The socio-cultural ingredients of the postmodern theory and its hypothesis to establish the fundamental structure for creating a cinematic language draw the attention of the intellectuals and the critics all over the world to postmodern American directors' radical interpretations of the contemporary culture.
A privileged position in American cultural history during the postmodernist era refers to a fascinating alienated individualism with the growth of the urban societies. Different forms of social discourses such as the gender politics, sexual orientation arguments and racial issues of ethnicity are increasingly emerged with the analysis of the postmodernism. Indeed, postmodernism occurred as the radical postwar movement against the modernist ideals firstly in Europe among the intellectuals, journalists and critics. The theorization of the conventional forms in film aesthetic had often been debated in order to capture and grasp a new ontological approach to represent postwar consumer societies which were going to be dependent on the growth of the capitalistic corporate values in terms of financial investments and economical development in the wake of the decline of modernism. The theoretical frameworks and aesthetic concern for founding a new school of film artistic practices among European intellectuals reached to America very lately almost at the end of 1970s and had a profound influence on the new generation of American directors. These directors were desperately and bewilderingly seeking for the initiative ways and the methods to demonstrate their new system of thought and to visualize and express cinematically their new enlightenment age of exploring the outcome of postmodernism in the American societies. A group of these young and ambitious directors who moved to Hollywood in California rejected the cultural realities of the East coast, patriotically defended the modernist American ideals. For them, the capitalistic investments in the marketing of the film industry was very important. These directors such as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg develop the genre of science fiction and combine its thematic structure with mythological and epical vision. On the other hand, the East coast directors explored their potential of creativity by identifying the growing importance of the postmodern problematic issues in their films. They were considering the establishment of the new artistic approaches for the characterized contemporary era. Some of these directors such as Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese expressed nostalgia to New York city where they were born or grown. They paid homages to the European and the American classical films and the older directors.
Scorsese's Taxi driver (1976) was narrated through the point of view of its protagonist in New York City, Travis(Robert De Niro), whose object of study is the multicultural experience of post-modernity . His obsession toward reshaping the social experience suggests a perspective of his racial response to the different social identities in the contemporary era. The violence which is found so disturbing in the film targets the American traditional working class for the replacement of old models of the optimistic and innocent idealism after Second World War with the new age of mass movements toward sexual, ethnical, ideological and racial differences and the politics. But the narrative of the film still epitomizes on the omnipresence of the detachment with the exterior realities through the protagonist's paranoia and schizophrenic impulses to the actuality of the events and the function of the multicultural vehicle. For Travis, the hyperreality of this new cultural condition within and reality beyond itself is provocative and particularly associated with his purposeful isolation. He tries to prove his superiority of his radicalism in confronting with " the other form of realities". His alienation in the city is decentralized and fragmented to the complex structure of the urban landscapes. Of course, this alienation can be interpreted based Upon Baudrillardian vision of a media world of simulations and signs through the windows and windshields of his cab which looks like a big screen of cinema for him. His racism is most overtly there which defines his characterization and his expressionistic way of response to the racial problematic issues in the multicultural postmodern society such as New York.
It is therefore appropriate to look at the context of the film in which some of the postmodern ideas emerge as the display of the pluralism and functionalism of the society. The sense of being an outsider and marginalized in a postmodern society which has not associated with the old definition of the modern life describes Travis' strange fascination and determinism with his loneliness and solitude. His wandering through the streets of New York which is aimless and disoriented portrays the distorted figure of his psychosexual fear of the breaking boundaries and characterizes the ironic and ambiguous representation of the modernistic utopian societies at the end of 1970s. The postmodern use of parody and simulation are identified in the film by reworking and rearrangement on John Ford's racist and misogynist character of The Searcher(1956), Ethan Edwards (John Ford), whose psychological fantasies of rape and revenge can be read as Travis's paranoia and Pathological condition as Jaubin states in her writing: "The difference between Schrader's and Scorsese's vision of Travis Bickle is encapsulated in their perspectives on John Ford's The Searchers(1956), the picture that is the ur-text for Taxi Driver, as well as for many other 70's films" (Jaubin, 19). The first person construction of the narrative describes the illusion of external reality which exists inside of Travis' madness and his apocalyptic mission to change the postmodern reality in his prophetic Christian ideological vision. The idea of progress which can be considered as the modernist ideological achievement is now connected and challenged with Travis' loss of faith and confidence to new postmodern urban society.
