30 years ago last February 8th, “Taxi Driver” was released. I asked our correspondent, Matthew, to write a brief review to honor the occasion. Here it is: - Dan
The individual in contemporary capitalist consumer society is subject to a wide range of elements that serve to obfuscate his or her notions of selfhood, position within the social framework, and the factors that constitute the fabric of identity. Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver illustrates this struggle through the protagonist, Travis Bickle, as he is confronted with the intense feelings of alienation offered by life in New York’s postmodern culturescape and he is consequently forced to struggle with the search for his own identity in an environment where the notion of “Ëœthe individual’ is grounded in ephemeral relationships to other people and, more importantly, in consumers’ relationships to the images presented by the media. Bickle is especially impacted by television and the presentation of human interactions therein, as he derives his understanding of socialization from television soap operas and of love through pornographic films (Friedman 71). Furthermore, his experience of the city is rarely direct, but is rather viewed like a television through the windows of his cab and is even further distorted/inverted by his rearview mirror, as he never looks at passengers directly, but only through the inverting mechanism of the mirror which “reduces the world and the people in it to meaningless objects, alike in their numbing sameness” (80). Thus, Travis enjoys a somewhat privileged position of detachment from the events of the city”â€a spectator always separated from the dilapidation that evokes such disgust in him by at least one layer of glass”â€and is able to therefore pass harsh judgment on the scene that perpetually plays out before his eyes. Travis then utilizes his scopophilia to absorb the violence inherent within the city and to reflect it back at the society that has inculcated its membership with a penchant for cold brutality, limitless consumptive urges, and tendency to dissolve into the homogeneity of capitalist sentimentality. However, Travis finds these urges to be problematic, for the environment of the city does not seem to hold a place for him and he finds only revulsion for the city and its inhabitants. Thus, the course of the film develops an increasingly titanic struggle within Travis to discover a comfortable niche in a hostile atmosphere and each step of his journey can be understood as a move towards the establishment of his identity as an individual”â€not merely a “fluid set of effects produced by processes of signification or discourse,” (Dunn 65) but rather an agent in control of his own position on the social stratum. For Travis, the need to exercise his agency accumulates momentum in a variety of areas, from his desire for Betsy, her rejection of him, and his desire to save Iris from a life of prostitution, as well as all of his experiences of the violence inflicted by the city”â€its oppressive imagery, nefarious citizenry, consumption of bodies, and the ubiquitous squalor of urban decay” all of which culminate to the point of his murderous catharsis. Violence functions as a means through which Travis’s identity crystallizes as something more concrete than a dynamic catalogue of images seen on television and appropriated for personal application, for the commitment of violence drastically alters the manner in which society must view Travis (and consequently how he must view himself) by not only transporting him into the media limelight, but also by establishing his personal agency within a world that refutes the notion that a person can truly be an individual or an agent.
Click below to continue reading Matthew’s analysis:
A key aspect of Travis’s struggle to ground his identity stems from his experience and interpretation of the city itself. As Travis drives past stoplight after stoplight and takes fare after fare, he observes that “all the animals come out at night,” yet he is willing to pick up any passenger and take them to any neighborhood, no matter how rough or ill reputed. It does not bother Travis because as far as he is concerned, the whole city is a cesspool and the poor/unrefined neighborhoods such as Harlem and the Bronx are simply microcosms representative of the intrinsic fiscal and social poverty that pervades the entire city as well as they signify the city’s propensity to decompose right before the people who dwell within its boundaries. The invasive neon lights, product advertisements, and myriad entertainment spots bombard Travis’s sensorium with cultural data, but are unable to effectively mask the poverty, rot, and human scum that Travis observes as a plague to New York’s streets at night, and that ultimately afflict the city at all times. According to Martin Scorsese, “[w]hen you live in a city, there’s a constant sense that the buildings are getting old, things are breaking down, the bridges and subways need repairing. At the same time society is in a state of decay,” and because he perceives no visible intentions from the political sector to improve conditions either socially or architecturally/structurally, Travis feels that he must affect change on his own (60-62). Thus there is a sense that Travis’s feelings are totally justified” that unless he can violently overwhelm the sources of his discontent he will be unable to navigate the chaos of the city to establish a stable and tangible sense of self.
