Thoughts on 'Taxi Driver' (Film)

Watched taxi driver again. he is driven by the need to "do" something significant. He is sickened by the city he lives in, by the crime, prostitution and violence. In this sense he is suffering an existential crisis, because his regular life seems meaningless and the only way to escape it is by doing something significant. His first attempt at achieving something is by finding the ideal woman. He states that "life is not about morbid self-contemplation, but one should be a person like everybody else". He wants to rise above his current station in life, he thinks that marrying the right woman will give him that status. But after she dumps him he concludes that she is just like everyone else, cold and distant and lifeless. So his next response is to kill the presidential candidate. I must admit I don't know why he wants to kill Palantine, maybe out of revenge for Betsy dumping him, or maybe because he considers him a a false prophet a hypocrite and liar who doesn't really care about the people. Maybe he thinks that by killing him he would be able to replace him as a "real" hero and not a fake politician. In the end he finds his true purpose, his "change" from the monotony of life in the killing of the pimp, the landlord and the customer. He turns out a celebrated a hero as he takes the law into his own hands. 

The film has a couple of artistic shots, the scene where he dissolves the Alka-Seltzer in his glass represents and idea building up inside him, the final scene where the camera hovers over the crime scene captures a birds eye view, or maybe gods perspective as if to suggest that justice had been served. "One day a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets" that's what Travis says as he narrates his diary while driving down the street in NY. In an interview with Scorsese he refers to the Freudian 'goddess-whore complex': the idea that women are either unreachable goddesses or lowly whores and worthless. Freud describes the attitude as "where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love". In Betsy he see his ideal saintly goddess as pure, blue eyed, blonde, whereas Iris he sees as a prostitute with no value. Its strange I remember saying something similar to a friend back in university, but I classified them as saints or demons. I think my classification was a bit different then Freud's. But one aspect was similar, which is that men tend to seek purity. They think of their women as an expression of their morality, as a redeeming figure. In the same way Travis sees Betsy as a saint ("they cannot touch her"). Contrarily he thinks of iris as an object that needs rescuing because of her low status in life, so both the assassination and the killing of the pimps serve as solutions to his problems. the 'Madonna-whore complex' is simply the fact that the man sees the woman either solely as a sex object or solely as pure expression of his morality. he is unable to combine both (to treat the woman both as an object of lust and as an ends in herself).

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