Refreshing my readers and myself, the thesis I’m developing is that there was something unique and odd about how Americans adjusted to the new world that they entered in the 1970s, and one way to examine the changes that altered family dynamics, sexual behavior and social violence, while spawning political apathy, is to look at the movies of that era. Movies aren’t always a gateway into the behaviors of a decade, but in 1970s, movies became more personal and freed from restraints of traditional genres, making them ripe material for such an exploration.
To this end, Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film “Taxi Driver” is something of a philosopher’s stone to understanding 1970s movies and the era in general. You can perform a lot of critical alchemy around the margins of the 1970s, but without “Taxi Driver,” none of it fully comes together. It is in this movie where all of the pathologies of the era explode into one brilliant, inimitable mess of a movie.
I never would have used that word ‘mess’ to describe “Taxi Driver” after my first 10 billion (slight exaggeration) viewings of the movie, but watching it again yesterday, I now think the term fits. There is a “shaggy dog” quality to the movie that probably requires it seeping into your unconscious first before becoming obvious. The first way this manifests is in Robert DeNiro’s completely bizarre characterization of Travis Bickle.
I noticed maybe 10 viewings of “Taxi Driver” ago that there’s a strong disconnect between the Travis Bickle we hear in the voice-over narration and the one we see interacting with other characters. I chalked that up in previous viewings to an unreliable narrator, one who lies to his parents in a letter about a romantic relationship that does not exist and frequently starts and stops trains of thoughts to get the words just right. Bickle in his waking life doesn’t show so much hesitancy and, if anything, comes across as scrupulously honest. If we didn’t see Bickle sometimes write these words on a page, I might even assume that he isn’t the real narrator.
That opinion changed in my viewing yesterday. I now believe that the Bickle in narration is the authentic one, self expressing his moods, desires, disappointments and terrifying plans. The evidence for this comes in the moments where Bickle appears to step out of character and express himself differently, his voice suddenly matching that in the narration. It doesn’t happen often. I noticed it first when he exploded with rage in the Palantine campaign office, confronting Betsy about the way she’s ghosted him. It happens again when he sadly and softly tries to engage Wizard in a discussion about the “bad things” running through his head. Then we see it again when Bickle sits down with Iris in a coffee shop and tries to convince her to escape from her pimp-captor.
In between these rare moment of alignment between Bickle’s running monologue and his interactions with people, DeNiro turns in a performance that can almost be described as goofy. I have been disturbed for a number of years now by my initial reactions to “Taxi Driver” when I first saw it in my late teens and early 20s. At that time, I didn’t just empathize with Bickle, I nearly identified with him.
That isn’t to say I approved of his violence and embrace of gun culture — I always found those aspects repulsive — but I did find DeNiro’s characterization of him somewhat appealing. Bickle has an oddball sense of humor at times, like when he goofs with a Secret Service agent and then gives him a false name and address in New Jersey.
There is also a dark idealism to Bickle, which I believe is the feature that Betsy found appealing . Surrounded by all of these men entrenched in their ironic detachment, Betsy sees Travis walk through the door and notices a different type of man, one who has genuine passions, who can see the world around him, and who is willing to fight for what he believes in. In this sense, Betsy is viewing part of herself. She isn’t working for a political candidate because she’s on an ego trip road to power — she genuinely believes in the candidate and what he stands for. She has not surrendered to the political cynicism of the age and still believes that a democratically-elected leader can enact change for the better.
Still, it bothers me that I gave Bickle so many passes in my youth. The way he treats Betsy is extremely disturbing and happens relatively early in the film. Yes, I can empathize with Bickle for being so socially screwed up that he thought taking a woman to a porn theater on a first date is a good idea. And I can empathize with his cringe-worthy attempts at making amends (and the brilliant scene, as Bill Hader pointed out in a Criterion Channel commentary, where the camera seems to get embarrassed by Bickle’s failed wooing and turns to an empty hallway to avoid looking at him.)
What I can’t believe that I ever forgave were the stalking scenes that followed afterwards. Again, I can excuse his confusion and even anger at that time, but I can’t forgive the terrifying way he expressed those feelings. I also completely empathize with Bickle’s instinct to do something big and heroic as a way of conquering his feelings about Betsy — but for years I let myself gloss over the fact that this man was planning a political assassination and didn’t back out due to conscience, but out of fear that his attempt would fall short.
