from The Blood
Poets: A Cinema of Savagery, 1958-1999, by Jake Horsley
You
don’t make up for your sins in church—you do it on the streets, you
do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.
—Charlie,
Mean Streets
Of all
the filmmakers discussed here, none exploded with quite such volatile energy on
the American screen as Martin Scorsese, with Mean Streets, in 1973. Of all our blood poets, none have
displayed quite such a thirst and an appetite for ectoplasm either, nor such a
painterly eye for the aesthetic virtues of blood. His films are positively
soaked in it, yet Scorsese differs from other directors (whose shared mentors
were that sacred trinity of savagery, Leone, Penn, Peckinpah) in two,
all-important ways: He is Sicilian-American (and like Don Vito Corleone, the
emphasis is on the Sicilian), and he is a Catholic. Scorsese’s films, at
least up until Raging Bull, have a sensual, expressionistic depth and texture that one associates
more with European auteurs like Truffaut, Godard, Buñuel, and Bertolucci
than with the American trash-gurus such as Fuller (or even Hawks and Ford). He
also has a rare and suprisingly enriching (to his art at least) sense of sin. Scorsese is, of all the American directors
who emerged in the ’70s, the one with the clearest vision of modern
civilization as Hell.
Martin Scorsese’s first film—a short
called What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?—was made in that halcyon year, 1963;
four years later, in 1967, Scorsese made a third short film, The Big Shave, a one-scene vignette-parable in which the
sole character—the first real Scorsese protagonist and something of a
prototype for all the rest to come—stands in front of a mirror to shave.
As he progresses, he begins to cut himself, but rather than stopping to treat
the wounds, he continues slicing and gashing away at his face with a ferocious,
fatalistic and suicidal compulsion, until finaly he slits his own throat. A
more revealing and fitting harbinger for Scorsese’s career in cinema
could hardly be imagined. It sums up in a single image most of the primary
obsessions that would pervade his work over the next thirty years:
self-sacrifice (Catholicism); insanity; violence; suicidal and compulsive
behavior; and, of course, the reflected, or projected, image of the mirror
which (like the mirrors in the opening shot of Mean Streets and the most popular scene in Taxi Driver) signifies vanity, voyeurism, narcissism,
self-doubt, and, at a more complex, subtle level, illusions, fantasies, dreams,
the quest for escape. Like those in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, the mirror serves, at its most basic,
mythical and magical level, like the cinema itself, as a doorway or portal, one
that takes us through space and time, and into another world. The fact that
Scorsese’s characters generally only see despair, madness or horror in
their mirrors says as much about ourselves, and the times and spaces we are
living in, as it does about Scorsese and his personal obsessions. The movie
screen is, after all, the biggest mirror of all the arts.
Scorsese made his feature film debut with the raw
and improvisatory black-and-white film, Who’s That Knocking at My
Door? (1969, starring Harvey Keitel
as J.R.) and he served his apprenticeship (along with half a dozen other major
American film-makers—Coppola, Hopper, Jack Nicholson, Bognanovich,
Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante, James Cameron, etc.) under Roger Corman at American
International Pictures (whose most enduring works are camp horror classics such
as Little Shop of Horrors and The Raven,
and the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations starring Vincent Price). There he made the
workmanlike but forgettable Boxcar Bertha (1972, with Barbara Hershey and David Carradine).
Scorsese cites John Cassevetes (the actor turned director whose films were
excercises in improvisatory acting) as a greater influence on him than Corman,
however. Cassavetes, after a screening of Boxcar Bertha, told him, with characteristic candidness:
“You’ve just spent a year of your life making a piece of
shit.” Cassavetes urged Scorsese to stick to his personal vision and not
to whore his talents to mainstream studios (or audiences). Scorsese followed
this advice and made Mean Streets, which, as much as Easy Rider and The Godfather, helped change the face, and the pace, of an
art form. (One might reasonably wonder, however, what Cassavetes would have
made of such later Scorsese films as The Color of Money and Cape Fear.)
*
I’m God’s lonely man.
—Travis Bickle, Taxi Driver
Taxi Driver may be to Mean Streets what Grand Illusion is to Rules of the Game for Renoir; what Jules and Jim is to 400 Blows for Truffaut; or what Last Tango in Paris is to The Conformist, for Scorsese’s contemporary,
Bertolucci. Namely, the realization of a personal vision, and the full
flowering of a movie auteur possessed (however briefly) by genius. But Scorsese
has in fact achieved an even greater unification of his vision here: by using
the same actors and the same location, and by dealing with basically the same
themes, his preoccupations, or obsessions, carry over from one film to the
next, and the two works seem actually to flow into one another. Taxi Driver not only develops and further extends the
ideas and characters from Mean Steets, it completes them and brings them to their full,
final form.
