Filmic Allusion in Taxi Driver
A brief analysis of Scorsese’s influences and inspirations
Emblematic of the New Hollywood movement at large, Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver consciously blurs the line between the artistic and the commercial. By means of allusion to influential films of Classical Hollywood and the films of international contemporaries, Scorsese responds to the industry’s crisis with the revision of generic conventions and an incorporation of ideals of authorial filmmaking into a commercial context — appealing to the traditional “popcorn” audience, yet directly addressing the growing film-literate community. In this synthesisation of the old with the new (and the external with the internal), allusion can distort the original material to result in an incomprehensible and alienating mess. But, in the hands of Scorsese — as well as Robert De Niro and Bernard Herrmann — Taxi Driver transcends these distortions to result in an innovative, invigorated and commercially appealing film.
Filmic allusion can be understood as the integration or re-creation of specific elements — lines of dialogue, specific framing and camera angles, plot motifs and themes, etc. — from film history into a contemporary film (Carroll 1981, 52). Noël Carroll (1981, 56) contends that the use of allusions sets up a “two-tiered system of communication”: the first involving the use of a traditional and genre driven narrative in order to appeal to the mass-market; the second aiming to utilise the allegorical connotations of the allusions to introduce or enhance themes and style, assuming the presence of a film-literate audience. For some, this strategy borders on plagiarism and risks alienation by going over the head of a “naïve” audience (Ray 1985, 327). However, when kept to a conservative degree and properly integrated with generic narrative and traditional continuity, strategies of allusion can amplify a film’s themes, motifs and style without sacrificing commercial appeal and the understanding of the mass-market.
As a key member of the film-school generation, Martin Scorsese’s intricate knowledge of film history (as seen in such documentaries as A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies and My Voyage To Italy) influences and infects the structure of his own films. His use of allusion ranges from subtle incorporations of style to direct quotations with emphasis of their origin — as with Jake La Motta’s (Robert De Niro) recital of On The Waterfront’s Terry Molloy (Marlon Brando) in Raging Bull. Rather than instigating the alienation of a large sector of his audience or distorting the original intentions of the source material, Scorsese uses these allusions with an undeniable deftness that has resulted in consistent critical and commercial success over several decades.
Golden Age – Taxi Driver’s Allusions to Classical Hollywood
Taxi Driver — Scorsese’s fourth feature film and first with significant commercial success (Flatley 1976, 49) — utilises allusionary techniques extensively, but attempts to appeal to a mass audience by reconciling these within a classical, generic framework (Christie & Thompson 1989, 52).
The work of Alfred Hitchcock, particularly his 1960 film Psycho, is closely entwined within Taxi Driver’s framework (Thurman 2005). Not only does the character of Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) share many idiosyncratic characteristics with Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), but Scorsese also integrates specific shots from Psycho into Taxi Driver. Taxi Driver’s famous overhead tracking shot that recapitulates Travis’ massacre in his attempt to save Iris (Jodie Foster) is a direct allusion to the same shot in Psycho, where Bates murders the detective charged with investigating the disappearance of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh). With the shot’s reflective nature, this association prompts a film-literate audience to further question whether Travis’ purported emancipation of a child prostitute is instead the work of a sadist as opposed to a saviour. For an audience that is not well versed in the work of Hitchcock, this shot remains stylistically engaging and works within the confines of the narrative.
Taxi Driver’s penultimate scene also alludes to Billy Wilder’s 1950 film Sunset Boulevard. After the audience is shown a close-up of the bloodied body of Sport (Harvey Keitel), the camera shifts outside and pulls away to show a long-shot of the bevy of media and bystanders rabbling on the steps to the door of the tenement house. This directly mirrors the sequence in the final scene in Sunset Boulevard, where the camera first shows the dead body of the murdered Joe Gillis (William Holden) before shifting to show the media on the steps of the moribund mansion of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson). This connection amplifies (but does not introduce) the same sense that this personal, intimate, painful story that has been shown for the past 105 minutes (in both films) has suddenly become an event on the nightly news. So, although this allusion heightens the understanding of a film-literate viewer, it avoids alienation of the mass audience that might arise when over-ascribing essential narrative significance through allusion.