I also in my youth bought into the movie’s ending at face value, which I’m sure would have shocked and disappointed Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader. Bickle’s spasm of violence was misunderstood as heroism by the general public of the film, but I bought it as well as a dark act of good. Speaking of cringe-worthy moments where the camera turns away, in a film class in college, I even voiced the opinion that Bickle was doing an act of social good by going on his bloody rampage at the end of the film and murdering the “scum” who enslaved Iris.
There’s an element of decency in my youthful opinion, I was repulsed by the child prostitution in the film and accepted Bickle’s explanation that the police would do nothing about it. We get some support for that theory by how the bloody conclusion plays out, because it begins with a mafioso taking protection money from Sport (Harvey Keitel) then going inside the brothel.
Where I was completely wrongheaded, however, was my belief that Bickle had a flash of conscience that turned him away from the assassination and towards another violent act of good. It is pure happenstance that keeps Bickle from going through with the murder of Charles Palantine. It is also clear that Bickle seems to believe he was noticed while getting away and feels that he is in imminent danger. Believing that his end is near, he goes on a suicide mission to take out the prostitution ring and, again by dumb luck, happens to survive it.
So, I think I finally have put my head straight in regards to Bickle, but it took quite a bit of work because DeNiro’s performance fights against my ultimate conclusion every step of the way. He finds a way to make us feel for this monster. And I don’t use that word lightly, because even if I no longer directly empathize with Bickle as he exists within the borders of “Taxi Driver,” I do feel for him because of the path that took him to that dark place.
In the 1970s, as I’ve noted many times in this series, most Americans retreated to a place of ironic detachment from the world around them. They found ways to look past the decay, freeing them to become politically apathetic and powerfully self-centered. There were always people in this era, however, who never had the freedom to take that stance. Many of them, like Bickle, fought in Vietnam. Others were police officers — and it’s not hard to imagine Bickle taking up that line of work after being discharged from the Marines. Others were on the front lines in other ways. I give Schrader credit for seeing that a taxi driver is an excellent secular version of that front line personnel.
Some people in that world, such as the Wizard, develop their own coping mechanisms to create the distance they need to survive the work. The speech that Wizard gives Bickle when he asks for help with his “dark thoughts” sounds almost word for word with what I imagined the characters in “The Last Detail” might say to justify their amoral attitudes — punctuated with “we’re all basically fucked.” Bickle rejects the speech. He is too far immersed into the real world to accept finding hedonistic joy in it.
Therefore, I feel for Bickle and his transformation into a monster, because the culture basically demanded that a monster rise and lash out at the insanity taking place. Detachment and hedonism cannot win out forever, there will always be people who find loneliness in the detachment and emptiness in the hedonism. There is nothing inherently wrong with these feelings, they can even be healthy if properly channeled. But Travis never had a fair shot at channeling his thoughts and feelings in a healthy way.
I’ll have more to say about “Taxi Driver” in the days ahead — the movie is far too immense to cover in one essay. But I want to end this part with a return to Jung and Cervantes and two other recent series. While “Taxi Driver” is firmly rooted in the real world of the 1970s and fits comfortably with the contemporary dramas of that era, it is also a deeply archetypal movie. It’s based on John Ford’s classic “The Searchers” and has the same bone structure as that movie.
That means that “Taxi Driver” straddles the realist/new cinema style and the archetypal/mythic storytelling form. Bickle is on a very typical hero journey in the film. The story almost seems like it was summoned from the cultural unconscious of the era as a way of explaining the appeal of vigilantes. With only slight tweaks, I can imagine a remake of “Taxi Driver” in the form of “Batman” … well, actually, they made something of a “Taxi Driver” remake recently in “Joker.” Even though I’m not a fan of that film, I do appreciate the filmmakers recognizing that this was not as large a leap from story to story as you might expect. It’s also no surprise that I loved “Taxi Driver” in young adulthood because I loved “Batman” as a child.
Where Cervantes comes in is the object of Bickle’s quest. Just like the Knights Errant dedicated their acts of bravery to a maiden, Bickle dedicates his bloody missions to Betsy. As I noted at the conclusion of my Don Quixote cycle of essays, there is always something oppressive about these dedications, especially given that the maidens in question aren’t asking for these acts to be carried out, often aren’t aware that they are happening, and in general have a right to just be left alone and not be bothered by these questing dudes thinking they are earning a trophy via their bravery.
