Monday, October 30, 2006
Taxi Driver
It's a little odd to return to blogging to write about Taxi Driver. But I saw it last night and I'm still disturbed, so I figure this is the best way to get it out of my system.
Given my love of gritty, social realist dramas, it's a little surprising that I hadn't seen Taxi Driver before now. After all, the 1970s is the last time Hollywood did anything relevant to working people's lives: films like Dog Day Afternoon, Deliverance and yes, even Saturday Night Fever chronicled the brutal realities of being poor, and sometimes hinted that a collective, political solution was necessary. Taxi Driver falls in this tradition, but it doesn't point a way forward; rather, it shows the hopelessness of working class life, and the utter hypocrisy of politicians who would claim to change it.
Robert De Niro plays Travis Bickle, a sleep-deprived Vietnam War veteran. Working nights as a taxi driver, he sees the violence and decay of New York City, at the nadir of its housing and fiscal crisis in the mid-70s. He doesn't see where it comes from: he just wants a storm to wash away the "scum" from the streets, even as those scum - junkies, pimps, prostitutes and their slimy johns - pay his fares.
His hatred of them comes from fear: he's closer to them than he'd like to admit. But rather than deal with the reality of being poor, or trying to change his conditions, he fantasizes. He dates Betsy (Cybil Shepherd), the 'pure' woman in a white dress. He meets her boss, presidential candidate Palantine, and is briefly wooed by his empty populist rhetoric. But he gets disillusioned when Betsy rejects him, and he quickly returns to his fantasies of massacring the underclass - the flip-side of his search for purity, but another a form of escapism.
Some kind of escapism would be great, right about now
Travis is a fascist. He's a victim of capitalism, he hates his job, but rather than blaming the system, he blames the other victims: women, African-Americans, unions, the poor. At one point he has a long talk with 'the Wizard', a more experienced taxi driver who tells him he has to find a hobby, accept his fate and, like every other working person, cope with how exploitative life under capitalism is. But Bickle can't: he's too close to it. In that regard, he's a tragic figure: fully awake to capitalism's ills, completely unconscious of its causes.
Which is ironic, considering he spends a good portion of the film planning to assassinate Palantine. He knows politicians are responsible, but he doesn't want to kill Palantine as a political statement. Palantine just joins the ranks of scum, no different than the poor people who use Bickle's cab - it's not a coincidence that the closest he and Palantine come is when Travis drives the latter to a hotel.
When Travis meets Iris, the 12 year old prostitute, he finally finds an outlet for his heroism. Here's a child he can rescue from the "filth", and Harvey Keitel is particularly filthy as Sport, her seductive pimp. But Travis only goes after Sport after he fails to assassinate Palantine. Here lies the irony: Travis gets lauded as a hero for killing Sport; had he killed the politician, he'd be jailed as a murderer. Yet in his eyes it's the same act. But not in our eyes - we want him to succeed, to save Iris.
Exploiter meets exploited - Palantine and Bickle
Scorcese is showing the alienation that causes fascism. But he's also saying that Travis is no different than us. In our desire to see Travis kill the pimp and his cronies, we've lost empathy or political understanding: just like Travis, we see no difference between Sport and Palantine, even though the politician is responsible for the maintaining an entire system's exploitation. We become fascistic, through our blind hatred.
This is a radical critique: politicians are pimps. But it's also deeply negative, because Travis doesn't distinguish between the two, and doesn't understand politicians as tools of power. Scorcese builds the character of Travis on the absence of collective struggle, and offers no hope for its return. (Compare this to deeply political, empathetic Dog Day Afternoon, also made in 1975, about crime in New York.)
