How Taxi Driver Affirms the Male Gaze

Bazin, Mulvey, the "Male Gaze," and Taxi Driver

The claim that Taxi Driver refutes Bazin's photographic/realist notion of cinema and affirms Mulvey's idea of the "male gaze" is valid when one considers the film in light of the "lens" of director Scorsese and his journey for the hero Travis Bickle. On the surface, it is a film about the "real" streets of New York City and the "real life" of an individual teetering on the brink of insanity while he drives strangers in his cab through the streets of Manhattan. But below the surface is a film that is pure fantasy and that projects the male gaze on to the viewer and obliges the audience to witness the world through the eyes of the male protagonist and to interpret the world from his isolated point-of-view. At the same time, Bazin's notion of cinema cannot be wholly discounted because what makes Taxi Driver so convincing in spite of its affirmation of the "male gaze" is precisely that it sets about depicting in realistic fashion, that is, in the genre of cinema verite, the real life of an individual like Travis Bickle. Yet, while Scorsese aims to transcend genre and produce a film that has a spiritual/cleansing message, its underlying nature is that which Mulvey identifies as scopophilia -- the deriving of pleasure through viewing the fantasy on screen. This paper will discuss the film Taxi Driver from the two sides of this question and show how it is actually supported by both perspectives, yet leans more so towards the concept expressed by Mulvey.

Mulvey's idea of the "male gaze" is that it "projects its fantasy" onto the object in question, specifically the female form -- but in the case of Taxi Driver it is the entire world around Travis Bickle. New York is seen through the "male gaze" in the film -- a gaze which is passive-aggressive, hostile, isolated, alienated, longing, and ticking like a time bomb. Bazin's photographic/realist notion of cinema is refuted in Taxi Driver, which (although it appears to be documenting the "mean streets" of NYC) is actually projecting the male fantasy of taking action in a violent and heroic manner in order to "cleanse" the world and "save" the girl, who is ultimately the object of the male gaze in the film.

Bazin, on the other hand, asserts that film/photography has "an objective character" that enables the filmmaker/photographer to realistically capture the real world.[footnoteRef:1] The problem is that there is a "lens" behind the camera lens -- and that is the perspective of the filmmaker/photographer. In Taxi Driver, the "lens" is the eye of director Martin Scorsese and the world he is shooting is not NYC but a projection of the images that he himself imagines as based on the script. What the viewer sees is taken for reality because there is a sense of "realism" to the way that images are captured by the camera lens, but the "realism" masks another reality underlying the genre. The underlying reality is the "male gaze" which is projecting in every which way, as Scorsese allows the camera to linger on passing persons -- pimps, hookers, pedestrians, cops, politicians, organizers: everyone falls under the "male gaze" and is interpreted through this "lens" as a result. Bickle, who fantasizes about his role in the world (a veteran of Vietnam, he feels alienated by a public which he feels should be more grateful), practices his encounters ("Are you talkin' to me?") in the mirror, thus coming directly under his own "gaze" and even projecting the machismo fantasy onto himself. What passes for reality in the climax of the scene when Travis explodes with violent rage on the pimp and his entourage is merely more of the fantasy being played out for the viewer under the guise of realism. [1: Andre Bazin, What is Cinema?, vol. 1 (LA: University of California Press, 2005), 13.]

Mulvey uses psychoanalytic theory to discuss the appeal of the erotic in narrative cinema and how the images projected on screen play upon "pre-existing patterns of fascination" within the audience.[footnoteRef:2] The point of Mulvey is that such images have a political use, which has been appropriated by studios, which a feminist audience can readily identify as a "phallocentric order."[footnoteRef:3] From the feminist perspective, the psychoanalytic theory offers a substantial insight into the social constructs that are used to engineer films for mass audiences, already saturated by a form of social-engineering from the various socio-political platforms in existence. [2: Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen, vol. 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975), 6.] [3: Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen, vol. 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975), 6.]

From the "male gaze" perspective, Travis Bickle is the good man who goes crazy, pushed there by societal failure (in every possible sense of the word -- morally, politically, economically, socially). He becomes Vengeance and represents the abysmal spiritual plight of a world that has fallen off the rocker: as Amy Taubin quotes at the beginning of her essay: "Really, it is not violence at all which is the 'point' ... but a certain image of man, a style, which expresses itself most clearly in violence."[footnoteRef:4] In Scorsese's reality, violence is a given -- it is a fact of life: it is what separates the men from the boys, what every man must partake of in order to become clean. It takes different forms and different objects: one need not destroy a host of pimps; one can be violent with oneself through discipline and austerity -- the end goal is the same: "purity," as Scorsese called it.[footnoteRef:5] [4: Amy Taubin, Taxi Driver (UK: British Film Institute, 2000), 9.] [5: Amy Taubin, Taxi Driver (UK: British Film Institute, 2000), 11.]