I’m not repulsed by much in “Taxi Driver,” but I strongly dislike the final scene. Betsy, to me, is the most genuinely heroic character of the film. Despite her intuitive misgivings about Travis, she gives him a chance when he first woos her, because she senses his ability to act passionately and take a stand for his beliefs. She has real insights into his character and agrees to go on a real date with Travis. And when that date turns out to be something genuinely disturbing, Betsy acts appropriately — she gets out and chastises him, then sticks to her ideals and doesn’t give Bickle a second chance.
I therefore find it sad that Schrader and Scorsese felt it necessary to bring Betsy back for one final scene where she second guesses herself and reaches out to Travis. This man put her in danger and will do so again. It’s fine that she admires his bravery and perhaps the way he protected this young woman, but the things she isn’t aware of — including his plans to murder her boss — would have horrified her. Betsy deserved to be left out of the ending and should not have become the story’s Dulcinea del Toboso.
I will have more to say on this subject tomorrow.
***
I want to start today by going back to that “shaggy dog” quality that I’ve noticed in “Taxi Driver.” I think much of that has to do with the fact that the movie was edited by committee. So much of Scorsese’s work is defined by his relationship with Thelma Schoonmaker starting with “Raging Bull” — the Scorsese/Schoonmaker movies are cut with brutal efficiency.
“Taxi Driver” was the work of three editors. Tom Rolf, who did excellent work later in his career, especially in his collaborations with Adrian Lyne. But he wasn’t an A-list editor in the 70s and was known for a lot of action sequel schlock early in his career. That continued with his work on “Taxi Driver” and parts of the movie have that lurid quality. Melvin Shapiro took on part of the work as well. He was best known as a TV police drama editor, and again the movie feels like a procedural in places. Lending some coherence to all of it is the great Marcia Lucas, the ex-wife of George Lucas, who some claim saved the movie in her credited role as “supervising film editor.”
“Taxi Driver” was the movie that convinced Martin Scorsese to use only female editors from that point forward. He said about that preference, and his evolving professional relationship over the years with Schoonmaker:
I’m not a person who believes in the great difference between women and men as editors. But I do think that quality is key. We’re very good at organizing and discipline and patience, and patience is 50 per cent of editing. You have to keep banging away at something until you get it to work. I think women are maybe better at that.
Along those lines, Marcia Lucas came into the project late and basically blended the Rolf and Shapiro approaches with an extra layer of dreamy schizophrenia. Combined with Bernard Herrman’s nightmarish score, “Taxi Driver” feels a bit like an early 50s film noir banned by the censors and finally released in 1976. But it was, of course, purely a movie of and about its age.
Somehow it all hangs together. The movie combines DeNiro’s goofy humor, Schrader’s psychology-informed moralizing and Scorsese’s Catholicism into something completely unique, even compared to other movies by the same creative team. But because the movie is so disjointed in its approaches and scene-to-scene pace, it is among the most misunderstood movies of all time, to the point that it, insanely, inspired John Hinkley to attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan to win Jodie Foster’s affections.
That’s just the farthest out of range misinterpretation of the movie and I mentioned my own evolution on the film in yesterday’s piece. It’s easy to get the sense while watching “Taxi Driver” that you’re seeing something unusual, vital and important while not really understanding why you feel like you do while watching it. Should you love or loathe Travis? Root for his defeat or triumph? Should you want him to win Betsy’s heart in the end or drive her into permanent safety? It is actually Betsy, who I believe is the most awake, clear-eyed character in the film, who recognizes all of this in Travis and explains him via the Kris Kristofferson song “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33.” By the way, there’s a really nice series about “Taxi Driver” and music here that I highly recommend you read for another interesting perspective on the movie. Betsy quotes the “prophet and a preacher” chorus of the song in explaining Travis to himself, but actually the entire song is incredibly insightful about him:
See him wasted on the sidewalk in his jacket and his jeans,
Wearin’ yesterday’s misfortunes like a smile–
Once he had a future full of money, love, and dreams,
Which he spent like they was goin’ outta style–
And he keeps right on a’changin’ for the better or the worse,
Searchin’ for a shrine he’s never found–
Never knowin’ if believin’ is a blessin’ or a curse,
Or if the goin’ up was worth the comin’ down–He’s a poet, he’s a picker–
He’s a prophet, he’s a pusher–
He’s a pilgrim and a preacher, and a problem when he’s stoned–
He’s a walkin’ contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction,
Takin’ ev’ry wrong direction on his lonely way back home.He has tasted good and evil in your bedrooms and your bars,
And he’s traded in tomorrow for today–
Runnin’ from his devils, lord, and reachin’ for the stars,
And losin’ all he’s loved along the way–
But if this world keeps right on turnin’ for the better or the worse,
And all he ever gets is older and around–
from the rockin’ of the cradle to the rollin’ of the hearse,
The goin’ up was worth the comin’ down–He’s a poet, he’s a picker–
He’s a prophet, he’s a pusher–
He’s a pilgrim and a preacher, and a problem when he’s stoned–
He’s a walkin’ contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction,
Takin’ ev’ry wrong direction on his lonely way back home.
