Blockage, Denial
Listen to this fascinating discussion of the impossible-to-swallow, fantasy-projection finale of Martin Scorsese‘s just-restored Taxi Driver by Slate‘s Dana Stevens and John Swansburg. It feels like a two-character play about a gap in comprehension among two extremely bright observers, and how they can absorb every detail of a classic film and still miss something really obvious.
Stevens and Swansburg list all the incredulous stuff during the film’s final minutes — tabloid news stories describing Robert De Niro‘s East Village whorehouse shootout as “heroic,” Jodie Foster‘s parents writing to thank him for saving their daughter, Cybil Shepard getting into his cab out at the very end and giving him admiring looks, De Niro’s Mohawk haircut completely grown out two or three months later — and they still can’t accept and in fact half-dismiss that the dreamlike coda is fantasy. Why? Because there hasn’t been any “precedent” or “cue” for a fantasy sequence. Swansburg actually calls it “a little bit of a false note.”
Don’t forget how horribly shot-up De Niro was at the end of the big shootout. But two months later he’s back on the job looking fit and healthy, as if nothing ever happened to him. It’s clearly a fantasy sequence.
Yeah, all fantasy. Who in hell can watch this without knowing that, since Travis Bickle is clearly a complete nut job? Similarly, who in hell can really (I mean REALLY) watch Shutter Island and not realize that Teddy Daniels is, likewise, a nut job, just about from the very beginning. And yet several generally clever critics did just that, thinking the film was nothing more than some kind of hack thing in which it’s all revealed to be a big dream at the end. Especially when all the clues are present throughout, indicating something which is taking place on simultaneous levels. Fascinating how folks can be flummoxed by storytelling that doesn’t quite fit inside the usual box of tricks — they want it to fit that box so badly that they just can’t accept it.
Austin111 wrote:
“Fascinating how folks can be flummoxed by storytelling that doesn’t quite fit inside the usual box of tricks — they want it to fit that box so badly that they just can’t accept it.”
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Never thought it was fantasy and still don’t. I get the arguments why it “is” on an intellectual level, but to me it plays as a cultural commentary instead.
You can argue this as fantasy until you are blue in the face but when I watch it I see it as literal and that’s all there is to it. I’m not sure what that means anyway even if its intended as fantasy – the last few minutes fail then? Nah…..”I” am failing then? Nah…….
Haven’t Scorsese and Schraeder nixed the fantasy scenario when asked about it?
Never trust the artist — trust the tale. Marty and Paul made the film, but it’s no longer theirs, in a sense. It’s ours, it’s everyone’s…and if we say the ending is fantasy (which seems dead obvious to me), then that’s that.
But “we” don’t say the ending is fantasy, if you’re talking about a truly collective opinion. I’ve never thought that for a second. It’s not “obvious” at all because it’s not there.
Let’s assume for a second that Scorsese and Schrader did mean it as fantasy. If they did, which I don’t believe, then they came up with a much duller ending than the one the Slate writers and most of the rest of us mistakenly inferred. Which of these two endings is most interesting: (a) “Society ironically mistakes mental illness for heroism.” (b) “And then he descended even further into a mad dream world.” Even you, Jeff, would have to agree that option A is more intriguing and haunting and less cliche than meaning B. No?
Not only is Chris right, but I also feel like people use the fantasy interpretation as a copout, because they know damn well it all adds up too perfectly.
“the incredulous stuff during the film’s final minutes — tabloid news stories describing Robert De Niro’s East Village whorehouse shootout as “heroic,” Jodie Foster’s parents writing to thank him for saving their daughter, Cybil Shepard getting into his cab out at the very end and giving him admiring looks,”
Considering how RW commentators continue to apologize for tea-bag terrorists, it’s not that absurd nowadays.
Taxi Driver has so many surreal touches that I can’t say with any conviction that the final blood bath is real or fantasy. I can accept either position. Definately need to revisit it and Scorsese’s other early films.
This is like the people who insist that Tony Soprano was wacked at the end… or that he wasn’t.
