Master Literatur und Medien Medienwissenschaftliche Grundlagen Hauptseminar: Der Regisseur Martin Scorsese Dr. phil. Georgiana Banita 21.03.2016 Thrown into the Melting Pot: Representations of African Americans in Scorsese’s Gangs of New York and Taxi Driver Anna-Lena Oldenburg Brennerstr. 32, 96052 Bamberg Zweites Fachsemester [email protected] Matrikelnummer: 1767907 Table of Contents 1. Introduction 1 2. Scorsese’s Depiction of African Americans in New York City 2 2.1. Gangs of New York 2 2.1.1.Nativism 3 2.1.2.The Competition between Irish and African Americans 4 2.1.3.Conflating the Civil War and the Draft Riots 5 2.2. Taxi Driver 2.2.1.New York in the 1970s: Cleaning up Times Square 7 7 2.2.2.Ideals of Beauty 10 2.2.3.The Space of the Porn Cinema 11 2.2.4. Nostalgia and the Ideals of American Masculinity 14 2.2.4.1. Competitive Masculinity: Killing the Black Man 15 2.2.4.2. Travis as the Western Hero: Rethinking American Militarism 17 3. Conclusion 19 Works Cited 20 1. Introduction Scorsese, third generation Italian-American with a penchant for casting fellow ItalianAmericans like Robert DeNiro, Nicolas Cage, Leonardo diCaprio, as his leading men, has always made the experience of migration and assimilation of groups seen as ethnically “other“ from the WASP mainstream one of his main concerns. Many of his movies revolve around an in-group of men of either Italian (Mean Streets, Raging Bull, Goodfellas) or Irish (Gangs of New York, The Departed) ancestry. Most of these films, except for The Departed’s depiction of Irish mobsters in Boston, are set in New York, the “quintessential immigrant city“ with America’s “two most powerful symbols of immigration […] - The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island“ (Foner 29). Scorsese’s focus on the rules governing the behavior inside ethnic enclaves leads to a drawing of strict boundaries along ethnic lines – although Mean Street’s protagonist Charlie desires the black striptease dancer Diane, he cannot be with her. None of his movies explicitly deal with the curious case of the involuntary immigrants, the African Americans sold into slavery and then subsequently dehumanized and exploited. While his earlier movies feature at least a modest amount of African Americans in speaking and background roles, his later movies, since the advent of the 21st century, bigger budgets and Leonardo DiCaprio as his leading man, feature them only in menial jobs – housemaids, wedding singers and bouncers in 2013’s Wolf of Wall Street, wardens in a psychiatric hospital in 2010’s Shutter Island or complete absence in historic pieces like the Howard Hughes biography The Aviator (2004). This is not to say that, if the scope of this paper had allowed a better, sub-epidermic probing of a larger amount of these pictures, the omission of black characters couldn’t have become meaningful in its own way in relation to the particular topics dealt with in the movies. For now, the focus of this analysis will be on one movie featuring African Americans more prominently – 1976’s Taxi Driver – and one movie seemingly relegating African Americans to the sidelines of history – 2002’s Gangs of New York. A close reading of the movies will answer how African Americans are represented and racial relations are configured. In showing the competition and tension between different migrant groups and their exclusion from the white mainstream – it is not by chance that Scorsese often explores the criminal underbelly of America, where the ones excluded from legal work opportunities try to regain their dignity and ensure their survival – Scorsese unmasks the “unalienable rights“ to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness“ for all human !1 beings, written down as a lofty goal in the US Declaration of Independence, as an ideal never fully realized for all citizens of the nation. Especially African Americans stand as the living testament to the bigotry and mere myth of the American Dream that states that hard work will inevitably lead to prosperity. The on-going marginalization of African Americans still belie the nation-building myth that America has relied on. This can only serve as a cursory glance at Scorsese’s oeuvre, with a deeper look into a boxing film like Raging Bull guaranteed to bring further fruitful analyses. 2. Scorsese’s Depiction of African Americans in New York City 2.1. Gangs of New York In Gangs of New York, Scorsese deconstructs myths used to foster a particular sense of chauvinist Americanness, pointing out that patriotic rhetorics often hinge on neglecting details running counter to America’s self-stylization as a beacon of freedom and egalitarianism, with every citizen purportedly equally entitled to constitutional rights. During the time Scorsese chose to portray in Gangs of New York, it was especially the treatment of Irish immigrants and African Americans, as well as that of working-class whites that made a mockery of American ideals. Scorsese shows this by conflating three different American conflicts that run along lines of immigration/state of assimilation/religion (Protestant Nativists vs. Catholic Irish immigrants), political affiliations (Civil War), class (workers turning against élites in draft riots) and race/class (white workers turning against recently freed African Americans in draft riots). Scorsese’s manipulation of historical details is telling, so that a comparison between Scorsese’s representation of the events and historical accounts of the time shows his agenda in making the movie. Of special concern are the portrayal of Bill the Butcher and the ways in which it differs from the historical figure of William Poole, whom he is loosely based on. Bill is taken to personify a vile and murderously racist part of the early republic that patriotic Americans would rather forget – but that is also deeply ingrained in American politics, as evident in the ultra-conservative stances of today’s Tea Party and other parts of the GOP. Furthermore, the intervention of Union troops in the draft riots is not historically documented and therefore a consciously added plot point of Scorsese. It links the atrocities of the draft riots and their sudden violent outburst against African Americans, leading to random lynchings perpetrated by a mob of angry white workers anxious about class differences that directed its violence against a scapegoated minority of !2 lesser standing – although the movie mostly leaves the historical context unexplored in which the influx of Irish immigrants during a time of rampant unemployment led to extreme competition for labor among minorities (McMahon 80). As Richard Oestreicher has remarked, this omission of historical context leaves open the question why the Irish responded to oppression with racial pogroms, ostensibly neglecting the African American perspectives to the events (Oestreicher 211). 