One of my very favorite pieces of literature is Herman Melville’s short story, Bartleby the Scrivener: the reason it appeals to me so much is that unlike the countless other characters in the fictional universe, Bartleby is not too concerned with participating. The little we find out about his back story involves his time working at a “Dead Letter” office where he collected, and then disposed of all the sent messages, some of which we can assume were very personal and anguished, which were written for nothing and received by a void. Bartleby was spiritually broken to some extent, we gather, during his time there.
Travis Bickle does not participate but not for lack of trying. He is pathologically incapable of conducting a comfortable conversation, most especially with women who he is sexually attracted to. He is a romantic, but at every turn he sees proof that he shouldn’t be: in the New York where he lives, Scorsese evokes the palpable decay, both literal and moral, of a city feeding on itself.
Pornography is tricky business; no one wants to say that it is dirty or rotten, yet, it feels so dirty and rotten when giant ‘XXX’ signs hang in unwashed bulletin boards over crumbling buildings as horns honk and the procession of traffic cannot just be heard, but felt. Indeed, the city even invades Travis’s apartment, his home, his last opportunity to fortify himself from the litter of the streets. Scorsese very deliberately set a recording device on a windowsill to document the ambient noise of the city, and often, that ambient noise is the only soundtrack to accompany Travis when he sits alone in his apartment. Compounding the seeping sounds of the city outside is the inconspicuous bric-a-brac shelving his mealy apartment: the blue, red, and yellow circles on a package of (wonder?) bread, creased cardboard boxes of cereal: both elements self-effacingly establishing the dispiriting banality of his existence. So what’s the solution? Get a girlfriend. That’s what everyone else does. They find a relationship; nurture and be nurtured; only Travis has very fine taste, and the young woman who catches his eye is a rather elusive choice. Betsy (a very attractive young Cybill Shepherd) actually does not avert her eyes and will him away with repelled discomfort as young women of my generation would so impulsively do when confronted with a socially awkward, looks-too-hard-at-people-without-knowing-it (read: creepy) type of man.
The first time I saw Taxi Driver, I honestly could not believe that Travis was ignorant of the effect that taking Betsy to a porno theatre would have. This was not a sub-conscious desire to sabotage the date either; this is where Travis’s ignorance of tact and the proper conduct of social rituals is the most alarming of all: he genuinely does not know that most women like men to pretend that the final step of the courting ritual is not the only step they are interested in. Upon repeat viewings, you could even say Travis’s unconscious frankness is sweet in its misunderstanding, as if he was an alien from another planet that has spent a few days on earth and does not know the appropriate protocol. She has not spent enough time with him or may even be intuitive enough to understand that Travis’s taking her to the porn movie is a one in a million freak occurrence; he’s not the jackass who does it, then looks over at her lecherously, nudges her in the ribs: “How ‘bout it, babe?”
With his dream woman quickly severing any hope for a second date after the aborted first one, Travis slips further into defeated isolation. He has learned though: in a great shot, we see his futile attempts to apologize and explain to Betsy on a payphone, his head framed by the metal box, the farthest right in a line of three phones, the first one being a more rudimentary phone, the second being a little more advanced, and the payphone being the final step in the evolutionary process. From his words, we understand that she will not be persuaded, and the camera pans even farther right and looks into an abandoned hallway which ends with an exit out into traffic.
Taxi Driver will be alluring to any young man who finds himself perpetually without the relief of female companionship. Some men, like Travis, are absolute failures in this department. We cannot even be sure whether or not Travis has ever been with a woman; his past is murky, outside of the knowledge that he served in Vietnam. Men in situations like this are susceptible to self-loathing, which can soon turn into suicide, or misanthropy. We already know Travis hates the hustlers and low-life night crawlers of New York, but after his unthinkable faux pas with Betsy, and her subsequent rejection, he moves his scorn to higher levels of society as well.
Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote a conflicted analysis of Taxi Driver, which dissects its philosophy, finding it muddled, and contradictory. While I found Rosenbaum’s review insightful and somewhat persuasive, I’m not sure if he’s intellectualizing Scorsese and Schrader’s intentions more than they themselves did. Couldn’t the film be simply a cry of hatred and anger? The scene which proves most troublesome to some viewers of Taxi Driver is a scene where Martin Scorsese himself appears in the film, one of the most disturbing and horrible characters I’ve ever witnessed on the screen. He plays an unidentified individual, though I refer to him as, “The Man in the back of the taxi.” The man turns Travis’s cab into a sickening confessional, actually informing Travis of a double murder he plans to commit, pointing to a window in a building that he has directed Travis to park near. “You see that woman in the window? Do you see the woman in the window? Yes? Yes, ‘cuz I want you to see that woman, I want you to see that woman, because that woman is my wife. You know what she’s doing up there? She’s fucking a nigger up there? A nigger. And…I’m…I’m gonna kill ‘em. I’m gonna kill ‘em with a .44 Magnum, I’m gonna kill ‘em with that gun. You ever see what a .44 Magnum could do to a woman’s face? Just blow it apart. You ever see what a .44 Magnum could do to a woman’s pussy? That, you should see.” The fact that it is the director himself playing this part makes it all the more traumatic. He is so utterly convincing (Scorsese is a great actor) and so frightening that I don’t read any irony in the part. Though I know that Scorsese is not a racist, or a misogynist, or fond of mutilation, he truly scares me, and I believe him. The grandfatherly, benevolent dignitary that we see so often now in interviews and light-hearted commercials, and even on Oprah, is accepted without thinking twice about it, but people seem to forget that that same man once played the evil-eyed, dark-bearded man in the back of Travis’s taxi (indeed, De Niro said that he modeled his appearance in Alan Parker’s Angel Heart after Scorsese; De Niro played Lucifer in the film).
I think if Raging Bull is Scorsese’s grandest achievement, then Taxi Driver is his most honest, and this is a man who has made a career out of frank brutality. Taxi Driver is a rather dangerous film in that way in that it voices all the politically incorrect, irrational, hateful, and improper thoughts and impulses that 99% of the country know to filter before expressing. With the encouragement of Schrader’s sullen, wrathful screenplay, Scorsese let his reptile brain roam free for a short time, and exorcise all the things we wish we could expel, but would rather someone else do it instead. The film is an unparalleled and volatile transgression in the world of cinema, performing the very most private purpose of all in art, which is to serve as a vessel for the artist’s suffering, hatred, despair, and all; in Travis Bickle’s story, Scorsese achieves catharsis, allowing for all us misanthropes to be relieved of our rage and disgust, if only for a time.
Grade: A+
+Bickle's Coda
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