The answer is both. It’s kind of like Dirty Harry, our hero is the dirty guy who knows it’s all dirty. We’re with him.
Except our dirty guy isn’t just cynical, he’s nuts. He’s Lee Harvey Oswald. So apparently we’re “with” a fucking nutcase. If we agree with the apparent ending, we’re as crazy as he is. If we don’t, we’re still trapped in it.
Either way, we’re damned. The movie has dropped us off in Hell.
Interesting point about Fedor Ozep’s Karamazov film and its influence on Herrmann, though.
The second these 2 idiot “critics” mentioned that they had forgotten the ending to this film (23 seconds in), I turned it off. Sitting through their insufferable uber-hipster San Francisco mocha swilling voices would have been bad enough had they not prefaced their deep insights with basically admitting they don’t know shit.
Regarding the ending – it’s up to interpretation. End of story.
Deathtongue_groupie says…
Anyone who cracks a smile, snorts, guffaws or chortles when Sport gives his sales talk to Travis should be put in prison.
Yeah, what’s with this “we” stuff?
One is reminded of this piece of dialogue from the film itself: “Let’s not fight. Look. We’ll make it real simple. We don’t pay for the buttons. We throw the buttons away. All right?”
Jeff wants to believe the end is a fantasy, it’s his right. Just as it’s his right to browbeat the Slate pups for not believing it’s a fantasy. Makes no difference to anything, anywhere, any how. What the fuck am I even doing on this thread?
As far as I could ever tell about Taxi Driver, Travis was a nut job, not quite from the beginning, but close. He could easily be seen as an unreliable narrator, ESPECIALLY at the end. It’s called PTSD. But instead of going on and on, it’s easy enough to read some of Scorsese’s own thoughts on the film in Richard Schickel’s book Conversations with Scorsese, if you can get hold of it. It just came out recently.
Never trust the artist — trust the tale. Marty and Paul made the film, but it’s no longer theirs, in a sense. It’s ours, it’s everyone’s…and if we say the ending is fantasy (which seems dead obvious to me), then that’s that.
Right, Jeff, they just wrote the film and made the film, while you… you honk off about films, so of course, your opinion trumps theirs.
If the ending is fantasy, where does the fantasy start and where does it end? If the shootout is fantasy then the reconciliation with Betsy has to be a fantasy too since she refers to hearing about his “heroism”. Then what does the rearview mirror adjustment signify?
This is like the people who insist that Tony Soprano was wacked at the end… or that he wasn’t.
The answer is both. It’s kind of like Dirty Harry, our hero is the dirty guy who knows it’s all dirty. We’re with him.
Except our dirty guy isn’t just cynical, he’s nuts. He’s Lee Harvey Oswald. So apparently we’re “with” a fucking nutcase. If we agree with the apparent ending, we’re as crazy as he is. If we don’t, we’re still trapped in it.
Either way, we’re damned. The movie has dropped us off in Hell.
Interesting point about Fedor Ozep’s Karamazov film and its influence on Herrmann, though.
How about the end of King of Comedy? I always felt that Scorcese is a bit more overt in making clear that the ending is a fantasy. And for me, the fact that he ended this movie, which thematically is quite similar to Taxi Driver, with a clear fantasy (hell, the movie is filled with Pupkin’s fantasies) has for some reason always made me more inclined to assume he was doing the same thing with the ending of Taxi Driver.
It’s clearly fantasy. I mean, how has no one mentioned the fact that he believes he works for the Secret Service? That’s the thing that clues you into the fact that he’s gone off the deep end and is fantasizing about stuff.
Also, regardless of his “heroism”, he murdered 3 people. It would be hard to get a jury to convict him based on the people he killed, but there would still be a trial.
Chris nailed it on the head in comment # 6. It’s absolutely real.
the only fantasy interpretation I’ve read (and which makes sense) is the final ride with Cybill Shepherd.