2.1.1. Nativism Gangs of New York’s main story line is the revenge plot between Amsterdam and Bill the Butcher, with Amsterdam’s father, Priest Vallon, murdered at the beginning of the movie by Bill. The choice of Bill as the main antagonist (together with corrupt politician William M. “Boss“ Tweed and, to a lesser extent, assimilated racist Irishman McGloin) is important as historically William Poole, one of the main inspirations for Scorsese’s butcher, has been represented as a martyr by American nativists, dying at the hands of “savage“ Irish immigrants threatening the social fabric of the United States (Gorn 395). Nativist ideology is seen as an articulation of anxieties concerning immigration like the threatening of the national identity and social cohesion, the social pathology of immigrants leading to increased crime rates, and, in later times, terrorism, epidemic diseases, fear of unemployment, overburdening of welfare and prison system and depletion of natural resources meant for already naturalized citizens (Bosniak 440). Furthermore, nativist politics have a unifying function for heterogenous social groups who bond over their anti-immigrant sentiment. As Gorn says, the appeal to ethnic animosities allowed men seeking office to “sidestep more complex and politically dangerous divisions of class“ (Gorn 397). In Scorsese’s movie, as the issue of race is pushed to the margins, class concerns surface. Affluent New Yorkers are partaking in misery tourism (“slumming“) and visiting the Five Points neighborhood – an immigrant hub and slum known for abysmal living conditions – out of curiosity, with workers ultimately shown to revolt when being left with the role of pawns, while élites profited from the war. As Walkowitz has noted, the $300 needed under the Conscription act to evade military service were the rough equivalent to a labourer’s annual income (Walkowitz 207). The feeling of having their cards stacked against them and the relegation to being either canon or economic machine fodder – a “New World dance of death“, with immigrant !3 mortality fueling the national machine and manufacturing prosperity (Kelly 9) – leads to a natural indignation of the workers discontent with the illusion of the American Dream. As Bosniak has argued, the term “nativism“ had been largely outlawed in public discourses and today takes on largely negative connotations of mob mentality and antiforeign sentiment, with “explicitly race-based arguments for immigration restriction considered normatively suspect in political culture“ (Bosniak 443). The early characterization of Poole as a fair, well-meaning, hard-working, unselfish, charitable man of the people and the assertion that his murder was due to “cunning priests manipulating Irish masses“ (Gorn 395) runs counter to both his later depictions as a deceitful, bloodthirsty, unscrupulous man formed by a cutthroat all-male society, with nationalism as an outlet to display “male bravado, group loyalty and bold self-assertion“ (Gorn 402f). It is this latter depiction that Scorsese chose to base his villain on, unmasking patriotic rhetorics as xenophobic sentiments, rendering Bill as an American outlaw playing according to his own rules and not shying away from breaking the law (in his electoral fraud and murder of an elected official, who did, however, come into power through a highly dubious electoral process with a voter turnout that surpassed the number of citizens in New York City). By aligning the viewers’ sympathy with an Irishman, Scorsese, unsurprisingly, tells his story from the point of view of the often maligned immigrants groups who suffered from discrimination of American mainstream society. He draws attention to persistent discrimination that belies the dazzling melting pot that the USA is often made out to be. 2.1.2.The Competition between Irish and African Americans If Irish immigrants and African Americans are shown to have received a similar amount of racist bile directed against them, the ending of the movie gives a clue to the differing fates of the two immigrant groups. While Amsterdam outlives Bill and buries him alongside his father on a hill with a view of the Manhattan skyline, the African American man who appeared as a member of Amsterdam’s gang is left in the streets unburied after being killed in the Draft Riots. Even though Irish immigrants and African Americans may have suffered from similar discrimination and economic hardship, the Irish were capable of blending in to the American mainstream and be accepted as white citizens on account of their skin color, while African Americans have remained marked as other. As McMahon points out, the Irish were able to climb the social hierarchy mainly due to the fact that they used !4 “virulent white supremacism“ to dissociate themselves from African Americans (McMahon 80). As the African American fate remains largely implicit in the movie, one could say that they serve as a negative mirror image of the Irish (with Native Americans, in turn, as mirror image of African Americans, the injustices perpetrated against them completely blotted from the national narrative). The scene in which a candle is placed on the body of the black man serves as mock sympathy and condolence from the government’s side, with Amsterdam’s voice-over ridiculing the notion that there would be family and friends seeking out the dead. Other than this scene, it is significant in which contexts African Americans are not depicted. They are not casting their votes, but rather forcing white men to participate, as they were kept from citizenship by the Naturalization Act and other restrictions, like the fact that African Americans needed to own land in order to be eligible to vote (in contrast to white immigrants qualifying for suffrage almost from the moment they hit American shores) (Foner in McMahon 81). Furthermore, there is no independent agency of African American gangs, they are interspersed within other immigrant groups, fighting along for causes not serving their best interests – at least in the Five Points neighborhood of Manhattan, the heart of New York City. African American enclaves further uptown subsisted, after many were driven out by the newly arrived immigrants, but they are not depicted in the movie. Interesting in this context is the fact that in 1854 an African American enclave, Seneca Village, was razed to make room for the creation of the Central Park, longstanding pride of New York City. The African American owners of the land were dispossessed and maligned as “squatters“ and then left to integrate into other communities, severely undermining group cohesion (Speed). 