Taxi Driver unfolds with all the force and inescapable logic of
an authentic nightmare—it makes a sense beyond sense (it is
Manson’s “no sense makes sense”). Like Repulsion, it puts us squarely and wholly inside the
point of view of its steadily deteriorating protagonist and drags us ever
deeper into its feverish dem
entia. Unlike Repulsion however the film has the breadth and scope of
vision to create an actual all-inclusive world for us to inhabit—the
world of a tormented soul.[1] Few if any films had gone this far before,
and Taxi Driver
may actually be closer in spirit (and stature) to some of the great literary
works of the Russian novelists and the French existentialists. When Pauline
Kael cited Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Undergound in her review of the film,[2]
she was making an instructive comparison. Both Scorsese and Paul Schrader (who
wrote the script and is not Catholic but Calvinist[3]) were at the time admirers of Dostoyevsky.[4] Dostoyevsky, like Scorsese, was a deeply
religious artist with a genuinely apocalyptic vision of suffering. He saw the
criminal mind as having a twisted relationship—or affinity—with
that of the saint, and he used madness as his subject because for him it was the
most fertile ground in which to develop his ideas about humanity. Like Scorsese
(and like Travis, who lacks this artistic release, and so becomes a killer
instead), Dostoyevsky saw the world itself as a kind of madhouse, an
“everyday inferno,” in which we were all burning, alone.[5]
For Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), isolation and
anguish are one. He isolates himself primarily in order to suffer, it would
seem, and yet he suffers above all because he is alone. (He writes in his
diary, without the slightest irony: “I do not believe one should devote
himself to morbid self-attention. I believe one should become a person like
other people.”) His similarity to Raskolnikov of Crime and Punishment, and to the abject, tortured protagonist of Notes, is in the way he twists everyone and
everything in the world to fit his own sordid vision, turning his madness into
a kind of inspiration, and finally, a demonic calling. Raskolnikov is an
intellectualized version of Travis—he kills the old pawnbroker out of conceit.
His theoretical superiority makes her expendable to his own advancement. This
“theoretical superiority” might be known as “the Napoleon
complex”; Raskolnikov believes that superior beings (such as Napoleon)
have the right
to destroy inferior ones if it is necessary to the fulfillment of their
destiny. Accordingly, he kills the old woman (and by “accident” her
young daughter) ostensibly in order to rob her, but actually to test his
theory, which of course falls apart at once, taking him along with it. Because
in actual fact, he kills the old woman out of frustration and self-hatred.
Like Travis, Raskolnikov is a solipsist who sees his
acts purely in terms of himself, and never in terms of those who are affected
by them. There are no victims, as such, in the solipsist’s perception,
and when Travis destroys Sport and the others, he is, like Raskolnikov, merely
lashing out at his own demons, demons which he has, in true schizophrenic
fashion, projected onto the world. The greatness of Taxi Driver above all is in its purely expressionistic
style—it has (like Mean Steets only far more so) all the consistency and the
visual richness of a painting, and no other film looks anything like it
(it’s like a mixture of Bosch, Francis Bacon and Jackson Pollock, with
some of the sensuality of Blake). This is how Travis sees the world and we
never get a sense of anything else; it’s Scorsese’s vision, but
it’s always Travis’s point of view. And Scorsese never rubs our
noses in the squalor or asks us to judge it or condemn it; on the contrary, he
draws us into this world, seductively,
like a master, and bathes us in its colors.
Travis is an authentic movie creation, a
killer-saint (self-obsessed martyr) descending into Hell like some pulp Dante
to save his Beatrice (in this case, Iris, played by Jodie Foster) from what
turns out, in the end, to have been his own demons. The comparison with The
Divine Comedy<
span lang=ES-TRAD style='font-size:14.0pt;font-family:
"Times New Roman";letter-spacing:-.1pt;mso-ansi-language:ES-TRAD'> is fanciful
at best, because Travis is no poet and Iris no saint (she’s a child
hooker), and the film bears far closer resemblances to (a more fittingly
“lowbrow” source) John Ford’s The Searchers. Its monstrous loner-hero, a reactionary
crusader and self-claimed “lonely man” of God, also ironically
invokes both Wayne and, that ’70s version of the moral avenger, Harry
Callaghan. Scorsese’s film has far more dimensions to it than either Dirty
Harry or The Searchers—it depicts Travis’s acts not as
heroic, or even anti-heroic, but as simply deranged, completely out of
proportion, and motivated not by nobility or justice but by madness and rage.
Much has already been written of the parallels
between Scorsese’s film and Ford’s, so I won’t go into it too
much here, except to mention the key difference, thematically speaking, which
is the inclusion of what Scorsese and Schrader deliberately referred to as
“the Scar scene.”
