Martin Scorsese, Hollywood Independent: Taxi Driver (1976) as a Bicentennial Film in the Age of Intertextuality by Frank P. Tomasulo, Ph.D. Abstract: This essay examines Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) as a Bicentennial opus, filled with all the sociocultural contradictions of that era: racial strife, economic "stagflation," rampant crime and violence, gender tensions, post-Vietnam War angst, political cynicism, and the Ford-Carter presidential election of the same year. In addition to these socio-thematic questions, the film's aesthetic derives from a variety of intertextual sources: classic film noir (albeit in color), John Cassavetes's cinéma-vérité "realism"; Michael Powell's Technicolor expressionism; the modernist European art cinema of Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Jean-Luc Godard; and, of course, John Ford's The Searchers. Key Words: Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese, film, Bicentennial, Vietnam War, intertextuality, aesthetics, Hollywood, independent cinema. In its bicentennial year, 1976, the United States was wracked by mistrust of the government and other social institutions. The Watergate scandal and the American evacuation of Vietnam were still fresh in everyone's mind. Forced to deal with these traumatic historical events, combined with a lethargic economy (8.5 percent unemployment, energy shortages, OPEC price hikes of 5 to 10 percent, high inflation (8.7 percent and rising), and the decline of the U.S. dollar on international currency exchanges, the American national psyche (what Siegfried Kracauer called “the national character pattern”; p. 6) suffered from a climate of disillusionment and despair. In the phrase made famous by California governor Jerry Brown the previous year, Americans had to adjust to “lowered expectations.” President Gerald Ford's WIN (Whip Inflation Now) buttons (Fig. 1) -- did nothing to bolster consumer or investor confidence and were widely perceived to be a public relations gimmick to paper over structural difficulties in the financial system. The federal government's “misery index,” a combination of the unemployment rate and the rate of inflation, peaked at 17 percent. Other intractable problems were apparent: stagflation, political paranoia, collective anxiety, widespread alienation, economic privation, inner-city decay, overt racism, and rampant violence. In short, there was a widespread perception that the foundations of the American Dream had been shattered by years of decline and frustration. Despite these negative economic and social indicators in the material world, the nation went ahead with a major feel-good diversion, the bicentennial celebration that featured the greatest maritime spectacle in American history: “Operation Sail,” a parade of sixteen “Tall Ships,” fifty-three warships, and more than two hundred smaller sailing vessels in New York harbor. Seven million people lined the shore, along with President Ford, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and a host of international dignitaries, including Prince Rainier and Princess Grace (née Kelly) of Monaco. The spectacular fireworks display was choreographed by Walt Disney Attractions and, as the radio simulcast of patriotic tunes concluded, “the Bicentennial was brought to you by Macy's.” Crass commercial considerations of this sort were highly prominent throughout the festivities, in sharp contrast to the privations of America's revolutionary founders in 1776. The American political landscape was also different than two hundred years earlier, although two schools of thought still remained prominent: the Federalists and Democrat-Republicans of the early days of the republic had morphed into the liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans of 1976. However, neither Gerald Ford -- the “accidental” president who succeeded Richard M. Nixon after the latter resigned in disgrace over the Watergate scandal just prior to his anticipated impeachment -- nor Jimmy Carter -- Ford's little-known centrist Democratic challenger -- were the equivalent of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, or the other founders of the republic, but that was the choice offered to bicentennial voters. Indeed, the closeness of the 1976 presidential election (Carter, 50 percent; Ford, 48 percent) suggested deep divisions in the nation. In many ways, the same ideological choice on the ballot was proffered to audiences of American films. The ideological themes (and styles) of the most popular films, as well as those most acclaimed by the critical establishment and the Motion Picture Academy, likewise reflected a growing national instability, a vestige of the Vietnam War and Watergate periods. Let me sketch out some of the cultural highlights of that era. “Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear…” Three of the top seven best-selling nonfiction books from 1976 were about the Watergate scandal: Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s The Final Days, a sequel or sorts to their All the President's Men; convicted Watergate conspirator Charles Colson's Born Again; and John Dean's Blind Ambition: The White House Years. The success of Alex Haley's book Roots suggested that racial tensions were easing despite events that indicated the nation was still racially divided. Finally, although not a commercial best-seller, another highly influential book appeared that year: Daniel Bell's The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, whose thesis was that U.S. society was splintering. In fact, Bell's book contains twenty-two references to America as “unstable,” as epitomized by the '''American climacteric,' a critical change of life” in the nation (213). On the international scene, Vietnam became unified, with its capital established in Hanoi and Saigon renamed as Ho Chi Minh City. Both Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai died in 1976, leading to a power struggle for control of the People's Republic of China. The incoming pragmatists purged hard-line Maoists, and many Mao loyalists, such as the Gang of Four (including Mao’s widow, Ch'ing Ch'ing, a former film star), were imprisoned. Perhaps because of the uncertain times and the excitement surrounding the bicentennial, the arts returned to more traditional modes and codes of expression, thus eclipsing the long run of the more experimental, political, and modernist aesthetic in painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, music, and cinema. As in past times of uncertainty, many “new” works harkened back to prior styles, such as realism, while also incorporating a postmodernist pastiche of intertextual references to older themes and forms, especially those with upbeat themes of national renewal (or at least survival). Indeed, many film scholars, including Glenn Man, David Cook, and Frank Tomasulo, date the demise of the short-lived “Hollywood Renaissance” to 1976. Rather than continue to explore the European art cinema's themes and techniques, many American films of the bicentennial year relied on formulaic patterns -- so much so that many movies were either remakes of earlier hits and classic productions or adaptations of successful books. Examples include King Kong, A Star Is Born, All the President's Men, Carrie, The Seven Percent Solution, The Omen, and the ultimate pastiche movie, That's Entertainment, Part II, which consisted exclusively of clips from Golden Age Hollywood musicals. Even movies that were not specifically remakes or adaptations were often derived from an earlier Ur-text. For instance, Arthur Hiller's Silver Streak and Brian DePalma's Obsession relied so much on Hitchcockian themes and techniques that one expected the Master of Suspense himself to make one of his patented cameo appearances (Obsession even used a passionate Bernard Herrmann musical score to accentuate the Hitchcockian overtones). Peter Bogdanovich’s Nickelodeon told of the early days of Hollywood silent filmmaking, when the nation and the motion picture industry were far less jaded. Similarly, in an hommage to the silent film era, Mel Brooks's Silent Movie contained no spoken dialogue except for Marcel Marceau's “Non!” Although not a literal remake, John Avildsen's Rocky became emblematic of the retrenchment of creativity by “sampling” all the clichés