07 · 14 · 26

TAXI DRIVER by Martin Scorsese, and male fantasies

Alonso Díaz de la Vega

The fact that Donald Trump is surrounded by men associated with the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC)—the most famous mixed martial arts tournament since the nineties—is not a coincidence. Over the past decade, the UFC has ceased to be a sporting event and has become a shrine to the type of masculinity that is cornered nowadays by this postmodern world. Living in a time lacking in metanarratives and laws—where divinities, capital, and patriarchy have been brought into question by ideas once considered minoritarian—, masculinity has turned into an island where only its most aggressive members find refuge. Historically, being a man was defined by brutality, authority, and silence. However, today, when vulnerability comes into play (our hero that was once John Wayne; now it is Batman or James Bond, who suffers from post-traumatic stress, and who falls in love and starts a family, respectively), the idea of “might makes right” is the last resort of the defeated male nation that yearns to reclaim its power.

The fame and political ambitions of Irish UFC fighter, Conor McGregor—a person who tried to run for president of Ireland and visited the White House at Donald Trump’s invitation with the aim of luring the almost exiled Irish right wing—as well as Trump’s closeness to Andrew Tate—a professional kickboxer, one of the leading promoters of the manosphere, accused of trafficking in women—tell us that the far right, originated from male fantasies of reconquest, is attempting to find its way toward purification and the eradication of a vulnerability that is seen as “girls’ stuff”. Needless to say, this is far from the first time.

Based on a text that analyzes muskism—the idolization of the richest man on Earth—co-written by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff for The New York Review of Books, the writer Mark O’Connell recalls how the sociologist Klaus Theweleit described the obsession the radical German reactionaries had with racial hygiene in the Weimar era: “Theweleit’s forensic analysis of the cultural production made by former members of Freikorps [paramilitary groups that supported right-wing political causes] reveals an obsession with transmission and contamination by the communism that threatens to drown their motherland in its feminized ‘red tide’”. This phobia ends up being embodied years later by Adolf Hitler, and O’Conell brings this up because muskism is a masculine phenomenon that is indeed attracting fascists, terrified of whatever seems different to them: women, LGBTQ people, and ideologies that privilege community over competitive individuality.

Considering all this, there is no film more contemporary than Taxi Driver (1976), by Martin Scorsese, whose fiftieth anniversary falls on the 250th anniversary of the United States of America. In the movie, we see Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), a taxi driver who has just come back from the Vietnam War and the Marine Corps, observes the impurity of New York City as a disappointed prophet. He writes in his journal: “Thank God for the rain, which has helped wash away the garbage and the trash off the sidewalks.” However, as the story unfolds, we realize that by “trash” Travis meant all the sex workers, African Americans, and small-time dealers: human trash from capitalism that escapes the downpours.

If his rhetoric seems moralistic, it is because Travis mirrors Jeremiah, the prophet of destruction who evangelized through intolerance and the promise of divine punishment. His idea of God the Father resembles that of those patriarchs who raised their children with a belt in hand. Believe it or not, Scorsese is no disciple of Travis as a large part of the audience thinks. For a catholic filmmaker, the easiest way of evangelizing would be through the action contained within the image, but it turns out that indoctrinatory films rarely make good cinema. Nevertheless, over the course of his career, Scorsese has chosen to moralize without preaching a sermon; his characters tend to perceive themselves as saints and preachers, but the gospels they preach are usually evil—just as Satan sermonized Christ. Consequently, Scorsese begins to question Travis (as he does with many of his other characters) from the character’s perspective: the film shows us how he sees the world so that we can shape our own judgment of his moral legacy.

The clearest resource to let us know what Travis thinks is his constant voice-over, but there are additional visual strategies that allow us to perceive the world exactly as this man, committed to wiping off the dirt, does. If we read his decisions with some irony and distance, we could see a man in the most contemporary sense of the genre: alienated, resentful, and violent. Two sequences in particular unveil the kind people our protagonist hates.

In the first one, Travis stares at an African American customer at a restaurant.

It may seem that what bothers the preacher-taxi driver is the presence of an apparent pimp (it is intuitive because of the way he dresses), but Travis's annoyance during an encounter with a harmless group of African American boys makes it clear that his previous stare was completely racist.

These shot/reverse shots and the subsequent appearance of a white criminal with whom Travis interacts unhesitatingly show us a tension between the perspective obsessed with supposed purification and Scorsese’s, which calls for skepticism toward a contradictory man.