There’s a lotta wrong directions on that lonely way back home.
The blog series that I linked to above had another interesting theory about “Taxi Driver’s” connection to the Van Morrison album “Astral Weeks,” but I’ll leave it to you to click to that story and read it for yourself. The movie inspires many interesting takes and theories. But it also inspires some garbage and incoherent theories.
This essay from someone named Dan Schneider I found especially annoying on two counts. First, it attempts to affix a personality disorder to Travis Bickle, which is 1) something lay people should never do to actual people, 2) something real mental health professionals do with great caution and 3) a completely pointless exercise for a fictional character.
Even worse in my book, Schneider takes some wild potshots at Betsy. He says of her:
Bickle also does not have delusions. In fact, the film, in many instances, makes it clear that he is the only character in the film that sees reality for what it is. He recognizes Betsy’s coldness, and the film, even to the end, shows her as a cold and manipulative person more interested in Bickle as a case study than potential lover.
Really, Bickle doesn’t have delusions? He doesn’t write to his parents that he’s working on a serious project for the government and is dating Betsy? And he is most certainly not the only character to see reality for how it is — Betsy, in fact, is far more clear eyed than him about that reality. She’s the one that recognizes the danger of his porn theater “date” right away. In fact, every one of her observations in the film is spot on from an objective standpoint.
To call Betsy cold and manipulative (who, exactly, is she manipulating?) says more about the writer than the character. I think even in the times when I was most sympathetic towards Bickle, I never embraced such a harsh opinion about her.
One of the things that gives “Taxi Driver” its unique lasting power is that it is not as male-centric as many films of that era. Betsy and Iris are fully drawn characters, well performed, that maintain the spine of the film. They are victimized by the deranged men around them, but somehow survive with their dignity intact. They aren’t saved by the men of “Taxi Driver,” they are simply lucky to endure them.
***
It’s time to conclude my analysis of “Taxi Driver,” not a moment too soon. It’s never terribly healthy to dwell too long in this movie, especially with everyone facing that extra layer of human alienation known as the Coronavirus pandemic. The stories of cocaine abuse on the set of “Taxi Driver” are legendary and completely unsurprising. This can be very tough material to handle with a clear mind
I wrote yesterday about how it’s a mistake to apply personality disorders or any type of diagnosis to Travis Bickle. It’s tempting to try to define Bickle and to identify with him. How can you not feel empathy for a character that expresses this:
Loneliness has followed me my whole life, everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There’s no escape. I’m God’s lonely man.
But is he a man? We really must think of Bickle as a literary archetype. Would a real human have the dark power to inspire someone like John Hinkley to take a shot at the President? Bickle is a symbol of the alienated modern/postmodern man. His literary twin is Holden Caulfield, who has a similar inner voice and also inspired a madman to assassinate. Caulfield lives his own imaginative heroic life, where he saves children as they haphazardly run off the edge of a cliff. Bickle becomes that catcher in the film’s final act by rescuing Iris.
To me, the narration that tips us off most accurately about Bickle is this:
I don’t believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention, I believe that one should become a person like other people.