As with many of its New Hollywood and film-school generation counterparts, Taxi Driver insistently refers to John Ford’s 1956 western The Searchers (Mortimer 2000, 113-116). The most tangible of these allusions is through the narrative: like Ethan (John Wayne) in The Searchers, Travis, with questionable intentions, rescues a young girl from an immoral captor despite the fact that the girl does not necessarily ask for a saviour. And although Sport (who is dressed in concert with Indian antagonist of The Searchers) constantly refers to him as “cowboy”, Travis adopts the Mohican — a symbol of the Indian, a traditional villain in the western — before his final bloody act. These allusions ask the film-literate viewer to question Travis’ media-driven status as a hero, and, in the tradition of the right-cycle, question the entire notion of the hero itself (Lichtenfeld 2007, 29). However, due to the integral thematic implications of these allusions, a “naïve” viewer may fail to receive this incitation of doubt.
2 or 3? – Taxi Driver’s Allusions to the French New Wave and Neorealism
Taxi Driver also takes inspiration from a far different source: international films of the post-war era — specifically films of the French New Wave and Italian Neorealism.
The most tangible of these allusions is to Jean Luc-Godard’s 1967 film Two or Three Things I Know About Her. Many film critics and theorists have noted the link between Taxi Driver’s alka-seltzer shot and the coffee sequence of Two or Three Things (see: Goldstein & Jacobson 1976, 67; Hayes 2005, 12-13; and Kirshner 2013, 129). In this scene, Travis sits at a slight but noticeable distance from the other cabbies and the camera follows his solipsistic gaze with a perspective shot of the chaotic world of the dissolution in the cup. Mirroring Godard, it continues to track into a confining extreme close-up, where the entire frame is filled by the bubbling frenzy in the cup. For a film literate audience, this homage conflates the mood and disposition of Two or Three Things — a politically loaded film that is critical of France’s growing injustice and aggressive to America and the war in Vietnam, but also a film that is obsessed with the idea of loneliness in an urban setting — with the classical narrative of Taxi Driver.
Additionally, Taxi Driver’s use of the driving scenes at night — interspersed with the violence, immorality, and “filth” of Scorsese’s New York — parallels Godard’s splicing of panned shots of the construction of bland, Corbusian architecture and uninspired infrastructure as interludes to the “narrative” scenes of Two or Three Things. These strategies attempt to incise the immorality of the urban, and the hypocrisy of the notions of “progress.” Scorsese uses this allusion to Godard in such a way to emphasise these themes to a film-literate viewer without inserting narrative implications, safeguarding against alienation of the mass audience.
And like Godard in Two or Three Things, Scorsese essentially provides a director’s commentary in Taxi Driver. Both of the directors literally speak the unspeakable themes that underscore the films, but their differing methods emphasise the difference between their industrial and commercial paradigms. Godard’s whispered commentary literally breaks down the conventions of filmmaking, with his semi-diegetic stream-of-consciousness running through the body of the film, emphasising the experimental freedom of the French New Wave. Scorsese’s approach — appearing as a traditional character within the diegesis — illustrates New Hollywood’s desire to take such personal liberties, but addresses its commercial need to work within the confines of the classical narrative.
Taxi Driver also borrows from the themes of Italian Neorealism. Most critically, Taxi Driver incorporates Neorealism’s premise of the distortion between good and evil and the breakdown of a traditional hero and villain (Hinton 2007). Travis’ status as a “walking contradiction” aligns him with the lead characters of such films as Rome, Open City, Bicycle Thieves, and Umberto D. For a film-literate audience, these parallels enhance Taxi Driver’s status as what Ray (1985, 327 and 349-356) terms the “corrected genre” film, where generic lines become increasingly blurred. Yet, again, a proficient understanding of the film does not rely on this awareness of film history.