In order for Travis to become realized as an individual, however, he must first effectively negotiate the social terrain of the postmodern city through his interactions both with individuals as well as with the larger notion of city itself. Postmodern cities in general maintain an array of definitive components that are easily recognizable in the New York that Travis encounters. For instance, in Jonathan Raban’s Soft City, he suggests that “[s]ignals, styles, systems of rapid, highly conventionalized communication are the lifeblood of the big city,” (7) all of which are present in Scorsese’s New York: brightly lit signs and advertisements, overly elaborate fashions and mimicry of television characters, and various forms of mass media, communication, and transportation all permeate the New York of Travis Bickle’s milieu. The impact of these notions is carried further by David Harvey as he speculates on postmodern city life: Contemporary communications have collapsed the “usual space and time boundaries’ and produced both a new internationalism and strong internal differentiations within cities and societies based on place, function, and social interest. This “produced fragmentation” exists in a context of transport and communications technologies that have the capacity to handle social interaction across space in a highly differentiated manner. (75) Hence the overall experience of city life in Postmodernity is one where the individual can traverse a minimal physical distance to easily access a wide range of various cultures, places, spaces, and activities and to contact a variety of people with very little personal exertion or effort. It is in this city space that Travis finds himself, where space and time are compressed and translated directly into capital, as displayed by the sequence where the camera cuts back and forth between shots of green stoplights and the escalation of the fare meter with each passage beneath a stoplight. There is no view of the street or the passengers or the world outside, simply the monotonous progress from one stoplight to another in the exact same fashion while the meter continues to climb faster and faster without the hint of a conceivable terminus. Travis’s life is characterized by endless repetition, and his job is one that is fueled entirely by the repetitive conversion of time/space into money; Travis’s livelihood hinges upon the willingness of people to pay a particular amount of money to traverse a correlated distance within the city. Consequently, Travis is at once exploitative of capitalism and its effects on society while he simultaneously seems to reject the accumulation of money, for he emphasizes on multiple occasions that he does not have anything better to do with his money than buy extraneous things such as a record for Betsy or to provide the money for Iris to return to her family from a life of prostitution. Nevertheless, Travis does not appear to be comfortable with blind consumerism and normative capitalist spending habits and he ultimately executes a devastating riposte towards the society that has continued to feed off of its own depravity in order to spawn a population of commodity hungry automatons.
A key scene that depicts Travis’s reaction against normative capitalist consumer identification surfaces with his appeal to Wizard for advice. For the duration of their conversation, the two characters are bathed in red light, a foreshadow to the bloodshed on Travis’s mind as he tells Wizard that he wants to “go out and really do something” and that he’s “got some bad ideas in [his] head.” Wizard then proceeds to elaborate on his fatalistic worldview that “a man takes a job and that job becomes what he is,” because “you’ve got no choice, we’re all fucked, more or less.” As Wizard sees it, people must adhere to their social stations, for things are inexplicably just the way they are: “one guy lives in Brooklyn, one guy lives in Sutton Place, you’ve got a lawyer, another guy’s a doctor, another guy dies, another guy gets well, people are born.” Yet, for all his eloquence, Wizard has just described the very ideals of the institution that Travis harbors ill feelings towards and hopes to lash out against. Wizard does not seem to believe in the “Ëœupward mobility’ purportedly offered by capitalism, but rather seems to apprehend the capitalist world as one in which people choose a specific position and must remain in place, wholly identified by their particular modes of production and consumption. Travis thinks that Wizard’s insight is “about the dumbest thing [he's] ever heard” for it reflects a level of societal conditioning that Travis cannot condone due to its complicity in the destitution of New York City and the severe restrictions placed on individual freedom and identity. It almost seems as if Travis sought for Wizard to convince him that violence was not a useful option for redemption, but after the conversation it is apparent that the reverse effect has come to pass, for the gravity of consumer capitalism tied to the grotesqueness of New York’s urban decay has expressed itself openly to Travis in Wizard’s speech and Travis is now aware that without his intervention he will decay along with the city and die a nameless inhabitant. Travis has plainly discarded any hopes to become a “person like other people” but rather seems to suffer an acute desperation to become an individual with definite characteristics that set him apart from the rest of the world. However, his path is only partially at this point in his chrysalis, and he must embrace his loneliness before he can catalyze personal change.
