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. His future is adumbrated once more, for his only companions now are the whores who stare at him as he walks into the night. Later, Travis tries unsuccessfully to repair the break with Betsy by phone. We never hear her, nor does director Scorcese cut away to show us Betsy. Instead, we are given only Bickle's POV as he hunches over a pay phone in a non-descript city building. Highlighting Bickle's psychological state and position within society, the camera moves away from Travis, who is left of frame, and pans slowly across to the right. Then it stops, holding for a long moment on a narrow corridor leading to the street. The corridor is completely empty and devoid of human life; the only sound we hear is Travis talking, as it were, to himself. His attempt to define himself as courtly suitor to the lovely Betsy frustrated, Travis transforms his Madonna into a Whore. Confronting Betsy at Palantine headquarters, he rants like a Pentecostal preacher consigning her to the abyss

("You're in hell, and you're going to die in hell like the rest of them. You're just like the rest of them"). Betsy is no longer the idealized Goddess untouched by the moral baseness of "the excremental city" but an insidious representative of it, a "deceiver" whose betrayal is all the more evil because it confirms Bickle's worst fears about women. "I realized now how much she was just like the others," he writes in his diary, "cold and distant. There are many people like that -- women for sure. They're like a union." Here, in clear-cut language, we are given Bickle's true feelings about the opposite gender. To Travis, women more than any other group personify the society that has rejected him. Instead of providing the love and nurturance Bickle craves, they are "cold and distant;" they behave "like a union" arrayed against him, thwarting his desire to "become a person like other people." After the ugly end of his association with Betsy, Travis discards the once-cherished Madonna myth and again goes in search of an identity. He also discards his desire to enter what critic Jack Kroll calls Betsy's "overworld" (Kroll, 87), characterized by daylight and sanity, and slips further into the "underworld" of night and madness. One of the major themes of Taxi Driver is the psychological and emotional impotence of its main character and his bid to assert power over the environment he feels is responsible for that impotence. The environment, Kolker's "excremental city," is linked to Bickle's conflicted perceptions of women. Unable to express his manhood through the conventional means of a romantic relationship, Travis follows the lead of a maniacal cab fare bent on killing his cheating wife with a .44 Magnum (Martin Scorcese in his final cameo appearance) and turns to that American symbol of pseudo-phallic power, the handgun. Bickle meets with a weapons trafficker who describes his goods in sexualized terms; two of the guns Travis buys are "beautiful," while another is dubbed "a little honey." The handgun as phallus connection is rendered obvious by director Scorcese as the camera pans slowly, almost erotically from the handle of a .44 Magnum and down its long, sleek barrel. After buying the guns, Travis feels exhilarated and powerful within the confines of his apartment. He preens in front of a full-length mirror, striking hyper-masculine poses and fantasizing about shooting bad guys. With time's passage Bickle becomes increasingly narcissistic, self-referential and mentally unbalanced. "Listen you fuckers, you screwheads," he intones as the camera jump cuts and the lines are repeated, indicating their rehearsed quality. "You're the man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. " Yet in a shot that beautifully illustrates Bickle's contradictory, passive-

aggressive nature, when the voice-over reaches the words "stood up," an overhead camera shows Travis lying passively on his bed and then curling up in a fetal position. Bickle now sees himself as an avenging angel, but that isn't enough; he still feels the need to define himself in relation to the opposite sex. He remembers a very young hooker who stumbled into his cab one night seeking to flee her pimp, and after the fiasco with Betsy, begins keeping tabs on the girl. He secures a "date" with her and immediately assumes the role of father-protector, a guardian who will save her from the streets. "I'm going to get you out of here," he tells her, "I don't want to make it; I want to help you. Don't you want to get out of here?" Yet twelve- year-old prostitute Iris (Jodie Foster) insists she doesn't need his help. However, as Bickle begins to withdraw Iris thanks him for his concern and suggests they have breakfast. For the first time in the movie, someone reaches out to Travis and seeks his company voluntarily. The two meet for breakfast the next day, and Travis describes the life he envisions Iris living (she should wear dresses, not jeans, date boys, and go to school). She interjects with the flip rejoinder, "didn't you ever hear of Women's Lib?" and Bickle ignores the comment because even if he knows what Iris is talking about, the concept of "Women's Lib" doesn't fit into his reductionist idea of the wholesome American girl. Still, unlike the exaggerated tone of awed respect that characterized his conversations with Betsy, Travis talks to Iris in an unaffected and (for him) articulate manner. When Iris bemoans the fact that he's so "square," Travis retorts passionately,

"Hey, I''m not square; you're square. You''re full of shit, man. You walk with those fuckin'' reeps, low-life''s and degenerates out in the street and you sell, you sell your little pussy for nothing, man? For some low-life pimp standing in a hall? I''m square? You''re the one who''s square, man. I don''t go screw and fuck with a bunch of killers and junkies the way you do. You call that being hip? What world are you from?"