of the boxing genre (and the Cinderella narrative) -- and rose to the top of the box office ladder. Only a few films by major New Hollywood directors challenged the return to normalcy by actively (and self-reflexively) interrogating the content and form of the studio genre picture. One notable example was Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians, an overtly self-referential satire on entertainment and American values in the guise of a Western. Likewise, Arthur Penn's Missouri Breaks attempted to deconstruct the Western, while Martin Ritt's The Front recreated McCarthy-era paranoia in the movie and television industries. Other inventive films of 1976 included Hal Ashby's Bound for Glory, based on the autobiography of folksinger Woody Guthrie, who rode the rails across Depression-era America and discovered his voice of protest, and Elia Kazan's The Last Tycoon, which harkened back to legendary 1930s movie executive Irving Thalberg to comment on the current state of Hollywood movie making. Even the science-fiction genre was postmodernizcd in Michael Anderson's Logan’s Run, in which the generation gap was transmogrified into a twenty-third-century society where everyone over the age of thirty has to undergo “renewal” (in reality, death). This was a time when the studios, which traditionally discouraged stylistic eccentricity, began to see directorial style as another form of product differentiation and a marketing strategy. In the past, only a handful of celebrity directors, such as Hitchcock or Capra, figured prominently in a film’s promotion, but in the 1970s the auteur theory had so pervaded the culture that promoting a film as an artistic expression of its director became a useful means to go beyond mere genre and star advertising, especially to the growing audience of cineastes. By 1976, this directorial model of filmmaking, resisted for decades in the studio era, became a convenient means for promoting a film’s artistry, for distinguishing its unique qualities, and for establishing its genre (or anti-genre) category. In its broadest sense, signature directorial style became just as important as genre and stars. As David Cook has noted, “That any aesthetically experimental, socially conscious cinéma d'auteur could exist simultaneously with a burgeoning and rapacious blockbuster mentality was extraordinary” (Lost, xvii). The movie industry itself underwent considerable change with the use of saturation booking and heavily targeted advertising. The blockbuster era was in full swing. Among the hallmarks of that trend was the use of bankable stars whose screen personas and professional reputations supposedly ensured box office success, or at least were a hedge against casting risk. The International Motion Picture Almanac listed nine such “profitability actors” (and one child star, Tatum O'Neal): Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Clint Eastwood, Mel Brooks, Burt Reynolds, Al Pacino, Tatum O'Neal, Woody Allen, and Charles Bronson (Cook, Lost, 339). Peter Lev's American Films of the 70s has a subtitle that summarizes Hollywood cinema in 1976: Conflicting Visions. That dialectical description could perhaps apply to any era in U.S. film history, but the term seems particularly apposite for the bicentennial year. Downbeat films about personal alienation, public corruption, and paranoia, best exemplified by Taxi Driver and Network, vied for audiences with upbeat movies about personal achievement and feel-good emotions, such as Rocky and Bound for Glory. Others, such as the middle-of-the-road All the President's Men, both castigated the corruption of the political process and applauded that system's ability to rejuvenate itself. These five movies, all Oscar nominees, constitute what Fredric Jameson has called a “national allegory” (87) that simultaneously conceal and reveal the nation's split sensibility to itself and to the rest of the world. Yet they are not isolated examples. This paper, however, focuses mainly on one particular Bicentennial movie, Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, that epitomizes the bifurcated American zeitgeist of 1976, in terms of both its themes and techniques. To paraphrase Charles Dickens, “It was the worst of times; it was the best of times.” Narrative. In terms of its narrative, Taxi Driver is essentially a retelling of John Ford's classic Western The Searchers (1954), transposed to a cesspool modern metropolis. Thus, Travis Bickle’s (Robert DeNiro’s) mission to rescue Iris (Jodi Foster) makes Taxi Driver a standard captivity narrative, and Scorsese’s willingness to appropriate it reveals a tendency to conceptualize film in standard generic and commercial terms. Hence it can be seen as having a classical Hollywood narrative structure. It also contains many of Hollywood’s key box-office ingredients: overt dramatic conflict, implicit sex, and explicit, yet stylized violence. Indeed, for Stephen Prince, a “poetics of violence” developed during the studio era, an artistic practice that both helped to avoid regulatory action but also to “expand the creative possibilities of expression in American cinema” (205). The studio era’s indirect and censored use of violence, he notes, had “left its visual legacy deeply embedded in American film,” long after the period in which films were forced to curtail explicit depictions of violence to avoid regulatory action (251). But, by 1976, aided and abetted by the demise of Production Code restrictions and regional film censorship, almost anything was allowed – although CARA administrators apparently forced Scorsese to use a lab to desaturate the color of the red blood in the climactic massacre scene to get an “R” rating. Although it shares many traits with Hollywood norms, Taxi Driver can also be classified as a colorized neo-noir, that is, a film that draws inspiration from the American postwar film noir cycle -- replete with paranoid consciousness, metropolitan malaise, rain-soaked streets, neon lights, low-key lighting, subjective voice-over narrations, femmes fatales, and a haunting musical score (in this case, composed by Bernard Herrmann, who was deceased at the time). But Taxi Driver updates those postwar tropes into the more contemporary sociohistorical context of America’s Bicentennial year: the post-Vietnam War era, political cynicism after Watergate, urban decay, racism, street violence, feminism and male chauvinism, and a postmodernist pastiche of cinematic techniques unheard of by John Ford. Thus, as Peter Biskind says, Taxi Driver is "descended from the fifties B film noir of 'psychotic action and suicidal impulse,' but by way of the French New Wave, John Cassavetes's documentary realism, the metacinematic fantasies of Federico Fellini, and Michael Powell's … Technicolor expressionism" (81). In that sense, Taxi Driver is both a studio picture and an independent film. In fact, contemporaneous reviewers of Taxi Driver often described the film’s style in incongruous terms. Some reviewers considered the film intensely realistic, an impression created by shots of filthy Manhattan, sweltering in the heat of the summer, the often documentary-like mise-en-scène and cinematography, as well as the performers’ acting styles. One reviewer referred to De Niro’s “stunningly dimensional” performance, which fleshed out “the surface dynamics of [the character’s] madness into all-too-believable flesh and blood” (S. K. 7). Another complimented the actor’s “totally convincing” work and Scorsese’s “naturalistic direction” (Bartholomew 35), and another referenced the film’s “frighteningly plausible case history” (Murf., “Taxi Driver,” 3). Reviewers said that events in the film take place “as haphazardly as in life” (Gow, 30) and that “the sophisticated use of lighting, color, camera angle and editing make the city streets so real that a viewer can feel fear even before violence occurs” (Lauder, “Hell,” 467). Others noticed its extreme stylization: ???. The film's divided sensibility, its "calculated ambivalence," may simply reflect the splintered Zeitgeist of Bicentennial America, and it may also well be the result of the different perspectives of Dutch-Calvinist screenwriter Paul Schrader and Italian-American-Catholic director Scorsese. This "aberrant" tendency may be why it took almost four years for the film to be