Movie Mania: Martin Scorsese, Obsession & Taxi Driver
“Obsessiveness is something I identify with wholly.” -Martin Scorsese
“All my life needed was a sense of some place to go.” -Travis Bickle, Taxi Driver
Long before Martin Scorsese was, you know, Martin Scorsese, Dean of American Cinema, he was scraping by as an assistant professor in the film department at New York University. This was 1969. He’d graduated from N.Y.U. four years earlier and, in the interim, had managed to make his feature debut, Who’s That Knocking at My Door. But that film’s irregular production — a sporadic, multi-year process of trial and error — and its subsequent patchy release had done little to bring him a sense of security in himself or his career. He’d wanted to make his first feature before he turned 25, and he’d done it, more or less. No small feat at the time. But now he was 26 years old and needed money. He’d been fired from his next directing gig. His marriage was crumbling. And he had a young daughter to think about.
Those who can’t, teach. That’s a pernicious lie, of course, but it’s reasonable to assume Scorsese felt that stigma upon returning to his alma mater. He’d been the star pupil of the burgeoning film program at N.Y.U., and his student shorts had earned him awards and acclaim at an international level. The irony of the those-who-can’t falsehood is that Scorsese definitely could, and, probably, better than just about anyone else his age. He was obsessed with becoming a movie director, and if teaching was a necessary pit stop on his way to another film set, then that’s what he would do. Nothing would stand in his way. If he also carried with him a damaged ego or resentful attitude, however, it never affected his performance in the classroom. Week after week, the students in Scorsese’s American Cinema course sat riveted as the assistant professor held court. He would jump on desks and extemporaneously perform entire scenes — complete with dialogue and camera movements — from whichever film was being discussed that day. Unenrolled students would show up just to hear his monologues.
Scorsese may have been biding his time at N.Y.U. until he caught his next big break, but he was never just collecting a paycheck. He was incapable of phoning it in. Not when it came to movies anyway. He was almost as obsessed with the films on his syllabus as he was with making his own. “My whole life has been movies and religion,” he would later say. “That’s it. Nothing else.” The formative sanctuaries of Scorsese’s childhood — the Catholic Church and the cinema — left an irreversible psychic stamp on the filmmaker. Growing up, he attended two houses of worship. In one, he grappled with the moral tensions of human existence. In the other, he was gripped by the flickers of artistic passions. But it was not until he attended film school that these twin ministries bore fruit. Scorsese’s professor and mentor, Haig Manoogian, encouraged absolute dedication to the art and craft, “to the exclusion of practically everything else in life.” Scorsese, however, did not need convincing. He was already possessed by the spirit.
The young director thought he was destined to make genre films, the same types of movies he grew up watching and loving, the same ones he revisited over and over again until they felt like they were a part of his DNA. Westerns, musicals, gangster pictures. But Manoogian (and, later, John Cassavetes) urged him to mine his own life experiences for script material. Their prodding gave Scorsese a new sense of purpose. He set out to give dramatic shape to the world as he saw it, to fit as much of himself on a movie screen as it could hold. It wasn’t merely autobiography, although that certainly found its way into the work, but rather the purging of his often volatile and conflicted emotional life. It may not have been pretty, but it was honest, and Scorsese didn’t shy away from unflattering self-portraits, allowing his own deepening moral tensions to fuel his growing artistic obsessions.
There’s no film in Martin Scorsese’s half-century body of work in which this philosophy is more powerfully on display than Taxi Driver. As an exploration of the obsessed mind, it remains an unmatched and uncompromising vision. The heartbeat of its troubled protagonist and the personal and cinematic preoccupations of Scorsese are so in sync that, when layered one atop the other, they approximate the unmistakable throb of anxiety.
