you're too young & eager to love

This is what happens when you watch Gangs of New York. The movie, let's face it, is not fantastic - thanks, mostly, to a still youthful Leonardo DiCaprio. However, I am always amazed and in love with Daniel Day Lewis' character. So, voila, a snippet.

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“You see this knife? I’m gonna teach you to speak English with this fucking knife.”
- Bill the Butcher; Gangs of New York


He has a strong, slow gait. The type of voice that, he would say, resonates his native status – the whiskey growl and smoke whisper of New York. The poverty doesn’t bother him; in fact, it suits him. Suits his calloused, long fingers, his one remaining eye, the skill that accompanies each deafening chop of his butcher knives. There is always blood on him too, and he fancies that, the little red rust stains of life sprinkled about the cuffs of his unclean linen shirt. It’s a declaration of his own liberating independence. His self sufficiency.

The government officials irritate him. The niggers make him grind his teeth. But the immigrants? The foreign plagues degrading his soil? Well, they slide under his skin as deftly as the way he can shed the hide off a calf. He barely acknowledges the rage until there's nothing left but gristle and bone.

“Trespassers.” Bill preaches, calmly, brandishing a thick hand in a gesture. “Worse than fleas on rats.” There is something vulgar in his simplicity, in his undiminished confidence. He does not throw the stones at the Irish flocking from the boats, but his men do – swift, hard blows to the temples of women and children, a painful shot to the fragile kneecap. Sometimes, he laughs – low, guttural, full of amusement.

He is not, however, without his elegance. Even the way he reads, unhurried and troubling over the occasional word, is firm. He is not embarrassed by the level of his literacy, or the fervor of his religious conviction or the fact that he has claimed himself God.

“Blasphemy,” Bill explains, “ain’t without a cause.”