Taxi Driver interprets Shakespeare

Rating: 10/10 (5 March 2006)

THE SICILIAN CONNECTION Taxi Driver and The Winter's Tale What follows comes from work in progress on how Scorsese's movie may cast light on Shakespeare's play.
At the end of Pasolini's film of dipus Rex the blind king walks out of his world into the streets of modern Bologna. If Leontes, King of the Sicilians,went missing, where would he reappear? The hero of Taxi Driver turns up in modern New York of 1976, as if out of nowhere, or maybe one of his own bad daydreams. He's looking for a job to suit an insomniac. Like the Great Gatsby, Travis Bickle seems to be be born of his vision of himself, and this casts doubt on the substance of both self and vision.
He gets a job driving a yellow cab. Then he falls for Betsy, a girl with class Then he goes out of his way to foul up by taking her to a blue movie. There, his attention is soon distracted from the real woman at his side . Betsy checks out in disgust. Later he calls her on the phone, but you can't tell whether there's really anyone at the other end. So his thoughts turn to 'saving' Iris, a twelve-year-old hooker who has also come out of nowhere, into his cab. Taxi Driver is set firmly in the eponymous mean streets of an earlier Scorsese movie, and before that, of The Godfather, the daddy of them all. Travis now has to kill some bad people, one of them Iris= trick, a Mafioso. Travis has already killed her pimp Matthew, or Sport - almost twice. In the street outside the tenement where she trades he shoots Sport in the belly before going inside to continue his righteous massacre. The pimp reappears in the hallway, alive and armed, and has to be gunned down again, as if to get it right. But Iris is saved, Betsy forgives Travis now that he=s a hero, and Travis survives. Or does he? Do they? Does any of it happen at all? Can such questions be asked of a work of fiction? In Taxi Driver the narrative viewpoint seems clear. The film opens and closes on Travis' brooding eyes. Intermittently he gives a running commentary in voice-over, which turns out to be the journal he keeps. Sometimes the screen shows things that appear to happen independently, without his knowledge. So these events seem to be 'real'. But they decrease in credibility. Travis sits in his taxi outside a building inside which a tender scene takes place between Iris and her pimp. And now Sport says: Come to me, baby, and he puts a record on the phonograph. He tells her: I'd like every man in the world to know what it is to be loved by you. Inadvertent humour can't get much bleaker. But whose joke is this? Travis buys a suitcaseful of artillery. He practises quick draws in the mirror. Sometimes he packs two guns, but he (as distinct from his reflection) is right-handed. Especially with his star weapon, a forty four magnum. In due course he uses it to shoot off some of the fingers of Iris' 'timekeeper'. Strangely, this has earlier and out of his hearing been described as a typical Mob punishment. Then, in reverse shot, we see the gun in Travis' left hand. He goes on to finish killing the pimp, the mobster and the timekeeper. And then himself - a death he has clearly intended or expected - except that now he=s all out of bullets. So he pretends. He points a finger at his own temple. It lets fall a single drop of blood. He gives a death=s head grin. His thumb works an invisible hammer. Bang, I'm dead.
Afterwards he gets police commendations, glowing press reports and grateful notes in what looks like his own handwriting. He loses the scar where a bullet creased him in the neck He grows back his hair, which he'd shaved to a Mohican crest. Finally exalted to a realm above human love and desire, Travis can patronise Betsy, who wistfully seeks him out, but can't get to him now. He's gone through the looking glass. Taxi Driver is perhaps the most chilling representation of psychic death ever to reach a universal audience. The question is: what sort of representation? In a Steinberg cartoon the subject, pencil in hand,is shown completing the picture which is himself. That picture is another of those 'impossible' objects which is possible because there it is. The work of art has become its own creator.
It's been said that a work of art goes about the world independently of its author's power to intend about it. In Taxi Driver it's as if the film itself has decided to dispense with the conventional markers that distinguish between what's 'really' happening and what's inside the hero's mind.
Such a work enacts the idea that all events, including events 'in the real world' are events in the consciousness; may only be events in the consciousness. We create the world, as they say, from moment to moment as we go along. If our dreams are allegories of the way we experience this world, then by extension our waking perception may be the same; except that it has to adjust itself - from moment to moment as we go along.
The movie screen, arena of the 'dream factory', is the obvious place to see this happening. So is the theatre. Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale is like a still, a tableau which suddenly comes to life out of a sort of Arcadian trance as in the Book of Genesis; and as in Genesis, with the touch of the serpent's tooth. It shows a man in torment because he's recreated the world as the hell in his own mind. A hell which he has to exorcise in blood. To understand Shakespeare's great work you could do worse than read it through the eyes of Taxi Driver.