Screenwriter Paul Schrader claims Taxi Driver sprang from his mind in just two weeks and in near-finished form. He also claims he wrote it without any intention of it ever being made. At the time, Schrader was suffering through a self-destructive bout of depression, and the script provided him an outlet in which to channel and explore his manic state of mind. He drew inspiration from the works of Sartre and Dostoevsky, but also from the news of the day. In 1972, while recovering from an ulcer that was brought on by his depression, Schrader heard about Arthur Bremer, the attempted assassin of presidential candidate George Wallace. It was then that Taxi Driver began to take shape.
Schrader had no delusions about the project’s limited commercial appeal. Still, he sent the screenplay to his agent after he had finished it, and, eventually, Scorsese got ahold of it. The director, fresh off Mean Streets, with Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore already in his sights, related to Travis Bickle, the disturbed, dark soul at the center of Schrader’s story. The Arthur Bremer connection was not lost on Scorsese. In fact, at one point during the film’s development, he described Taxi Driver as really being a film about Bremer. But that, strangely, didn’t stop him from excitedly telling the Boston Globe in 1975 that the screenplay, despite his lack of involvement in its writing, was “practically me already.”
From the outset, Taxi Driver aims to put us squarely inside Travis Bickle’s head. By way of introduction, there’s a lingering extreme close-up of Travis’ scanning eyes. Scorsese, ever sensitive to point of view and the associative meaning of cuts, dissolves to Travis’ field of vision. It’s the front windshield of an automobile, blurry from rain and too difficult to see through, yet still in motion. It’s a city at night turned into an impressionist urban landscape painting, streaks of neon signage shimmering unfocused behind a layer of precipitation. But just as the wipers clear away the rain, Scorsese dissolves again. The new frame isn’t too dissimilar from the previous one — we’re still looking through that windshield — but it’s no longer water obscuring the point of view. This new image has been manipulated in post-production, step-printed to create a slow-motion strobing effect. Before long, we’re back on that extreme close-up of Travis’ eyes, still scanning. We’ve traded one distorted perspective, the familiar sight of a rain-blurred window, for one less common and more disorienting. The musical score, alternating abruptly between noirish saxophone solos and martial crescendos that give way to bombastic finishes, does little to put us at ease. Travis doesn’t listen to music, so is this the orchestral storm that plays in his head? Is this the filter of distortion through which he experiences the world?
Scorsese points to his early films — namely, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, New York, New York, and Raging Bull — as being too painful for him to watch. Part of that revolves around the grueling experience of actually making them (interminable night shoots; unpredictable summer storms; never enough time or money on Taxi Driver, for instance). He also admits they’re too personal, too emotional for him to revisit. They’re reminders of who he was at a specific time in his life, private confessions made public on movie screens across the world. Scorsese never drove a cab and he didn’t fight in Vietnam. I also doubt he ever took a girl to a Swedish porno on a first date. The superficial and external circumstances of Travis Bickle’s life could not possibly have been a mirror in which Scorsese saw his own reflection. But only the more worrying aspects of Travis’ character remain: his inability to relate to others, his loneliness and rage, his rejection, his savior complex, his objectification of women, his racism, his violent impulses.
Earlier in Scorsese’s life, at age thirteen, he had recognized the darker side of his own nature in another troubled protagonist: Ethan Edwards, the Confederate Cavalry officer played by John Wayne, in The Searchers. Little Italy was a long way from Monument Valley, and yet Scorsese says he and his friends understood Ethan on an intrinsic level. “I related to the Wayne character in The Searchers because of the darkness of his character — how he was exposing his racism, exposing his own inner conflicts, and yet he was a hero…And the guilt, whatever the hell Ethan is hiding in himself, whatever he did in that war — he can’t stand himself anymore.” When Assistant Professor Scorsese screened The Searchers in his American Cinema class, he showed up in a cowboy hat and fired cap guns into the air. He told his students that it was the best western ever made.