Travis Bickle is also a man behind the wheel, whose initial mission is to drive the cab -- but who receives a new mission as the surreal, haunting, chaotic world of the city closes in around him and he has (seemingly) no choice but to shoot his way out. He is Mt. Vesuvius erupting -- and, yet, the point is not the violence, but rather the cleansing effect that the violence has: it purges, it purifies. That is the point, from Scorsese's perspective, and for the viewer it gives the sense that the male image is responsible for all the of the world and for setting things "right." There is not so much a dependence upon eroticizing women but certainly in viewing them as a helpless sex (the young prostitute who Bickle helps) and as a conniving, manipulating sex (the female organizer for whom Bickle develops a fascination).

At the same time, there Bazin's notion that the film does depict realism cannot be completely discounted because on some level, Bickle is an accurate representation of the man-child of the 1970s. For example, he speaks in the language of the times, and reflects an aspect of the culture of NYC in the 1970s. Ethnicity is more apparent and acknowledged in Taxi Driver than in other films as the camera's eye wanders over the various and diverse citizens in the city, and as Bickle states to another, explaining his own feelings on diversity, "Some won't even take spooks. Makes no difference to me." Mulvey would suggest that this is the scopophilic aspect of Travis (and the audience, under the direction of Scorsese) which takes pleasure from accepting all manner of people into his cab (and therefore into his life). He is not discriminating -- he opens his door to all. In a realistic sense, however, this may be interpreted differently: the divisive issue of race is used to illustrate Travis's own aloofness: he is adrift, without any sort of attachment to any sort of preconceived notion or prejudice. The painful moment when he applies for the job and the hirer asks, "Education?" and Travis responds with a look of bottomless sadness, "Some ... here and there," shows that this is a poor kid (aged 26) who hasn't been given the tools to actually mature -- though he has been given the tools to kill (he's a Vietnam veteran with an honorable discharge). Violence is real in Taxi Driver, not just a vehicle out of which a hero can emerge, and for this reason it is more difficult to assert that the film wholly refutes Bazin's photographic/realist notion of cinema.

Scorsese's picture is about the devastating effect of senseless violence, of violence without honor or principles, of violence without nobility. When Travis explodes with violence at the end of the film it is a moment of the outcast, forgotten child of a decade, of a century -- an orphan of the modern world -- responding in the only way he knows how to the brutal night life (and day life) of New York City, and, in fact, of the whole world. His response is a definitive "No." And mad he may be when he explodes, but so too is Hamlet mad when he kills Polonius. Both characters rise again from their madness. Travis, at the end of the film, is a man who has been purified by blood. Scorsese captures harrowing moment after harrowing moment, each one almost too shattering to be endured -- which is why the Endurer (Travis Bickle) does what he does. New York as a city where the American Dream (so it is believed) can be captured. Bickle is not so conventional that he believes in such a Dream. He keeps a diary of his thoughts. He records his introspection. He is not conventional. He is looking, seeing, observing, waiting. He is beyond longing. And yet -- he isn't. His appreciation for beauty, for innocence -- this is what saves him, just as it is what saves Holden in The Catcher in the Rye.

The arc for Travis Bickle is downward, in a spiraling fashion, like a plastic toy being flushed down the toilet, observing the bowl as it goes round and round, down and down. Only when the toy gets clogged in the pipe does it realize it has the means of getting out: it comes with a self-destruct trigger. That Travis is not allowed to kill himself at the end and, in fact (ironically), is hailed as a hero and even given a later smile of benevolence from the angelic Betsy shows that the "mean streets" are not just ugly, they also have a sardonic sense of humor.

Betsy's smile is in a way the viewer's reward and the reward of the male gaze as it has been fantasizing about Betsy, seeing her as an angel but one who is unattainable. Therefore, the male has to prove himself and to do this he sets about rescuing the damsel in distress (who is Iris, not Betsy). Iris the girl-child prostitute is really the innocence that the male gaze wants to protect, making him similar to Holden -- he wants to be the savior. He does not eroticize Iris the way he eroticizes Betsy (though both are equally untouchable and unattainable). Travis, moreover, is in as much distress as Iris and is losing his mind out of a sense of purposelessness, isolation, and inhumanity. The male is who is really at risk here and the female's role is to help in his salvation. That is evident in the film as it revolves around Bickle's relationship with these two women. Thus, the Bazin thesis is only half-convincing as an accurate assessment of the film. This is not exactly, therefore, cinema verite, or the kind of photographic realism that Bazin attributes to film -- for it gives Betsy's and Iris's image a meaning that is implied by the script, the framing, the lighting, the camera work, the action of the plot, all of which conspires together to inform and steer the male gaze fantasy. This is why Mulvey's thesis is primarily the most compelling way to analyze the film: it gets beneath the realism of the surface of the film and delves more deeply into the psychology of the film's genius.