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Catcher in the Rye: Gender and Identity in Martin Scorcese's Taxi Driver Ⓒ Mark Mantho

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Catcher in the Rye: Gender and Identity in Martin Scorcese's Taxi Driver Ⓒ Mark Mantho Catcher in the Rye: Gender and Identity in Martin Scorcese's Taxi Driver Ⓒ Mark Mantho To Travis Bickle, the protagonist of Martin Scorcese's Taxi Driver, Betsy and Iris represent versions of the "Madonna/Whore" dichotomy, reflecting Bickle's beliefs about the city he sees around him and playing a central role in shaping his self-image by film's end. From the very beginning, Taxi Driver presents a conflicted view of women. The first females we encounter are whores walking the streets of New York at night, presenting a visual motif of metaphorical darkness and depraved femininity that recurs repeatedly throughout the film. As seen from Travis Bickle's cab (and thus his POV), the whores are objects of voyeuristic interest, both repulsive and fascinating. Via voice-over, Travis includes them in a sweeping indictment of all the "sick, venal... animals" wandering the squalid and morally bankrupt environs of an "excremental city" (to use critic Robin Wood's phrase). Yet the camera simultaneously tracks the whores movements in lingering slow-motion (another device Scorcese uses again and again), which serves to denote Bickle's unacknowledged attraction to them. And though Travis reserves some of his greatest contempt for those who buy sex in exchange for money, almost immediately after removing the evidence of such transactions from the back seat of his cab he pays to watch a pornographic movie. Before doing so, however, he strives to connect with a young woman reading a magazine behind the concession counter. Conceivably, Bickle simply desires interpersonal contact -- one can never be sure about our Travis -- but his lame attempt at friendliness ("What's your name?") is predictably misinterpreted as a creepy come-on. When the counter-girl threatens to summon the theater manager, Bickle salvages his moment of social intercourse by buying several items of candy, and Scorcese makes the money-for-contact dynamic explicit with an overhead shot of dollar bills resting atop the girl's magazine. Fundamental to our understanding of Travis through most of Taxi Driver is the degree to which he is utterly alienated from others and unable to communicate with them in any meaningful way. Although screenwriter Paul Schrader and Scorcese provide some scant detail about Bickle -- his age, his spotty educational record, the fact that he was a Marine in Vietnam and drives a cab because he's unable to sleep -- they present a character who is essentially a cipher, a nobody who seems to have gleaned his ideas about what constitutes normality not from actual experience but rather from the popular culture around him. As critic Robert Phillip Kolker suggests in his book A Cinema of Loneliness, "The more deeply (Bickle) withdraws, the more he comes to believe in the American movie myths of purity and heroism, love and selflessness, and to actuate them as the grotesque parodies of human behavior they are. Travis Bickle is the legitimate child of John Wayne and Norman Bates: pure, self-righteous, violent ego and grinning, homicidal lunatic... a persona so out of touch with ordinary human experience that the world he inhabits and perceives becomes an expressionist noir nightmare." (Kolker, 236) Alone in his barren little apartment (a metaphoric extension of his emotional condition), Bickle spends hours obsessing over the acute loneliness he feels, simultaneously telling himself that one should not "devote his life to morbid self-attention; I believe that someone should become a person like other people." (Emphasis mine.) At 26, Travis is a young man desperately searching for an identity, waiting for something, or someone, to help him understand who he is. Bickle believes he's found that someone in the person of Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a gorgeous young blonde working on the campaign of presidential candidate Charles Palantine. True to form, Travis does not meet her in the course of normal social interaction but rather admires Betsy from afar and then works up the nerve to ask her out. Director Scorcese sets up Bickle's perception of Betsy in a masterful scene that highlights one half of the "Madonna/Whore" motif so central to Taxi Driver. It begins as Travis describes the moment he laid eyes on Betsy -- "I first saw her at Palantine campaign headquarters at 63rd and Broadway; she was wearing a white dress" -- and smooth, assured piano chords are heard on the soundtrack. It is day, and a hand-held camera representing Bickle's POV plunges into waves of oncoming New Yorkers like a nervous fish swimming against the tide. Bickle's voice-over narration and the jarring camera move hastily forward, creating a searching, anticipatory mood. Travis says "she appeared like an angel out