A word of exposition is required then: The
Searchers involves
Wayne, as Ethan, the lone gunfighter, tracking down his niece, who was taken
and adopted by the Apaches when they slaughtered her family, many years before.
Ethan is dedicated to tracking her down and destroying the Apaches and—as
we discover during the course of the film—his niece as well, whom he
considers “contaminated” by the Apaches. When he discovers her, she
is married to the Apache “Scar.” Ethan kills Scar, but has mercy on
his niece—played by Natalie Wood—and spares her life. At the end of
the film Ethan is framed in the doorway outside the house of the reunited
family and, as he walks away into the desert, the doorway closes on him, shutting
out the wandering hero and the desert both. This closing shot is perhaps the
single most effective and powerful image depicting “God’s lonely
man”—the alienation of the popular male action hero—in
American movies. As such it sums up, perhaps better than any other image
(though Kit “crucified” in Badlands comes close), an entire mood, beyond genre,
of modern movies; what Kolker called a cinema of loneliness, we have called
poems in blood.
The “Scar-scene” which Scorsese and
Schrader devised is meant deliberately to correct what they perceived as a
central weakness of Ford’s film, namely the fact that we are never
allowed to see the niece’s life within the Apache community, nor asked to
imagine her relationship with Scar, nor ever made to feel the slightest
sympathy for Scar himself. In Taxi Driver this thematic weakness is amended with a specific
scene that takes place outside the perceptions of Travis (the rest of the film
is almost entirely inside his point of view). The scene gives us Sport
(Iris’s pimp, played by Harvey Keitel) and Iris dancing together in the
seedy, sultry gloom of Iris’s apartment; it allows us to see that Sport
is no monster (as Travis perceives him to be), and also just why, and how, Iris
is so drawn to him and his world, a world which, for all its sordidness, is a
necessary refuge for her. Travis’s “saving” of her, and his
murder of Sport (and the others) becomes accordingly an invasion, an onslaught,
on what he perceives
as iniquity and abomination. But quite plainly, exactly like Ethan in The
Searchers, he’s
going after his own demons.
*
The idea had
been building up in my mind for some time: true force. Here is man who would
not take it any longer. Here is a man who stood up. . .
—Travis
Bickle, Taxi Driver
These words, for all the conviction with which they
are uttered, ring horribly false. For a moment it seems like the film is about
to go grotesquely wrong, to degenerate into a macho fantasy of vigilante
justice, to become as trite and contrived as Travis’s speech. Right after
the words “stood up,” however, Scorsese cuts to one of the most
eloquent images in the film—an overhead shot of Travis, splayed out on
his bed, fully dressed and armed to the teeth. He looks like a catatonic rag
doll, drained of all vitality, dignity and purpose: a l
ost soul. Which is
exactly what he is, of course, and all his bravado, his newfound sense of
direction, are reduced by this single image to what they are: an insane
man’s desperate reaching for sanity, a drowning man’s last grasping
for the straw that will break the camel’s back.
Before Travis decides to vent his religious wrath
upon the venal world of street scum, he first directs it at the political
candidate Palantine, for no obvious reason other than that he is associated in
Travis’s mind with Betsy, the vision of perfection who rejects him and
turns out to be “like all the rest—in hell.” But there may be
more to it than this. Travis is split in his moral outrage and his nausea: he
can’t decide whether to strike at the top or at the bottom of this rancid,
irredeemable hellhole “society” (it’s his own hell, of
course, one that he’s made and is now stewing in). He appears to see a
“hit” on Palantine as an appropriate response to the
candidate’s ineffective mincing, and as a fitting challenge for the guerilla
skills which he learned in Vietnam, in the marines (where shaving the head into
a mohawk, as Travis does here, signifies a kamikaze-style attack mission).
Apparently Travis fully expects to die for his action, and it seems fair to say
that his motive is really a suicidal one. Lacking the clarity and the courage
(and the honesty) to destroy himself, Travis redirects his destructive energy
outward, at a more or less random target, knowing that he can thereby assure
his own death. This is one of the film’s most profound observations
(accordingly it remains occulted, barely even implied, but it’s
there)—that all violence is essentially a deviant form of violence
against the self, and that many killers are simply failed suicides. And of
course Travis does attempt to end his life in a dramatic fashion after the
carnage of the finale, but all his guns are by then all empty, leaving him no
choice but to endure.
It is particularly intriguing (and disturbing) to
look at these two alternative options of attack, of Palantine and then of Sport
and the other hoods, in relation to two real-life events that followed Taxi
Driver and would appear to have been
inspired by the film (in the first case directly, and in the second case only
indirectly). These cases are the John Hinckley, Jr. assassination attempt on
Ronald Reagan, and the Bernard Goetz shooting of several black youths on the
New York subway.
