University of Cape Town – FAM2004F

 Hollywood Transformed Essay

‘He hates New York in June, how about you?’: Martin Scorsese & Paul Schrader’s Taxi Driver as an Expressionist Dialogue with an overripe Big Apple

“No other film has dramatized urban indifference so powerfully; at first, here, it’s horrifyingly funny and then just horrifying.”
– Pauline Kael in ‘Underground Man’, her review for The New Yorker (2011: 527)

New York does not exist in Taxi Driver (1976, henceforth TD). As it is presented to us through Michael Chapman’s neon-drooling cinematography and Bernard Herrmann’s brassy, schizophrenic score, the film should more appropriately be read as Travis Bickle’s Dante-like descent ever deeper into the spiraling circles of his own alienation, with the ‘scum and filth’ of the naked city left to be his last fantastical witness. Thus James Sanders is interestingly wrong in proclaiming that it is the “indeterminable ratio” of “reality and projection” that bestows TD’s New York with its particular cinematic immortality. In fact it becomes increasingly clear on every re- viewing that the film’s reality – its complete diegesis – is in itself Travis’s projection of his degraded urban isolation, the bloody fever dream of an immutable somnambulist. As such, he is perhaps Cinema’s, and definitely Hollywood’s, first unalloyed example of a truly unreliable narrator-protagonist.1 His voiceover is not his story, but an intimate record of his consciousness. Every supporting character is exactly that, a self- set prop for his conception of his own indivisible difference from the rest of humanity. And the ‘New York’ we recognize from our reality is not any ordinary backdrop for his wanderings but a grand, industrial canvas for the eventual splattering of his psychoses. Finally, we, the audience, receive no relief following this latter consummation of Travis’s internal contradictions. The film’s denouement leaves us not with the sense of awaking from a nightmare, as in most Horror Cinema and Film Noir, but with a further fall into fantasy, into a masculine subjectivity that it now seems will most likely

1. One could make cases for Federico Fellini’s 81⁄2, John Boorman’s Point Blank, Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd. or even Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour, but none of these enduring films really goes the distance of matching Taxi Driver’s sheer climactic denial of external reality.

never be breached. This essay thus sets out to both elaborate on the technical portrayal of this devolutionary process and go on to suggest its roots in the essence of the cinematic experience of New York City, paying homage to 150 years of the urban literary tradition and 80 years of ‘transcendental’ cinema so as to reread TD with the sophistication and brashness it itself expounds through its own vital telling. We are all God’s lonely people it seems, but apparently especially so in the city that never sleeps.

To say that Taxi Driver contains any proportion of recognizable reality would be to deny its manner of presentation. Its first images are as key in this regard as its last. In the words of the critic Ryan Gilbey, they establish that “Travis is the author of the movie; our only way into the film’s world is through [his] sleepless eyes2 that flood the screen in extreme close-up.” (2004: 202) Then, in the tradition of screen dialogue and the Kuleshov Effect, we see the reverse-shot, what the eyes are bound to see: the city out the windscreen, like a Jackson Pollock painting made from the rain-soaked and steamy glare of city lights and their reflections, while the alternatingly ominous and pining score swells, intimating itself as the recurrent sound of Travis’s mind shaking. What is less obvious is the import of the first shot following this iconic preamble, in which we are shown the door of the Cabbies’ Registration Office just before Travis enters through it, so that we are introduced to him from behind, seeing the back of his head3, his marines jacket and his emblazoned name before we see his face. For the entire rest of the movie this perspective is nigh on never repeated. Instead, we always

2. Ironically though, it’s not often noticed that the first red-drenched, anguished eyes we see are not actually those of Robert De Niro, but of Martin Scorsese himself, whose implicit identification with his protagonist here – along with in his other tiny appearance, before his later ‘murderous jilted passenger’ cameo, as a seated bystander gaping, just like the unseen Travis, at Betsy’s slow-motion glide into the campaign office – suggests another reason for our unique immersion in Travis’s consciousness: his auteur was in a sense living through his own movie. Our lack of distance from Travis’s experience is also fundamentally Scorsese’s.