By alluding to these foreign films, Scorsese incorporates the harsh reality and duality of Italian Neorealism and the experimental detachment of the French New Wave to stretch the limitations of a far more codified and generic film for the highly film-literate audience. Due to the exclusiveness of these references, however, Scorsese risks alienating a mass-audience and putting the commercial success of the film in doubt, but takes care to reconcile these within a commercial paradigm and uses them to enhance the themes of Taxi Driver rather than define them.
Taxi Driver’s pertinent use of allusion — specifically in reference to the films of Classical Hollywood, Italian Neorealism, and the French New Wave – functions within Carroll’s “two-tiered system of communication” in such a way that emphasises the film’s themes and motifs for the film-literate audience without sacrificing the understanding of the mass-market. By use of these intertextual connotations, Scorsese emboldens the film’s artistic and authorial value whilst working within the commercial realities of Hollywood.
Films Cited
A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies. DVD. Directed by Martin Scorsese and Michael Henry Wilson. [United States]: Lionsgate: 2012
Bicycle Thieves. Blu-Ray. Directed by Vittorio De Sica. [Australia]: Umbrella Entertainment, 2014
Hugo. Digital Download. Directed by Martin Scorsese. [Australia]: Paramount, 2011
My Voyage To Italy. DVD. Directed by Martin Scorsese. [Australia]: Shock Records, 2004
On The Waterfront. DVD. Directed by Elia Kazan. [Australia]: Sony Pictures, 2002
Psycho. Blu-Ray. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. [Australia]: Universal, 2010
Raging Bull. Blu-Ray. Directed by Martin Scorsese. [Australia]: MGM, 2010
Rome, Open City. DVD. Directed by Roberto Rossellini. [United Kingdom]: Arrow, 2005
Sunset Boulevard. Blu-Ray. Directed by Billy Wilder. [Australia]: Paramount, 2013
Taxi Driver. Blu-Ray. Directed by Martin Scorsese. [Australia]: Sony Pictures, 2011
The Searchers. Blu-Ray. Directed by John Ford. [Australia]: Warner Home Video, 2007
Two or Three Things I Know About Her. DVD. Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. [United States]: Criterion, 2009
Umberto D. DVD. Directed by Vittorio De Sica. [United States]: Criterion, 2003
Works Cited
Carroll, Noël. 1981. ‘The Future of Allusion: Hollywood in the Seventies (and Beyond).’ October 34: 51-81.
Christie, Ian, and David Thompson, eds. 1989. Scorsese on Scorsese. London, UK: Faber & Faber
Goldstein, Richard and Mark Jacobson. 1976. ‘Martin Scorsese Tells All: Blood and Guts Turn Me On!’. In Martin Scorsese: Interviews, ed. P. Brunette (ed), 58-70. Oxford, MS: The University Press of Mississippi
Hayes, Kevin. 2005. ‘Introduction: The Heritage and Legacy of Raging Bull.’ In Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, ed. K. Hayes, 1-18. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press
Hinton, Erik. 2007. Grotesque Neo-Realism: Discussing Martin Scorsese’s Confounding Style (online). (Cited 19 April 2014). http://www.popmatters.com/feature/grotesque-neo-realism-discussing-martin-scorseses-confounding-style/
Kirshner, Jonathan. 2013. Hollywood’s Last Golden Age: Politics, Society, and the Seventies Film in America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press
Lichtenfeld, Eric. 2007. Action Speaks Louder. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press
Mortimer, Barbara. 2005. Hollywood’s Frontier Captives: Cultural Anxiety and the Captivity Plot in American Film. New York, NY: Garland Publishing
Ray, Robert. 1985. A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema 1930-1980. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Thurman, John. 2005. ‘Citizen Bickle, or the Allusive Taxi Driver: Uses of Intertextuality.’ Sense of Cinema, issue 37, http://sensesofcinema.com/2005/37/taxi_driver/