In the first case, Hinckley claimed to be haunted by
the film Taxi Driver and
to have fallen in love with its adolescent heroine, Jodie Foster (he wrote her
love letters). In a truly uncanny (and definitely somewhat suspect) case of
life imitating art imitating art imitating life (a sort of endless loop seems
to be created here, like mirrors inside mirrors), Hinckley was somehow
“inspired” (or coerced?) to imitate a movie “hero” who
was in actual fact a psychopath who in turn was inspired—albeit
unconsciously—to act out his own fantasies of heroic behavior, as
engendered by a culture gorged on such infantile ideas of manliness and heroism
as propagated by John Wayne films and the like (The Searchers is an exception, of course, because it
includes both irony and melancholy in its vision of the “hero”).[6]
Hinckley’s reasoning (if
such it may be called) was as incoherent as Manson’s—there was no
possible relationship between his “love” for Foster and his attempt
on Reagan’s life, nor was there any conceivable heroic motive for such an act (save politically
speaking, which as a motive is as beyond Hinckley as it is Travis). He merely
claimed he’d done it “to prove his love” (or some such,
though I’m guessing here)[7] to Foster. But, as far as relations to Taxi
Driver go, Travis was never in love
with Iris in any case, only infatuated with Betsy, on account of whom he made a
go at Palantine. In which case, Hinckley was obsessed with the wrong actress;
either that or he made an attack on the wrong “scum”![8]
Regardless of the true meaning
or motive behind the Hinckley affair, it proved one thing beyond all
doubt—Taxi Driver
was an uncommonly powerful film, the kind that affected people deeply, and, if
the media was to be believed, could even incite them to murder. Poor Martin
Scorsese has, I’ll wager, had a few sleepless nights wrestling with his
own “artistic responsibility” over this affair. He might do to
research the matter a little further, in order to ease his conscience some.
The Bernard Goetz case is another matter, and it
establishes something even more remarkable about Taxi Driver. Anyone can see for himself that the film is
an uncommonly impressive work; what might have been in doubt however (before
Goetz exploded onto the scene) is that it is also a disturbing, insightful,
intelligent, and now prophetic film. At the ending of the movie, Travis’s
explosion is interpreted, by tabloid journalism at least, as authentic heroism,
and Travis himself is not only exonerated but emerges as a modern-day
crusader—a crime fighter along the lines of Death Wish’s Charles Bronson or the Batman. This
was received by some critics as a dubious “liberty”—an
essentially implausible ironic resolution. But certainly it made one ponder the
possibility that Travis’s own insane fantasies might after all not be so
aberrational, but merely a product of the society and culture in which he existed.
In which case, it didn’t seem so far-fetched that this society
would—to the extent that it shared in such fantasies—accept and
even embrace Travis as the hero he imagined himself to be. (The movie slips
into outright fairy tale in the last scene however, when the ice-angel Betsy
“comes back” to him.) Whatever our original feeling about the irony
and the insight of this ending, the Bernard Goetz case put any doubts to rest
and proved that truth is indubitably stranger—and more twisted—than
any fiction.
Goetz exploded one day on a New York subway car,
drew a pistol and shot down several young black “hoodlums” who he
claimed were trying to rob him; the young men denied this claim and at least
one of them has since sued Goetz for damages.[9]
There seems little doubt that (like Travis) Goetz acted out of personal rage
and frustration, that he simply snapped and started shooting. The media and the
general public, however—so satiated and fed-up with the ever increasing
crime rate and street violence of New York—reacted with (only slightly
qualified) approval. Quite literally, “Here was man who would not take it
any longer. Here was a man who stood up!” The actual resolution of the case was by no
means so simple or unambiguous as that of Taxi Driver—Goetz served eight and a half months
for possession of an illegal weapon—but (and this is the most important
point) in the eyes of the public, or parts of it anyway, he was a hero. His
actions were viewed not with horror or with disgust as the acts of a madman (or
a fascist),[10]
but those of a brave and justifiably indignant
citizen, albeit a citizen of Hell (where any kind of action may be permitted,
so long as it appears sufficiently justified). There’s no telling what
kind of man Goetz was (or if he’d ever seen Taxi Driver), but it really doesn’t matter. Like
Travis, he may as well be Everyman: just one more downtrodden, dejected nobody
with delusions of grandeur (he carried a gun, obviously) who happened to reach
the limits of his patience—or his sanity—a little before the rest
of us. As Pauline Kael wrote of Taxi Driver: “part of the horror implicit in this movie
is how easily he [Travis] passes. The anonymity of the city soaks up one more
invisible man; he could be legion.”[11]
Scorsese’s vision of New York City as a
microcosm of the world, an ordinary inferno burning with ever greater intensity
and rage, no longer seems (if it ever did) to be hyperbole. Scorsese is an
artist of expressionism, with a visionary gift close to madness, perhaps, but
if so that’s exactly what makes him qualified for his subject. His art
was to take us where we all—and the world along with us—must some
day go. Taxi Driver
and Mean Streets
simulated the experience of urban apocalypse for our edification and our
education (even perhaps, our preparation?); meanwhile, the Bickles and the
Hinckleys and the Mansons and the Goetzs (and the Reagans and the Bushes and
the Palantines), and all the other citizens of Hell, keep themselves busy
making reality of the nightmare. Taxi Driver and Mean Streets give us the American Dream
exploded—it’s what America looks like when the “Dream”
comes true. And who could blame us, in which case, for going back to sleep?