I also agree with comment #6 – the irony is much more interesting that a nut job about to kill a presidential candidate becomes a hero by going on a killing spree to save a child hooker
I don’t know, I always thought that Taxi Driver had the feel of a sort of lost chapter from Dante’s Inferno.
We begin with that weird, almost impressionistic scene of the lights bouncing off the taxi as it drives through NYC at night. And unless I’m mistaken, after the twin epilogues, we get the same montage again, almost shot for shot.
Now, Paul Schrader was raised a Calvinist, and I feel like that sense of the Elect and backsliding and predestination weighs heavily on his writing.
With all of this i mind, I’ve always felt like Taxi Driver is a story set in hell with Travis Bickle reliving the end of his life over and over on a deteriorating mobius strip where he goes mad a little sooner each time.
I think that the fantasy ending concept stuck because it’s unintentionally visually implied in the film. The film stock change makes the final scenes look different and unreal. And then you have that freeze frame with the camera floating overhead, which is certainly out of step with the gritty realism of the first two/thirds.
However, the cynical irony of a story of a world gone so mad that it holds Travis Bickle up as a hero is far more prescient and in keeping with the message of the film. In the end, you see, everything Travis said was right. I mean, if he really IS the hero, then damn, the world really has gone to shit.
But then wait…didn’t you just spend 10 bucks to see a movie where Travis Bickle was (ostensibly) the hero?
It makes for strong meta commentary.
I liked the audio chat, but how can you have a discussion about Taxi Driver without talking about the phone scene? One of the finest moments in Scorsese’s career, which is to say, one of the finest moments in American cinema, bar none.
The moment when Travis struggles on the phone, trying desperately to keep some form of normalcy and human contact, and it’s so painful that the camera just pans away from him and into the empty hallway. Brilliant.
If the film IS a fantasy, then that is the moment when he truly becomes an unreliable narrator.
The other key moment in the film is when Jodie Foster runs into his cab and then her pimp comes and grabs her, roughly pulling her out of the car, then tosses Bickle a wrinkled and bloody 20 dollar bill, which later shows up as a symbolic reminder of his fall from grace and thus his chance for redemption. Flawless visual storytelling, in my opinion. Says so much without a single word. Recalls Jesus and Judas while also making perfect sense in a directly textual mode. Such a deep metaphor.
My other favorite scene is Scorsese’s monologue, which I once performed as an audition for a role I didn’t get. Late i switched to doing “Wasted Youth” from Bat Out of Hell II.
Then I gave up on acting.
I’m agreeing with Chris Willman and laughing with Glenn Kenny.
I’m also looking back at the 1976 Oscars and perplexed by what a weird year it was. The Hollywood auteurs were getting their asses handed to them by the new breed of blockbuster kids and the “Taxi Driver vs Rocky” showdown was emblematic of that time of dreary defeat for the New Hollywood and also for all Americans who thought it was the perfect opportunity for fearless truthtelling and bracing self-examination and instead got Reagan’s lulling-as-laudanum “Morning in America.”
And Hollywood dutifully followed suit.
Remember that landmark Vanity Fair extolling the virtues of Ron and Nancy on their cover?
WE’VE GOT GLAMOUR BACK, AMERICA!!!
SHUT UP AND CONSUME!!!!
That became the dominant cultural motif of that moment, which begat our National Material Girl, so Go Tell It On The Mountain, that’s how we got so spiritually, ecologically, politically, financially and artistically bereft, adrift and Slip Slidin’ Away.
On another note, there’s a bounty of movies of that pre-Deluge year 1976 that I personally revere and/or admire more than “Taxi Driver.”
That list includes, but isn’t limited to:
Nicolas Roeg’s “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” Ingmar Bergman’s “Face to Face,” Federico Fellini’s “Casanova,” Sidney Lumet’s “Network,” John Schlesinger’s “Marathon Man,” Don Siegel’s “The Shootist,” Roman Polanski’s “The Tenant,” Wim Wenders’ “Kings of the Road,” Richard Lester’s “Robin and Marian” and Paul Mazursky’s “Next Stop, Greenwich Village.