2.1.3.Conflating the Civil War and the Draft Riots As Daniel J. Walkowitz has noted, one of the movie’s historical inaccuracies is the plot element of Union troops intervening in the Draft Riots, with frigates firing at the Five Points neighborhood. Furthermore, critics have admonished Scorsese for his use of outlandish violence. In quoting David Kelly, it will be argued that Scorsese deliberately used excessive cruelty and violence to draw attention to circumstances possibly overlooked at the viewer. This focusing of attention is, however, not aided by what Walkowitz calls a “class narrative hodge-podge with no sense of historical development“ in which history is telescoped into the moments in 1846 and 1862-3, making the historical process almost unreadable for viewers (Walkowitz 207). When the, arguably, less violent Draft Riots are !5 connected to the larger scale of death of the Civil War, new implications arise. The national trauma of the Civil War (largely resolved through celebration of victorious forces) is conjured up, with the movie highlighting state violence in quelling uprisings and corruption and lack of concern for both slaves and freed men. As Tony Horwitz has detailed, the historic appraisal of the Civil War has undergone numerous changes, with revisionists in early to mid 20th century arguing that the war could have been prevented, with statesmen and abolitionists to be faulted, as slavery was cast as a “relatively benign institution“, and dismissed as a “source of sectional conflict“. From the Civil Rights Movement onward, however, historians have highlighted the importance of slavery and emancipation for the War, with human casualties as “necessary and ennobling“ sacrifices, redeemed by the liberation of four million slaves. When Scorsese merges the Draft Riots and the Civil War, however, the liberation of four million slaves is juxtaposed with the lynching of freed slaves in hostile, capitalist urban centers of the North, previously assumed to be safe havens for African Americans seeking employment opportunities and refuge from white supremacists denying them their status as humans. Scorsese shows that the dichotomy of the backwards, unenlightened South seeking illegitimate profit from slavery and the sophisticated North offering employment and equal rights for all is false. As previously detailed, voting rights in the North were seriously curtailed and African Americans relegated to compete for menial, unskilled labour jobs with recently arrived other minorities. As historian David Goldfield has argued, the Civil War showed how white supremacy is entrenched in both North and South and that the war and the Reconstruction never delivered racial justice to slaves who became peons, subjected to Black Codes, Jim Crow and rampant lynching (Goldfield in Horwitz). The movie’s emphasis on the workers’ objection to fight in the war also highlights the fact that it was, in general, not fought for a “multicultural republic based on enlightened ideals“ (Kelly 11) and that abolition was not even a main concern of most, but rather national unity. To quote Brundage, “When you incorporate these elements, the war looks less like a conflict over lofty principles and more like cross-societal bloodletting“ (Horwitz). While Horwitz describes the Gettysburg Address and the 13th Amendment as commendable achievements of the Civil War, he also draws attention to the fact that Lincoln had pledged not to interfere with slavery in the South and to the nation abandoning Reconstruction. !6 2.2. Taxi Driver Taxi Driver is a movie whose temporal and spatial setting in the New York of the 1970s is highly significant for the abundance of topics it explores during its course. It captures the historical moment after the initial excitement of the 1960s and the Civil Rights and Feminist movement had worn of and the American public had become disillusioned with its status as a hegemonic militaristic power, after the heavily publicized Vietnam War delivered media images of destruction into living rooms. The war had, at least in popular thought, no tangible benefits for the American people and was fought almost exclusively by the poor and minorities. Portrayed is the in-between state in which interracial tensions rose due to the unfulfilled promises of equality and desegregation that left African Americans in rapidly decaying urban centers while affluent whites migrated to the suburbs and the anxiously eyed encroachment of the patriarchal, white mainstream by women and minorities. Travis, in this scenario, acts as an agent of a conservative order trying to reassert itself, which is ultimately exposed as the true pathological culprit and threat to the fabric of the nation. The glorification of hypermasculinity and military aggression against perceived outside threats at the core of American identity, going back to the founding myth of the frontier and westward expansion, is portrayed as the reason for the inability of the American polity to form the pluralistic unity it was designed to be. The movie shows, through its depiction of African Americans, how American mainstream notions of propriety, social order and gender performance have worked to subordinate and marginalize others unwilling or unable to conform. The following considerations will also show how spaces in the movies are racialized, gendered and classed. 