*
We have reached the turning point.
—Charles Palantine, Taxi Driver
As Travis, De Niro gives a cagey, evasive, and strangely
haunting performance; we feel at all times his internal anguish, his growing
desperation, his overwhelming sense of isolation. Travis is alienation
incarnate, and when he’s up there on the screen, we don’t feel
disgust or superiority—our hearts go out to him. What De Niro
accomplishes here goes beyond standard screen acting: Travis being a secretive,
introverted and above all lost soul, most of his work is internal. It’s not
a showy performance, like his Johnny Boy (or like Brando’s Kowalski), yet
neither is it a work of restrained grandeur like his (and Brando’s) Vito
Corleone. Yet it is I think even more remarkable—it’s not only De
Niro’s finest performance, it’s one of the finest in the brief
history of movies. De Niro and Scorsese work so closely together here that
it’s impossible (and unnecessary) to separate their work. Between the two
of them (working from Schrader’s script) they have created a modern
archetype—a “hero” for our times. The irony of course is that
Travis is both a nobody and an Everyman: he is, if you like, the archetypal
stereotype. What Scorsese and De Niro have done however is to make him into a
living, breathing person, giving us perhaps the most fully realized picture of
a sociopathic killer outside of literature that the arts have yet provided.
The other players in the film, though incidental to
Scorsese’s vision and peripheral to Travis’s viewpoint (everyone is
peripheral, finally—he’s got tunnel vision and there’s only
darkness at the end of it) are collectively inspired, right down to the bit
parts given to Peter Boyle and Harry Northup (as Wizard and Doughboy,
Travis’s cabbie associates), Cybill Shepherd as Betsy the urban angel
Travis becomes obsessed with, Albert Brooks as her nebbish co-worker, and most
of all Harvey Keitel and Jodie Foster, as Sport and Iris, the pimp whom Travis
pits himself against and the whore whom he “saves.” It’s in
the scenes between these characters that we really see Travis more or less as
he is:this is his
world, though he won’t admit it to himself. In his “date”
with Iris in the coffee bar (for noonday breakfast—she’s wearing
two pairs of sunglasses) Travis, for a brief moment, actually seems to relax
and forget all his morbid brooding, and to become an ordinary person at last.
There’s no possibility of redemption here (Iris and Travis are as
impossible a couple as Travis and Betsy) but there is something approaching
relief—for us at least, if not for Travis.
Conversely, in his meeting with Sport, we get to see
Travis as the street warrior he imagines himself to be. (Sport seems vaguely
aware of Travis’s fantasies here, he calls him “cowboy” and
seems convinced that Travis is a cop.)
In their first scene together (they only have two, the meeting and the
stand-off, but they are the high points of the film), Travis seems dazed and
bewildered—he hardly seems to know what Sport is talking about (but he
registers all right). Sport for his part is amused and just a little bit
baffled by Travis. He instantly senses that Travis is not quite all there, but
being a pimp he’s used to dealing with weirdos. Yet Sport’s
playfulness here ironically helps Travis set him up as his adversary and,
finally, his victim. (Sport’s reference to guns and his playful gestures
with his fingers—simulating a pistol just as Charlie does in Mean
Streets—seem to
ominously foreshadow the showdown.) When he talks in lurid detail about
Iris’s “services” (Keitel improvised the scene) he is
tragically unaware of how he is feeding the flames of Travis’s demented
rage, and how these flames will soon come to devour him. For Travis’s
demons, once released, turn not on himself but on everyone else. Sport is
actually one of the most likeable characters in the film—along with Iris
he seems to be the only “real” personality; the rest of them,
because they are so irrelevant or repugnant to Travis in his isolation, seem
like shadows.[12]
And amid these shadows walks Travis, a man crucified
by his own fear and loathing, a martyr to modern alienation, himself no more
than a shadow, a suffering phantom with no chains to rattle (the soundtrack
rattles them for him).[13] The tragedy of Taxi Driver—and of maybe all solipsistic sociopaths
driven to rape and murder—is that Travis only becomes real (to himself
and to a world of indifference) when he kills. Travis is one of a
n unknown
legion for whom “murder is the only door, through which they enter
life.”[14]
And when the film leaves him
pacified, vindicated, strangely complacent, chatting with his cabbie
“buddies,” it’s the most disturbing image in the whole film,
because we know that the heat that sent him past boiling point is still on, and
that it’s only a matter of time until the next explosion comes.