Ah, yes, tell the children.
It was the Apocalypse of the Auteurs and soon the Dark Night of the Accountants would banish all but the brash, pink-cheeked directors of mass entertainments, those purveyors of boffo grosses and sellers of beaucoup boxes of popcorn who came to win the hearts and minds and wallets of The Hollywood We Now Have and whose attention to quadrants, smiles and racing pulses has begat the Bigger and the Decisively More Bloated, and whose newest work of wonder is being debated here at HE as we speak.
I shall not speak its name.
As my foreman at Kaiser Steel Mill once said to me, “And Steve, that’s how I got so goddamned fucked up.”
I think the end of Taxi Driver ascends to the realm of pure cinema, in the sense that the final sequence is simply playing off, a bit cheekily, what came before. There’s no “real” events happening, nor is it all “in his head”… it’s a series of images that only makes sense as part of a movie.
(Er, what? Exactly.)
Considering the sequence after the shootout was added later and never meant to be the ending originally, this conversation is ridiculous. Scorsese added the “hero” stuff later when they told him you can’t have the film end on the bloodbath, but if you watch the film it makes sense to end there, especially with the use of the overhead shot.
Rocky was, and is, a better movie. It has lasted throughout time, and has only grown in reverence amongst moviegoers. Save the whole “the tide was turning” garbage for someone else. This whole revisionist outlook is nonsense.
Plus The Deer Hunter, which is superior to Taxi Driver and touches upon similar themes, ended up winning best picture just 2 years later.
The argument over the ending points out the fundamental flaw of Taxi Driver – Cybill Shepard never would have dated Travis Bickle in the first place. I don’t believe that Cybill Shepard was dating too many psychotic cab drivers in 1975. It’s too big of a gulp to take and completely ruins the suspension of belief. The only way to reconcile that is to theorize that it is all a Bickle fantasy..But then you have the problem pointed out in post #6.
I’m not much of a fan of Taxi Driver.
I agree with comment #24 from cricket and I’ll add my own viewpoint:
The whole movie is fantasy because it is a fictional movie. It is an elaborate mirror of society. And within that fictional narrative, the ending is real.
“if we say the ending is fantasy (which seems dead obvious to me), then that’s that.”
In other words, Cokie’s Law: Once something is “out there” and people believe it’s true, then it’s true–even if it isn’t.
I’ve always likened the end of Taxi Driver to the end of Clockwork Orange. In the end, both Travis and Alex are the same sociopathic nutjobs they’ve been all along. But society decided it had a different role for each to play.
Another head-scratcher from Rashad. Armond White would be proud.
I love Taxi Driver & have never for a moment felt like the ending was a fantasy. He claimed to be Secret Service because he was just lying, not because he really believed he was. Also, I just watched Bouzereau’s making-of doc for the 1st time the other day, and over the course of nearly an hour of interview with all the principals, no one even raises the possibility that it’s not real.
I think that Scorsese is too smart to play the “that part definitely wasn’t real” card because he knows, deep down, that it’s a movie, and that those sort of twists — if made explicit — always pull the movie down, because all it really does is remind you that you were watching a movie, and that NONE of what you just saw was real anyway. Trying to parse an entirely fictional movie down to which parts are real and which parts aren’t is never the intention of a genuinely great film, it’s always a gimmick.
Ah, a great discussion on one of my favorite movies — and conclusions — of the modern era. I’m sorry I (mostly) missed it.
Not unlike the finale of Inception, the ending’s really a bit of a Rorschach test, isn’t it? I mean — you could probably ask a group of 10-15 people to sit down and watch it for the first time (sadly, this would probably not be a difficult task even for a picture as “classic” as this one), and you would probably come up with at least 6-8 distinct theories on what the last 20 minutes or so “really meant.”
Ultimately, I think this kind of decoding probably says more about an individual’s philosophy and worldview than it does the stance of the film itself. This isn’t to say that Scorsese and Schrader didn’t have a point-of-view — of course they did! — it’s just that “great art” somehow manages to be ambivalent in the way that it seems to hold two seemingly conflicting ideas in equal esteem.