of the filthy mass" and the score changes to feature a sensuous jazz riff. The camera simultaneously shifts into slow-motion, panning from the right as beautiful Betsy moves into frame. Sitting alone in front of Palantine headquarters, a bearded denizen of NYC swivels his head in admiration while she strides past, oblivious to his leering gaze. (Significantly, the "bearded denizen" is none other than Martin Scorcese, appearing in the first of two cameos. More than an inside joke or homage to Hitchcock, director Scorcese here echoes Bickle's voyeuristic impulse and thereby, at least to some extent, aligns himself with it.) "She is alone" continues a worshipful Travis, and then offers what for him is the penultimate compliment: "They... cannot... touch... her." To Travis, Betsy is not an actual human being with attendant complexities and flaws; rather, to use critic Robin Wood's phrase, she is instead "an ideological construct, a figure of almost total vacuity." (Wood, 52) As Betsy, blonde, blue-eyed Cybill Shepherd -- the reigning "Ice Princess" of popular film in the '70s after her turn in Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show -- symbolizes the American male's standard of feminine beauty. Travis projects a one-dimensional, idealized fantasy of Woman as Madonna onto Betsy (Scorcese makes this connection obvious by outfitting Betsy in a white dress the first time we see her; this is the first detail of her appearance that Travis notes as well). In Bickle's mind, Betsy is a Goddess, a vision of perfection and virginal purity untainted by the moral corruption around her. When Travis asks Betsy for a date, he unwittingly describes her in terms that mirror his own psychological state ("I think you're a lonely person... I saw by your eyes, by the way you carry yourself, you're not a happy person") and, more crucially, he defines himself as the agent of her deliverance ("You need something. If you want to call it a friend, call it a friend.... We can go just outside; I'm there to protect you..."). The scene is key because it introduces Bickle''s method of gaining self- respect and power by projecting his own helplessness onto women and then playing the role of chivalrous do-gooder intent on saving them from themselves. Lacking identity, Travis Bickle throughout Taxi Driver defines himself almost exclusively in relationship to the women he encounters. The role he assumes is, of course, a masculine cliché; it's equal parts movie myth (as Robert Phillip Kolker points out) and literary convention, an illusion which has no basis in reality. But Travis believes it, and this belief allows him entrée into Betsy's world, the world of normal human interaction he longs to be part of. Similarly, as they sit in a diner attempting small talk (a social skill Travis repeatedly fails to master through much of the film), Bickle tells Betsy, "I felt that when I walked in (to Palantine headquarters), there was something between us, an impulse we were both following, so that gave me the right to come in and talk to you. Otherwise, I never would have felt I had the right to talk to you or say anything to you; I never would have had the courage to talk to you." Referring to Betsy's co-worker Tom (Albert Brooks), Travis opines, "I don't like him. He doesn't respect you." Bickle's words reflect the hackneyed notion that women should be placed on a pedestal and imply that only he can love Betsy properly. Behind the protectiveness, flattery and self-deprecation lies a need to control and posses, indicating yet again that Bickle does not understand what authentic relationship entails. For their first (and, as it turns out, last) official date, Travis takes Betsy to see a pornographic movie, illustrating how poor his understanding of social mores really is. Nowhere in Taxi Driver is the schism between Bickle's generalized fantasy of how to treat the perfect women and his ignorance of actual dating etiquette more pronounced, a point Scorcese underlines by making the porn flick on the theater screen initially out of focus. Unsurprisingly, Betsy stalks out of the theater after only a few moments, leaving a befuddled Travis to follow after her. With mind-boggling naivete he apologizes profusely, honestly baffled by Betsy's agitated reaction. It does not occur to the isolated voyeur Travis, whose experience of "romance" consists of watching strangers perform perfunctory sex in such movies, that these images might be offensive. Sex is something divorced from love in his mind, something he watches but never participates in, an impulse he sublimates but is afraid to act on. Outside the theater Travis pleads with Betsy not to leave, and the composition of Scorcese's exterior shot foreshadows Bickle's future, placing Travis to the extreme right, Betsy center frame, and a hooker waiting for a "date" to the extreme left. After Betsy leaves in a huff, a deflated and pathetic Bickle is left to make his way home alone.
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