Travis’s hell of loneliness and enforced
celibacy comes from his incapacity to connect with women: either he wants to be
saved by them (as in the case of Betsy), or else he wants to save them (Iris).
In both cases, there’s no possibility of equality or understanding
between them, and he feels betrayed when these women don’t act according
to his fantasy-view of them. When he says of Betsy, “I realize now she is
just like all the rest, cold, distant. Many people like that; women for sure.
They’re like a union,” what he feels is that women are a force unto
themselves, gathered together against him, refusing him any access into their
world. But Travis is so isolated inside his own world that all his efforts at
communicating—at sharing—are doomed to failure from the start. Only
when he literally blasts his way out of his shell and into the real world does
the world sit up and take notice. And when Betsy “comes back” to
Travis in the final scene, it might be Travis’s ultimate fantasy
fulfilled. He’s not only slayed the dragon—he’s won the
maiden. And what’s more, he gets to reject her (gently) as well, thereby
proving his own superiorty, his righteousness. She is “in Hell, like all
the rest,” and, now that she realizes it too, she comes back to him, her
savior. But it is too late, he has moved beyond her. (Iris, on the other hand,
always knew she was in Hell, and so was willing, and therefore able, to be
saved.) The film actively shares in Travis’s fantasy here, as well as his
madness and alienation: it’s a poetic fairy tale, after all, written in
blood.
Part of the film’s subversion and inversion of
the old conventions of the Western hero and moral avenger (a subversion that
began with The Searchers)
can be traced through the superficial details. The “scar,” for
example, such as it is, is now on
Travis himself—a war wound across his back (he was “stabbed in the
back” by America?). Likewise the mohawk. Travis himself has become the
adversary, obviously; he’s fallen prey to Nietzsche’s axiomatic
trap of self-immersion and vengeance—by battling with monsters he has
become a monster, and he’s been gazing at the abyss so long that
it’s all he sees.[15] Travis sees
enemies—corruption—everywhere: “all the animals” that
“come out at night—whores, skunks, pussies, buggers, queens,
fairies, dopers, junkies.” Travis is a man whose inner hell has seeped
out into the world around him. His mentioning having served in the marines (in
the opening scene with Joe Spinell) and the scar on his back are the only
indications of his war experience, and for those of us who don’t register
the symbolism of the mohawk, there’s no overt suggestion that these experiences are
responsible for the state of his mind, or for his finally coming off the rails.
Yet the film is, I think, the first film to deal—in a nonsymbolic
fashion—with the horrors, the psychological consequences, of Vietnam. (In
fact, there is a scene in Mean Streets which anticipates Taxi Driver: a returning vet Jerry—Harry
Northup—goes to a party in his honor, is presented with an American
flag(!), gets drunk, and then explodes in apparently unmotivated rage and
violence, attacking one of the girls and being dragged off and placated by his
friends.)
Of course, the war is neither seen nor mentioned in
the film, but then it doesn’t have to be. Travis brings the war with him,
and wherever he goes he’s in a state of total paranoia—the
“heightened awareness” of his fear and his loathing. Travis has
transposed the “gooks” of Vietnam onto the junkies and pimps and
pushers of New York City, and he sees them as every bit as alien, inhuman, and
threatening as (presumably) he was conditioned and trained to see the
Vietnamese. Travis’s internal conflict—his tension and
dread—is so intense, so overwhelming, that he positively needs a visible enemy to placate him, to give him a
means of releasing and directing this pressure. And the bloodbath, when it
comes, is Scorsese’s idea of a baptism—it’s Travis’s
redemption and damnation all in one, and his sexual consummation also. (As Kael
writes, it’s “the only real orgasm he can have.”[16]
This idea is also anticipated in Mean Streets, when Charlie describes his dream to Theresa:
“I come, only I come blood.”) The final orgy of killing is anything
but pleasurable to watch, but it is strangely orgasmic in effect—it presents the
only relief that the film has to offer, to Travis and, by extension, to us.
Scorsese has taken us too far by now to let us off with anything less than
murder.
The director’s choice to play the demonic role
of the backseat driver with fantasies of vaginal destruction give us the best
clue we could ask for as to Scorsese’s true artistic intentions here.