In his diary, Travis refers to himself as God’s lonely man, for loneliness has followed him his entire life “everywhere.” It is undoubtedly difficult for Travis to live in a world where he is unable to function socially beyond the dictates of a mass media template for human intercourse, especially when he yearns to be free of such a restrictive regime. This desire is the root his loneliness: the feeling that he is the only one who sees the obscenity rampant in society and the only one who cares to see it change. Accordingly, he cannot relate to those around him, especially Betsy, whose interest he is able to temporarily capture, but by virtue of his meager social training, he errs grievously and takes her to a pornographic film for their first date. Henceforth he is estranged from the object of his affectionate desire, but he manages to justify this estrangement as he comes to realize that Betsy is no better than the rest of the cogs in the postmodern capitalist machine. Upon this realization, Travis proceeds to Betsy’s work to abusively notify her that she’s “in Hell and [she's] going to die in Hell like the rest of them,” an act that serves to performatively sever any potential ties he might have had with Betsy and to institute a definitive rift between Travis and the society to which Betsy is so unconditionally wedded. Travis’s interest in Betsy simply appears to be the expression of his desire for contact with another person such as himself”â€someone who is not willing to passively accept the world as necessarily immutable or correct. Nonetheless, through his apprehension of Betsy’s conformity, Travis manages to move on and open himself up to new suggestions for self-identification. Had he managed to develop a relationship with Betsy, Travis might have been pacified enough to avoid a violent upheaval, but since Betsy’s lived form was utterly contrary to his idealized notion of her, an alternative method was required to stabilize his fragmented consumer identity. When violence was later glorified by a deranged passenger as a supreme form of retribution or outlash, with emphasis on the destructive force of a .44 Magnum pistol, Travis was quick to appropriate the idea for his own ends.
As a consumer of images to mold his identity, Travis ingests and regurgitates not only the roles cast by mass media but also those presented as he interacts with other people, such as the passenger with the .44 Magnum pistol and the Secret Service agent with the mirrored sunglasses. Nonetheless, Travis’s notions of proper social interface and etiquette are evidently derived almost entirely from television. “By day he watches porno movies and television soaps, complementary distortions of human intercourse that intensify his alienation from actual life” (Friedman 63) just as they shape his conceptions of socialization and the conventional ways in which people are allegedly supposed to behave. He sends Betsy flowers and buys her gifts, following the proper protocol for courting a woman as might have been seen on television; he also chastises Iris for her lifestyle because “a girl should live at home” and should be “going to school, should be dressed up and going out with boys” conventions which he could easily have derived from television programs. These episodes display Travis’s relationship with his own consumption of images as his identifying characteristics and raise questions about how deeply entrenched within televisual imagery the man really is and the potential extent to which Travis is impacted by television’s broadcasting spectrum. Robert Dunn points out that “[t]he nonsocial relational character of the television viewing experience symbolizes the transformation of the problem of identity formation from the alienation of self-other relations to the isolation and fragmentation of the self in consumption relations” (75). The implications of Dunn’s speculation on Travis are manifold, for Travis is found mindlessly absorbed in the television several times throughout the film, and the programs he views seem to directly correlate to his (in)ability to relate to other people. Travis’s entire conception of socialization is the result of a nonsocial interface with an inanimate object, the TV, and he therefore cannot hope to adequately participate in actual social situations because his comprehension of suitable social activity is the product of a one-way relationship in which the television always projects towards him and he always receives/consumes its image-fodder. At this point, Travis is only capable of social consumption and television is a mandatory determinant of his identity. An interview with Charles Palantine, a cheesy soap opera with a melodramatic scene of a failed relationship, a group of young people at a dance all of these scenes flit across the screen before Travis and he seems to regard them as serious models for selfhood or at least as benchmarks of the popular culture that he claims to be so oblivious to. Because his ignorance of pop culture estranges him from Betsy (and the rest of the postmodern world) Travis feels the need to learn more about it by the only instrument at his disposal, television. Travis, then, is constantly engaged in a feat of compromise, for he allows his life to be technologically mediated by television in order to accrue popular knowledge, but his goals for self-identification lie in the opposite direction: unmediated social experience. To achieve these goals, he must go out into the world and face it firsthand, without the assistance of a technological apparatus.