"What makes you so high and mighty, will you tell me that?" Iris snaps back, "Didn't you ever try looking at your own eyeballs in the mirror?" Bickle has no reply of course, because although he's manifestly self-absorbed, he's equally ignorant of his motives. Lacking both identity and self-awareness, he projects his psychosis outward onto females like Betsy and Iris, and more broadly upon the city he lives

in. Even so, Travis is able to relate to Iris as an equal, and their discussion is the warmest and most sincere Bickle will have with another person in Taxi Driver. Jokingly, Iris asks whether he is a "narc." "Do I look like a narc?" queries a bashful Travis. When she answers affirmatively, Bickle responds with sheepish charm, "I am a narc," and they both laugh together. "I don't know who's weirder; you or me," muses Iris affectionately. The fact that the two connect as well as they do is a function of Bickle's inability to communicate with adults, male or female; if Iris is a child whore, then certainly Travis is a man-child. It is also highly significant that Iris is as much of a social outcast as he, and nearly as damaged psychologically. More than anything else, this shared bond allows Bickle to form the only authentic friendship he enjoys in the entire film. To Travis, Iris is the quintessential victim of the excremental city, an innocent defiled by its corrupting influence. Unconsciously, his vow to save her supplies a means of acquiring identity. "In his dealings with Iris, (Bickle) becomes nothing less than a parody of John Wayne's Ethan Edwards in (John) Ford's 1956 film The Searchers," writes Robert Phillip Kolker, "and like Ethan Travis will overcome all odds, will risk his life, to save what is left of Iris's innocence. Travis believes in the rightness of his plan, as does his filmic forbearer. What he does not see is that his whole notion of saving people is based on a movie cliché of heroic activity [which Ford himself questioned] that his madness seems to make valid. " (Kolker, 240) Just as Ford's hero Edwards confronts the hostile "Comanch" Indians and harsh elements of nature in the West of the 1800's with simplistic beliefs about good and evil, Paul Schrader and Martin Scorcese (whose love for Ford's classic is well-documented) depict their anti-hero battling moral turpitude in the urban hell of 1970's New York. The critical difference is that evil exists not as unambiguous, socially sanctioned "fact" (Indians are bad, settlers are good, etc.), but as the dubious projections of a disturbed man's psyche. Bickle wants to see himself as a defender of virtue in a sick world, and through obtaining salvation for Iris, he attempts to effect his own. By saving a helpless female -- and who could be more helpless than a twelve-year-old whore? -- Travis can assume the mantle of heroic figure. Without Iris to help define his identity in this way, Bickle would continue to be an aimless loser searching for purpose. At some level he knows this, and the knowledge informs his subsequent actions. When Iris invites him to join her at a commune in Vermont, Travis demurs; living peaceably on a commune does not fit his idea of manly, heroic behavior. He