greenlighted by Columbia Pictures. Aside from the anti-hero's divided psyche (Betsy [Cybil Shepard] compares him to a Kris Kristofferson song: "a prophet and a pusher, partly truth, partly fiction: a walking contradiction"), the themes of American violence, teenage prostitution, male chauvinism, political assassination, and racism suggest a disturbing national dilemma in the year of the Bicentennial. This chaotic atmosphere may be why Robin Wood called this postmodernist movie an "incoherent text" (41-62). Similarly, Todd Berliner refers to the movie’s “narrative frustration, genre deviation, and conceptual incongruity” (21). On that latter point – “conceptual incongruity” – consider two scenes: the playful banter between Betsy and her coworker Tom (Albert Brooks) in the campaign headquarters and the pictures of murderous carnage near the end. If shown these two scenes back to back, one would have a hard time placing them within the same film. Characters. According to screenwriter Paul Schrader, Vieteran-turned-vigilante Travis Bickle was modeled after the would-be assassin Arthur Bremer and his diaries. Another obvious intertextual reference would obviously be The Searchers’ Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) – like Travis Bickle, another disillusioned veteran of a war lost three years before, a permanent outcast from his society. They are both determined to rescue a girl held captive by people they view as degenerate. Overt racism is crucial to the characters of both Ethan and Travis. Iris’s pimp Sport (Harvey Keitel) is similar to an Apache brave from a Western. He has long brown hair, and wears a headband in one scene with Travis, whose boots provoke Sport’s taunt of “cowboy.” Travis barely conceals his hatred for Sport, the same kind of attitude that leads Ethan to scalp Scar in The Searchers. When Travis returns to kill Sport, he has shaven his hair into a Mohawk, which can be explained in terms of the film’s Vietnam subtext, but it also resembles Ethan’s transgression of his own society’s mores in order to “save” it. Later, following the bloody shooting spree in which Sport and his associates are murdered, “Pappy” (John Ford’s nickname and the title of his biography) is seen scrawled on a bloodied wall as the camera retreats over the carnage. Of course, some of these parallels between the two films have been analyzed extensively in the scholarly literature, even if they were not noticed at the time (??). One should also note that Bickle writes in his diary, "I think I have stomach cancer," a line borrowed from Diary of a Country Priest, a film by Robert Bresson, who Schrader wrote about in his book, Transcendental Cinema. Bickle's voice-over provides a running racist rant; he aims hostile glares at black men at every opportunity, and even kills a black stick-up man in a New York bodega. These acts, combined with Scorsese's role as a racist passenger who spews the "n" word and makes derogatory remarks about women ("Have you ever seen what a .44 Magnum can do a woman's pussy?"), define the racial and gender Zeitgeist of 1976, although it could be argued that the film itself is neither racist nor sexist, only its sociopathic characters are. More to the point would be to say that American society had been buffeted by losses and failures—both foreign and domestic—and that Taxi Driver contains images (and a paranoid protagonist ) that alternatively project that despair and impotence along with frustrated individualized violent and chauvinistic outbursts that are clearly not a substitute for meaningful social action. But if Travis is so angered by the "scum" and "filth" of the "open sewer" all around him, why does he plan to assassinate the cliché-spouting presidential candidate Charles Palantine (Leonard Harris) who has promised to clean up that mess? Is it because after the exposure of Richard Nixon's Watergate tapes no politician could be trusted? Or is it because Betsy, the woman who rejected him, was a Palantine campaign worker? And why does Travis switch targets and kill Iris's pimp, Sport? Is it the same twisted rationale as he used when he took Betsy to a porno movie on their first date? Why does he wear a Mohawk haircut, which would only call unwanted attention to himself? Is it just psychopathology? Or are all these incidents part of a system of paradoxical tropes in the film's Bicentennial discourse? Most important, is Bickle's final killing spree heroic (as the press reads it) or psychotic (the result of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder)? As an alienated loner surrounded by the corruption of a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America, he tries to play the part of the old-fashioned Western hero (albeit with a Native American hairdo), whose decisive action wins the day and saves "his lady fair," twelve-year-old Iris. But genuine heroism is no longer possible in the post-Vietnam era; Travis can only be an ambiguous and dubious anti-hero, like Ethan Edwards, trained by his society and the Marines (like Lee Harvey Oswald) to "search and destroy." Postmodernist Cinematic Style. Todd Berliner has suggested the following: “Hollywood … discourages conspicuous and idiosyncratic stylization. By the standards of classical Hollywood cinema, Taxi Driver risk[s] aesthetic disaster for a classical film, [by] diverting spectator attention away from plot patterning and onto film technique. In Taxi Driver, Scorsese creates idiosyncratic stylistic devices so pervasive and bold that they become a form of narration in themselves” (21). In this way, many of Scorsese’s artistic choices are semiotically charged conveyers of narrative, character, and meaning. David Bordwell, among others, including Frank Tomasulo, has noted that stylistic patterns have the potential to gain such prominence in a film that they become more than mere ornamentation or embellishment but they become a shaping narrative force. According to Bordwell, arthouse movies “elevate various stylistic features to the level of intermittently dominant structures” and highlight film technique to such an extent that it threatens to “deform” other narrational devices (Narration, 278). I will touch on some of those specific techniques in passing but want to also emphasize that one aspect of that stylistic signature is an idiosyncratic penchant for intertextual allusions, something to be expected from an MFA graduate of and instructor at the NYU Film School. For the most part, the intertextual references in Taxi Driver are relatively limited in scope, although they do provide a subtle sub-structure for the narrative. Aesthetically, the film is a nightmarish inferno, with vapors emerging from the underground and Bernard Herrmann's haunting musical score enveloping the proceedings. At the very outset, Scorsese's camera fetishizes and fragments the taxicab by showing isolated metonymies of its body: the side-view mirror, windshield, tires, rear-view mirror, just as Jean-Luc Godard fragmented the human body in Une Femme Mariée (1964). Since much of the film is shot from Travis's distorted insomniac perspective, this fragmentation might reflect his disintegrating mind and spirit. Another obvious Godardian reference is the image, an extreme close-up, of fizzing Alka-Seltzer (probably for his stomach cancer) as Travis sits essentially alone, although amidst his fellow cabbies at a cafeteria table. This disintegrating tablet resembles a galaxy and refers to a similar shot of a coffee cup in Godard’s Deux ou Trois Choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her, 1967). Perhaps these isolated references may be “a representation of the private universe in which Travis is lost,” as one commentator put it, but it could also be, in combination with the other intertextual references I’ll mention, that these isolated references are essentially little more than a show of appreciation, “a tissue of quotations” (Thurman ??). Here are some others: Bickle eats bread soaked in peach brandy, which is a take on Bresson’s saintly prelate in Le Journal d’un Curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest, 1951), who subsists entirely on the Eucharist: bread soaked in wine. Incidentally, Bresson’s country priest dies of stomach cancer and Bickle says in voice-over that he suspects he has that disease. Paul Schrader has