And yet, according to Marie Katheryn Connelly, Travis mimics the viewing of the televisual apparatus even while he is on the job and should technically be directly involved in social practice: “Like a television screen, the windshield of Travis’s cab allows him to see firsthand the depravity of society, the sick underside of humanity that middle-class suburbanites never have to see.” (40) In light of this observation, the importance of television for Travis can be understood in terms of the distance it places between him (the audience) and the events that transpire before him (the spectacle). Such a distance allows Travis the freedom to both judge the spectacle’s merits and to consume those aspects of the performance that he perceives as useful to reflect/inflict upon society in the form of a projection of his personal identity (i.e. violence). Additionally, the distance permits Travis to homogenize all of society as an act “all people as players in a complexly constructed scheme and all environments as mere settings within which the performance takes place” and to consequently view himself as a non-actor, set apart from, but invariably drawn to, the drama of city life. Because of the fact that Travis actively participates in the pursuits of the capitalist system that he evidently finds distasteful his job that helps to extend the power of capital to time and space, his eagerness to court Betsy, his consumption of food (he is often seen in the presence of or act of consuming Coca Cola), drugs, and images of prefabricated identities, his excited attitude towards the amount of money he can earn, but cannot find enough commodities to spend it on”â€he is caught in a situation where he must recognize his dependency upon the images that he consumes and attempt to defy that addictive need.
One scene that indicates an important turning point within Travis shows him robotically absorbed in a television soap opera, .44 magnum in hand, as he begins to rock the television back and forth with his foot until at last he kicks the TV over and it explodes. Immediately afterwards he holds his head in his hands and repeats “God damn!” a couple of times, perhaps from his disgust with the junk he has been watching, or perhaps from his loss of an outlet to the external world. In either case, the following scene begins with a first-person perspective from inside the cab as Travis watches through the windshield two men fighting on the sidewalk then pans right to find Iris crossing the street. He proceeds to exit the cab and to execute his plan to remove Iris from the prostitution racket, a move which requires Travis to interact on a social level with people that he finds utterly disgusting, such as Sport and the timekeeper. Interestingly, Travis has by this point adopted the mirrored sunglasses that the Secret Service agent had been wearing at the Palantine rally and Sport mistakes Travis for a policeman. The glasses serve a dual purpose for Travis Bickle, however, for they not only mark yet another allusion to a particular image that he has encountered and consumed, but they also provide a layer of mediation between him and the world: he has not yet overcome his need for a layer of glass to separate him from his surroundings and to give the illusion of a mediated spectacle. He noticeably wears the sunglasses at the Palantine for his failed assassination attempt, perhaps because he was not yet prepared for a wholly unmediated social experience. Possibly this contributed to Travis’s failure. However, when Travis arrives at the brothel to massacre its attendants, the glasses are not present which leaves little question as to his commitment to a total lack of mediation in what he suspects to be his final hour.