2.2.1.New York in the 1970s: Cleaning up Times Square The expressionistic nighttime depiction of New York City sets the movie in line with earlier German Expressionist paintings and the American film noir tradition in which the city is constructed as an abattoir of sinfulness, darkness and decay, in contrast to an imagined transcendent, sublime, unspoiled nature. Nightmarish cityscapes have functioned in noir as places in which conflict inside the unconscious were mapped – and it’s the nightmarish subjective visions of the city that plague an insomniac Travis who replaces his nighttime rest with driving his cab around the darkest corners of the metropolis. The specificity of a narrative set in 1970s New York City problematizes this pessimistic notion of urbanism in !7 modernity, stemming from the mindset of Europeans at the beginning of the 20th century. Travis’s perceptions of the world relate his discomfort. He is confined in a urban space that is rendered black – and from the pseudo-safety of his panoptic cab, Travis, as voyeuristic spectator, registers what he deems “scum“ taking over the streets. He takes particular offense to prostitution and gang activity and perceives many areas as overtly hostile to him, like the diner in which he feels the cool gaze of pimps on him, he is sized up by gangs passing him by with rattling chains, the frame steeped in bright red signaling danger and alarm, with the black bodies dissolving into the darkness of the city. The streets seem to be very much in control of African Americans and the fact that Travis’s cab gets attacked and briefly followed by gang of youths points to the fact that within the city there are ethnic borders which are problematic for him to cross as a white man. Significantly, Travis also can’t comfortably move in white public spaces, always perceived as an intruding outsider, who is confined within the space of his cab from which he tries to observe the outside. He is shooed away by other white men twice, once when he is caught staring at Betsy at the campaign headquarters by his romantic rival Tom and once when he parks close to the Palantine rally, again to be close to Betsy, and is prompted to leave by a policeman. The public perception of New York City and the entertainment district of Times Square and 42nd Street in particular in the 1970s, where most of Travis’s nightly voyages take place, is marked by “street crime, substandard and insanitary conditions“, “physical, economic and social blight“ and contributing to growth of crime and delinquency while simultaneously impairing growth and development (Miller 139), making it a prime target of attempts of gentrification, a “clean-up“ just as Travis sets out to do in the movie. The 70s mark a time when, on the one hand, affluent whites have moved in droves into the suburbs while African Americans and other minorities migrated from rural to metropolitan areas. As Webb asserts, this led to an exchange of about a million people – tax-paying white people and their jobs migrating away from the city and not yet securely employed minorities unprepared for a postindustrial society in which the importance of manual labour has waned, migrating into the city (Webb 82). The proposed clean-up therefore can be seen as a measure to drive the poor and unseemly from the city center to make room for large corporations and position New York as a financial and cultural hub attractive to tourists (as seen in today’s incarnation of Times Square that stands in stark contrast to the cheap and dirty entertainment district of !8 second-run cinemas shown in Taxi Driver). As Webb has proposed, the dystopian, anti-urban images of 70s movies set in New York helped legitimate New York’s restructuring after hitting the height of a financial crisis caused by municipal overspending on social services in 1975 (Webb 76). But is this also part of Scorsese’s agenda in making the movie? After all, as Webb has remarked in the same paper, the 70s also saw a high point of cultural production and especially underground and countercultural activities, chiefly among the African American population with the emergence of hip hop, breakdancing and graffiti (Webb 81). The disreputable second-run cinemas that Travis mainly frequents to watch pornography were distributors of diverse material deemed inappropriate for more normative, mainstream venues and catering to niche tastes. They billed, among genre, exploitation and blaxploitation pictures (the first genuine spark of an independent black cinema), also more sophisticated European arthouse movies (Church 80), so that they effectively served as a site of distinction from the mainstream (75). While Travis is embarrassed by his entertainment preferences through Betsy’s negative reaction to being taken on a date to an adult theatre, he nevertheless feels comfortable enough initially to share a public space with those that are deemed “sexually deviant“ or “racially other“ (86). The paranoia Travis feels in New York, a metropolis of imposing architecture and towering global importance and therefore, building on Zanker, a “canvas of imperial ideology“ (Zanker in Betcher 54), is described by Liam Kennedy as a symptom of threatened white hegemonic masculinity, resulting in the attempt to master “the international other“ in the self and at home. Kennedy describes white manhood as threatened by affirmative action, declining real wages, postindustrial job insecurity, fear of downward mobility and missing out on capital growth and the loss of control over society and thereby also of power and authority (Kennedy 89). Travis therefore displaces the fear, anger and shame he feels as a disempowered male, stylized as a victim of social and technological process, onto the bodies of African Americans. He, like the protagonist Jake La Motta in Scorsese’s Raging Bull, seems incapable or unwilling to understand the true reasons for his predicament. He goes on to direct his anger against those whom he feels have contributed to his marginalization, the actors symbolizing societal change, instead of what he perceives as the actors marginalizing him, instead of attacking those powerful institutions (the state, the military) that have first used and then abandoned him. !9 As Chesluk has remarked, the drive to impose order on New York in the 70s marked the end of liberal and the beginning of neoliberal politics in New York, leading to a privatization of public spaces, the promotion of real estate speculation and development and the enforcement of order-maintenance policing (Chesluk 250) that made victimless crimes like the solicitation for prostitution, petty drug sales and drinking in public punishable (254) and was deemed oppressive and intolerant (255). In drawing on Cintron’s notion that ordering necessarily means the exclusion of troublesome elements seen to be contributing to neighborhood change and economic decline, Chesluk calls the ideal of community underlying the clean-up efforts “highly selective and romanticized“ (257). Another collaboration between Schrader and Scorsese, Bringing out the Dead, serves as an addendum to Taxi Driver set at the end of the millennium, a point when the War on Drugs has had disastrous effects on the disadvantaged of the city. The name of the powerful drug playing an important part in the movie, “Red Death“, and the title of the movie itself reference the plague, the former probably being an allusion to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death“ in which an elite tries to isolate itself spatially from the diseased outside the gates (Roth 50). The social commentary of Bringing out the Dead, especially in contrasting the relentless guilt felt by its white male EMT protagonist unable to save lives with Travis’s resolve to take them away, deserves further critical attention, which cannot be provided in the scope of this essay. 