leaves others seduced and abandoned. Showing that Scorsese understands the American dream in terms of a tension between provincialism and cosmopolitanism, Jim Cullen offers a new lens through which to view such seemingly atypical Scorsese films as The Age of Innocence, Hugo, and Kundun. Fast-paced, instructive, and resonant, Martin Scorsese and the American Dream illuminates an important dimension of our national life and how a great artist has brought it into focus.

For over four decades, Martin Scorsese has been the chronicler of an obsessive society, where material possessions and physical comfort are valued, where the pursuit of individual improvement is rewarded and where male prerogative is respected and preserved. Scorsese has often described his films as sociology and he has a point: his storytelling condenses complex information into comprehensible narratives about society. In this sense, he has been a guide through a dark world of nineteenth century crypto-fascism to a fetishistic twentieth century in which goods, fame, money and power are held to have magical power. Author of Tyson: Nurture of the Beast and Beckham, Ellis Cashmore turns his attention to arguably the most influential living film- maker to explore how Scorsese envisions America. Greed, manhood, the city and romantic love feature on Scorsese's landscape of secular materialism. They are among the themes Cashmore argues have driven and inform Scorsese's work. This is America, as seen through the eyes of Martin Scorsese and it is a deeply unpleasant place. Cashmore's book discloses how, collectively, Scorsese's films present an image of America. It's an image assembled from the perspectives of obsessive people, whether burned-out paramedics, compulsive entrepreneurs, tortured lovers, or celebrity-fixated comedians. It's collected from pool halls, taxicabs, boxing rings and jazz clubs. It's an image that's specific, yet ubiquitous. It is Martin Scorsese's America.

This account of American films is balanced between subjective enthusiasm and objective analysis. Scorsese starts from his own childhood love affair with the cinema, when he discovered King Vidor's Dual in the Sun as a boy.

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 2,3 (B), University of Cologne (Institute for the English Language and its Didactic), course: Seminar: The Cultural Analysis of Contemporary American Films, language: English, abstract: „I believe in America. America has made my fortune.“ These are the very first two sentences in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather from 1972 - exactly the same year when director Martin Scorsese decided to film Herbert Asbury’s non-fiction book The Gangs of New York. “Asbury (1891-1963) was a journalist and a pioneer historian of low life, whose Gangs of New York originally appeared in 1928, subtitled an informal history of the underworld.” (Christie 2003, p. 250) At the beginning of The Godfather: Part II, a film which is about the life of an Italian who immigrates to the United States in the 1920s, the film depicts the arrival of Italian immigrants at the New York harbor. All the passengers of the ship are full of expectation. They are looking at the famous Statue of Liberty, which welcomes America’s new citizens. “Bring us your homeless and your poor”, is written in a poem by Emma Lazarus that is graven on a tablet within the pedestal on which the statue stands. (Cf. Christie 2003, p. 253) This sequence portrays the fulfilment of the American Dream. In 2002, after nearly 30 years of preparation, Martin Scorsese’s epic Gangs of New York which is also set in New York one century before the action of The Godfather takes place, finally was released in the United States. Scorsese’s film covers a period of New York City's history, from the 1840's through to the bloody Draft Riots of 1863, when graft and corruption permeated every level of government including the police department. The Statue of Liberty had not been built at the time in which Gangs of New York is set (Cf. Metzger 2000, p. 23), and there aren’t any Italians in the film. The movie concentrates on the struggle between the so called Native Americans and a huge number of Irish immigrants who arrive with ships every day. The picture describes America’s birth from violence and the development of the country into the state which is presented in Coppola’s The Godfather and former pictures by Martin Scorsese like Goodfellas or Casino. Gangs of New York is in a way the foundation of which all the other movies by Scorsese are based on.

Collected interviews with the man who has been called the greatest living American film director

While the myth of a classless America endures in the American Dream, the very stratification that it denies unfairly affects the majority of Americans. Studies show that it's difficult for working class people to achieve upward mobility in the US. This book shows that the American Dream's glorification in Hollywood cinema should not be ignored.