Also complicating matters is the fact that you really have three distinct components of the ending — 1) the climactic, bloody shootout; 2) the “hero” epilogue with Travis’ voice-over, and 3) his final cab ride with Betsy. For the record, I think 1) really happens, and 2) and 3) do not, but I could go either way on nearly every section; it doesn’t really seem “clear-cut” to me in the slightest.
Another question is if they don’t happen, what exactly are we watching? Projections of a man who has completely retreated to the recesses of his own mind? Fever dreams? Bickle’s dying fantasies in the waning moments of his life? Is it purgatory? Or is the body of the film purgatory, and the last two sequences mark the beginning of his Michael Landon-esque journey on the Highway to Heaven?
One of the keys to fully embracing Taxi Driver — and I feel like it’s a cinematic masterpiece in the most timeless sense of that phrase — is embracing its complete and utter ambiguity. That goes double for the ending.
Considering the sequence after the shootout was added later and never meant to be the ending originally, this conversation is ridiculous.
leaving aside the strange idea that something imposed on a movie is not actually in it, Schrader himself begs to differ
“The film stock change makes the final scenes look different and unreal. And then you have that freeze frame with the camera floating overhead, which is certainly out of step with the gritty realism of the first two/thirds.”
Funny how censorship (and, in a semi-related way, on-set “mistakes”) can occasionally force the filmmakers to make decisions that lend certain scenes their singular trademark atmosphere. Besides just being against it in principle, this is one of the prime reasons I’m not in favor of the color of this scene being “restored.”
“I think the end of Taxi Driver ascends to the realm of pure cinema, in the sense that the final sequence is simply playing off, a bit cheekily, what came before. There’s no “real” events happening, nor is it all “in his head”… it’s a series of images that only makes sense as part of a movie.”
That’s true. I wrote one of my final papers in college on Taxi Driver. The essay was about how the movie combined classical Hollywood narrative filmmaking (i.e. The Searchers element) with the more avant-garde, experimental techniques (i.e. the Alka-Seltzer scene, the camera panning away from Travis on the phone). The final two scenes are definitely “New-Wavey” in the sense that they’re more of a comment on the picture itself — and a wink to the audience — than it was about what “literally” happens.
“I’ve always likened the end of Taxi Driver to the end of Clockwork Orange. In the end, both Travis and Alex are the same sociopathic nutjobs they’ve been all along. But society decided it had a different role for each to play.”
That’s an interesting analogy, and not entirely inappropriate given the fact that the characters can both probably be fairly classified as “anti-heroes” in the sense that their behavior is problematic for society at-large. I feel like ACO takes a much more political stance toward societal rehabilitation, whereas none of the characters in TD seem to believe in it at all (or at least believe it’s worth the effort, anyway).
“Let’s assume for a second that Scorsese and Schrader did mean it as fantasy. If they did, which I don’t believe, then they came up with a much duller ending than the one the Slate writers and most of the rest of us mistakenly inferred. Which of these two endings is most interesting: (a) “Society ironically mistakes mental illness for heroism.” (b) “And then he descended even further into a mad dream world.” Even you, Jeff, would have to agree that option A is more intriguing and haunting and less cliche than meaning B. No?”
I think you’re actually oversimplifying things. You have to remember the flick is seen almost completely through Bickle’s eyes, so why not (c) he descended even further into a mad dream world (or dying fantasy, whatever) where society ironically mistook mental illness for heroism?
Throughout the narrative, Travis is often seen “putting words in other people’s mouths” without ever really bothering to ask them how they feel (or even talking to them at all. The hero scene plays out a lot like the “letters home” sequences for me; they both strike a lot of the same ant-social, narcissistic notes.
“Then what does the rearview mirror adjustment signify?”
You know, I’m not exactly sure…but watching the end of the film, it sure seems important. It’s an unusual shot and the sound design certainly calls a lot of attention to itself. I’ve always kind of read it as his moment of clarity — “okay, Travis, this cab ride bullshit is all in your head and deep-down you know it — but again, “true” meaning seems to be in the eye of the beholder. Love to hear anyone else’s theory.