2.2.2.Ideals of Beauty If the New York of the 70s is used as a symbol for ugliness and decay, the darker side of the individually human and national psyche, then what is the cause of its ugliness? What are the underlying ideals of beauty? While it would be possible to surmise that the movie wants to show that it is the mere corrupting presence of poor minorities contributing to the urban centers’ bad reputation, Sharon Betcher’s observations on the beauty of cities (although made in the context of disability studies) are instructive. She states that beauty equals symmetry equals fairness, so that New York isn’t un-beautiful due to its darkening, the influx and clustering of African Americans in the urban center, but only through the economic inequality perpetuated since the days of slavery, relegating minorities to identities and career avenues (the pimp, the street thug, the drug dealer, the prostitute) of ill repute. Professions, areas, entertainment options (like the second-run grindhouse cinema) are racialized and help maintain a hierarchical order in which African Americans occupy the lowest rung. !10 But it is not only the beauty of the city that is invoked. When Travis first visits a rather shabby, small adult theatre, he chats up mixed-race concessions girl (if you go by actress Diahnne Abbott’s ethnic background) and is immediately rebuffed. She mistrusts his intentions of seeking sincere companionship, threatening immediately to call her boss. The mise-en-scène here is interesting – foregrounded and put into focus is a miniature version of the Venus de Milo, the ideal of (white) feminine beauty stemming from ancient Greece. Schrader’s script highlights the contrast between the appearance of the concessions girl and the Greek goddess: The real woman is described as “plain“ and “dumpy looking“ (Schrader 10), juxtaposed to the beauty of the sculpture, which comes in form of a cheap commodity, with only its aura still conveying the idea of sublime beauty. The sculpture points to the fact that an ideal of white beauty is still ingrained in people’s heads, conjuring up the specter of a white fear of miscegenation, which is reinforced in the image of the jealous husband wanting to mangle his wife’s vagina with a gun after fearing that she is cheating on him with a black man. The combination of mise-en-scène and the self-chosen sexual unavailability of the concessions girl do, however, also point to the fact that times have changed and that it is possible to portray a black woman as assertive and non-sexual on screen, even when propositioned by a white man – although Travis is portrayed in the movie as of a decidedly low station and only transports a black person in his taxi once, when a female prostitute shares the backseat with her white suitor. 2.2.3.The Space of the Porn Cinema The space of the adult theatre is interesting because it is thrice coded as a space of fantasy – it is Travis’s nocturnal refuge from insomnia and subsequently a dream space, in addition to also being a cinematic space and a pornographic space. It is important as an ambiguous site of both sexual transgression and social progress, in which different members of different races, genders, and sexualities meet, which is however also clearly segregated from the mainstream. Travis, over the course of the film, visits porn cinemas of different repute. The first time has already been detailed. On his second visit to a grindhouse cinema, Travis is accompanied by Betsy, whose perfect middle-class whiteness Travis presumably wants to taint through the insertion of her body into the masculinely coded space of the cinema and the confrontation of her mind with the images she sees projected on the screen. Betsy’s initial !11 hesitation to enter the cinema can on the one hand be explained by a rejection of pornographic material in general and on the other hand by the reputation of these cinemas as “unsafe and uncomfortable“ for women, visited only by “semi-licit, anti-domestic, manly adventurers into a world of sleaze“ (Hollows in Church 87). Her subsequent revulsion at the sight of (interracial) group sex scenes can be both interpreted as an expression of her personal sensibility or as a clue to the general acceptance of sexual liberation and racial mixing in mainstream America. The grindhouse cinema has been thought of as a place of violence, sexual deviance, dirtiness and cheapness (Church 73). It has been ghettoized as a venue for low entertainment and cheap thrills, with its “economically undifferentiated seating“ (meaning democratic, undiscriminating, and affordable to all) in contrast to the reserved seats and feeling of superiority and higher status conveyed by roadshow pictures (Church 79). In this space, blaxploitation became possible and successful with urban audiences (Church 85). Its possibility to show explicit material insulting the propriety of white Americans deeming the cinemas as a hotbed of moral decay resulted from the faltering of production codes that has also made it possible for Taxi Driver to portray New York in an unflattering light, enabling a gritty reality that was previously suppressed on the screen to come to light. As a shared public space, the adult theatre serves as a great equalizer in American culture, bringing together people of different sexualities, genders, races and presumably also classes, as evidenced by the homosexual couple entering the theatre with Travis and Betsy and the black couples seated around them inside the cinema. Betsy’s reaction betrays that the American founding myth of egalitarianism and classlessness is a lie. (Public) spaces are racialized, gendered and classed. The movie of Travis’s choice is also significant in regard to its political content and its stance on racial relations