even confirmed that Travis’ narration from his diary is borrowed from Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), the title of which, like Taxi Driver, refers to an occupation, not a person. In addition, Bresson’s pickpocket, Michel (Martin La Salle), rehearses his crimes with a deliberateness that Travis also uses with his guns. Scorsese admits to being influenced by Irving Lerner’s Murder by Contract (1958) (??). In that movie, a hired killer, Claude (Vince Edwards), exercises alone in his apartment, where a clock ticks in the background like a time-bomb. This is much the same as when Bickle prepares for his assassination attempt against Senator Palantine (Leonard Harris). Taxi Driver also adapts (plagiarizes?) another scene from Murder by Contract in which the killer describes the impact of various types of ammunition – a scene re-enacted by Scorsese as a crazed passenger in the back of Travis’s cab. (Thus, Scorsese and Schrader both “borrow” allusions to art cinema and Hollywood genre pictures, another indication of the bifurcated aesthetic vision at work in Taxi Driver.) Another example from the arthouse cinema: Scorsese says he watched Salvatore Giuliano (Francesco Rosi, 1962) to study general visual approaches he could utilize in Taxi Driver (??). Both films depict a “scene of the crime” image in remarkably similar ways: from the POV of an overhead shot that surveys the carnage. Of course, from a characterological perspective, both criminal protagonists become folk heroes. Up until now, I’ve shown how Hollywood and arthouse scenes coexist in Taxi Driver. But I also want to present a sequence that uses both paradigms. This is the scene in which Travis shoots and kills a gunman robbing a New York bodega. At first, the scene seems intent on avoiding the suspense and thrills that normally accompany scenes in which Hollywood protagonists use violence to stop armed robberies in progress. Consider this medium shot of a robber pointing a gun at the owner of the store, while Travis, in the background, draws his own gun. This shot—which both communicates Travis’s intentions to the audience and reveals the gunman’s ignorance of Travis’s presence—seems designed to exploit the scenario’s potential for Hollywood-style action. Indeed, in a more typically Hollywood movie, the deadly face-off between the two characters would generate excitement, but here it comes across rather coldly. The moment of confrontation, quick and un-suspenseful, begins when—rather than delivering the kind of sharp, confident line that spectators often hear during comparable moments in Hollywood crime movies (“Go ahead, make my day”; “Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker”)—Travis quietly says to the robber, “Hey. Hey.” It ends just two seconds later when the robber, whom Travis shoots only once, slumps down dead before firing a shot. A moment such as this seems designed to frustrate spectator expectations of a satisfying confrontation, squandering its potential for thrills, suspense, and spectator satisfaction. We can also note how the scene exploits conventional genre devices to create unsettling and unresolved incongruities. The scene relies on our habitual responses to generic conventions (an armed hoodlum threatening an innocent victim; our protagonist, prepared, but forced into a confrontation in which he must prove his mettle through violent action) in order to set us up for its unconventional outcome. This kind of face-off scene would be familiar to spectators from a variety of movies released just prior to Taxi Driver—including Billy Jack (1971), Dirty Harry (1971), Straw Dogs (1971), Shaft (1971), Deliverance (1972), Walking Tall (1973), and Death Wish (1974)—in which a character initiates a violent confrontation in order to save another character from a hoodlum or gang, a frequent scenario in films of the Nixonian early seventies. Like any genre bender, the scene begins true to form: We hear the hoodlum demanding money of the store owner and watch Travis at first considering what to do and finally reaching for a pistol hidden in his pants. However, the movie neglects to fully deliver on its generic promise, preferring instead to portray a scene far more unnerving than the one predicted by its genre. Even compared to other seventies movies in which protagonists save people from hoodlums, Taxi Driver’s use of the scenario is extremely unconventional: Whereas generically similar scenes tend to glamorize vigilante killings, this one creates disconcerting conceptual incongruities. The scene comes across as conceptually incongruous largely because the narration’s attitude toward the killing seems oddly inconsistent. Robin Wood notes this quality in the movie, saying that “the central incoherence of Taxi Driver lies in the failure to establish a consistent, and adequately rigorous, attitude to the protagonist” (53). Indeed, the movie seems both to condemn and to side with Travis’s actions. On the one hand, his reaction to the killing makes him look callous: Travis is more concerned with how to deal with his illegal weapon than with the killing itself, and earlier scenes in which he glares at black characters gives the shooting of the thief, who is black, a racist undertone. On the other hand, he does come to the defense of a crime victim, who is a minority group member himself. Moreover, his reaction to the shooting seems sympathetically confused and afraid. After the killing, Bickle wrinkles his forehead anxiously, turns his body in several directions, and continues to point the gun at the obviously dead body, leaving the impression that Travis, clearly frightened by the event, doesn’t know what to do with himself. The film’s ambivalent attitude toward the killing impedes efforts to form a coherent moral judgment of Travis’s action. Perhaps the most frustrating, generically unpredictable, and conceptually incongruous moment occurs after Travis leaves the scene, and the camera lingers in the market. For no obvious reason pertinent to narrative causality or the protagonist’s predicament, the owner of the market—who, for a brief period, was perceived primarily as an innocent victim of a robbery—viciously beats the dead body of the robber with a metal bar. Berliner says that, “Moments such as these indicate the extent to which Hollywood could take the narrative perversities characteristic of 1970s storytelling” (??), but the continuation of this scene could suggest that Travis’s racism and violence are not unique to him but are embedded in the American “national character.” One of the most conspicuous artistic shots in the film starts on Travis talking on the telephone to Betsy, begging her to give him another chance. As he speaks, the camera inexplicably tracks to the right and holds, for almost 30 seconds, on an empty, uninhabited hallway, as though the film were temporarily being directed by Antonioni, whose autonomous moving camera became a trope of the European art cinema in the 1960s and 70s. Scorsese said about the shot, “I guess you can see the hand behind the camera there” (qtd in Thompson and Christie 54). Although ostensibly unmotivated by the narrative proper, I’ve always read this shot as a sign of the emptiness of Travis’s life and as a metaphor for the dead end in his “relationship” with Betsy. In addition, the vanishing point mise-en-scène and the hidden “X” pattern suggest the vanishing of almost any chance for Bickle to make meaningful contact with another human being. (BTW, there are many instances of this hidden “X” throughout Scorsese’s mise-en-scène.) One must also consider the film’s potpourri of realistic and formalist devices and the creative means by which the movie unites these ostensibly paradoxical styles. According to Robert Kolker, “‘Realism’ and expressionism work against each other, creating a strong perceptual tension that can be felt throughout [Scorsese’s] work” (166). Another reviewer referred to cinematographer Michael Chapman’s “admirable mix of reined reality and modified hallucination” (Gow 30). And Scorsese himself said, “The overall idea was to make [Taxi Driver] like a cross between a gothic horror and the New York Daily News” (qtd in Thompson and Christie 54). Take the movie’s very first shot -- a taxicab driving through smoke and mist—a shot that resembles a stylized horror