Much has been written about the parallels between John Ford’s 1956 western and Taxi Driver. Roger Ebert went so far as to call The Searchers an “undertext” for Scorsese’s film. It wasn’t, however, the first time Ford’s film had influenced Scorsese’s work. In his feature debut, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, the two main characters first meet and bond over an extended conversation about the film. In Mean Streets, Charlie and his cohorts watch it at a matinee screening. Scorsese even allows a brief clip to overtake the frame. Those were reverent, if passing, nods to one of his all-time favorite films, but Taxi Driver would actually provide Scorsese with an opportunity to riff on similar themes. In broad strokes, both films are stories of disillusioned men returning home from war to find themselves outsiders in a country they no longer recognize. Like Ethan Edwards, Travis Bickle becomes the self-appointed savior to a wayward adolescent girl. In The Searchers, that girl is Ethan’s niece, kidnapped by Comanches when she was a child. In Taxi Driver, it’s a teenage prostitute. Ethan and Travis see themselves as avenging angels. They both came from violence, and violence is in their futures.
“Some day this country’s gonna be a fine, good place to be,” says Mrs. Jorgensen, a former schoolteacher whose son was killed on Ethan’s mission of vengeance in The Searchers. If Ford’s film was a comment on the darkness lurking beneath the American psyche of the mid-1950s, using the post-Civil War years as a stand-in for the Cold War era, then Taxi Driver might be considered a contemporary update. Scorsese’s film, released two decades after The Searchers, reflected the turbulence of the intervening years, with the Civil Rights era, multiple political assassinations, Vietnam, and Watergate in its rearview mirror. While all of that informed the film, Scorsese’s lens remained personal rather than anthropological. “The urge behind this film is religious,” he said at a post-screening press conference. “I relate to it personally on an emotional level. It’s about a guy whose feelings are repressed and what happens in extreme cases of repression and isolation.”
“Making a film is like trying to find peace with yourself,” Scorsese would later say. Like Charlie in Mean Streets, Scorsese didn’t make up for his sins in the church. He didn’t do it on the streets either. He did it on movie sets. I don’t pretend to know the storminess of Scorsese’s soul, but there was a time in which he portrayed himself in interviews as someone in need of atonement. “I’m a true Catholic,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1983. “I’m sure other people feel the same way, but I feel I’m sure a horrible person.” He was promoting The King of Comedy, his eighth narrative feature up to that point, and, not coincidentally, another film about an obsessed and disturbed individual. And yet peace was still elusive. Maybe that’s why he once joked that he was going to die behind a movie camera.
Directing is an inherently obsessive pursuit no matter the filmmaker. It’s a requirement of the job. Great films are never the result of lukewarm indifference. Films are collaborative, but not democratic. Every day on a movie set, cast and crew work long hours, grinding their way through take after take, setup after setup, chasing after a purity that exists, presumably, only in one person’s mind. But when the stakes of your profession are life and death, as Scorsese has claimed they are for him, when your devotion to the history of the artform — to see it all, to understand it all, to teach it all — engulfs your consciousness and stokes your creativity, when the medium becomes a self-styled form of personal therapy that allows you to look at yourself in the mirror at the end of each day, like Jake LaMotta at the end of Raging Bull, it’s no surprise then that it could take on the significance of religious discipline. You’re no longer scratching an itch. You’re seeking transcendence from the flesh. Cinema as sanctification. It’s no wonder Scorsese views Marvel movies as an entirely different beast.
In Taxi Driver, Travis is looking for transcendence, too. But he doesn’t have a camera, and there’s no cast or crew to support him. He has no outlet for his confusion. But Travis does have a gun. Four of them, in fact. He buys them after a disturbing encounter with a passenger who asks to be driven to a stranger’s apartment, where he tells Travis to pull to the curb and leave the meter running. The passenger’s wife is in that apartment. The passenger says she’s cheating on him. He says he’s going to kill his wife with a .44 Magnum. The dialogue here is graphic and offensive. Like almost every scene in Taxi Driver, it’s an example of Travis’ life being pointed in one direction, this particular passenger acting as something of a deranged Jiminy Cricket. Travis doesn’t go looking to buy a .44 Magnum for protection from this type of person. No, he buys one because this person has tapped into and articulated thoughts and feelings that Travis himself is incapable of expressing, “bad ideas,” as he refers to them a few scenes later while ineffectually reaching out for help. That the passenger in question is played by Scorsese is a provocative bit of stunt casting. It should raise eyebrows. In a reflexive sense, yes, the film’s director has literally shown up on screen to provide motivation for his main character. But on a more personal level, if Scorsese recognizes himself in Travis, and Travis recognizes himself in this passenger, then is Scorsese inviting us to see ourselves somewhere in this troubling scenario?