This malignant imp—who is, indirectly but nonetheless effectively, the
one who awakens Travis’s gun-mania and inspires him to “get organizized”—is Scorsese’s way of once
again confirming the allegiance of the artist to the “evil” of his
imagination.[17]
For when he, as the director of the film
and therefore Travis’s primary creator, appears like a grinning demiurge
inside his own mise en scène, in the back of Travis’s cab, he is
there specifically to get the show on the
road, to ignite the spark that will set fire to the cinder block that will lead
to the final apocalyptic movement. Kael’s comment on Scorsese’s
performance seems a propos here: “he burns a small hole in the screen” (italics mine, When the Lights Go Down p. 130-35).
This creative intrusion is the ultimate artistic
conceit, or hubris—both perverse and inspired, in equal portions: the
film director as deus ex machina, the auteur who divinely intervenes in the
life of his own creation, not for its salvation, but for its damnation (or maybe
both at once). Once again, the poet is exposed—has exposed himself—as being of the Devil’s party, and
Scorsese’s wicked snickering at his devilry may linger on in our ears,
long after the show is over.
Scorsese’s diabolic persistence may also be
evidenced by his handling of the irate studio heads, who found the final
holocaust scene just a tad too much for their palates, and insisted Scorsese do
something about it in order to avoid an X rating. In order to avoid really
doing anything, he came up with a demonically inspired “solution”:
To really
stop Columbia from redoing things, I suggested the idea of draining the color
out of that scene. I had wanted to do that originally, because I wanted to do
an experiment in draining colors out of the shots like John Huston did with Moby
Dick. But it was also a way of making
it appear that I was doing something to tone things down in the scene. When I
finally saw the scene with Julia [Phillips, the producer] the toning down of
the color made it look even worse![18]
Columbia went along with it anyway: of course it was
the only thing they could do—the little devil made them do it! The
extremity of the violence in this scene is integral to its meaning, and any
attempts at diluting its savagery and power would be futile. The whole film is
expressionistic, but never more than when Travis’s madness finally comes
into its own, and his inner hell spills out, in a paroxysmic surge of agony and
ecstasy. To interfere with the sweeping, tidal force and rhythms of this scene
would be to render it impotent; and so instead Scorsese “washed”
the images, not with water but with blood. The final tint that the images
assume is a dirty, reddish brown that actually makes the sequence, if perhaps
less powerful and searing, certainly more grotesque and nauseating in effect.[19] It remains today one of the most relentlessly
savage and virtuoso blood poems ever written across the American
screen—one of the very few cases that transcends the law of “less
is more,” a law which so particularly applies to screen violence.
Apart from the shooting of the
black holdup man in the grocery store, these last five minutes constitute the
only violence in the film, the rest of the time having been devoted to the
steady build-up of pressure, dread, and nausea. So the explosion simply has to
be worse than we ever feared it would be, and anything less than a full-fledged
massacre would be an anticlimax. And though Scorsese has shot equally brutal
and even more nasty scenes in later films (Goodfellas and Casino in particular), he has never equalled the horror
which he creates here.[20]
Scorsese just naturally
possesses far more power to shock and revolt us than most other movie directors
will ever learn—he hasn’t lost his edge—but his later
depictions of violence lack the deeper meaning and the more disturbing,
troublesome beauty and intensity of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, which have all the raw splendor and searing
passion of an urban crucifixion. These images stay with us, and haunt us, much
as the works of the Surrealists, or of painters like Francis Bacon, may stay
with us—images from the unconscious that we can’t quite be free of,
unable to decide if they are beautiful or ugly. Such pure expressions of the
soul in torment make art out of atrocity, and atrocity out of art; which is,
after all, the privilege of the damned, and the sine qua non of every artist,
chosen by Hell, to represent it.
[1]. The difference between Taxi Driver and Repulsion is above all the difference between a
religious and an atheist vision of madness—Polanski’s film suggests
the hell of the mind, while Scorsese’s goes further by far, into the hell
of the soul.
10. Kael called the film “a raw, tabloid
version of Notes from Underground,
in
“Underground Man,” When the Lights Go Down, p.131.
[3]. According to Schrader, a basic Calvinist
belief is that “the body is the prison-house of the soul.” In
interview on The South Bank Show, BBC TV.
[4]. In particular “The Gambler,”
which Scorsese finally got to reinterpret freely in New York Stories. Scorsese’s segment, “Life
Lessons”—a small, sensual masterpiece—is the story of a
painter (Nick Nolte) obsessed with one of his assistants (Rosanna Arquette),
and draws indirectly on the novella The Gambler, which was partially inspired by
Dostoyevsky’s masochistic relationship with Paulina Suslova.