movie. On the one hand, it seems like a highly expressionistic image; yet, many real-life New York streets periodically belch steam from manhole covers, creating an aura of a Dantean netherworld. At the very end, two images, separated by a swish pan, display another incongruous vision of New York: as Travis’s taxi pulls away from Betsy’s curb, we see her in a reverse tracking shot, filmed though through the rear window of the cab. She gets smaller and smaller in the frame as the camera pulls back. The camera then quickly swish pans through the inside of the cab until it faces the front of the cab, where we see the back of Travis’s head, his face in the rearview mirror and the streets of New York out of the front windshield, perhaps a reference to the famous noir opening of Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place. During the span of that quick camera maneuver, the world dramatically changes in bizarre ways, signaled by a drastic change in film styles. The shots out of Travis’s front windshield are high-contrast and use extremely hard, low-key lighting, giving the New York streets a distinctly blurry appearance as abstract shapes and non-representational colors dot the screen. Whereas the shot of Betsy makes the world look benign and normal, even romanticized, the images seen through Travis’s front windshield make the world look perplexing and portentous, crazed and out of control. Those images, created by pushing Kodak Ektachrome EF an extra stop, take us from classical realism to abstract expressionism. Moreover, Bickle seems to have driven, in the time it takes to swish pan, from the Upper East Side to Forty-second Street. Then, the previously “realistic” images change to an abstract array of colors and shapes that dissolve into one another and reposition chaotically, coming from all directions, layered on top of one another, creating a dynamic and hectic mise-en-scène. This ominous image of the city is the visual antithesis of the one we saw only ten seconds earlier, as we switch from Betsy’s comfortable Manhattan into Bickle’s crazed vision of New York. During their final conversation, Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker use a classical shot/reverse regime to show the contrast between the two, with Betsy’s all-American beauty encircled by the amorphous and menacing color splotches associated with Travis. And those are the blurry bicentennial images we are left with as the credits roll: high-contrast abstractions of color and shape that shift chaotically, depicting an ominous and frenzied urban landscape. Taxi Driver’s musical score consists of variations on two main themes, representative of different aspects of Travis Bickle’s character. The first is a simple progression of two descending tones, using brass, woodwind, side drum, and cymbal; it is associated with Travis’ negative reaction to the “filthy mess” – the moral corruption he sees around him (??). Its pounding, incessant rhythm sets an ominous tone. The second theme is a bluesy development of the first one, introduced by a harp and followed by a romantic lilting saxophone that is often equated with Travis’ desire, first associated with Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) and then, later, with Iris (??). The schism in Travis’ personality reflected by these twin musical themes is analogous to the schizophrenia of Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Psycho has other similarities to Taxi Driver, especially in the doomed journey of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) to the corrupted world of the Bates motel, where her point-of-view shots through the rainy windshield are accompanied by subjective voice-over. These images evoke Travis’ insomniac, night-time taxi drives through the rainy streets of New York (??). In fact, when Travis enters a bodega one night, Herrmann uses the same three-note motif from his own Psycho score to represent Norman’s madness (Bruce 68-9). This is the first time in the film that Travis kills someone. That leitmotif is also used at the very end, when, with Betsy gone from his life, Travis’ eyes are seen in extreme close-up, as at the beginning. The suggestion is apparent that, as before, he is a ticking time-bomb that could go off at any time.. By employing the same formal devices as when Citizen Kane‘s Rosebud is introduced, it is suggested that, for Bickle, Betsy occupies the same importance as Rosebud does for Kane. Both represent the ultimately failed chance at true love. Kane was removed from Rosebud, and his mother’s love, to have his childhood overseen by Thatcher and his bank. Travis alienates Betsy through his own actions, and Betsy is lost to him (although at the end the possibility for a rapprochement is implied, and immediately abandoned by Bickle). Scorsese further expands upon this by placing himself in the shot, perhaps emphasizing the Rosebud-like importance that Citizen Kane holds for him, like a love letter to that film. (17) This also brings to mind Hitchcock’s brief appearances in his own films, the menace of which implies the duality in pairing references to Welles and Hitchcock. Incidentally, Scorsese makes a two-second cameo in Taxi Driver just as Betsy is introduced entering the Pallantine campaign headquarters on Broadway. Perhaps even the director didn’t notice himself sitting against a wall when he decided to limn a more substantial part as the psychotic passenger in Bickle’s cab later in the movie. When Betsy is disposed of as Travis’ obsession, Scorsese refers again to Citizen Kane. Travis appears at Palantine’s rally, where Betsy is also on stage. Bickle is introduced with a shot that tracks past a sign reading “Pedestrians Keep Out,” past a cast-iron fence, and finally tilts up to his literally off-beat applause. He does not follow through with the planned assassination. That part of him ends with this scene. Afterwards, Travis’ interest and related violent impulses shift to become enmeshed with Iris. Betsy is beyond his grasp. Travis stands apart from the crowd, alone. This shot, as with Betsy’s introduction, compresses two scenes borrowed from Citizen Kane into one. Travis and the camera are both trespassing (which is odd given the crowd just beyond the fence), in a reference to the opening of Kane. There, the camera famously cranes past a “No Trespassing” sign, over a series of chain link and cast-iron fences, moving into Kane’s death chamber, where he utters “Rosebud.” Kane’s life-long quest for love, symbolized by Rosebud, ends in failure, as does Travis Bickle’s. Another Hollywood reference point in this postmodernist pastiche is a different Western, Shane (George Stevens, 1953). On the Taxi Driver laser disc commentary track, Scorsese explains that the dissolve eliding the middle of Travis’ walk outside the cab company – a “jump dissolve,” so to speak -- is a borrowing from Shane. The result implies a momentary lapse of consciousness (qtd in Grist 141). An even more direct hommage is, of course, the supposedly improvised “You talkin’ to me?” scene. The dialogue between Shane (Alan Ladd) and Calloway (Ben Johnson) is rather close to Bickle’s crazed monologue. Shane asks, “You speaking to me?” And Calloway responds: “I don’t see nobody else standing there.” Finally, I will not, due to time considerations, address an essay by John Thurman called “Citizen Bickle,” which avers that Taxi Driver is just an aesthetic retelling of Citizen Kane. As evidence, he states that “for Bickle, Betsy occupies the same importance as Rosebud does for Kane. Both represent the ultimately failed chance at true love” (Thurman). He also compares Travis’s writing in his diary to Mr. Thatcher’s memoirs in Kane. Recurring Motifs. Examples of relatively inconspicuous recurring motifs include the colors red, green, and yellow; the sounds of beating and clicking (e.g., the sounds of the taxi meter, a drummer on the street, or Hermann’s clanking score). Noel Burch says, “even though there may be structures that are ‘perceptible only to those who have created them,’ they nonetheless play an important role in the final aesthetic result” (67). When Travis shoots off the fingers of the hotel owner at the end, the moment rhymes with the playful banter between Betsy and Tom at Palantine headquarters about the man at the newsstand who is missing several