Vince does his best Travis Bickle impersonation in La Haine (Hate)
This nihilism also disturbs me, because Taxi Driver is hugely popular among young men. I knew these lines from (urgh) House of Pain years before I saw the film:
Too late
Given my love of gritty, social realist dramas, it's a little surprising that I hadn't seen Taxi Driver before now. After all, the 1970s is the last time Hollywood did anything relevant to working people's lives: films like Dog Day Afternoon, Deliverance and yes, even Saturday Night Fever chronicled the brutal realities of being poor, and sometimes hinted that a collective, political solution was necessary. Taxi Driver falls in this tradition, but it doesn't point a way forward; rather, it shows the hopelessness of working class life, and the utter hypocrisy of politicians who would claim to change it.
Robert De Niro plays Travis Bickle, a sleep-deprived Vietnam War veteran. Working nights as a taxi driver, he sees the violence and decay of New York City, at the nadir of its housing and fiscal crisis in the mid-70s. He doesn't see where it comes from: he just wants a storm to wash away the "scum" from the streets, even as those scum - junkies, pimps, prostitutes and their slimy johns - pay his fares.
His hatred of them comes from fear: he's closer to them than he'd like to admit. But rather than deal with the reality of being poor, or trying to change his conditions, he fantasizes. He dates Betsy (Cybil Shepherd), the 'pure' woman in a white dress. He meets her boss, presidential candidate Palantine, and is briefly wooed by his empty populist rhetoric. But he gets disillusioned when Betsy rejects him, and he quickly returns to his fantasies of massacring the underclass - the flip-side of his search for purity, but another a form of escapism.
Some kind of escapism would be great, right about now
Travis is a fascist. He's a victim of capitalism, he hates his job, but rather than blaming the system, he blames the other victims: women, African-Americans, unions, the poor. At one point he has a long talk with 'the Wizard', a more experienced taxi driver who tells him he has to find a hobby, accept his fate and, like every other working person, cope with how exploitative life under capitalism is. But Bickle can't: he's too close to it. In that regard, he's a tragic figure: fully awake to capitalism's ills, completely unconscious of its causes.
Which is ironic, considering he spends a good portion of the film planning to assassinate Palantine. He knows politicians are responsible, but he doesn't want to kill Palantine as a political statement. Palantine just joins the ranks of scum, no different than the poor people who use Bickle's cab - it's not a coincidence that the closest he and Palantine come is when Travis drives the latter to a hotel.
When Travis meets Iris, the 12 year old prostitute, he finally finds an outlet for his heroism. Here's a child he can rescue from the "filth", and Harvey Keitel is particularly filthy as Sport, her seductive pimp. But Travis only goes after Sport after he fails to assassinate Palantine. Here lies the irony: Travis gets lauded as a hero for killing Sport; had he killed the politician, he'd be jailed as a murderer. Yet in his eyes it's the same act. But not in our eyes - we want him to succeed, to save Iris.
Exploiter meets exploited - Palantine and Bickle
Scorcese is showing the alienation that causes fascism. But he's also saying that Travis is no different than us. In our desire to see Travis kill the pimp and his cronies, we've lost empathy or political understanding: just like Travis, we see no difference between Sport and Palantine, even though the politician is responsible for the maintaining an entire system's exploitation. We become fascistic, through our blind hatred.
This is a radical critique: politicians are pimps. But it's also deeply negative, because Travis doesn't distinguish between the two, and doesn't understand politicians as tools of power. Scorcese builds the character of Travis on the absence of collective struggle, and offers no hope for its return. (Compare this to deeply political, empathetic Dog Day Afternoon, also made in 1975, about crime in New York.)
Vince does his best Travis Bickle impersonation in La Haine (Hate)
This nihilism also disturbs me, because Taxi Driver is hugely popular among young men. I knew these lines from (urgh) House of Pain years before I saw the film:
I'm a survivorIf a nihilistic, violent proto-fascist is a hero - and has been for 30 years - that's more proof that people are deeply alienated, that capitalism's effects on our consciousness are brutal and real. But it's also a sad statement on how little hope working class people have for the future. No matter how much I resent Che Guevara's commercialization, I'd rather see his face on a t-shirt than Travis Bickle's.
Feeling like De Niro in Taxi Driver
With Jodi Foster and Harvey Keitel
Looks like I'm walking through a living hell
Too late