The postmodern inter-textual influences in the film is pumping of Hitchcockian's horror, violence and brutality with paying homage to his films, Psycho (1960) and The Wrong Man (1956). The relationship between the film and the idealistic ideological past of Hollywood is not only radical and revolutionary to disobey the conventional rules but also it pays the homage to the nostalgic creative period of the collapsed studio system as Jaubin states in her writing: "Taxi Driver honors many fathers, from John Ford to Alfred Hitchcock, but it does not obey the rules" (Jaubin, 24). Scorsese's self-conscious homages to the films made in the past can be increasingly considered in the postmodern culture as a kind of spatialized temporality of the pre-existing representations and styles, a simulation and simulacrum of the real past which does not exist any more. The self reflexive contextualized elements of the film text according to postmodern definition can be followed through Scorsese and his screenplay writer Schrader's cooperated experience of the same pressure, rage and anxiety that they feel to the entire chaotic situation of the corrupted and collapsed society. Their self-identification with Travis obviously refers to the encapsulated Christian elements of the religious education which is folded in the unconscious of the director and the screenplay writer of the film as Jaubin observes precisely:
"Scorsese and Schrader were both raised as a Calvinist in the Midwest. They agreed on the Christian allegorical aspect of the Travis' story, but Scorsese sees him as the "commando" for Christ who goes too far, he has to kill you to save your life, while Schrader focuses on the problem of the determinism and chance" (Jaubin, 19).
As it was mentioned before, for Scorsese, the film is a kind of nostalgic reactionary response to the old urban landscape of New York city which is going to disappear and vanish under the beginning of the economic boom of the corporations at the end of the 1970s. His self-identification with Travis is the essence of his self-perpetuating way of dealing with his emotions as Keyser states in his book:" Scorsese viewed Travis, he told interviewers as 'a sympathetic figure' with real affinities to himself: 'There is certainly a lot of Travis in me, some of the same emotions. There are deep, dark things in all of us and they come out in different ways" (Keyser, 74).
Travis' murderous desire which results in real depth at the final sequence of the film explains his obsession and paranoid vision with the "representation of the postmodern differences" that threatens the utopian structure of the masculine wholeness in modernism: The hallucination that Travis enacts in that scene-and which results in real death-is the hallucination of masculinity. It's search for that image of ideal masculine wholeness that subtends the entire history of the movie" (Jaubin, 21). One of the important postmodern messages of the film is Travis' masculine anxiety to the decline of the patriarchal authority. The ideological representation of the film and its contradictions in terms of defining the solidified and integrated school of formalism and storytelling regardless of artistic and cultural discourse can be interpreted as the deconstruction of the modern sense of life in the decentered cultures. Indeed, the truth bout the film's quality of representation of the images which put is outside the mainstream of Hollywood production constructs the new artistic and cultural discourses to challenge the complexity of the identity in the postmodern era. The "others" who are blacks, pimps, women as a 'wives or prostitutes' and gays who seem to be marginalized in the ironical juxtapositions of the cultural forms, the ideas and the images of the patriarchal societies become to be significant elements of hegemonic racial hybridity for Travis. From first look at Travis, it is clear that he is positioned in the dominant racial order of the narrative to criticize the other characters. His expressionistic subjective gaze which governs his paranoid consciousness is the only frame of reference to echo the problematization of representation and to interrogate his carnivalesque objects from the perspective of class, gender, sexual orientation and identity.
The neon strip of Broadway between Time Square and Columbus Circle in New York City with pluralist display of multicultural identity through Travis' cab windows in the world dominated with image and sign creates the simulation or hyperreality of diversity which is not ideologically uniform such as the scenes in which he follows Iris (Jodie Foster), young prostitutes, through New York streets as his obsessional object. The tendency towards performance and the lack of grand narrative are the others postmodern features of the film. The acting for Scorsese is everything. Deniro's Choreographed performance displays his skills and familiarity with the acting styles in Actor's Studio, and his inspiration of Marlon Brando and James Dean testifies to the intrinsic and authentic performative values of his self-identification with the role. Deniro's reveals on numerous occasions Travis' incapacity to adapt with the external reality and his psychotic breakdown which is the effect of the narcissistic character disorder. Deniro's methodological style of film acting brings Travis's paranoid schizophrenic trauma on the surface, and it simultaneously helps the spectator to concern on Travis' wandering to search for his own identity through different costumes, make ups, and performances. Travis' voice over which is reading his underground diary is a kind of homage to Dostayevsky's underground notes creates a postmodern multiple narrative in which the four different almost episodic narratives are eventually interwoven to gether floating in his stream of consciousness.: Travis's wandering and loneliness through the streets of New York City, his fascination with the blondes and specifically his girlfriend Betsy(Cybill Shepherd), his obsession to protect Iris and his final revenge against the other identities existed in the multicultural diversity. The lack of closure at the end of the film that abondons Travis in the middle of the street driving to nowhere with the close up of his paranoid eyes and his gaze to the night lights of New York City define the critical and satirical analogy for the determining code of postmodern in the evaluation of contemporary cultural contextualization. The spectator's mind is now prepared to receive the hermeneutic interpretation of the film which is one of the most important ingredients of the postmodern structure in the analyzing of the text. The end of the film which keeps the narrative open is the appropriate visual motif of Baudrillard' simulacra: the copy without the original. The neon and the lights of the streets in New York city through Travis' point of view is the simulation of the external reality that can be reflected to his eyes from the windows of his cab, and those windows are the perfect metaphor for the screen of the cinema.
