Martin Scorcese's Taxi Driver As Radicalized Film Noir
Genre Film Knight
3 May 1995
Taxi Driver as Radicalized Film Noir
In his film Taxi Driver, Martin Scorcese presents a world where characters are subsumed in the urban landscape, vertical planes obscure the horizon, and hazy lights reflect off streets perpet ually slick with rain. Scorcese combines realistic settings with expressionist cinematography to construct a stylized vision of meaninglessness, in which a psychopathic protagonist moves from street to street without direction, finding no release for the nameless anxiety he feels for the city. Taxi Driver, with its unconventional (anti)hero, Travis Bickle, lack of substantive plot, and mix of documentary and abstract photography, defies traditional efforts to place it in a specific genre. …show more content…
In his essay, Schrader points out the four major influences on noir, each of which seems also to have influenced, in one form or another, his and Scorcese’s work on Taxi Driver. The first of these forces Schrader discusses is war and postwar disillusionment. Considering World War II, Schrader outlines the way in which America, recognizing man’s capacity for inhumanity to man, prepared itself to see this reality represented in art as well as in the news. The notion of disillusionment connotes the growing lack of faith in conventional images of American man and society as capable of doing only good; disillusionment meant an upsurge in moral ambiguity or relativism, the sense that what a person feels is “good” or “evil” is subject to change, depending on context. In mid and postwar Hollywood, the heroes began to skirt the edge of corruption, eventually rooting out the villains, but perhaps using questionable methods to do so. But these new protagonists did not necessarily disappoint the viewing public. Instead, audiences were willing to take on a realist perspective in looking at America. “Audiences and artists were now eager to take a less optimistic view of things,” Schrader suggests (1972), a view that reflected the realities of the war, one that made allowances for ostensibly immoral acts in times of need. Recognizing that capacity for immorality in themselves, and seeing themselves a component part of society at large, artists and audiences turned a cynical eye toward their own values. Schrader notices this pessimism emerging thematically in films of the period which featured servicemen returning home after the war to find unfaithful lovers, cheating business partners, or —in a mode more explicitly critical—“the whole society something less than worth fighting
3 May 1995
Taxi Driver as Radicalized Film Noir
In his film Taxi Driver, Martin Scorcese presents a world where characters are subsumed in the urban landscape, vertical planes obscure the horizon, and hazy lights reflect off streets perpet ually slick with rain. Scorcese combines realistic settings with expressionist cinematography to construct a stylized vision of meaninglessness, in which a psychopathic protagonist moves from street to street without direction, finding no release for the nameless anxiety he feels for the city. Taxi Driver, with its unconventional (anti)hero, Travis Bickle, lack of substantive plot, and mix of documentary and abstract photography, defies traditional efforts to place it in a specific genre. …show more content…
In his essay, Schrader points out the four major influences on noir, each of which seems also to have influenced, in one form or another, his and Scorcese’s work on Taxi Driver. The first of these forces Schrader discusses is war and postwar disillusionment. Considering World War II, Schrader outlines the way in which America, recognizing man’s capacity for inhumanity to man, prepared itself to see this reality represented in art as well as in the news. The notion of disillusionment connotes the growing lack of faith in conventional images of American man and society as capable of doing only good; disillusionment meant an upsurge in moral ambiguity or relativism, the sense that what a person feels is “good” or “evil” is subject to change, depending on context. In mid and postwar Hollywood, the heroes began to skirt the edge of corruption, eventually rooting out the villains, but perhaps using questionable methods to do so. But these new protagonists did not necessarily disappoint the viewing public. Instead, audiences were willing to take on a realist perspective in looking at America. “Audiences and artists were now eager to take a less optimistic view of things,” Schrader suggests (1972), a view that reflected the realities of the war, one that made allowances for ostensibly immoral acts in times of need. Recognizing that capacity for immorality in themselves, and seeing themselves a component part of society at large, artists and audiences turned a cynical eye toward their own values. Schrader notices this pessimism emerging thematically in films of the period which featured servicemen returning home after the war to find unfaithful lovers, cheating business partners, or —in a mode more explicitly critical—“the whole society something less than worth fighting