The Big Shave (1967)
America slits its own throat in Martin Scorsese’s gory, NYU short, The Big Shave—also revealingly referred to by the not-so-cryptic, alternate title of Viet ’67. As artful as it is gruesomely grotesque, and as hard as it ever was to stomach, The Big Shave remains one of my favourite shorts, due to its deceptively simple concept, and hard-hitting, unforgettable execution.
I always, quite naively, took The Big Shave at slashed-face value, due to the queasy collision of its amusingly-titled jazz soundtrack—Bunny Berigan’s 1939 song, “I Can’t Get Started,” which foreshadowed Marty’s cleverly-layered needle drops, and its troubling imagery. There’s a methodical build—a routine, a ritual, that begins peacefully, and climaxes with a bloodbath of obsessive compulsive (call it what you will) tendencies, depicting the same brand of self-cleansing violence seen subsequently in Scorsese’s features. Was it an existentialist riling against futility? A depiction of a young man, likely a Scorsese avatar, who can’t make the first correct move, and ends up butchering himself in the process? Someone self-sabotaging—getting nowhere by destroying their own path and process through acts of self-harm? A man getting in his own way, by attempting to fix a problem that doesn’t exist?
The simplicity of the presentation, and the bloodthirsty act itself, renders the film with many potential meanings, and a wide applicability—yet the execution is so precise that Scorsese’s intended, overbearing message rings out and resonates loudest. Under the carved skin, it was a 25-year-old Marty’s blunt visual metaphor to symbolically express dissatisfaction and disgust for his country’s involvement and interference in Vietnam. Giving new meaning to “cut-throat razor,” The Big Shave is the doomed pursuit of perfection, whether it’s in your own immaculate bathroom, or a war-torn foreign land—a wince-worthy, toe-curling tale of American self-mutilation, and an early glimpse into Scorsese’s fascination with self-destructive characters.
The synchronicity of the music and editing is meticulous—even at this early stage. Yes, a cut is a cut, but from The Big Shave‘s opening rhythmic montage, it’s clear we’re in the safe hands of a filmmaker whose methodical cuts (in both senses here) magically and mysteriously land more forcefully and effectively than many of his predecessors and peers. It all too soon becomes a palette-battle of perfect white (for which, Marty credits Herman Melville) versus scarlet red—the latter is victorious, with a rain of blood eventually flooding down the young man’s chest and dripping into the pristine sink. Scorsese’s celluloid-surgeon cuts sit alongside literal physical cuts—gashes to the skin. The splicing technique of film editing is depicted as a visceral, violent act. His three-peated, overlapping motions of the young man removing his t-shirt echo Harvey Keitel’s head hitting a pillow in jump cuts six years later in Mean Streets, and even feel like Robert De Niro’s revolving recital of, “Listen, you fuckers—you screwheads” mirror spiel—as if perched atop a broken record in 1976’s Taxi Driver.
The climactic, self-inflicted ear-to-ear severing of the jugular is as disturbing as ever, but most unsettling for me—aside from the obvious bloodshed, was the young man’s self-satisfied admiration of his maroon mess, as he oddly grooms his crimson neckline as if it’s all in a day’s work. Tidying up a gushing wound, as if merely tackling the final bumps of stubble, removes anything kitsch, or humorous about the piece. In that moment, the short becomes a dark and pensive omen.
Scarious Artists 