and sexual liberation. Travis takes Betsy to watch The Swedish Marriage Manual (1969), which first ran in the US in 1971 under the alternative name The Language of Love after having been held up in Customs for some time on charges of obscenity. The movie is a Swedish, transgressive hardcore porn movie masked by its purported didactic value (and therefore called a “white coater“, as it displayed a medicinal interest in anatomy) and showing scenes of interracial group sex which are figured as entangled human bodies. As Capino has noted in his analysis of cinematic pornographic images of the 1970s, even sexual positions are political. He references the “Reverse Cowgirl“ !12 as on the one hand exploitative in showcasing the female body and potentially empowering to the woman on top able to control the dynamics of intercourse. In Schrader’s original script, Travis’s apartment is scattered with cheap, sadomasochistic pornographic images of women “tied and gagged with black leather straps and clotheslines“ (Schrader 8), a decidedly different dynamic than the one he is confronted with in the movie theatre. His private predilection for pornography that plays into the argument of feminists like Dworkin and MacKinnon that all pornography subjugates women and perpetuates violence against them (O’Brien 21) fits neatly into his characterization of a man seeking to re-masculinize himself through the assertion of dominance. In the cinematic space of the cinema, African Americans are again inserted into sexualized contexts, their appeal exotic and probably stemming in a good part from the sensation of the mixing of races. Rather than completely showing an image of exploitation, Scorsese renders the situation more complex, however. The view of the bodies is obstructed to the viewer, with fast cuts and the chaotic mass of people not enabling the viewers to easily satisfy their voyeuristic impulses. Politically, the sexual configuration is a lot more democratic and sex positive than the sado-masochistic entertainment Travis seeks in the original script. The mixing of races is here welcomed or at least found titillating. Sweden has, at some point, earned the reputation of being especially progressive in its sexual politics, “especially sinful“ or “sexually liberated“ (Larsson 218). The free exploration of sexuality and openness in sex education, together with depiction of nudity, premarital sex, active and independent female sex lives, and sex as a weapon in games of political power (Beckman 171) set Sweden apart from the repressive approach Americans have taken to sexuality. The combination of sex and (socialist) politics in Swedish movies like Jag är nyfiken (the last movie to be banned in the US on the grounds of pornography) (Beckman 174) can be deemed highly explosive in a society like America in the 60s and 70s. Upon Travis’s third visit to the porn cinema he has, out of shame, internalized the credo of self-restraint that is deemed essential to American manhood: He now watches the action on the screen unfolding through his hands, while he still gets generous peeks of the action. His earlier acceptance and enjoyment of (interracial) pornographic movies and championing of progressive presidential candidate Palantine (despite complete unawareness of his policies at this point) shows that Travis here could be swayed into either progressive or regressive thinking, with Betsy’s reaction implanting in him shame, a repressive morality and !13 the desire to reinstitute old gender and racial orders that had come under attack during the Civil Rights movement. 2.2.4. Nostalgia and the Ideals of American Masculinity 2.2.4.1. Boy Scouting When Travis scopes out a Palantine rally for the second time, he starts composing a postcard to congratulate his parents to their wedding anniversary. The music played in the background is ominous and the camera pans from his cab to Palantine’s supporters and the Secret Service men protecting him. Betsy is shown sitting on the stage, her entire body visible in contrast to the men framing her. Although Schrader indicates in the script that while “we see shots of Palantine speaking, a seated row of young black Palantine red, white and blue bedecked cheerleaders, Secret Service agents examining the crowd“, these shots have “no direct relationship to the narration“ (Schrader 72). The scene serves, however, to clearly align Betsy with politically powerful men in charge of surveilling and policing the mass of people that Travis stands out from as a potential threat. After Travis is shooed away from the scene by a local police man, he completes his writing job in his room – the card is inscribed “To a couple of good scouts!“, with a man and a woman in boy scout uniform presented on the front. The man is considerably taller, so that the woman has to look up to him, and the woman is remarkable especially for her considerable bust (the man’s abnormally large feet might indicate power, security and steadfastness). The original script calls the design “urkitsch“ with “a cartoon Mr. and Mrs. All-America stand[ing] before an outdoor barbecuing grill, clicking salt and pepper shakers in a toast“. What, then, is the significance of Boy Scouting that provoked the change from script to finished film? The Boy Scouts in the 1970s, with its declining membership numbers, stood for an unravelling of communities that had been designed to preserve the hegemony of a dominant group. As Arneil details in her comparative analysis between the American boy and girl scouts, the boy scouts had been founded in imperial Britain as a reaction to an “empire under threat“: a perceived crisis of masculinity of ever-softening boys and the influx of racial others from the colonies, who were meant to be relegated to inferiority and subservience (Arneil 54). American boy scouting troops were, according to her, initiated out of an anxiety about shifts in demography and values, like urbanization, feminism and the migration waves coming from Southern and Eastern Europe (Arneil 55). She draws on the thoughts of !14 Macleod that fear of women led to a sense of confinement in an increasingly feminized world, in stark contrast to the mythical endless spaces of the Western frontier (Arneil 55). These thoughts resonate strongly with the depiction of Travis in the movie, who is repeatedly dressing like a cowboy, in a plaid shirt and meticulously shined cowboy boots and even called a cowboy by the pimp Sport, who is nevertheless confined in the small space of