My First Film 320 Essay

Fascination and Massacre

“I'm gonna kill her. I'm gonna kill her with a .44 Magnum pistol.” These are words uttered to Travis Bickle in his cab on a lonely night, on a lonely street corner. The man who said these words, Martin Scorsese, well not really, the viewer is only to know him as “the fair”. These words said to Travis Bickle do more than just carry a tingle down his back, as he repositions his mirror. These words set off a motion of events in the mind of Travis Bickle, just as though someone unhinged the gate to an angry raging bull. The character of Travis Bickle is one of a suppressed man who has an idealistic view on how the world ‘should’ be. In this scene between director and actor, Martin Scorsese takes Travis to the next level in his objects of fantasy and fascination. Scorsese unleashes, with eloquent words of hate and destruction, the next path that Travis Bickle must take towards the town of New York; Massacre. In this essay we will discuss and uncover Martin Scorsese’s scene that took Travis Bickle from the man of fascination to the man capable of massacre. From the first time that Travis is seen in his taxi, as he goes throughout the city we get a glimpse and almost a foreshadowing of the events that are to come later. We see the words “Massacre” and “Fascination” along the way of an unknown New York street. These words are a subliminal ticking time-bomb that lines the streets of Travis Bickle’s New York City. Travis is under the constant neon glow of the world around him.

As the scene begins we have an already vulnerable and upset Travis, who has just destroyed any chance of a relationship with a woman that he thinks, is pure and above the rest of society. Then the ‘fair’ begins to talk about the reason we are sitting at this street corner. He prods Travis to look up at the window with the light on. In this scene Travis is being asked to look at something and someone. The continuous invitation to look at images in the film makes us, the viewer, aware that we are to pay attention to everything that we are being allowed to see. We are encouraged to have a voyeuristic bend throughout the entire film, and now even the director of the film is asking us to specifically look at the window. The shapely figure that comes into view, after we tilt up the building and pan right is in silhouette. This very basic of images makes the eye to look for detail; the camera’s gaze is intent on the fascination aspect of this scene. After a moment of mind-wandering Martin Scorsese brings the focus back into view, by telling Travis he is going to kill her. The object that he was just allowed to gawk at is now at the threat of loosing its life. The transfer of fascination to a point of massacre is made evident in the text of the ‘fair’. This conversation has transference into the mind and life of Travis Bickle.

Lesley Stern, in her essay “A Glitter of Putrescence” states that ideas and images that are seen in a film, can trigger other images and ideas that have been brought up throughout the film and in other films. When we watch a moment in a film and we have a fleeting feeling that we have seen this somewhere before, most likely we have had an involuntary memory come to the forefront of our mind regarding this particular scene. If the case is that we have seen a film many times, this involuntary memory can greatly increase our understanding of the whole of the film. In the case of Travis Bickle and the ‘fair’, this scene begins a great divide in the film, a turning point one could say, where the character we once knew, and were beginning to understand, now is going to take and turn in a different direction.

When we look at the whole of the film surrounding the scene of Travis and the ‘fair’ we can look back at other areas where we may have been given a hint towards this revelation. One such area of the film you could look at is the relationship between Travis and Betsy. Their relationship was birthed from a conversation awkwardly initiated by Travis and the date that came from that conversation was purely out of curiosity. Travis Bickle was fascinated by this girl whom he thought was a bastion of goodness and purity. As an aside again we see the influence of the director who took a scene to look at Betsy as she walked into the Palantine campaign headquarters. Here we were encouraged to be fascinated by this beautiful woman walking gracefully, and in slow-motion, into her job. Betsy was fascinated by this man who she considered a “walking contradiction”. The brevity of the relationship could easily be because it was built on nothing more than curiosity and not a need for one another. As their relationship ends we see how Travis takes Betsy of her pedestal of purity and puts her on the ground when he says she is “like the rest of them”. The “them” he is referring to are all the people that fit into the neon glow world that surrounds Travis in his cab.

Gilberto Perez wrote in “Toward a Rhetoric of Film: Identification and the Spectator” that people sometimes have a connection with characters in films if not on the level of identity, but at times on the level of identification with a characters feelings. A connection between identity between the film world and reality collided in 1981 when John Hinckley Jr. tried to take the life of President Ronald Reagan. The person John Hinckley was personally fascinated by the film Taxi Driver and its character Travis Bickle. So much so he believed that he had a personal relationship with Jodie Foster, the woman who played Iris. He continued to pursue Foster and when he realized that he would never be able to be with her, he snapped. His attention went to fascination of Jodie Foster to the massacre of people he despised, for his personal gain. The real life Travis Bickle, embodied in John Hinckley allows us to see the slipping of a person’s mind that could lead them down a path of destruction.

Now in the cab with the ‘fair’, Travis realizes that there is no place for fascination any longer and if he wants to end the world of chaos and fascination that surrounds him he needs to take it to another level. This level that he wants to take the fascination to is the level of massacre and death. His anger and disgust for the people of New York is still a new subject for himself. Just as someone can’t jump into a pool of freezing cold water without feeling shocked, Travis’ decent into the massacre world he surrounds himself with is not an easy one. He becomes uneasy in his own cab, and uneasy with the ‘fair’ himself.

The next course of action Travis Bickle goes to is a complete regiment of revenge towards massacre. He has his mind set on the goal of killing people responsible for making the town the way it is. His fascination has now changed from pleasure and happiness to the fascination of death. Just as the ‘fair’ says “I’m gonna kill her” Travis feels in his heart “I’m gonna kill them”. The rest of the movie is centered on and leads towards an eventual release of Travis’ restraint towards the scum of the city. Now that he has the idea of massacre and death on his mind, he is allowed to once again be fascinated. He became transfixed with getting his body into shape and becoming a force to be reckoned with.

The story of Travis Bickle however becomes even more complicated, his fascination of death and destruction will definitely be fulfilled, but he starts make a move towards helping another person who has fallen completely to the level of the sick people he wants to kill. Understanding the relationship between Iris and Travis through the lens of fascination and massacre takes us a step past the hopeful outcome of his massacre. Travis believed himself to be a freedom fighter, by saving the world from people like Palantine and Sport; he would become a hero to some. The idea of killing a politician and getting away with it was certainly absurd as Travis found out. However the killing of pimps and profiteers, and the saving of a child was an advantageous result of his massacre. If we stepped back at the end of the film and reviewed all the actions taken by Travis, post-‘fair’, we could say that he was fascinated by the idea of himself. He would transpose the ideas of fascination and put them in context for himself. Travis Bickle was fascinated by himself, by the idea of becoming a freedom fighter.

As the movie comes to the end and we get to the actual act of massacre, Travis once again becomes nervous about the acts he is going to commit. The act of massacre is almost secondary to the way Travis went about it. At the end of his rampage we see Travis sit down next to his scene of carnage as if he wants to watch and wait until someone can see what has gone on. His focus is not on Iris whom he just took out of a bad situation. His wants the police who have come in to see what he did. His look is almost one of “look what I did for you”. Just as the ‘fair’ talked about how sweet it would be to kill a woman with a .44 magnum, and how Travis should see that happen. Travis looks to his viewers in the brothel as thought they should be thankful to him for what he did.

Travis Bickle saw himself as one who was above the scum of the streets, and his descent into anger and massacre allows us to see the complexities of the character who, some would say became the problem. Martin Scorsese’s delicate balance between the fascination and the massacre make for another enveloping character study where we can learn and gain knowledge from.

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