fingers. There are a total of four shots in which characters pretend to shoot someone with their fingers. Other stylized recurring motifs -- such as slow-motion point-of-view shots of Travis’s obsessions -- Betsy, black men, prostitutes, liquid, and the candidate, Palantine -- are found throughout Scorsese’s oeuvre, especially in Raging Bull. Finally, I could catalog all the shots of water, liquid, bubbles, fog, smoke, and haze; mirrors and windows; empty hallways; and the colors red, green, and yellow (of, for instance, traffic lights, “Don’t Walk” signs, taxicabs, and, of course, blood. Theme. As in the other Scorsese-Schrader collaboration, Raging Bull (1980), there is a religious subtext in Taxi Driver, a “born-again” flavor that fit persona of the Southern Baptist and Sunday School teacher Jimmy Carter. Travis calls himself an "avenging angel" and "God's lonely man" (a reference to the title of Thomas Wolfe’s essay). In fact, Schrader used a quote from that essay as the epigraph to his screenplay: "The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon . . . is the central and inevitable fact of human existence." The ironic relationship between this quote and the moment when Travis defines himself as "God's lonely man" is that while Wolfe tried to explain that loneliness is what all humans have in common, Bickle believes that his loneliness makes him special and different from everyone else. Wolfe understands, however, although each man feels chosen, no one actually is. Indeed, Travis descends into an urban hell. Betsy is also "like an angel out of this filthy mess." In reality, according to Robin Wood, she is "a figure of almost total vacuity," a mindless mediocrity, who becomes a disembodied head floating in Travis's rear-view mirror (46). These religious connotations and iconography are found in a number of the important films of 1976, often figured in the cinematic trope of the high-angle, directly overhead shot looking down on characters from a Godlike point of view. In Taxi Driver, this shot occurs after the climactic shoot-out, when the camera retreats to a detached position to contemplate the carnage. (The "firefight" ending is straight out of Vietnam, with nods to film noir and the Western.) Travis's Christ-like martyrdom, which is at odds with his propensity for random violence, is suggested by his stigmata wounds but complicated by his role in initiating the bloodbath in the whorehouse. The equivalent of The Searchers’ "Scar" scene in Taxi Driver occurs when Sport (Harvey Keitel) tenderly sweet talks and slow dances with Iris -— a scene that is significant precisely because Travis is not there. Furthermore, when Travis appears with his Mohawk, Sport sports the long hair and headband of an Apache brave. Thus, the two characters can be perceived as doppelgängers, just as Scar and Ethan Edwards were in The Searchers. After all, they have in common that they are both outsiders in society and that they both desire Iris, a figure like Debby (Natalie Wood) in a standard captivity narrative. After being the whore, Iris miraculously becomes a virgin again when she is returned to the bosom of her family. (Ironically, our only – very brief -- view of Iris’s parents, the Steensmas -- in a newspaper clipping -- reveals them to be none other than Scorsese’s own parents: Catherine and Charles.) All of Travis's voice-over narrations read like diary entries or confessionals -- a disembodied voice speaking to an unseen listener. Similarly, the burning of his hand, the ascetic training, and other obsessive rituals he follows are part and parcel of the Catholic creed, as well as Travis's Christ-like martyrdom and masochistic desire to sacrifice his own life to save Iris in a bloodbath of purgation and purification. Although it is often difficult to make explicit connections between a film and its possible effects on society, Taxi Driver offers an example of a movie that did have a singular influence on society and the political sphere. On March 30, 1981, a young man named John Hinckley, who had watched the film fifteen times, attempted to assassinate President Reagan in order to impress the real-life Jodie Foster. In that case, life imitated art in a very macabre way. Despite its current prestige and status, Taxi Driver earned a paltry $12.6 million in domestic rentals in its initial release, a signal that troubling and paranoid films that dissected and deconstructed the American Dream were no longer desired by the mass audience, especially in the ostensibly up-tempo and patriotic Bicentennial Year. Instead, the optimistic and all-American Rocky was the box office champion and Academy Award winner in 1976. Conclusion. In some general sense, films can be said to reflect the culture in which they are created and, likewise, they interact with that culture (Kracauer 6). As such, they are epiphenomenal manifestations of larger social circumstances. It must always be remembered, though, that the various arts often evince “unequal developments” in their relation to each other and to the larger public sphere. As a commercial enterprise, the Hollywood cinema requires significant “lead times” (often one to three years) in which to develop a script (or “property,” as industry insiders call a screenplay), finance and cast it, shoot it, edit it, and market it. Thus, assessing the precise correlation between a given movie (or group of films) and its social hieroglyph can never be an exact science. Furthermore, American films are not just the products of their individual creators but of a larger cultural horizon, or society as a whole. Mainstream movies are always commercial products produced, distributed, and exhibited by corporate conglomerates and, as such, reflect the practices and ideology of particular industrial regimes. At some historical conjunctures, the dominant ideology may be overt and monolithic, but, more often than not, the spirit of the times is represented by conflicting discourses. Even within a relatively homogeneous society, “gaps and fissures” may appear. It is through these “structural absences,” these lacks and incongruities, that the nature of the ideological system may be interrogated and revealed (Editorial Board 496). Through an examination of those cinematic subtleties, Kracauer’s notion that “what films reflect are not so much explicit credos as psychological dispositions—those deep layers of collective mentality that extend more or less below the dimension of consciousness” (6) can be clearly seen in Taxi Driver. Indeed, Travis Bickle’s “psychological disposition” can be seen as a “collective mentality” of his nation at a particular historical conjuncture, the Bicentennial year. My earlier reference to Daniel Bell's The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, therefore, was not solely to establish a general national mood; it was to suggest that, like U.S. society, our protagonist was “splintering” and “unstable,” and, as such, a representative of the ''American climacteric,” a critical change of life” in the nation’s history (213). In America's bicentennial year, most of Hollywood's box office and critical hits revealed contradictory, even dialectical, propensities. On the one hand, the themes, narratives, and characters of the year's movies often evinced cynicism about the body politic, as well as a healthy skepticism about the future of the nation. On the other hand, those self-same themes, narratives, and characters frequently foregrounded an all-American optimism about how to solve the problems the country faced. Whether the actual social issues of the day were the focus of those texts (or present in their subtexts only), there was no ideological conformity, no allegiance to a fixed party line. Indeed, most of the major movies were internally contradictory -- that is, they had both conservative and liberal elements, currents of racism and brotherhood, and characters who were sexual chauvinists and feminists. Although “you don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” as Bob Dylan said, the film critic’s weather vane must be extremely sensitive to accurately ascertain the prevailing conditions when the cultural spirit of the times are “blowin’ in the wind.” Taxi Driver offers an illustrative example of the propensity of bicentennial filmmakers to adopt a “middle way” between