Ralph Bakshi's Heavy Traffic (1973) opens with scenes on the streets of Brooklyn. Two men bump into each other; “I didn't think I was gonna see you again," one says, wagging his finger. A man and a woman walk past, her ass nearly falling out of her dress. Cut to shots of a pinball game: someone's about to lose.
So begins Bakshi's sophomore feature, produced on the heels of Fritz the Cat (1972). The film follows Michael Corleone (Joseph Kaufmann)—yes, cheekily named after that Michael Corleone—a 22-year-old cartoonist who lives at home in Brooklyn with his father, Angie, a philandering Italian mafia man, and his mother, Ida, who feeds her son too much and always has one nipple falling out of her nightgown. Angie is worried about Michael, who spends too much time making cartoons when he should, his father thinks, be getting laid. Yes, Michael is a virgin. He's a little nervous about women.
Michael is based on Bakshi himself, who was raised in Brownsville by two immigrant Russian Jews. Coming of age in New York comes with the learned, often not kindly, attitude that you are one with every other thing on the street—the glory, the gold, the spit, the shit. Bakshi once summed up Heavy Traffic as a film about “a Jewish mother trying to chop the Italian father's balls off and a kid who never got laid.” All that is true; Angie and Ida are locked in domestic warfare; Michael tries, even gets a girlfriend, but does not quite get laid. Instead, he fails. And to be honest, who isn't in New York City?
In America, Bakshi's father found work in a sheet metal shop, while his mother worked in the Garment Center. Living in Brownsville in the ‘40s meant that Bakshi grew up around many other working-class and immigrant Jews, Italians, and Black Americans. That also meant he experienced gang violence; in 1981, Bakshi told the New York Times that he witnessed a mafioso hit at the age of eight. “My specific sensibilities of being an artist at that point—a cartoonist—had to be hidden. You had to carry yourself around guys on the block who didn’t understand it,” Bakshi shared with BOMB in 2010. In the same interview, he said Heavy Traffic became “a combination of a lot of different things that I saw [in Brownsville].” His actual father was a “very quiet guy,” although concerned about how Bakshi would make a living with art. “Back then, no one was telling us that we were poor,” Bakshi told BlackBook in 2008. “We made our own toys—everyone did […] If you wanted to play basketball, you went and robbed a ball and went to the park. We played in the streets from morning until night, and the city became a tremendous, beautiful playground of alleyways and fire escapes. The whole thing was so rich; I wouldn’t give it up for a second.”
That same feeling is in Heavy Traffic, where everything happens in the streets. Things happen to young Michael in Brooklyn; sometimes he walks into them, and sometimes he just happens to be there. Michael just happens to be there when Carole (Beverly Hope Atkinson), a bartender he is fond of, decides she needs a man, at least until she gets back on her feet. The scenes in Heavy Traffic are fleeting, zany, crass and absurd—yet, somehow, they all still belong to the same city.
Animation before computers had always been the effort of many hands—Bakshi, in many of his interviews, is abundant in gratitude for all his men—so any animated effort presented its own physical constraints. (In two minutes of film, Bakshi told NBC in 1981, while flipping through cel sheets, “you have two-and-a-half years of our work.”) Bakshi’s response to constraint is, as it should be, wonder. The form of Heavy Traffic is vastly creative, with animated bricolages of live action and still photography. Many of the animated figures in Heavy Traffic walk and exist against live action backgrounds. In one scene, an animated Ida departs from a live action background of a dance hall to the bustling streets of Brooklyn, also live action, and then walks through her own history as photos of Bakshi's own family pan across the screen. Animated Michael listens to a live busker in Washington Square Park, the same park where live Michael later dances with live Carole. The largely animated film opens and ends with live scenes.
There is art, and then there is the business of art; authenticity versus money is the ultimate conflict for working artists. Bakshi, whose films are lurid and loud, never had a break from controversy. “Because everybody has tried to get his hand in the money pot and nobody (the filmmakers excepted) has had the wit or courage to see the movie in a true light, Coonskin [1975] looks doomed. That’s a shame,” wrote Roger Ebert in his review of Coonskin, a film which drew such ire upon its release that Paramount dropped its distribution. Bakshi's twice producer, Steve Krantz, locked Bakshi out of his studios; Bakshi also separately sued him. Upon learning that Hollywood had rewritten his original script for Cool World (1992), Bakshi purportedly punched his producer, Frank Mancuso Jr. (“I like Frank,” Bakshi said, denying the fight); Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures (1987-88) was canceled after a family organization accused Mighty Mouse of snorting cocaine on air; and Spicy City (1997), Bakshi's final stint in the industry, was canceled before its second season. According to Bakshi, HBO asked him to replace his writers, poets from the streets whom Bakshi had befriended at a bar, with Hollywood writers—so he quit.
The extremities of Bakshi's films sets them up to be misunderstood. Even by Bakshi himself: “When I saw Heavy Traffic, I fell down. [...] It was as big a shock to me as it was to people seeing it for the first time,” the cartoonist said to Vulture in 2008. Heavy Traffic could, in one sense, be interpreted as a film about a young man struggling with his relationship to sex and women. The sexual content in Heavy Traffic is frequently puerile and decidedly male; here, cartoon imagery of breasts and penises is, sometimes, the tired joke. Although Bakshi treats the character of Carole, who is Black, with an admirable deal of compassion, the racial language in Heavy Traffic is uncomfortable. Though, discomfort is the regular feeling of a Bakshi film. Everyone is free game for a joke, although there's a trans character whom the film finds particularly cruel and belittling humor in. A naked woman, one of Michael's attempted sexual exploits, falls off a roof and hangs from an electricity line for the rest of the film; a scene where Michael gets a blowjob from the woman his cheating father brings home is a flavor of debauchery that doesn't appeal to me.
The appeal, though, of Heavy Traffic is not its luridness, but its heart. Reading his interviews, I was moved by Bakshi's sense of beauty and his ardor for the city he long knew as home (Bakshi now lives in New Mexico). “I am looking to be in the Village in a bar with a bunch of guys I really want to be with. And everybody else can go fuck themselves. You have to understand that I love art,” Bakshi told Salon in 2015, the same year that he released The Last Days of Coney Island, which he entirely funded through Kickstarter, online. “I’m into what’s happening on the streets. I’m into documentaries. I’m into Greenwich Village. I’m into the cobblestones, how they shine at night… I’m into America and what it’s like living on the street, and loving the street.” Heavy Traffic, at its most sincere moments, is a film about just that: being in New York, believing in art, wanting to make art, and wanting to be an artist. Anyone who's ever tried to make art, like Michael, has failed once or twice—if they're brave enough, their whole life.
In Heavy Traffic, Michael fails so hard that he dies—well, in his animated form, at least. I'll end with one of my favorite scenes in the film. Michael and his friend, the “crazy man” Moe who lives on the roof, try to release a pigeon from its cage. To encourage the reluctant bird to fly free, they curse at and chase after the pigeon across rooftops. The pigeon does leave, but not before offering its own version of farewell. “Why, you little dumb, stupid…” Michael says, waving his fist. “I set you free, and you shit on me!”
Heavy Traffic screens tonight, August 4, at IFC as part of the series “Ralph Bakshi: Outside the Lines.”