“Right, Jeff, they just wrote the film and made the film, while you… you honk off about films, so of course, your opinion trumps theirs.”
Everyone’s opinion is of equal value assuming (s)he can connect the dots of his/her interpretation with what’s actually onscreen. The primary source is the actual movie itself, not the people who made it — definitely not the actors, but not even the director and/or screenwriter(s). Just because Ridley Scott comes out 25 years after Blade Runner‘s release and tells everyone that Deckard was a replicant doesn’t mean we have to take him at his word without sufficient visual evidence. I have no doubt now that was his intention, sure, but that in and of itself doesn’t necessarily make it fucking so.
“How about the end of King of Comedy? I always felt that Scorcese is a bit more overt in making clear that the ending is a fantasy. And for me, the fact that he ended this movie, which thematically is quite similar to Taxi Driver, with a clear fantasy (hell, the movie is filled with Pupkin’s fantasies) has for some reason always made me more inclined to assume he was doing the same thing with the ending of Taxi Driver.”
Although the styles are very different, the two definitely share the bonds of motifs and common central character psychoses (although De Niro must be applauded for constructing two wildly different surface personalities to express them).
Based purely on memory alone, I was ready to agree with you about TKoC being the “clearer” fantasy. But I just re-watched the last 10 minutes, and now I’m not so sure. It’s almost a beat-for-beat re-working of TD’s hero scene following a “mass killing” (this one symbolically at Jerry’s late-night TV show). There’s obviously no cab ride scene equivalent here, which makes sense as Bernhard is less of a love interest than a female doppelganger of Rupert, but I dunno, man…it still seems pretty content to let the viewer form his/her own theory based on the (rather inconclusive) evidence on display.
Here’s a pretty interesting blurb on King of Comedy, from the Wikipedia page:
“In his commentary on The Criterion Collection DVD of Black Narcissus, Scorsese stated that Michael Powell’s films influenced The King of Comedy in its conception of fantasy. Scorsese said that Powell always treated fantasy as no different than reality, and so made fantasy sequences as realistic as possible. Scorsese suggests that Rupert Pupkin’s character fails to differentiate between his fantasies and reality in much the same way. Scorsese sought to achieve the same with the film so that, in his words, the “fantasy is more real than reality.”
Which is of course basically just a long way of saying that we’re dealing with an unreliable narrator, which is made clear multiple times throughout the film. The flick takes the stance of “the audience shouldn’t know what’s real and what’s not” because the main character doesn’t know, either.
I think the same is probably applicable in Taxi Driver, certainly by the time the epilogue(s) roll around. I guess my real question is this: should we be taking everything before that — including the bloodbath climax — at face value??
>The whole movie is fantasy because it is a fictional movie.
Taking this line limits possible readings of a text. Some movies present what appears to be a coherent reality in which all the characters live, while others delineate certain scenes as “dreams” or “taking place within a character’s head.” (“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” for example, becomes incoherent if we don’t presuppose the ability to distinguish between these modes.) I think a good-faith reading of mainstream cinema presumes that it’s possible to make such distinctions based on narrative cues. I don’t know whether Taxi Driver particularly does that, but simply writing off the possibility because it’s fictional seems to me to be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
One more thought – isn’t the ending of the movie, elevating Bickle-as-vigilante to an urban hero of sorts, an open attack on ‘Death Wish’ and those sorts of ’70′s vigilante movies?
That is to say, even if they’re depicting a fantasy, is it Bickle’s fantasy?
That’s an interesting distinction.
I feel like — if indeed you do consider it a fantasy — it functions just as much as wish fulfillment on the part of the audience as Bickle himself.
It almost seems to saying, “well, he beat the bad guys, lives to get praised, and while he doesn’t get the girl, he at least gets one last opportunity for a wistful goodbye…isn’t that what you guys normally love?”
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