classical Hollywood norms and international innovations. Indeed, Scorsese has frequently noted his indebtedness to both traditions,18 which allowed him, on the one hand, to exploit unrealized potentials within traditional Hollywood cinema (including the tradition of stylized depictions of sex and violence) and, on the other, to adopt some of the boldness and eccentricity of foreign cinema of the sixties, which, afforded him a wealth of stylistic techniques previously uncultivated in the studio years. Likewise, with respect to ideology, a more militant filmmaker might have focused more on the economic inequalities in the United States. But Scorsese and Schrader are not radicals. And Scorsese is a liberal humanist thinker, while Schrader, at least according to Robin Wood’s hyperbole, is a "vicious … quasi-Fascist," despite his interest in things existential and Bressonian (45-46). Taxi Driver, however, obeys too many of the commercial cinema’s codified devices—such as shot/reverse shot, master shots, classical framing, the 180-degree rule, and narrative causality—to characterize its narration as predominantly parametric. According to Bordwell, parametric narration causes the film’s plot to emerge “on the style’s own terms” (Narration, 288); however, Taxi Driver, although it continually tests the boundaries of Hollywood classicism, mostly obeys classical norms. Relatively too limited to serve as the prime structuring pattern for the entire film, Taxi Driver’s visual devices offer intermittent stylistic structures behind or in between the film’s more dominant classical structures. Although Taxi Driver is as stylistically eccentric a film as one is liable to see in Hollywood cinema, style is only one of the film’s structuring patterns; the rest are classical. According to Berliner, “With Taxi Driver, we see the extent to which mainstream seventies cinema challenged narrational norms within Hollywood, both narratively and stylistically. Although Columbia Pictures gave Scorsese only a tiny production budget (the industry’s customary strategy with films it’s wary of), that a Hollywood studio financed the film at all, that the film achieved surprising success with critics and audiences (it earned $12.6 million in domestic rentals in its first run, almost ten times its negative cost), and that AMPAS recognized such an unusual film with four Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture, and the Directors Guild with a nomination for Scorsese illustrate the degree to which audiences and the Hollywood film industry, albeit briefly, fostered narratively perverse filmmaking in the 1970s” (??). Conclusion. In some nebulous sense, all films can be said to reflect the culture in which they are created. As such, they are epiphenomenal manifestations of larger social circumstances. Nonetheless, assessing the precise correlation between a given movie and its social hieroglyph can never be an exact science. Because mainstream movies are not just the products of their auteurs, but also of corporate conglomerates, they reflect the ideology of particular industrial regimes. At certain historical conjunctures, the dominant ideology may be monolithic, but, more often, the spirit of the times is articulated by conflicting discourses. Even within a relatively homogeneous society, gaps and fissures may appear. It is through these structural absences that “the System” may be interrogated and exposed. Taxi Driver can be seen as an exemplar of that methodology, using Kracauer’s notion that “what films reflect are not so much explicit credos as psychological dispositions.” Indeed, Travis Bickle’s “psychological disposition” can be seen as a “collective mentality” of his nation at a particular historical moment, the bicentennial year. Despite its current prestige and status, Taxi Driver earned a paltry $12.6 million in domestic rentals in its initial release, albeit on a negative cost of only $1.2 million, a signal that troubling and paranoid films that dissected the American Dream were no longer desired by the mass audience, especially during the ostensibly up-tempo and patriotic Bicentennial. Instead, the optimistic and all-American Rocky was the box office champ and Oscar winner in 1976. Furthermore, on the level of film style, Taxi Driver offers an illustrative example of how bicentennial filmmakers adopted a “middle way” between classical Hollywood norms and independent innovations. Indeed, Scorsese has often noted his indebtedness to both traditions, which allowed him, on the one hand, to exploit unrealized potentials within traditional Hollywood cinema (including depictions of sex and violence) and, on the other, to adopt some of the advances of the foreign cinema, which afforded him a wealth of stylistic tools previously uncultivated in the studio era. Taxi Driver, however, obeys too many of commercial cinema’s codified devices—master scenes, shot/reverse shots, classical framing, the 180-degree rule, and narrative causality—to call it parametric. Instead, Taxi Driver tests the limits of Hollywood classicism, but mostly obeys established norms. While Taxi Driver is as stylistically independent as one is likely to see in a 1976 American movie, style is only one of its structuring patterns; the rest are classical. Indeed, in 1976, most of Hollywood's box office and critical hits revealed contradictory, even dialectical, propensities. On the one hand, the themes, narratives, and characters of that year's movies often evinced cynicism about the body politic, as well as a healthy skepticism about the future of the nation. On the other hand, many of those same films foregrounded an all-American optimism about how to solve the country’s problems. In fact, most major movies were internally contradictory -- that is, they had both conservative and liberal elements, currents of racism and brotherhood, and characters who were sexual chauvinists and feminists. Although as Bob Dylan said, “You don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” the film historian’s weather vane must be extremely sensitive to ascertain the prevailing conditions when the zeitgeist is “blowin’ in the wind.” References Berliner, Todd. Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. Biskind, Peter. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex ‘N’ Drugs ‘N’ Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. Boyd, David. “Prisoner of the Night.” Film Heritage (Winter 1976-77): 24-30. Bruce, Graham. Bernard Hermann: Film Music and Narrative, Studies in Cinema No. 38 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985. Brunette, Peter, ed. Martin Scorsese Interviews. Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1999. Editorial Board. Cahiers du cinéma. "John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln." In Movies and Methods, 493-529. Edited by Bill Nichols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Grist, Leighton. The Films of Martin Scorsese, 1963-77, Authorship and Context. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Kolker, Robert. A Cinema of Loneliness. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.  Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947. Schrader, Paul. Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. Berkeley: University of California, 1972. Taubin, Amy. Taxi Driver. London: British Film Institute, 2000. Thurman, John. “Citizen Bickle, or the Allusive Taxi Driver: Uses of Intertextuality.” sensesofcinema 37 (October 2005). Retrieved at: www.sensesofcinema.com. Figure 1. Martin Scorsese, quoted in Christie and Thompson, 54. Scorsese says “The whole film is very much based on the impressions I have as a result of growing up in New York and living in the city.”  Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex ‘N’ Drugs ‘N’ Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), p. 300.  Schrader, 89. The script makes Betsy’s turnabout more explicit. Her last line to Travis is “Maybe I’ll see you again sometime, huh?”  Bruce, 72.  Quoted in Ian Christie and David Thompson, eds., Scorsese on Scorsese (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 54.  Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” reprinted in Image – Music – Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 146. Barthes writes: “The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.”  