his cab or room, while striving for masculine greatness and liberation from the sinful city of New York. The promotion of obedience, strict morals and self-discipline conditioned boys into what can reasonably be called the ideal soldier, submissive to authorities but himself exacting power over others. This, together with traditional gender roles and racial segregation, was summarily rejected in the countercultural movement of the 1960s, with special skepticism exacted towards militarism after the heavily mediated spectacle (and great political debacle) of the Vietnam War. The happy couple on the card (and the fact that Travis’s parents, although unseen in the movie, are still married) speak to a nostalgic longing for romanticized easier times, before the corrosion of families ostensibly left men like Travis without strong communal ties. His anxiety in regard to the improved ability of spouses to divorce even without mutual consent also becomes clear when Travis tips over his television set at the moment a wife explains to her husband that she has fallen in love with another man. 2.2.4.2. Competitive Masculinity: Killing the Black Man Murderous fantasies are, during the course of the film, repeatedly projected onto black male bodies. Travis, after purchasing his gun, fashions himself as a vigilante and punishes a black 7/11 robber with death and a white man describes how he would like to mangle the vagina of his unfaithful wife with a gun, lingering on the fact that she cheated on him with a “nigger“ – the insulting of minorities is a recurring trope in Scorsese’s movies, according to Marc Raymond, as a sign of anxiety in the face of challenged masculinity (Raymond 70). Additionally, Travis seems to harbor violent racist fantasies when he plays with his gun while watching an episode of American Bandstand showing interracial and all-black teenage couples dancing. American Bandstand became contested ground after black teenagers, envying what they saw as an Italian American/Catholic privilege of being able to participate in the show as a dancing couple (Cannady in Delmont 182), demanded inclusion not only as practicing musicians during the show but also as participants. Racial integration first occurred in 1964 but opposition to interracial couples remained fierce, due to various groups deeming !15 interracial mixing as against God’s will (Delmont 192). At the end, Travis tries to safe Iris and return her to a (quasi-virginal) state of innocence within the confines of her family, without previously ascertaining what made her leave her family. Travis’s final murderous acts are his shootings of the men that he thinks are essentially holding Iris hostage, with a special focus on the pimp Sport, whose hypermasculine, yet at the same time feminine and gay appearance (Greven 174) recalls the look of flamboyant, African American pimps. His aggression is thereby directed against a man from a similar social stratum as him, who is punished for performing a pseudo-blackness and his ambiguous relationship to Iris, who is situated at a nexus between sexual liberation and naiveté in her romanticizing of her profession that ignores the unevenness in power dynamics between her and Sport . Both Travis, as a poor white man at the margins of the white mainstream, unable to attract the white woman of his dreams, relegated to margin of society, and the black men of the movie are set up in competition in their claims to masculinity. The silent pimps at the tables surrounding the one of Travis and his colleagues at the diner seem menacing to Travis, as evidenced by his nervous, distrustful looks, just as the gang of youths with rattling chains that pass Travis in front of the diner’s door, bathed in red light that signifies danger and alarm; additionally, Travis’s black colleague reminds Travis that he still owes him money and calls him “killer“ upon saying goodbye while pointing a finger at him in a way that could be interpreted as both jovial and reminiscent of the guns Travis likes to fondle. The attire of the pimps reflects constructions of black masculinity as seen in the blaxploitation movies that specifically targeted black inner city audiences yearning for agreeable cinematic representations. The pimp here is (sexually) powerful, self-made and does not subordinate himself to white institutions of power, instead using illegal avenues for financial gain (Wander 2). While the storytelling of the white mainstream held a wide array of narratological options, common mythology and folklore, black cinema had to build up positive models for blackness and reclaim stereotypical representations to their advantage, thereby at times harkening back to damaging portrayals perpetuated by whites like hypersexuality. Additionally, black characters were sometime also constructed after white models, as shown in Melvin Van Peebles, director of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), calling the character of Sweetback a “brown Clint Eastwood“, while Brandon Wander has compared him to John Wayne (6). According to Wander, heroes of the Western and Film !16 Noir have similarly entered “irrational frontiers“ and “urban jungles“ to “restore white balance and meaning“ (3). Travis is making similar claims to the frontier myth and the identity of the Western hero. 2.2.4.3. Travis as the Western Hero: Rethinking American Militarism As Susan J. Rosowski has remarked in her study of how Westerns produce meaning, the generic formula for the story is that an outsider enters a community, defends “townspeople/settlers/farmers against Indian/wilderness/ranchers“, restores order and leaves, resulting in his redemption and regeneration. To this she adds Cawelti’s observation that the hero is rewarded with a promising future and marriage if he manages to recover “basic human and American values“ (Rosowski 269). John Hellmann, writing about the cycle of Vietnam movies that includes Apocalpyse Now (1979) and The Deer Hunter (1978), also starring Robert De Niro, contends that the Western shows its lone hero on his quest from the safety of a community into the unknown wilderness of the west and the effect the frontier landscape has on a man’s character. Just as Hellmann describes the men in The Deerhunter as confronted with “darker races“ associated with wilderness and the unconscious in the hostile territory of the Vietnam jungle that serves as a “nightmare inversion“ to the sublime American nature, Travis is confronted with similar forces (Hellmann 426). Applied