[5]. The closest any film has come to Taxi
Driver’s
relentless vision of individual torment in the big c
ity is probably Adrian
Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder, in which the hero, played by Tim Robbins,
hallucinates demons and freakish monsters everywhere he goes; he’s
flashing back on the worst acid-trip of the millennium—the ‘60s,
and he’s probably not so alone as he thinks.
[6]. Robert Philip Kolker calls Travis
“the legitimate child of John Wayne and Norman Bates,” and writes
that “the more deeply he withdraws, the more he comes to believe in the
American movie myths of purity and heroism, love and selflessness, and to
actuate them as the grotesque parodies of human behavior they are.” A
Cinema of Loneliness,
p. 194.
[7]. There is no book on the subject, so far
as I know.
[8]. The behavior-mod boys at MKULTRA, or
wherever, might have shown more fidelity to Taxi Driver’s schemata if they had “obsessed” Hinckley
with Cybill Shepherd, instead. So long as we are delving into the folklore of
paranoia, it’s of passing interest to note that the 1997 movie Conspiracy
Theory—which
pays homage to Taxi Driver in its credit sequence—has no trouble at
all linking up Mark Chapman (John Lennon’s assassin) with John Hinckley
Jr., as supposed “Manchurian candidates”; the link it posits is via
J. D. Salinger’s mysterious novel Catcher in the Rye, an idea which comes under similar
scrutiny in Six Degrees of
Separation.
17. He was eventually awarded $43 million in damages. Goetz claimed to have been “threatened” by the teenagers’ “body language,” but when he was arrested, the only words he recalled any of them saying to him prior to the shooting were, “How are you?” In the same interrogation, Goetz admitted that before firing a second round into victim Darrell Cobey, in true Hollywood vigilante fashion he quipped, “You seem to be all right: here's another.” Three of the teens were found to be carrying long screwdrivers at the time they approached Goetz, however, and partly as a result of this, a grand jury declined to indict Goetz of attempted murder. In 1987, he was found guilty in criminal court of an illegal weapons charge and nothing more.
[10]. Or “Manchurian candidate”?
[11]. From “Underground Man,” in When
the Lights Go Down,
p. 133.
[12]. A particularly disturbing but sickly
hilarious performance is given by Scorsese himself as one of these urban
fiends—as a jealous husband in the back of Travis’s cab,
fantasizing out loud about destroying his wife’s vagina with a .44
Magnum. The joke turns sour however when we see Travis specifying this very
model while choosing his arsenal.
[13]. Bernard Herrmann’s music is a
deeply ominous, overwrought percussive score which, much like the film itself,
has fortunately improved with age. It no longer seems obtrusive to the film,
and its excessive augmentation of the already gothic atmosphere of dread seems
less an intrusion and more a simple accompaniment. Actually, the score, having matured
and mellowed with age, seems somehow ironic in effect—it’s like
Travis’s own idealized soundtrack, by which he pumps up his existential
angst, and romanticizes his torments. Consequently I find it curiously
relaxing, because its threatening quality is so obvious and unsubtle that it
nullifies itself, while Travis’s deceptive calm and inhuman passivity is
what really gets to one.
[14]. From the Tom Waits song, “Murder
in the Red Barn,” on Bone Machine.
[15]. “He who fights with monsters
should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze
into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” Nietzsche, Beyond Good
and Evil, p. 84.
[17].
I believe it is in Psalms, or somewhere in the Old Testament, where it is
written that “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his
youth.” Certainly organized
religion has little tolerance or time for the artist, who is just naturally
predisposed to subversion (and even perversion).
[18]. Quote from The Scorsese Picture, by David Ehrenstein
[19]. It’s hard to say which way is
better, having never seen the “unwashed” version. At other times
Scorsese reputedly lamented the changes, but it still seems to be the most
felicitous case of studio interference that I know of, because the artist for
once pulled the wool over the tycoons’ eyes, and the overall effect of
the tint is intriguing, rather than merely annoying. By separating the final
massacre from the rest of the action, it heightens the hallucinatory,
dreamlike, and surreal quality of the film as a whole.
[20].
In fact, except for possibly Raging Bull, Scorsese’s subsequent treatment of
screen violence has nothing in common with the violence in Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, and seems to be merely his way of
keeping ahead of the times; as if, having gotten much of the credit and the
blame for inaugurating the new wave of movie brutalism, he wasn’t about
to be outdone by (relatively untalented) upstarts such as Tony Scott, Alan
Parker, and Adrian Lyne. The violence of Scorsese’s later work may go
beyond Taxi Driver in
terms of graphicness, but it is slick and merely shocking, senseless violence (a good example being Joe
Pesci’s use of a fountain pen on some poor slob who insults Robert De
Niro in Casino).
It’s powerful stuff, but there’s no real psychology behind it.