The Billionaire Underdog

Martin Scorsese is the cinematic champion of the underdog, even if he happens to be the richest man in the world. That explains how The Aviator (2004) fits into the impressive body of work Scorsese has created in his long and distinguished career as a director. At first glance, the billionaire aviation tycoon Howard Hughes would not appear to be the sort of subject that would attract Scorsese.

As a rich and powerful businessman, a handsome playboy, and a media celebrity, Hughes seems to be the archetypal top dog. He is exactly the kind of person a typical Scorsese protagonist can only dream of being. A Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver, 1976) or a Rupert Pupkin (The King of Comedy, 1983) stares at public figures like Hughes and is driven to commit crimes in the hope of entering the charmed circle of their publicity.

Scorsese is the great poet of the American underclass, focusing on the loners, the losers, the misfits, and the malcontents, those on the outside of society desperately struggling to get in. As an Italian American, he has often dwelled in particular on the plight of immigrant subcultures as they try to fit into the mainstream of American society, culminating in his dark tribute to the immigrant experience in Gangs of New York (2002). Howard Hughes would seem to be the opposite of all this. Stepping right out of the American heartland, he was born in Texas and inherited a fortune and, hence, social respectability. As a record-setting aviator, he seems cut out of the mold of the quintessential all-American hero Charles Lindbergh — and, hence, worlds removed from a typical Scorsese psychotic criminal like Max Cady (Cape Fear, 1991).

Yet The Aviator manages to turn Howard Hughes into a trademark Scorsese underdog, the Jake La Motta of the aviation industry. Scorsese's Hughes is a street fighter, sometimes a bully, and always a scrapper. He is portrayed as continually at odds with the establishment, whether in Hollywood or the aviation industry, and, ultimately, he runs afoul of the law and finds himself pitted against the US government itself.[1]

Despite the fact that he is surrounded by beautiful women and, at times, an adoring public, the film reveals him to be at heart a loner and a misfit, even a freak. To be sure, Hughes is far more successful than the typical Scorsese protagonist in pursuing his ambitions, and he does accomplish what they can only dream of doing. Yet, in the end, Hughes is just as tormented as Travis Bickel, Rupert Pupkin, or Jake La Motta. Like these earlier Scorsese figures, he pursues his dreams obsessively, compulsively, monomaniacally, and, therefore, cannot remain content even when he achieves his goals. Driven by a perpetual dissatisfaction with himself and the world around him, he seems destined to unhappiness.

Still, Scorsese finds something triumphal, and, perhaps, even redemptive, in Hughes's tortured psyche because it is, after all, the source of his creativity. Precisely because the world does not satisfy him, Hughes is always out to change it and improve it. His obsessive perfectionism continually drives him to new heights of achievement. He wants the perfect motion picture, the perfect airplane, and, one might add, the perfect woman, and, in each case, he keeps on molding and remolding reality to make it fit his visionary expectations.

Scorsese uses Hughes's story to explore the thin line between madness and genius and, ultimately, shows that the line cannot be drawn. Hughes's psychological obsessions make his achievements possible, but in the end poison them and incapacitate him. The artist as madman, the madman as artist — here is Scorsese's deepest point of identification with Hughes and the reason why he is able to give such a sympathetic portrait of a figure who could easily be presented in a very negative light.

Scorsese obviously saw a great deal of himself in Hughes — and with good reason. As an independent filmmaker who bucked the Hollywood studio system, as a perfectionist who kept reshooting scenes and reediting film footage, thereby continually going over budget, Howard Hughes was the Martin Scorsese of his day. As Scorsese himself describes Hughes: "When he made Hell's Angels (a picture I've always loved), he was a truly independent filmmaker, and he literally spent years and a small fortune trying to get it right."[2]

Many of Scorsese's films have drawn on autobiographical material, most obviously whenever he dealt with Little Italy, the New York neighborhood in which he himself grew up. But it is remarkable how, in turning to what at first seems to be subject matter utterly alien to his own immigrant background, Scorsese nevertheless found in Hughes a mirror of his own struggles as a creative artist. The Hollywood scenes of The Aviator are probably as close as we will ever come to seeing Raging Director: The Martin Scorsese Story.

