The summer before I went to college, a much-admired older boy loaned me a copy of Scorsese on Scorsese, a book-length interview concerning Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and other pictures from the director’s early oeuvre. I had seen none of those movies. Yet, the volume was a revelation, not only because of its aroma of exciting adulthood but because its aesthetic principles had previously lain beyond my grasp. The house in which I had been raised was literate but not artistic. Martin Scorsese’s way of talking and thinking about his work opened a door that I badly wanted to see beyond.