Watching Scorsese’s 1976 masterpiece, Taxi Driver, it was startling to see how relevant it would be even today. Apparently even more today, because, thanks to social media, a lot of mind-speaks are out in the open for everyone to witness, than have ever been in history.
Taxi Driver, starring Robert DeNiro as the lead, takes the viewer through the psychological journey of a young and lonely taxi driver, Travis. As an individual who is too perceptive for his own good, Travis minutely notices all the actual and metaphorical dirt in the streets of New York during his taxi rides at night, leading him with a desperate desire to clean the city of its own mess.
Living in his own mind, he makes misguided attempts at doing something, only to finally get some satisfaction by making a 12 year old prostitute get off the streets. That he becomes something of a hero is only incidental, given a potentially botched earlier attempt at assassinating a presidential candidate without much insight into what he even stands for. Besides satisfaction, there is also a mild re-conciliation with a girl he fancies and who does not respond to him after a first date.
At a time when social media is rife with ‘trolls’, who are essentially people with misdirected anger which gets vented on people without warning and often without much thought, Taxi Driver is an insightful watch. This is particularly so, in so far as women get targeted. There is a scene in the film when Travis’s inner dialogue is audible about the girl, Betsy, he likes.
It so happens that he takes her out to watch a film, which turns out to be a pornographic one. She gets up and leaves the movie theatre midway, and does not engage with him thereafter. Travis can't figure out what happened and why it happened. Clearly, the guy has no clue about the rules of a date, even though he likes the girl and feels quite genuinely about her. Unable to understand what just happened or find a finer way to communicate, when she suddenly takes off, in his mind, he sees all such women as cold, which adds to his build-up of rage. (“I realize now how much she's just like the others. Cold and distant. And many people are like that. Women for sure. They're like a union.”)
Even though it might not be the intention of the film, it does give a perspective on how misogyny starts to take shape in some men’s minds, especially if they have limited influences otherwise. It is hardly difficult to see the character of Travis as an internet troll mouthing arbitrary abuses to people who represent a certain kind of individual or group of people, irrespective of what the person actually represents.
Nevertheless, even though he is a romantic hazard for one woman, Travis turns out to be the saviour for another, who among other things, has very mistaken notions of women’s lib. Playing a 12 year old prostitute who has run away from home, Jodie Foster’s Iris, is a rebel who thinks her parents hate her. When Travis decides to talk her out of it, in the process asking her what she is doing being a hooker in the first place, she tells him: “Didn’t you hear of women’s lib?”. Even though it’s a child talking, it is an interesting reference to arbitrary sense of personal power derived from little understood social constructs.
Apparently Scorsese has said in an interview that Taxi Driver is his kind of feminist film, in referring to Travis’s oscillation between women who are viewed as either goddesses or as whores, with little in between. Ultimately, though the feminist angle is not the main theme of Taxi Driver, it does however, provide for a fascinating perspective.
Living in his own mind, he makes misguided attempts at doing something, only to finally get some satisfaction by making a 12 year old prostitute get off the streets. That he becomes something of a hero is only incidental, given a potentially botched earlier attempt at assassinating a presidential candidate without much insight into what he even stands for. Besides satisfaction, there is also a mild re-conciliation with a girl he fancies and who does not respond to him after a first date.
At a time when social media is rife with ‘trolls’, who are essentially people with misdirected anger which gets vented on people without warning and often without much thought, Taxi Driver is an insightful watch. This is particularly so, in so far as women get targeted. There is a scene in the film when Travis’s inner dialogue is audible about the girl, Betsy, he likes.
It so happens that he takes her out to watch a film, which turns out to be a pornographic one. She gets up and leaves the movie theatre midway, and does not engage with him thereafter. Travis can't figure out what happened and why it happened. Clearly, the guy has no clue about the rules of a date, even though he likes the girl and feels quite genuinely about her. Unable to understand what just happened or find a finer way to communicate, when she suddenly takes off, in his mind, he sees all such women as cold, which adds to his build-up of rage. (“I realize now how much she's just like the others. Cold and distant. And many people are like that. Women for sure. They're like a union.”)
Even though it might not be the intention of the film, it does give a perspective on how misogyny starts to take shape in some men’s minds, especially if they have limited influences otherwise. It is hardly difficult to see the character of Travis as an internet troll mouthing arbitrary abuses to people who represent a certain kind of individual or group of people, irrespective of what the person actually represents.
Nevertheless, even though he is a romantic hazard for one woman, Travis turns out to be the saviour for another, who among other things, has very mistaken notions of women’s lib. Playing a 12 year old prostitute who has run away from home, Jodie Foster’s Iris, is a rebel who thinks her parents hate her. When Travis decides to talk her out of it, in the process asking her what she is doing being a hooker in the first place, she tells him: “Didn’t you hear of women’s lib?”. Even though it’s a child talking, it is an interesting reference to arbitrary sense of personal power derived from little understood social constructs.
Apparently Scorsese has said in an interview that Taxi Driver is his kind of feminist film, in referring to Travis’s oscillation between women who are viewed as either goddesses or as whores, with little in between. Ultimately, though the feminist angle is not the main theme of Taxi Driver, it does however, provide for a fascinating perspective.
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