It will be a white character who offers Travis guns, drugs, and even a stolen car; and, unexpectedly, another character—played by Martin Scorsese himself—tells Travis his plans of murdering his wife with a .44 Magnum. Travis then buys this gun—even though the dealer warns him that the gun is hardly practical–and, with this gesture, shows his sense of identification with the misogynist. A detailed shot shows us how Travis fetishizes the gun muzzle, while another shot—based on Spellbound (1945), by Alfred Hitchcock—exposes how he fantasizes about shooting a couple of women.

As the story unfolds, the .44 Magnum becomes a phallic symbol of power and derangement. Travis toys with the gun in front of the mirror and watches TV with the gun in his hand. 

It must be stressed: Why does the gun mentioned by a potential perpetrator of femicide become his favorite object? Perhaps because he is planning to use it, along with the rest of his arsenal, to punish a woman.

At the beginning of Taxi Driver, Travis observes Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), who is part of Charles Palantine’s (Leonard Harris) presidential campaign—a candidate with a social-democratic rhetoric. Travis describes Betsy in a virginal and immaculate terms: “She appeared like an angel out of this filthy mess [...] They cannot touch her.” Scorsese makes a cross-fade between the heavenly image of Betsy and Travis’s childish handwriting, as if contrasting male fantasies with their irrefutable clumsiness.

When he finally succeeds in asking her out, he starts acting proprietorial toward her: he nearly forbids her to speak to a co-worker, and later humiliates her by taking her to a porn theater. From that moment, the idea of doing “something” begins to grow in his mind, and it is no coincidence that he becomes determined to kill Palantine, the man Betsy speaks of with admiration. There is a scene, after the estrangement that Betsy creates between them, in which Travis breaks into her campaign office and yells at her “You're in a hell and you're gonna die in a hell like the rest of them. You’re like the rest of them.” This quick line resembles the language used in the manosphere, according to which women do not know how to appreciate good men and, for that reason, women should be subjugated through manipulation and coercion.

In order to fulfill his mission of punishment, Travis devotes himself to rebuilding his strength. However, we see his process through images that evoke not health, but decay: he’s alone, in his messy and filthy apartment, just using improvised tools to exercise while listening to Bernard Herrmann’s music whose tone describes something ominous. For a brief moment, Scorsese’s moral questioning takes over the montage and exposes a deranged fanatic. The question is: How far are these shots from our culture obsessed with physical perfection, driven to display its power inside a cage?

Travis Bickle’s male fantasy finally unveils itself with greater force at the end of the film—which has been discussed since its premiere, half a century ago. Travis fails in his attempt to kill Palantine and ends up choosing to rescue Iris (Jodie Foster)—a 12-year-old girl that does not want to be saved—from sex work. Scorsese exploits the situation to outline a complex moral dilemma: Travis begins with his obsession with virginity —a purity he wishes to seize from Betsy and, perhaps, from Iris as well. Iris, however, has the right to her own will, yet her will is manipulated by Sport (Harvey Keitel), an older and experienced pimp. Scorsese refuses to resolve the problem and carries the ambiguity into the final scene.

This way, Travis plans a suicidal mission in which he intends to massacre Iris’s sex traffickers, but, against all odds, he survives and is celebrated by American society as a hero. Paul Schrader—the screenwriter of Taxi Driver and director of other remarkable reinterpretations of the theme, such as Hardcore (1979) and First Reformed (2017)—has said that he started from a certain sense of verisimilitude, since he saw figures similar to Travis on magazine covers. On one hand, his and Scorsese’s conclusion directly attack a society where the spectacle of violence prevails over legal and ethical concerns; but, on the other hand, it marks the culmination of the male fantasy, briefly judged in a moment of rupture. 

Like in a dream, Betsy gets into Travis’s cab and looks at him through the rearview mirror. Her expression is inscrutable. It seems to contain an emotion, yet we cannot tell whether she feels fear, remorse, or desire. But we must be aware of seeing her through the eyes of the delirious Travis.

As he drops her off at the entrance to her building, Travis notices something in the rearview mirror. Here, a reversed sound and a rapid montage accentuate the brief act. 

What did Travis see in the reflection of the mirror, and why does it perturb him so much? At this point, it doesn’t matter whether this ending is credible or not; what matters is what it tells us about male fantasies: even when fulfilled, they do not mark the end of obsession and aggression. Travis will murder again. And this endless ambition defines the avenging masculinity of our time: men, as a political and reactionary concept, not only yearn to reclaim “their” empire but to expand it once they own it. Travis is a descendant of the former Freikorps militant described by Theweleit, yet he is also a precursor of the males who now move from the fighting cage to the screens, and from there to the White House yard. If life is a dream—as the poet says—today we live in a world imagined by Travis Bickle.

Translated by Michelle Olvera