The Businessman as Visionary

As a result of Scorsese's identification with Hughes as a filmmaker, The Aviator offers something rare in a Hollywood movie — a positive portrait of a businessman, precisely in his role as a businessman. In the typical Hollywood production, whether in motion pictures or television, the businessman often appears as a villain.[3] Businessmen are generally presented as greedy, corrupt, uncaring, and willing to do anything for the sake of profit. They typically cheat customers, employees, colleagues, and investors, despoil the environment, subvert the due process of law, and commit all kinds of crimes. In one mystery after another, the murderer turns out to be a businessman, trying to eliminate a rival, cover up an earlier misdeed, or just make a buck at the expense of his fellow human beings.

Over against the capitalist villain, Hollywood offers a variety of altruistic, public-spirited heroes who, by contrast, put the common good above their narrow economic interests. Public prosecutors, the police, government officials of all kinds, together with an army of social workers, investigative journalists, environmentalists, and other do-gooders, are presented as necessary to rein in the antisocial impulses of private enterprise. Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987) — which ironically immortalized Gordon Gekko's phrase "greed is good" — is only an extreme example of the negative image of businessmen that Hollywood usually projects.[4]

Scorsese himself has participated in this antibusiness trend in American popular culture. In movies such as The Color of Money (1986) and Goodfellas (1990), he portrays the corrupting effects of the profit motive and works to link the world of business with the world of crime. As part of his sympathy for the underdog or little guy, he has generally adopted a left-wing attitude toward big business/corporate America, namely, that it is evil and corrupt and leads to the big fish preying on the little fish. But, in The Aviator, Scorsese seems to strike off in a new direction and look at the positive side of business for a change, perhaps because he is dealing in part with his own business, filmmaking.

The story of Howard Hughes allows him to portray the businessman as visionary and creative, even heroic. Hughes was, of course, heroic in a conventional Hollywood sense. As a pioneer in aviation and, specifically, a daring aviator himself, often serving as the test pilot for his own innovative planes and setting speed and distance records, he was obviously courageous in the way in which the traditional Hollywood hero normally is. With the title of The Aviator, one could imagine Scorsese's film assimilating Hughes to conventional Hollywood models of the heroic aviation pioneer, from Charles Lindbergh to Amelia Earhart to John Glenn. Hughes did have the right stuff. But, although the heroic aviator archetype is integral to Scorsese's portrayal of Hughes, the movie reveals much more than his raw courage in an airplane.

Scorsese's Hughes is heroic as a businessman, displaying a different kind of courage in his willingness to take economic risks, above all with his own money. The Aviator is unusual among movies in capturing what it is specifically to be an entrepreneur, a genuine innovator in business. Scorsese's Hughes is creative in all his activities, not just in his work as a filmmaker. What unites his activities in the film and aviation industries is his ability to predict the future. He is always alert to emerging technological possibilities and the new demands of consumers, and he is willing to bet his own money on what he thinks the wave of the future will be.

In most movie portrayals, the businessman has nothing to contribute to the common good and, in fact, makes his money only by cheating, defrauding, or otherwise exploiting the public. By contrast, The Aviator presents Hughes as a progressive force in two industries, someone who gives the public what it wants (e.g., talkies rather than silent movies) and, more remarkably, correctly anticipates what the public would want if it were made available (e.g., transcontinental and transatlantic flights in reliable, fast, and comfortable aircraft).

Thus, even though Scorsese may share the left-wing political opinions typical of Hollywood, The Aviator in many respects celebrates the spirit of free enterprise and, more generally, embodies a kind of libertarian philosophy. One may profitably interpret the film in terms of concepts derived from classic defenders of the free market such as Adam Smith and also draw on the work of the Austrian school of economics, one of whose chief representatives is Ludwig von Mises. The emphasis in Austrian economics on the