The two parts of this statement are blocked off with the affirmation “I believe.” It’s basically Cartesian, Bickle is affirming his humanity by stating his values directly. Except is he? That phrase “morbid self-attention” stings a bit, until I step back and recognize that Bickle is writing it in a personal diary to no one in particular. The other belief, that “one” should become a person like other people is fascinating. Who is one? The One? While I am not claiming here that Bickle identifies with Jesus in this moment, he is certainly taking an otherworldly stance, which I will call ur-human. A real human being never has to question whether he is human, never mind take a strong affirmative stance about becoming not just a person, but one “like other people.” To this “one,” blending into the crowd is difficult work.
I have read in another analysis on Facets.com that Bickle believes he is better than everyone else, and I don’t buy that. I do believe that he holds up a mirror to the weaknesses and flaws of men in the 1970s — and I’ll return to that in a minute — but this only heightens his alienation from a humanity he wants to join. In Betsy, he sees a path to a form of union with humanity.
But he doesn’t seek out Betsy because he wants a normal human connection. Rather, she appears to him “like an angel” and she also, he believes, shares his sense of lonely alienation. Betsy could easily be creeped out by this analysis, but embraces both sides of it — she doesn’t mind being worshiped like an angel for her beauty and tacitly accepts Bickle’s assertion that she is a lonely person who deserves better than the weak, ironic men who half-heartedly pursue her.
The short-term meeting of minds between Travis and Betsy is meaningful, even if doomed, because it gives a glimpse into the world around them that is crumbling rapidly. Not caring and developing a blindness to the insanity all around isn’t working out well for anyone in mid-70s New York. Travis and Betsy agree that it will take some form of passionate commitment and action to turn things around. They just discover, rather quickly in Betsy’s case, that they cannot pursue this mission together.
In fact, they have opposite views of how this world should be turned around, but that too is fine. This yin/yang of social activism where both sides actively pursue change-directed agendas is what democracy is supposed to be all about. Partisanship only becomes a dirty word when the motives become blurred and people act in their own self interests purely to gain power and to enrich those who can keep them in power, losing sight of the ideals that make political struggles worth having.
I don’t want to make too much of the political angle because the ur-human Bickle seems to lack the intelligence to form anything close to a coherent political position on anything. But he is awake and aware of the suffering around him and he refuses to tolerate it. If we avoid the temptation of identifying with Bickle, that gives us an interesting view of the culture.
There are numerous human archetypes of alienation, the most stark being Jesus Christ, the son of God who takes on human form to save us. Scorsese will later directly take on the loneliness of being Jesus in “The Last Temptation of Christ.” Here he gives us an ur-human who will not save us. He won’t even give us a direction to a new humanity, like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Bickle just brings the storm. He declares that “someday a real rain will come” and later delivers on it.
Bickle is not a demon nor anti-Christ, he provides no false hope of salvation. He is misinterpreted as a hero, but that says more about the culture than about him or his actions. By the mid-1970s, the culture is craving heroes to rise and save them from the mess they created and are too caught up in their own shit to clean up. Bickle rises out of this dung heap and “saves” Iris by giving her another fresh trauma to relive for a lifetime, murdering three people along the way.
Did his victims deserve that fate? By the mid-1970s, it had become perfectly acceptable to answer yes, that the criminal justice system couldn’t possibly fix the social wrongs of child sex trafficking. This shows just how corrupted we view our own criminal justice system. We’ve lost the ability to see a horrific crime underneath our noses, plan about how to bring those involved to justice, execute those orders effectively, then try those criminals in a court of their peers where fair sentences will be given to the guilty. Re-enacting a scene out of a Western movie seems like a reasonable solution, given our societal neglect and failure.
We are living right now with a backlash to the mentality that arouse out of that era, but be careful in your judgment. Are we putting the kind of rigorous thought and debate into fixing the criminal justice system so that we can avoid returning to mid-1970s New York in cities across the nation? Chicago today doesn’t look like the New York of that era, but I wouldn’t argue with the assessment that we seem to be sitting on a powder keg.
Knee jerk swings of the political pendulum, to me, just invite future rounds of apathy to social ills and more lazy acceptance of vigilante solutions. I am relieved, so far at least, that Trump’s “law and order” calls are not moving voters, especially given his joy at sending unidentified federal troops into harms way that at least violates the spirit of the Constitution. But that doesn’t mean that this rhetoric won’t work in four weeks or four years. Public opinion can turn on a dime. Fascism in America is gaining a dangerous foothold.
Travis Bickle is part of that story, and that should scare us for as long as we remain in this cycle of willful neglect.