to Taxi Driver, Travis’s mythical quest is to defend the city of New York (standing metonymically for the entirety of the United States) against deterioration ostensibly caused by the influx of ethnic others, which are in this film mainly identified as black and marginalized. He could also be seen to fend off the signs of social progress he sees in the sexual liberation of women, the pacifist movement and the Civil Rights Movement in general. As he cannot purge the city (and nation) of every element he perceives as destructive, he sets out to complete a more manageable task: Retrieving teenage prostitute Iris from her unquestionably manipulative pimp to return her to presumably loving parents, thereby restoring the integrity of the nuclear family. His redemption comes in the form of the media celebrating his heroic act of vigilantism – although the viewer, through the dramatic irony of knowing Travis’s journey and the pathologic tendencies of his personality, may be reluctant to join into this celebration. Travis’s reward, then, is Betsy entering the backseat of his cab, seductively posing in his rear view mirror, seemingly wanting to rekindle their romance. Travis, giving off an air of distinct coolness, in contrast to his less self-assured previous !17 demeanor, and only shown to be checking Betsy’s reaction in the mirror once, says that his deed left him with just „a little stiffness“ and then proceeds to ignore Betsy when she lingers in front of his door. He rides off into the night without payment, rejecting her advances. If this sequence is taken for real, it serves as an affirmation that (career-oriented) women like Betsy reduce a man to his success and masculine prowess, which has been hinted at in how Betsy wants to “sell“ Palantine to the electorate; if it’s not, as seemingly evidenced by Travis’s double-take and readjustment of his rear view mirror after he has driven off, which is combined with a short dissonant sound that interrupts the theme with which screen appearances of Betsy are normally accompanied, we are witness to a fantasy of a successful reassertion of hegemonic masculinity through violent acts. The fantastic quality of the scene is helped by the fact that Betsy is only shown through the mirror, with a soft glow giving her an almost ethereal quality and hair softly blowing in the breeze. In the way Travis, characterized as a man of disorder (“One of these days, I’m gonna get organiz-ized“), is shown to impose his moralistic order on others, he acts in a fashion similar to the US in previous international conflicts. Just as Travis instigates a conflict with Sport based on his own morality and paternalistic impulse, the US did the same without regard to the domestic turmoil the US found itself in in the 1960s and 70s, foregoing selfreflection and the necessary forging of a new identity adapted to updated realities of life to pursue easy targets chosen for ideological reasons. As Keys lines out in her description of the “Trauma of the Vietnam War“, war apologists saw the human suffering inflicted by war as both understandable and inevitable (49), just as Travis ruthlessly murders the man Iris believes she loves in front of her eyes. Similarly, Keys quotes Genovese in saying that the war threw America into a spiritual crisis, in which its sense of “national virtue and omnipotence“ crumbled, along with the belief that America was invincible and all problems soluble (51), which in its turn led to a “combustible mix of doubt, anxiety, shame, anger [and] frustration“ shaping foreign relations (52). To further prove his alignment with conservative thought, we also see Travis as distrustful of the communes Iris mentions, which served, as Sulick detailed, as pockets of resistance of the hippie youth culture against the government (Sulick 37). !18 3. Conclusion While a superficial skimming of Scorsese’s work might lead to the impression that Scorsese is unconcerned with the history of African American while investigating the place of Italian- and Irish-Americans in great detail, a closer reading reveals that even narrative marginalization of African Americans serves a meaningful purpose in telling stories about the lie of equality and the pathological qualities of American masculinity and patriotic rhetorics. Both the militarism of Gangs of New York and the vigilantism of Taxi Driver show an outlaw mentality that is ultimately valorized by society but condemned by the viewer. Tension and competition between different groups of immigrants or members of the same class and different ethnicities are a prominent concern of Scorsese’s, as well as the myth of the American Dream that promises prosperity to hard workers like Travis. Both movies detail how freed slaves fared in the northern centers they fled to, although from different points in history. These centers are exposed not as a safe haven but as similarly racist and segregationist as the South, albeit under a more progressive veneer. The temporal distance between the two narratives also shows how white ethnicities previously on a similar footing as African Americans are, in the 1970s, safely integrated into the mainstream while African Americans are still marked as distinctly other and perceived as a threat. Taxi Driver shows that while during all the years blacks and whites have lived together in cities some kind of convergence has happened, racial relations are still at a tipping point. Fear of interracial mixing and the “decay“ of cities through disproportionate presence of African Americans are still a concern – at least when you scour the dark corners of the American psyche, away from the mainstream in which unity and progress are celebrated in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. Both movies can therefore be seen as indictments of the racist undercurrents of American society. As previously remarked, the research undertaken for this essay suggests that Scorsese’s oeuvre merits a closer inspection in regard to his depiction of African Americans, with Bringing out the Dead and Raging Bull as suitable options. !19 Works Cited Arneil, Barbara. “Gender, Diversity and Organizational Change: The Boy Scouts vs. Girl Scouts of America.“ Perspectives on Politics 8.1 (2010): 53-68. Jstor. Web. Beckman, Frida. “Epilogue: Swedish Sin, or the Importance of Remaining Curious.“ Between Desire and Pleasure: A Deleuzian Theory of Sexuality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Print. 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