3. Possibly a reference to the beginning of Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie, another great ‘first-person’ film of urban isolation, in which Anna Karina’s character is introduced and only shown from behind for the whole of a five-minute dialogue scene.

see Travis facing or walking towards us4, or we see what he ostensibly sees. Even the exceptions to this are intriguing commentaries on his, and our, locked-in subjectivity. A series of ‘God’s-eye view’ overhead shots repeat at regular intervals – from showing the registrar’s cluttered desk in the first scene, to the gun salesman’s showcased stock in the film’s center, eventually to the out-of-body sweeps above the carnage in the post- climax brothel – which suggest, given our complicity with Travis’s mind, that he is seeing the world before him from an elevated perspective, a space of higher judgement. Likewise, the rare scenes he is not conspicuously in are uniformly departures into various different genres and film styles, such that we can suspect they are Travis’s imaginings, little movies he concocts to explain other people. Tom and Betsy’s banter in the campaign-office, for example, – which we eventually realize Travis has been watching the whole time through two ‘screens’ of glass while sucking at a soft-drink – is classic screwball comedy5, while Sport and Iris’s slow-dance reconnection – a la the soppy 70’s Romances (Love Story, Butterflies are Free) that accompanied the Hollywood Renaissance – is introduced by a shot of Travis gazing out his cab window at their apartment. What all this reinforces is an understanding of Travis’s zero-level passivity as a protagonist. His cab drives him around the city more than he drives it6. As a rule, conversations happen to him and he does not know how to respond. Through his failures to communicate he is literally decentered; forced to the edges of the frame and the limits of the camera’s attention.7

When he does try to reach out of himself it is from desperation at his own “morbid self- attention”, but every instigation – with Betsy, with Wizard, with Iris – collapses back

4. Gilbey again: “[H]is journey is toward the camera’s eye, fittingly enough for an individual whose conception of himself is so rooted in notions of singularity and narcissism…” (2004:199)
5. Specifically a kind of platonic version of the office scenes in Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday, dramatizing Travis’s suspicion of their more-than-civil friendship.

6. Paul Schrader, the film’s screenwriter, wonderfully called the cab Travis’s “premature coffin.” Quoted from (Bouzereau, 1999).
7. Examples are entertainingly manifold: After blowing even the simplest chat-up in the pornographic theatre, the camera absent-mindedly zooms into the projection booth’s window; spacing out while his cabbie friends are scatting, he and the camera stare for ages into a glass of fizzing water; crashing and burning during his make-up call to Betsy, the camera disregards him entirely and pans to see New Yorkers passing by on the street beyond a neighboring corridor, as if his mind has already drifted beyond his disappointment.

into silence, leaving him once more in his own company. Thus we can never really confirm the ‘reality’ of Travis’s experience because he never breaks this cycle of social deprivation. Like his moviegoer audience, he is trapped watching his own emptiness, his own alienation from effective action and change, and it’s as sad a sight for him as it is for us. The point we should realize now is that it is New York itself that creates this condition.

Like Vertigo’s San Francisco, The Third Man’s Vienna and Breathless’s Paris, the New York of Taxi Driver is a reflective specter of its hero’s “walking contradictions”. As we have shown, Travis is indeed, as Betsy diagnoses, a person “partly truth, partly fiction”8, but his subtler, more important internal division lies in his split-identity as both a taxi driver and a human being. When in a pool of blood-red street light he consults a friend, the respected senior driver Wizard, for help with the “bad ideas in [his] head”, Peter Boyle’s character responds with a semi-improvised advisory monologue: “A man takes a job… and that job, y’know… It becomes what he is. You do a thing, that’s what you become” but “you’ve got no choice anyway. We’re all fucked more or less.” Then he defuses the situation’s seriousness by telling Travis he’s “alright” and should probably just “go get laid!” It’s clear, at least to me, that Wizard’s on to something here. Not “Bertrand Russell”, as he himself dismisses, but, in point of fact, Jean-Paul Sartre. Specifically, in Being and Nothingness, the French Marxist’s famous anecdote of the ‘waiter who thought he really was a waiter’. It’s part of modern alienation, Sartre claims, that people mistake themselves for the duties they are called upon to perform by society, instead of recognizing their complete freedom. My point here is that whatever propensity for loneliness and self-detachment that already resides in Travis’s nature (“Loneliness has followed me my whole life. I’m God’s lonely man.” he unknowingly quotes Thomas Wolfe) is gravely exacerbated by his over- identification with his job.9 Indeed, he begins his extended breakdown just after he