Although Travis’s violent outburst is ultimately discharged at the men responsible for the prostitution of twelve-year-old Iris, it is highly significant that he initially intends to kill Charles Palantine, the presidential candidate. Even as he eats breakfast with Iris, Travis has expects to kill Palantine that very day as a form of destructive opposition not only to the political structures that uphold the city (and that are likely responsible for its decay), but also against Betsy and the betrayal that she perpetrated upon Travis’s psyche. Furthermore, Travis fully expects to die in the process of killing Palantine, or at least to “go away for a whileÂ; either result can be interpreted as a form of martyrdom for the sake of rebellion against an oppressive regime, but either outcome would sufficiently result in the accomplishment of Travis’s quest for identity by satisfying the violent urge and the consequent incorporation of his name into the history books, newspapers, television news, and other mass-distributed media forms as an image to be consumed by the public. No longer would Travis Bickle be a faceless man. Nor would he struggle any further to exercise agency, for his need to consume popular imagery as an avenue of self-identification would have instantly dissolved at the moment he pulled the trigger and initiated the act of violence. Instead, Travis would become an object to be emulated by other members of the public, an image fit for mass consumption, appropriation, reconfiguration, and reinstitution into the social sphere. Though it is likely he would be portrayed as a villain, it is of little consequence, for he would be remembered for his deeds. Nevertheless, Travis is thwarted in his attempt on Palantine’s life and must proceed with a less conspicuous though no less meaningful violent outburst.
Travis’s actual performance of violence takes place in the building where Iris is involved in prostitution and is enacted against her pimp, Sport, the timekeeper in the building, and a Mafioso customer of Iris’s. The entire scene is shot with a different light filter than the rest of the film, which contributes to its dreamlike quality by making the characters appear gray and the blood appear an unnatural red. Essentially this equates an excessively violent scene to one that might be experienced via a television set, and the implication is that Travis undergoes the entire affair with a degree of detachment, perhaps a refusal to accept it as reality. Nonetheless, Travis achieves an exceptional level of aggression as he extends his power, unmediated, to his adversaries via his arsenal of weaponry (which have at this point become an extension of his self). Each of his victims receives multiple gunshots as Travis revels in his potency and employs maximum agency by ensuring the annihilation of all who confront him. Yet it is not a total victory for Travis, because he is unable to finish the job and commit suicide”â€an example of the ultimate act of agency and violence: to beget one’s own death. Though in the course of the massacre Travis did receive his share of bullet wounds, he failed to become a martyr, and instead became a public hero. This borderline heroism has several implications for Travis’s identity. First of all, through the act of violence he has become a type of social myth, and his heroic image is therefore highly likely to be consumed by the public. It is unclear whether Travis modeled himself after the heroes he might have seen on television, or whether other television heroes might be modeled after him because of his deeds, but in either instance, Travis Bickle definitely assumed the role of the disgruntled citizen who took the law into his own hands because he saw no other option, a highly replicated role in media narratives. Secondly, because he took up the responsibility of “arbiter of justice,” Travis directly assisted the institutions he had initially hoped to react against for their part in the obstruction of his course to self-identification. He made an effort to clean up the street, massacred three (admittedly bad) people, but the media hailed him as hero and converted his deeds into something noble, desirable, and worthy of public encomium. Thus, as a consumable image, Travis Bickle now represents upstanding citizenship and the will to sacrifice the self in order to uphold the right to a comfortable lifestyle for the “good” consumers in the postmodern city. His image could easily be employed by social institutions/media as an exemplar of the type of person desired by society to promote and protect the greater good, not necessarily the position he had initially had in mind. And finally, Travis has become a consumer of his own image. He has the newspaper clippings taped to his wall as constant reminders of what he is capable of and what sort of hero he might model himself after. Hence Travis seems to have fulfilled his objective, to stabilize his identity within a dynamic and hostile culturescape by becoming the embodiment of a social prototype that refuses to accept filth as a given byproduct of urban life. However, it is interesting that Travis is still a consumer of images “he has not escaped that fate” but the chief difference is that now he is able to consume his own image, to model himself after his ideal self as presented in the form of media imagery. New York has not changed, for better or worse, but to change New York, or even the system itself was never Travis Bickle’s aim. He had much more selfish reasons for killing the street scum, and those ambitions were satisfied through ultraviolent forms of aggression. Had his objective been to reconfigure the oppressive social institutions persecuting the city, Travis would have failed, but because the ambition was for one man to discover himself amidst utter chaos, his enterprise was seemingly fruitful.