Quoted in Richard Goldstein and Mark Jacobson, “Martin Scorsese Tells All: Blood and Guts Turn Me On!” Village Voice, 5 April 1976, reprinted in Peter Brunette, ed., Martin Scorsese Interviews (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1999), 67.  Quoted in Christie and Thompson, 66.  Quoted in Christie and Thompson, 60.  Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver, screenplay (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 85. The overhead tracking shot is in Schrader’s script, but in a sketchy form. Scorsese, of course, chose the actual framing.  Quoted in Christie and Thompson, 62.  In Richard Thompson, “Screen Writer, Taxi Driver‘s Paul Schrader,” interview, Film Comment, March-April 1976, 11. Schrader’s film criticism previous to his career as a screenwriter includes the book, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (Berkeley: University of California, 1972).  Subsumed within the The Searchers pattern is a further development of Travis as cowboy, made by Scorsese through two references to Shane (George Stevens, 1953). Taxi Driver, The Criterion Collection Laser Disc, Santa Monica, Voyager Company, 1990. On the laser disc commentary track, Scorsese explains that the dissolve eliding the middle of Travis’ walk outside the cab company is a borrowing from Shane. The result implies a momentary lapse of consciousness. Leighton Grist, The Films of Martin Scorsese, 1963-77, Authorship and Context(New York: Palgrave, 2000), 141, 213. Grist makes two valuable points here, citing Shane as the inspiration for the improvised “You talkin’ to me?” scene, worked out between Scorsese and De Niro. The dialogue between Shane (Alan Ladd) and Calloway (Ben Johnson) makes this clear. Shane: “You speaking to me?” Calloway: “I don’t see nobody else standing there.” Grist also relates this to Christie and Thompson, p. 42, where Scorsese says a lot of his mirror scenes are inspired by his boyhood impersonations of actors done before a mirror. He specifically mentions Shane.  David Boyd, “Prisoner of the Night,” Film Heritage, Winter 1976-77, 24-30. Robert Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 237. Amy Taubin, Taxi Driver (London: British Film Institute, 2000), 19-20, 60, 62-5.  Graham Bruce, Bernard Hermann: Film Music and Narrative, Studies in Cinema No. 38 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985), p. 65.  Bruce, 68-9.  Grist, 133.  Grist, 142.  Bruce, 47. Interestingly, Bruce uses the term “rapturous” to describe the scores introducing both Rosebud and Betsy. He does not, however, identify the connection between the two.  Schrader, 13. Scorsese makes a change here from the script, which specifies Betsy in a “stylish yellow dress.” Martin Scorsese, “In the Streets,” in Peter Occhiogrosso (Ed), Once A Catholic: Prominent Catholics and Ex-Catholics Discuss the Influence of the Church on their Lives and Works (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 98. Scorsese clearly put thought into the dresses to be used. He relates a middle-school fascination with girls’ parochial school uniforms, consisting of a blazer and plaid skirt. He says that, in Taxi Driver, he had Cybill Shepherd wear an outfit like this “as a kind of joke.” Obviously, Betsy is wearing something else entirely when she is introduced.  Taubin, 43. Taubin writes that Scorsese claims this is a borrowing from Godard’s Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963). Yet, the thematic context is entirely unrelated, and formally too it is a far cry from Taxi Driver‘s nearly exact match with Citizen Kane. Godard crosscuts between the farewell note of Camille (Brigitte Bardot) to her husband, and the car she is riding in. John Thurman, “Citizen Bickle, or the Allusive Taxi Driver: Uses of Intertextuality,” sensesofcinema 37 (October 2005). Retrieved at: www.sensesofcinema.com. Martin Scorsese, quoted in Christie and Thompson, p. 54. Scorsese says “The whole film is very much based on the impressions I have as a result of growing up in New York and living in the city.”  Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex ‘N’ Drugs ‘N’ Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), p. 300.  Schrader, p. 89. The script makes Betsy’s turnabout more explicit. Her last line to Travis is “Maybe I’ll see you again sometime, huh?”  Bruce, p. 72.  Quoted in Ian Christie and David Thompson (Eds.), Scorsese on Scorsese (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 54.  Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”, reprinted in Stephen Heath (trans.), Image – Music – Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 146. Barthes writes: “The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.”  Quoted in Richard Goldstein and Mark Jacobson, “Martin Scorsese Tells All: Blood and Guts Turn Me On!”, Village Voice, 5 April 1976, reprinted in Peter Brunette (Ed), Martin Scorsese Interviews (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1999), p. 67.  Quoted in Christie and Thompson, p. 66.  Quoted in Christie and Thompson, p. 60.  Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver, screenplay (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), p. 85. The overhead tracking shot is in Schrader’s script, but in a sketchy form. Scorsese, of course, chose the actual framing.  Quoted in Christie and Thompson, p. 62.  In Richard Thompson, “Screen Writer, Taxi Driver‘s Paul Schrader”, interview, Film Comment, March-April 1976, p. 11. Schrader’s film criticism previous to his career as a screenwriter includes the book, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (Berkeley: University of California, 1972).  Subsumed within the The Searchers pattern is a further development of Travis as cowboy, made by Scorsese through two references to Shane (George Stevens, 1953). Taxi Driver, The Criterion Collection Laser Disc, Santa Monica, Voyager Company, 1990. On the laser disc commentary track, Scorsese explains that the dissolve eliding the middle of Travis’ walk outside the cab company is a borrowing from Shane. The result implies a momentary lapse of consciousness. Leighton Grist, The Films of Martin Scorsese, 1963-77, Authorship and Context(New York: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 141, 213. Grist makes two valuable points here, citing Shane as the inspiration for the improvised “You talkin’ to me?” scene, worked out between Scorsese and De Niro. The dialogue between Shane (Alan Ladd) and Calloway (Ben Johnson) makes this clear. Shane: “You speaking to me?” Calloway: “I don’t see nobody else standing there.” Grist also relates this to Christie and Thompson, p. 42, where Scorsese says a lot of his mirror scenes are inspired by his boyhood impersonations of actors done before a mirror. He specifically mentions Shane.  David Boyd, “Prisoner of the Night”, Film Heritage, Winter 1976-77, pp. 24-30. Robert Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 237. Amy Taubin, Taxi Driver (London: British Film Institute, 2000), pp. 19-20, 60, 62-5.  Graham Bruce, Bernard Hermann: Film Music and Narrative, Studies in Cinema No. 38 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985), p. 65.  Bruce, pp. 68-9.  Grist, p. 133.  Grist, p. 142.  Bruce, p. 47. Interestingly, Bruce uses the term “rapturous” to describe the scores introducing both Rosebud and Betsy. He does not, however, identify the connection between the two.  Schrader, p. 13. Scorsese makes a change here from the script, which specifies Betsy in a “stylish yellow dress”. Martin Scorsese, “In the Streets”, in Peter Occhiogrosso (Ed), Once A Catholic: Prominent Catholics and Ex-Catholics Discuss the Influence of the Church on their Lives and Works (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), p. 98. Taubin, p. 43. Taubin writes that Scorsese claims this is a borrowing from Godard’s Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963). Yet, the thematic context is entirely unrelated, and formally too it is a far cry from Taxi Driver‘s nearly exact match with Citizen Kane. Godard crosscuts between the farewell note of Camille (Brigitte Bardot) to her husband, and the car she is riding in. John Thurman, “Citizen Bickle, or the Allusive Taxi Driver: Uses of Intertextuality,” sensesofcinema 37 (October 2005). Retrieved at: www.sensesofcinema.com.  CHAPTER     Notes