Friday, July 25, 2008

Fact is, he was talkin' to all of us


The yellow cab emerges silent, hulking, opaque and phantom-like out of the plumes of steam that waft up from the gutters, the gauzy, rain-slick streets bleed super-saturated reds and blues, the brass and snare drum conjure up oppressive waves of portent, and finally the darkness parts its curtain for God’s lonely man to make his entrance. He comes from nowhere, peers the world through slatted fingers, and can’t make convincing small talk to save his life. By his own claims he’s a Vietnam vet, an ex-marine, with no friends or family with whom he can connect or accept consolation from. A genuine outsider with only the most marginal sort of charisma imaginable, he seems somehow the unlikeliest of characters to mount the stage of movie history, but more than 30 years after making his first appearance there’s no denying that he’s earned his place there.

I think I’ve probably seen Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) as many times as I’ve seen any movie, yet every time I revisit it I’m always caught off guard at just how abstract, even hallucinatory, those opening moments are that I’ve described above. I’m equally caught off guard by how goddamned young, even asexual, Jodie Foster is as the child hooker Iris, or just how deeply immersed Robert De Niro seems in the role of the titular cabbie Travis Bickle, how convincingly he nurtures Travis’ loneliness, alienated logic, and the notion that his movement toward vigilantism is inevitable and somehow even heroic, cleansing, this 20th century underground man determined to wash the scum off the mean streets.


“I don’t believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention,” Travis writes in his diary. “I believe that someone should become a person like other people.” As delivered by De Niro, the comical, crude poetry with which he expresses his delusions of conformity is marvelous, and just one of several elements that make Paul Schrader’s churned-from-the-gut screenplay one of the most perfectly realized of the New Hollywood era. And you can actually access the script as you make your way through the movie on Sony’s recent Taxi Driver two-disc set, stopping at any point to see how it matches with the final result. Its just one of a plethora of special features designed to entice fans who obsess over the film to a level that competes with Travis’ obsessing over his misguided vocation.

There have been a number of excellent multi-disc packages of Scorsese films in recent years, with the two-disc release of Raging Bull being a major standout. I’m not sure why it took so long to finally get Taxi Driver the same deluxe treatment, but its proven to be worth the wait. There’s good making-of type stuff and testimonies from everybody from Scorsese himself to his one-time student Oliver Stone to numerous New York City cabbies who remember just how mean the city streets were back when the film first came out.

There’s also a pretty smart little featurette that’s got plenty of interesting quotes from the always articulate Schrader, though the highlight of the whole package for me is Schrader’s full length audio commentary, where he discusses where he was at in his life while writing the film (i.e.: in miserable shape), how he’d connected with Scorsese, how they adjusted the project to best accommodate the cast and shooting conditions, how much of the film was scripted and how much improvised, and how little anyone expected the film to become the enormous success it did. Schrader talks matter-of-factly about the underlying themes of racism in the film, explaining why he though it essential that Travis attack blacks in particular, and why the racism in the film eventually became one of the factors that led to Harvey Keitel being cast as the jive-talking pimp Sport, a role originally meant for a black actor.


Taxi Driver is a film that speaks to the ages yet could probably only have come out of the particular conditions of its time. Its fixations are those of young, angry men, and Scorsese, Schrader and De Niro were just young enough to still really feel it. Its singular position both in its response to and shaping of film history is on exhibit all over the place, with Scorsese’s wildly adventurous playing with form indebted to his voracious consuming of the work of Jean-Luc Godard and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, among many others. And it’s a film that’s finally a product of the heady 70s, that time when young directors with a newly-gleaned sense of film history's continuity could take control of their work, a time when mainstream audiences occasionally flocked to see films for reasons other than fleeting thrills (though Taxi Driver arguably has those, too), and the battle between art and commerce in movies found some near-perfect harmony for a few golden years. Taxi Driver is the grotesque child of that era, and one that deserves to be visited again and again.

3 comments:

Paul Matwychuk said...

Nice essay, but I'm even more fascinated by the poster. My God, what kind of complicated, endless, high-level agent/studio negotations produced that crazy hodgepodge treatment of the names of the actors... some with boxes around their names, some with their names followed by the names of their characters, Peter Boyle getting a box AND an "as Wizard" credit, Cybill Shepherd getting her name in an even bigger font than Robert De Niro's, Martin Scorsese's name smaller than anybody's?

I had a similar reaction when I was at the movies the other night and saw the poster for THE SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS 2. The image on the poster is a photo of the four actresses, and I couldn't help but wonder what kind of intricate calculations the studio had to make in order to figure out their relative starpower, and how to pose them in a way that reflected Blake Lively's newfound GOSSIP GIRL fame without making Amber Tamblyn or former Gilmore Girl Alexis Bledel feel slighted. And even though America Ferrara is on UGLY BETTY and is arguably the biggest star of any of them, it was obvious there was no way they were making the heavy girl the centrepiece of the ad.

So in my analogy, does that make Albert Brooks the America Ferrara of TAXI DRIVER?

JB said...

It is an especially good example of the incomprehensible logic of movie posters, isn't it? My biggest question, from childhood onward, though not applicable to this particular poster, has always been this: Why have the faces of the leads lined up in a different order than their names? Do they actually want to confuse the viewer? A random example: the poster for THE BIG CHILL. According to the billing, Mary Kay Place is actually Tom Berenger, Jeff Goldblum is Mary Kay Place, Jobeth Williams is Jeff Goldblum. It's fucking madness.

One of the things I really like about this TAXI DRIVER poster however is the gorgeous, utterly misleading image: the empty NYC street, Bickle standing in the middle of it, waiting, looking scared, slightly pigeon-toed, perhaps preparing to be abducted by UFOs.

Paul Matwychuk said...

JB, The Onion AV Club has already ridden to your rescue with an answer to that very question. Read on:

http://www.avclub.com/content/feature/ask_the_a_v_club_february_22