8. That’s to say both that his relationship with reality is kept constantly ambiguous and literally that he is the product of Schrader, Scorsese and De Niro’s imaginations as well as many aspects of their real lives. (Bouzereau, 1999)                                                                                                                                  9. Hence the genius of the film’s title: there’s a little part of Travis Bickle in every taxi driver in the world, though most just hate their job not the city that enlists them.

starts doing non-stop night shifts. He remains speechless whenever a passenger addresses him. And, as a Vietnam veteran and ‘a boy from the Midwest’, he rightfully doesn’t belong in the city anyway. He is its underclass, its waste product, its exploited labourer, and as such he feels himself becoming ineluctably desexualized and desubjectivised. He is ‘the people’, not Palantine, the white-collar presidential candidate. Thus he rallies with blind vitriol against the city that accedes to his abjection:10 “Listen, you fuckers. Here is a man who would not take it anymore…” Because we see the world of Taxi Driver through Travis’s eyes, this externalized antagonism is cinematically conveyed as the antidote to every Romanticized image of New York. The kaleidoscopic lighting scheme, like that of the dystopian cocktail party at the beginning of Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou, is sickly and oppressive; a parody of variety and tastelessness, a souring of the look of Scorsese’s beloved Powell and Pressburger. Ditto for the sound design which, when not just the quiet trod of Travis’s footsteps, manifests itself in the “relentless bustle of ghoulish cries and anonymous protestations” revealing “the authenticity of city life and madness.” (Gilbey, 2003: 184) These expressionist elements are accentuated by the paradoxical influence of the Cinéma vérité movement on the film’s mise-en-scene: techniques that began in the early 60’s as the means of a new documentary realism – handheld shooting on location, the unbroken presence of the protagonist(s), the inclusion of chance elements – are here in aid of a pervasive ‘surreality’, as Travis traverses a city made strange by its actual dirty details, pursued by a camera that can’t stop moving. This is not just a depiction in contrast to almost all preceding New York movies, but also to the cultish literary celebration of the city spanning from Walt Whitman through Hart Crane to Jack Kerouac. The beauteous vitality of the Broadway musical, the casual thrill of the gangster picture and the cheap skyscraper-fetishizing breeze of the city rom-com are all shown up here. Those movies happen to other, more talented New Yorkers and not Travis Bickle, who by his own admission hasn’t yet “become a person

10. It is perhaps one of Travis’s few truly ‘admirable’ qualities that, though “he is a racist character” (Schrader in Bouzereau, 1999), it “[m]akes no difference to [him]” which boroughs of the city he works. He sees New York as one “filthy mass” throughout, showing that he has an acute enough sense of his predicament not to center his essential anger on one race or gender, but on the amorphous socio-economic being that seeks to contain him.

like other people.” Instead he belongs to a literary and cinematic tradition of outsiders writing themselves ‘Notes from Underground’: Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, Sartre’s Roquentin and Bresson’s Michel in Pickpocket being just the first three to come to mind. It is Schrader, Scorsese and De Niro’s great achievement here to indelibly transfer this character into New York’s recognizable cinematic environs. Like all of them, Travis Bickle finds his modern urban existence in crisis, with seemingly no means remaining of attaining secular grace.