Travis's death-obsession towards the minority subcultures such as punks, lesbians, gays and drug addicts can be immediately recognized and understood as the motivated psychological response to the other social and sexual identities. His sado-masochistic relationship with Betsy, Iris and society through the grotesque inflation of abusers and victims drives him to the tyrannical brutality that penetrates through the image of reality, and his murderous desire to demolish that image can not be efficient to destroy the essence of that reality. At the end of the film that reality still lingers on every corner of the streets of New York city. Indeed, his rage is against the virtual image which is constructed inside of his mind through the labyrinth of his paranoid exploration of the postmodern urban landscape, his cinematic voyeurism and sadism inverts the social type and the role of the men in the ultimate definition of gender politics.
The lack of phallic power and the obsession with masculinity enforce Travis to destroy the image of reality by using the violence. The ostensibly private world of the darkness and night scenes inspired by the film noir constructs the horrific atmosphere for Travis' castration anxiety. His desire to own a gun in order to alleviate his threat of castration anxiety is explained by feminist critics in psychoanalytical terms in the ultimate result of his voyeurism and fetishistic desire as Keyser states in his book: " The nexus in Taxi Driver between Travis' repressed sexuality and cathartic violence provides the dramatic energy; each failed romance loads another cartridge into Travis' weapons" (Keyser, 73). The hypnotic effect of his windshield on his eyes provides a met-cinematic distanciation for him. His claustrophobic isolation in the car creates an entrapment and prison for his masculinity and desire to having physical relationship with the female body. The postmodern concept of gender policy serves to destroy the authenticity of the male gaze and power on the objectified representation of female body and identity as the fetishized object. The actual and satirical analysis of sado-masochism and voyeurism in the film raise consciousness about working of patriarchal representation of the images in the process of questioning the fear of sexuality as somehow compromising feminine virtue. Travis's fear to touch Betsy as the object of desire prepares a context for the film in which her appearance as an angel pushes him to find obsession with the archetypal symbolic male power, in this case the physical relationship. The avoidance of possessing her drives him to violence as Keyser indicates in his book: "Travis cannot understand Betsy, cannot enter her world. So like Frankenstein's monster, he tries to destroy what he can not embrace" (Keyser, 75). The solidarity of the masculine virtue in the dominant film genres such as western and gangster film is principally the problematic discourse of Scorsese's films and his homage to classic Hollywood films. In fact, the male character's powerlessness in terms of femme fatal of film noir draws the attention to the mystery and instability of sexual identity in Scorsese's films. In both films, Taxi Driver and The Searchers, the central theme is the irritated masculinity which is insulted and disrespected by the representation of femme fatale as Stern states in his book: "Central to both films is an impulse to rescue-to "return home'-a woman who does not want to be saved" (Stern, 33). In fact Travis tries to save his last image of femininity folded in the patriarchal structure of American societies.
The concept of "Body' and bodily obsession in the film is the reminiscent of the sickness which is everywhere in Travis' postmodern society. The body for Scorsese's characters is the religious and ritual device to organize a disciplinary regime for cleaning the conscious of the anti-patriarchal external reality of postmodernism as Stern continues in his book: "Taxi Driver doesn't assert that the body is a machine )or conversely, that the machine is a body) but rather it unleashes the metaphor of the body as vehicle for the acting out of prohibited impulses, and explores the psychic and somatic mutations which this entails" (Stern, 53). The shift of power of domination of men over women which is characteristic and authentic element of postwar and postmodern eras can be recognized as the horrible self-destructed desire of the male when he tries to make a weapon of his body in order to rape and destroy the new identity of femininity in the female body.
Jaubin, Amy. Taxi Driver, London: BFI.2000.
Keyser, Lee. Martin Scorsese New York: Twayne Publisher, 1992.
Stern, Lesley. The Scorsese Connection London: BFI, 1995.
By: Morad Sadeghi
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