YOU SHOULD SEE THAT: Eternal spectatorship in “Taxi Driver”

Taxi Driver: A Look at NYC's Inglorious Past | Den of Geek

Much can be — and has been — written about “Taxi Driver,” a film not much interested in the particular ins and outs of taxi driving. No, for Scorsese, the checkered cab, when not idling on street corners spying very shamelessly on Cybil Shepherd-as-political-canvasser, is somewhat more akin to a mobile movie theater. The windshield a projector screen, flashing discordant street scenes set to the soundtrack of a singular, mewling saxophone. New York City, laid bare in all its foul glory, an “open sewer … full of filth and scum.

Best Taxi Driver GIFs | Gfycat

Slouched in his seat, passive as they come, Travis Bickle says this of his cab: “Each night, when I return the cab to the garage, I have to clean the cum off the back seat. Some nights, I clean off the blood” — and it is as though the taxi is interchangeable with the theater, indistinguishable in their viscerality, in their voyeurism. Bickle goes to the theater and watches a porno just as just as he parks outside Palantine’s campaign headquarters and watches Cybil Shepherd’s Betsy just as he sits in the front of his cab and watches the silhouette of his passenger’s wife flit across an impossibly greenish window.

In an unblushing cameo, Scorsese apprises his star of the fact that in just a moment, he’s going to take a gun up there and kill his wife. “You should see what a 44 Magnum can do to a woman’s pussy,” he says, and then repeats it, a bit neurotically. He repeats it again: “you should see,” “you should see,” “you should see that.”

Martin Scorsese's best movie cameos cover a wide range of tones - Polygon

You should see, instructs the director of his star, and under his enunciative hand it follows that we, too, should see. We must bear witness as, following this scene, our protagonist appears to undergo some sort of transformation, purchasing several briefcases worth of weaponry and preparing his mind and body, in a somewhat farcical montage sequence, to kill — a transformation that will eventually culminate in Bickle’s rather ill-advised haircut, which itself calls to mind the film Scorsese will make nine years from now, “After Hours,” with the mohawk an emblem of a new subculture — punk — and so perhaps in this way Bickle’s cosmetic conversion signals a slippage of sorts, the 80’s subsuming the 70’s whole.

Bickle’s desire to kill, or at least to fire off one of his many guns-as-phalli, seems mimetic at best. The director, as Passenger Watching Silhouette, has outlined a clear shooting plan — both the film’s and his own. Bickle — in porno cinemas, on street corners — has spent so long watching, but now he has finally figured out how to become the watched — the one who is photographed, written about, clipped out of newspapers and taped up on walls.

Cinematic Artistry on Twitter: "Taxi Driver (1976) Director: Martin  Scorsese Cinematographer: Michael Chapman https://t.co/GTg5YhSFDq" / Twitter

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