We can thus say that New York is just as much Travis’s projection as he is New York’s present creation. No matter how ridiculous this cyclical dialectic sounds, we can observe that he internalizes its essential contradiction. Simply put, he hates New York because he hates himself. His alienation from the city and everyone in it is, fundamentally, his alienation from himself. And this is in fact portrayed quite famously: the “You talkin’ to me?” mirror scene can be read as more than just lonely play-acting. The violence Travis is preparing to unleash on someone, somewhere, he first seems to try to test on his own reflection. “Faster than you, motherfucker!” he shouts as he wields his homemade sliding pistol. And he answers his own question: “Well, I’m the only one here. Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?” as if he had honestly forgotten for a second that he isn’t more than one person. This scene’s self- divergence is also famously evidenced in its editing: Travis first stands in his apartment, gazing half-hypnotized with his arms folded, on the left side of the frame before an immediate cross-fade openly breaks the 180 degree continuity rule, depositing him unchanged on the right, as if he were both parts of a screen dialogue. Likewise, we immediately see a different doubling effect, as he starts and then restarts the shot of his “Listen you fuckers…” body-rotating monologue, as if resetting his own speech or allowing for two voices to say the same epithets. Such techniques are more subtly used throughout the film, constantly confusing our presumptions about Travis’s position and sanity within many scenes and especially those where he is trapped behind his taxi’s wheel. Taxi Driver’s story is thus really that of Travis’s increasingly pathetic attempts to reconcile himself to himself by reference to the city. First he sees it as potentially coming from the purifying grace of love. It is madonna- white, gliding-in-slow-motion Betsy who ‘cannot be touched’ by the crowd. He sees her as being just as lonely as he is and tries to charm her by telling her so with unabashed honesty. She plays along for only as long as he can avoid self-sabotage, which, of course, takes until their second date at the pornography theatre. This initial crash of misguided idealism inculcates his need for purification – for “a real rain” to come – into his battered ego. He begins to enact his stuttering fantasy of getting “organiz-ized”; starting with his body’s purging, then the city’s, and ending with a final cathartic suicide. New York is his “voluptuous enemy” (Kael, 2011: 526) and, in allegiance with the target-less rhetoric of the conservative candidate Palantine, Travis arms himself like a samurai, discovers the excuse of Iris’s ‘incarceration’, and – after failing to assassinate his ‘leader’ – performs a murderous commando raid into arguably its most sinful corner to save her ‘innocence’, miraculously using up all his procured weapons in the process. The scene is shot in a far grainier film stock than the entire rest of the movie and its utter discordance in every technical aspect gives it the deliberate appearance of being Travis’s nightmare. And one that, more awfully, he cannot even end because he runs out of ammunition with which to complete his act and life before the cops arrive. When he holds his bloodstained index finger against his temple and fires off three ‘rounds’, the message is open: every violent act he’s committed against the “filthy mass”, the city and God, has ultimately been aimed at himself. Thus his failure to traverse his fantasy leaves him trapped within it, and he seems to invent the aftermath of the bloodbath as a form of valedictory consolation. In his mind, he gets back from ‘the city’ and Iris’s unseen parents the approval and attention he couldn’t have received in ordinary life. His guardian angel, Betsy, in an ethereal shot of her reflection, gives him her personal thanks for his actions. With a last little moment of unease as he adjusts the rearview mirror, Travis happily returns to his job. The very last shot of the film has Herrmann’s score swell again over an extended night shot of hundreds of cars stretching into the distance. “The anonymity of the city soaks up one more invisible man; he could be legion.” (Kael, 2011: 527)

Can we now see the full picture? The New York of Taxi Driver is both the arbiter of Travis Bickle’s alienation and is itself an alienated city: a schizophrenic urban plane whose romanticized movie image belies its squalid reality. The film concludes with Travis’s ‘survival’ because, in Kael’s words again, “[i]t’s not that he’s cured but that the city is crazier than he is.” (2011: 529) Yet because we are encased in his consciousness throughout, we are forced to make this assumption ourselves, as Travis can only bow to the position and self-awareness demanded of him by his job and social standing. We cannot be sure of the reality of any of his experiences and thus every scene retroactively takes on the tinge of fantasy, the suspicion that his nightmare doesn’t have either a beginning or an end but is the movie itself, inspired by a ‘real-existing’ New York that haunted Schrader, Scorsese and De Niro but which only exists in its subjective, ‘unreal’ appearance here. Travis’s violence is, in the determining instance, his most extreme reactionary means of affirming his existence. It fails, like all his other attempts, and therefore we still don’t know if he is actually “a person”, a character of defining actions. Instead he remains just a New York taxi driver, grinning on into the void of the city.

Word Count (excluding footnotes): 2565

Reference List:

Bouzereau, Laurent. 1999. Making Taxi Driver. (Documentary included on the Collector’s Edition DVD of the film)

Gilbey, Ryan. 2004. It Don’t Worry Me: Nashville, Jaws, Star Wars and Beyond. London: Faber and Faber.

Kael, Pauline. 2011. ‘Underground Man’, included in The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael. Sanford Schwartz, Ed. New York: The Library of America.