tells her he must stay in the city because he has important work to do for the government -- an oblique reference to his planned assassination of presidential candidate Palantine -- and insists instead that she take his money to escape the pimp Sport (Harvey Keitel). If Travis has come to view Betsy as a feminine symbol of the excremental city's "overworld" -- the cruel deceiver who has betrayed him -- then he sees Sport as her masculine "underworld" counterpart, an amoral man profiting from the corruption of innocents like Iris. "He's the lowest kind of person in the world," Travis admonishes Iris prophetically, "someone has got to do something to him." Bickle's intended assassination of Palantine may be explained as an act of vengeance directed at Betsy as well as a confused attempt to "save society" on a macro level. When the attempt is foiled, Travis lowers his ambitions and endeavors to save Iris, at least, from the excremental city. He sets aside money for her to leave Sport and return home -- a gesture presumably sufficient enough to achieve that result -- yet Bickle cannot stop there. The inarticulate, mounting rage at the nightmare city he perceives around him and deep feelings of psychic impotence combine to finally push him over the edge of sanity. Violent, destructive action has become his last avenue toward emotional release. In his fevered mind Travis doubtless realizes that the death of a single pimp will not materially change the nature of the excremental city, but he has already forsaken the vague dream of "cleaning up the scum." A single act of vigilante justice -- however illogical or ultimately pointless -- is the only justice left to him, and by that logic Sport must die. Bickle's long-suppressed sexual impulse, an impulse frustrated by Betsy's rejection and never acted upon with Iris, explodes at last in an orgasm of murderous carnage. By the end of Taxi Driver's climactic scene, three men (a John being entertained by Iris, Sport, and the old man who collected money from Sport's clients) lie dead in a seedy downtown apartment building. Iris cries hysterically and the near-dead Travis tries unsuccessfully to kill himself. Bickle's behavior here permits two interpretations, neither of them mutually exclusive. Killing himself would satisfy the unacknowledged death wish he's carried around since the time of planning Palantine's assassination (and likely long before that). And, committing suicide after saving Iris and attaining his (unconscious) goal of psychic release allows him a "graceful" exit from the excremental city; the damsel in distress rescued and his identity thus defined, his raison d'etre would be fulfilled.

Regardless, Iris is reunited with her parents and Travis survives to be hailed as a hero by the tabloid press. By film's end, Travis Bickle is both the same and radically different from the individual we meet at its beginning. Having recovered from his injuries, Bickle has resumed his life as a cab driver, and it appears he's right back where he started from. Yet as he makes small talk with the other cabbies -- a newly developed social skill! -- he seems casual and far more relaxed than ever before. A fare arrives and Travis discovers that his passenger is Betsy. They exchange pleasantries and it's obvious that the dynamic between the two has changed dramatically; it is Betsy who now evinces attraction to Bickle, and he who can afford to appear diffident. Betsy stares steadily at him through the rear-view mirror, her gaze sexually inviting, but Travis isn't interested. Critic Robin Wood writes that Martin Scorcese depicts Betsy as "a disembodied head floating in (Bickle's) rear-view mirror" (Wood, 52), and symbolically, that's all she means to him now. Travis recognizes that she's just another human being, not an "ideological construct" of the perfect female. Nor does Bickle retain feelings of anger toward her; as an inhabitant of the excremental city, she is probably no worse than many. As Betsy alights from the cab, she attempts rapprochement with Bickle, but he does not notice. Rather, he refuses to take her money and, John Wayne-like, drives off into the night, leaving Betsy metaphorically as well as physically behind. In short, he doesn't need her anymore. Throughout much of Taxi Driver, Travis has sought to define his identity in relation to the females he meets, first with Betsy and then with Iris. Yet by the end of the movie Bickle apprehends the illusory nature of this practice and finally abandons it. The cathartic mayhem he initiates, the "salvation" of Iris and the subsequent celebrity status conferred upon him provide a spring-board to a new self-image. That self-image is now firmly rooted in the excremental city, for Travis - - who after all possesses the freedom to leave any time he chooses -- continues to roam the streets of his urban hell. The final scene of the film (in which Bickle catches sight of himself in his rear-view mirror, suddenly lunges forward to adjust it and then looks away) makes plain that symbolically, Travis remains uneasy with anything more than a fleeting glimpse into his psyche. He also remains mentally unbalanced and fully capable of more violence, and by the way his eyes furtively scan the streets outside his cab, it's also evident that Bickle's habit of projecting dark impulses onto the city has not changed either. Even so, Travis now seems comfortable within the milieu of New York's grimy underworld. It is populated by

freaks, misfits and dangerous psychopaths -- in other words, people just like him. Bickle's identity and self-esteem are no longer so heavily predicated on veneration of a feminine ideal or the restoration of compromised virtue. To the degree that he has achieved self-awareness, Travis now appears to accept himself and his position as social outcast. "God's lonely man" has become, finally, an extension of the excremental city he once sought to destroy.

Bibliography

Kelly, Mary Pat. Martin Scorcese: The First Decade. Pleasantville, New York: Redgrave Publishing. 1980. Kolker, Robert Phillip. A Cinema of Loneliness. New York: Oxford Press. 1980. Lawson, Terry. " 'Taxi Driver' Still Makes Us Squirm." The Detroit Free Press. Dec. 6, 1996. Scorcese, Martin. Scorcese on Scorcese. Ed. David Thompson and Ian Christie. Boston: Faber and Faber. 1989. Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. New York: Columbia University Press. 1986.