Lucia Lopez
One scene that caught my attention was when Bill the Butcher, or William Cutting, is teaching Amsterdam how to kill, using a pig in place of a person. He tells Amsterdam that he loves butchering pigs, saying, “The nearest thing in nature to the flesh of a man is the flesh of a pig.” Before letting Amsterdam try for himself, he shows him where the correct places to strike are. He points out the liver, the kidneys, the heart, and the main artery. As he points out each part, he puts a hand on the same part on Amsterdam’s body.
The music in the background of this scene is very calm and there are people seen walking around nonchalantly, which contrasts with the brutal skills Bill is teaching Amsterdam. When Bill passes Amsterdam the knife, the people in the background are more interested in what is happening. The music gets slower and sadder, but it also gets louder. Amsterdam glances up and sees what seems to be a newspaper drawing from the day the natives fought the Dead Rabbits, a gang that consisted of Irish immigrants. The drawing depicts Bill standing over Amsterdam’s father’s dead body, surrounded by his fellow nativists. The headline reads, “Battle of the Five Points: Great Native Victory Over the Foreign Invader”.
From this scene, the film quickly transitions to a flashback. It is the scene in the very beginning of the movie, when Amsterdam’s father hands him a blade and Amsterdam wipes some of the blood off of it. This scene is kept very dark, which alludes to the sadness and darkness of this day and, now, memory. In the flashback, the father’s face is not shown, nor is he heard telling Amsterdam not to wipe the blood off of the blade. These small changes in the same scene serve to show that Amsterdam has learned much since he was a child, and possibly means to show that he does not need the guidance of his father. Although this may be the case, he still is very much interested in getting revenge, which is obvious by the way he stabs the pig.
After the flashback, the scene sharply cuts back to the present, where Amsterdam pauses to look and the knife and tighten his grip. He then stabs the pig in the areas that were told to him by Bill so violently that it’s as if he were picturing Bill in the pig’s place. Right at his first stab, the music becomes much quieter and each stab is accompanied by the sound of a large drum being hit. Bill praises him on his skill, and while Amsterdam doesn’t seem to be really listening to him, he takes a final stab at the pig’s stomach.
Before Bill taught Amsterdam where the correct places to stab a person to kill them were, he told him that stabbing someone in the stomach would only make them bleed to death; it wouldn’t kill them right away. The fact that he stabbed the pig in its fatal places and then proceeded to stab it in the stomach shows that he doesn’t want Bill to just die quickly; he wants him to suffer and possibly feel the same pain his father did as well as the pain Amsterdam felt after he died.