At the conclusion of the film, during which Travis picks up Betsy in his cab, the final validation that Travis needs to fully crystallize his identity emerges. Travis looks at Betsy through the rearview mirror, and responds to her remarks coolly, as if he never had an interest in her. Betsy, on the other hand, is the one who initiates conversation and mentions that she read about Travis in the newspaper. Now that Travis’s image is held in high esteem for his violent act, Betsy seems to feel that he is worthy of her attention, but by now he is beyond the desire for her. Travis managed to do it on his own, to assure his own identity in spite of Betsy, and suddenly she finds him worthy of notice, possibly even admiration for the proliferation of his image in the wake of his devastating capabilities. Betsy’s lack of agency pointedly excludes her from individuality, but she may harbor some hope that Travis’s attention might occasion the discovery of faculties of authority within her own identity. Unfortunately for Betsy, Travis has gained traction in the form of social capital and she has found that this disables her from approaching Travis on the social plane. As she gets out of the cab, Betsy is at a loss for words, but Travis waives her fare and drives away, which indicates that he does not care to indulge sycophancy or apology from Betsy, actions that would only further confirm her similitude with the rest of the populace, confirmation that Travis would deem unnecessary by this late stage in his development.
Despite the relative dearth of options provided for Travis, he somewhat surmounted the obstacles before him and justified his existence within a harshly restrictive social framework. Urban consumer capitalism largely forbids individual actions that could potentially be regarded to subsist external to its dictates, and extreme violence flagrantly challenges the notion of a docile consumer subject. Travis had spent his entire life as an alien to his culture, had accumulated most of his cultural knowledge from a television set and a pornographic theater, and still he was nauseated by the fraudulent and polluted reality of city life, as it is inconsistent with those images depicted on the television screen. So perhaps Travis hoped only to align the real world with the one onscreen, but it appears that his disgruntlement originates in a much deeper appraisal of the bankruptcy of postmodern experience. Ultimately, Travis’s evaluation of the intrinsically violent city led him to respond in a like manner “the only sort afforded to him” and to cathect his loneliness in a specifically purposeful way that dealt punishment to others while it congealed his own selfhood. Through violence, Travis was able to emerge from the veritable pandemonium of the postmodern culturescape and to revolutionize himself both in society’s view as well as in his own observation as he dismantled his consumptive relationship to popular media images in favor of an autonomous personality. Travis’s murderous endeavors functioned to distance him ever further from the populace that composes his milieu, but in so doing he was also distanced from the need to consume in the same fashion as the rest of the world, for rather than a pure consumer, Travis became available for mass consumption because of his violent experience. This is not to suggest that violence is the only boulevard by which a person in postmodern society can refute the idea of becoming “a person like other people” and define a ground for his or her own identity, but it seems that in Travis Bickle’s case it was an effective means to reach that end. By this point in the world violence has been committed with such frequency as to transmogrify popular consumer imagery to situate violence at the crux of its essence, a detail to which we might credit Travis Bickle as one of the forbears. The consequence is that the postmodern person is charged with the task of pioneering a new road to identity formation. With a great deal of cleverness and enough resolve, perhaps there will be more Travis Bickles amongst the ranks of individual agents.
Works Cited
Connelly, Marie Katheryn. Martin Scorsese: An Analysis of His Feature Films, with a Filmography of His Entire Directorial Career. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1993. 33-48.
Dunn, Robert G. Identity Crises: A Social Critique of Postmodernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
Friedman, Lawrence S. The Cinema of Martin Scorsese. New York: Continuum, 1997. 61-87.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell Inc.,1992.
Raban, Jonathan. Soft City. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1974.
Taxi Driver. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Perf. Robert DeNiro, Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel, and Cybill Shepherd. Columbia Pictures, 1976.
Thompson, David, and Ian Christie, eds. Scorsese on Scorsese. London: Faber and Faber, 1989. 38-67.
posted on 6:23 pm 03/25/2006Movies, Reviews | |
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