Burnt Out at the Bellmore

DETONATE A BOMB in the middle of a conversation, Alfred Hitchcock observed to an interviewer, and you will make the audience jump. But let them know that there is a bomb underneath the table over which two people are having a normal conversation and you can have your audience on the edge of their seats for as long as you like.

Martin Scorsese learned this fundamental principle of suspense sometime after his first movie, Mean Street. He has an obsession with two things--the street and violence--and he seems to have a very real, accurate sense of both. But in his debut, his enthusiasm for his subject overwhelmed any possibility of creating a tightly structured movie of sustained interest. Instead, he presented us fistfight after gunbattle after fistfight ad infinitum, and the final effect was to numb rather than involve us. Because the flow of passion had been so steady during the movie, the "climactic" shootout was hardly cathartic at all--it merely appeared a degree or two more intense than what had preceded it.

Taxi Driver, Scorsese's latest effort, is a much tauter, much more disciplined work. Without sacrificing any of the authenticity of his feel for the subject, Scorsese controls the tension of the movie; he's constantly holding something back. The violence is always there, murmuring relentlessly in the facial expressions of Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro), in the sweltering New York City streets, but Scorsese restrains it, draws us ever closer to the explosion then retreats, telling us smilingly, "No, it's not time yet." And we wait anxiously for deliverance.

"AFTER A WHILE, everyone becomes his job," declares the self-proclaimed Wizard of New York cabbies to Travis. The Wizard (Peter Boyle) holds court in the fluorescent, all-night Bellmore Cafeteria, nocturnal stalking ground for taxi drivers and absurdly elegant pimps. The Wizard makes his remarks self-deprecatingly, dismisses them with a "what the hell do I know, I'm just a cabbie," but this idea is the animating force for the movie's action.

For screenwriter Paul Schrader, the taxi driver is a metaphor for modern, urban man. The taxi driver will go anywhere for money, and is forced to see everything, all the degredation and cruelty men are capable of, but always with the understanding that he will remain outside, uninvolved and untouched. This is the hack's code: be deaf and you will hear everything; be blind and you will see everything. Travis does eventually learn the rules, but only after one last, desperate, misunderstood attempt to remake the world in his image.

He comes to New York an innocent. We know little about him--he's in his mid-twenties, he mentions that he was in the army, and he maintains a deceptive correspondence with his parents. Travis tells the dispatcher that he wants to drive a taxi because he can't sleep, and he wants to go everywhere.

It's experience he craves, but what he finds disgusts him. A passenger (played by Scorsese) describes to Travis the .44 magnum holes he will make in his adulterous wife's body, and through it all Travis is expected to stare straight ahead. The camera cuts between the back of his neck, to which the passenger speaks, and Travis's face, which reflects a mixture of horror and fascination. Prostitutes fellate businessmen in his cab--Travis's role is to remain oblivious, and, at the end of the night, to clean the semen stains off the back seat.

Travis tries desperately to make some sort of contact with the world, but he is systematically rebuffed. The macadam mob--taxi-dispatchers, hookers, pornographic movie-house vendors--looks at him with sullen, suspicious eyes. The claustrophobic routinization of their lives, the daily bombardment of the senses, has forced them into the defensive position of "cool". They are wary, detached from their experience; some adopt swaggering, arrogant personae, others merely become dead to the world--all of them are irreversibly divorced from their emotions.

Unable to form connections with street people, Travis's attentions turn to Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a campaign worker for Charles Palantine (Leonard Harris). This, Scorsese implies, is the other, the dominant stratum of society. Betsy is confident, manipulative, and vapid--like the low-lifers, she registers no emotions, but unlike them, she is not motivated by fear. Rather, it is her job to calculate the effect stimuli will have on "the electorate" and to organize the stimuli in a way that will best promote her product. "After a while, everyone becomes his job," warns the Wizard, and Betsy has clearly completed the evolution. She is an ice-queen (Shepherd seems incapable of playing anything else), self-possessed for as long as she can sustain her fortress of manila folders and coy sexuality. But when Travis takes her to a 42nd Street moviehouse, she runs--the scent of real life, outside her redcarpeted office, is too much for her to deal with.

All of this passes Travis by. He has no organizing principle to his life. Experience floods him, but the distinctions blur. He can't understand why Betsy flees. To him it's just another betrayal, another failure, and his rage continues to mount. He prepares to assassinate Palantine.

Political assassination has been a subject of fascination for writers and film-makers since the late '60s. In the final analysis, Scorsese fails to explain the phenomenon, but at least he fails brilliantly and courageously. Robert Altman, capped Nashville with an assassination that remained unexplained and curiously unmoving; one was left with the vague suspicion that Altman was cynically creating a sterile, objectified, metaphor for the American Situation, an image audiences could construe any damned way they pleased.

Scorsese, on the other hand, does not rely solely on intellectual guesswork. Travis's emotional development is sketched vividly, convincingly. When he arrives in New York, his letters and diary are fairly banal, but as his experience begins to baffle him, the tone of his writings become progressively more psychotic, until it reaches an Arthur Bremer-like level of intensity. Scorsese plays on our knowledge of real assassins, but he doesn't abuse it. He provides the context; our sense of history merges seamlessly with our understanding of Travis.

BUT WHILE SCORSESE succeeds viscerally in convincing us of the authenticity of the psychosis, there is a gap. It is never fully explained why Travis's violence would focus on Palantine rather than, say, on Betsy. Scorsese reaches for something very big here, and he falls a little bit short. "Something has to be done," Travis writes in his diary. "There's too much dirt, too much filth here. I just wish a big rain would come and wash it away." The frustration is conveyed, but the connection to political assassination is muddled.

The final moments of Taxi Driver constitute one of those endings too good too spoil. Intellectually it's a trifle slick, a sort of cinematic illustration of the old Rolling Stones lyric about "just as every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints..." But if Scorsese teases us through the body of the movie with latent violence, he more than compensates for it in the final shootout--a rapid, graphic sequence of knives, bullets and blood, followed by a perversely loving, achingly detailed pan over the scene of the massacre. In this and in the epilogue, Scorsese achieves a near-perfect identification between his hero and his audience; like Travis, we have been aching for this release, and now that it has been granted, we're left cold, drained, and a bit removed from ourselves--like the denizens who haunt the all-night Bellmore Cafeteria.