As a child, a young priest once told an impressionable Scorsese, “You don’t have to live like this,” referencing the more disreputable elements and criminal activity within his Bowery neighborhood. In one way or another, nearly every Scorsese film has been about this hypothetical fork in the road, each of his protagonists a surrogate for the director, living the life he chose not to lead. “I think I learn more in a movie or in a story,” he would later write, “when I see what a person does wrong and what happens to them because of that.” Scorsese has never been interested in unblemished heroes. His characters do plenty wrong. But the implicit throughline in all of his work is that, with just a few wrong turns and a couple of bad decisions, his path might not have been so different. To acknowledge that capacity within himself in film after film, each one a flame over which he could hold an outstretched hand, is to rediscover his own humanity, and, by extension, to recognize his need for absolution. For a “true Catholic” like Scorsese, to be alive is to be guilty. So how, then, are we to live? How are we to cope? How is Travis Bickle to cope?
These are underlying questions of compassion in Scorsese’s cinema. When Travis writes a letter to his parents back home, it comes so late in the film that it’s almost shocking. He didn’t simply emerge from the hellish steam rising out of New York City’s streets. No, even this pitiable creature has a mother and father. It’s a passing detail, but it serves as a sobering reminder that Travis — the man lying to his family about his top-secret government work, the man plotting to assassinate a presidential candidate — is also somebody’s son. He didn’t ask to be here, but here he is. If our ability to relate to Travis has diminished by this point, a sad new wrinkle now forms to alter our perception of him. The theme song to The Searchers echoes in my mind:
“What makes a man to wander, what makes a man to roam? What makes a man leave bed and board, and turn his back on home?”
Travis isn’t savvy enough about popular culture to imagine that his own fantasies — the best of them or the worst of them — could ever be projected on a movie screen. When he does engage with the media landscape, it only furthers the disconnect he feels and intensifies his sense of isolation. He doesn’t seem to realize the images he sees are just another distortion of reality — pornography, soap operas, embracing couples dancing to heartbreaking love ballads on American Bandstand. And so he’s driven to act out his fantasies. Travis never had a choice, or so he writes in his diary. Scorsese did. Taxi Driver does not offer a defense of Travis’s psychotic actions, nor does it misjudge them as heroic, even if the other characters do. But it understands his very existence is a struggle, and it never looks upon that fact with condescension or condemnation. For Scorsese, there’s power in realizing that we can be driven right up to the edge by our obsessions, by our weaknesses, by our suffering, without responding to them as Travis does. It may not be a cure for what ails him, but perhaps one step away from the edge is also one step closer to peace.
“A man will search his heart and soul, go searchin’ way out there. His peace of mind he knows he’ll find, but where oh Lord, Lord where?”
Quotes:
1 — Scorsese to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 1983
2 — Scorsese during a press conference for The Last Temptation of Christ, 1988
3 — Scorsese to Mary Pat Kelly in her book Martin Scorsese: A Journey, 1991
4 — Scorsese to Richard Schickel in his book Conversations with Scorsese, 2011
5 — Scorsese during a press conference for Taxi Driver, 1976
6 — Scorsese to the Los Angeles Times, 1983
7 — Scorsese to Richard Schickel in his book Conversations with Scorsese, 2011
8 — Scorsese in the press notes for Casino, 1995
