Moral Dualism In Taxi Driver

Moreover, Scorsese adopted a disjunctive editing style in contrast to the classical continuity editing, exploited jump shots and fragmented scenes to generate a mix of engagement and disorientation between the audience and Travis’ split personality. In terms of visual literacy, Scorsese is known for his fluent shift between subjective and objective shots to reinforce the effect. (Rodríguez 2011, p. 181) The frequent use of first-person perspective voiceover and insertion of self-conscious viewpoint shots (Berliner 2010, p. 158) violate the norms of classical Hollywood objective story telling. Instead of relying on motions and conversations to portray the character state of mind, Taxi Driver employed stylized tableau and infiltrated music to

augment Travis’ very angle. This goes against the old-fashioned, subservient operation of background music – in the original soundtrack of Taxi Driver, American composer Bernard Herrmann accurately underscores protagonist Travis Bickle’s schizophrenic personality by mixing a dreamy, jazzy number with an angsty, aggressive piece, which the three-note ‘madness’ motif famously appeared in the 1960 Psycho theme was infused. (Brown 1994, p. 43) These are all innovative techniques popularized and favored only until the advent of Hollywood Renaissance.
Delving further into the construction of protagonists, the classical Hollywood paradigm of moral dualism is no longer emphasized in the new Hollywood.

Due to the new ratings system, filmmakers were enabled to seek inspiration beyond the restriction of the Production Code. Breaking away from the limited and implicit elaboration of two-sided characters such as the outlaw heroes against official heroes (Ray 1985, p. 59), the reconciliatory combination of moral ambiguity and complexity into one thus became the salient characteristic that divided experimentation and avant-garde films from the typical melodramatic investigation between the good and evil. (King 2002, p. 32) A common phenomenon in Hollywood Renaissance is the use of marginalized individuals as the main character. Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver is a disturbed individual devoured by loneliness and moral mysophobia; McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) is a criminal not understood by the society, battling authority in a mental institution; in Harold and Maude

(1971) the companions with huge age difference were both fascinated by death and strived for their relationship regardless of social dogma – this inclusion of outsiders in the New Hollywood appears to echo with Diane Arbus’ idea about freaks, “Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.” (Arbus, as cited in Baird 2008, p. 982) The exquisitely designated parallel between a taxi driver and a prostitute in the film seems to enhance the sense of incarceration, both of which fettered in a limited space (a cab and a brothel) facing the come-and-go tide of people. Audiences are induced to relate to the isolation and post-traumatic stress disorder often shared by veterans at that time, which is a highly introspective analogy of the postwar circumstances. This new fascination, curiosity and even glorification centring on the grey area of morality and social norm can essentially be seen as a response to the dissolution of the industry self-regulation and the altering public conception, resulted in an unrestrained environment for films to prosper, alongside with the thriving anti-war and hippie movement, and thus marked the growth of the unprecedented form of aesthetic. The contradictory nature of the protagonists exemplified the novel method of Hollywood Renaissance narrative style.
The transformation of the star system could also be considered a means of distinguishing the classical and new Hollywood cinema. Molded by the rigid division of labor in the studio system, classical Hollywood was heavily star-driven. De Cordova (as cited in McDonald 2000, p. 36) argues that the industry collaborated with the press to promote Hollywood stardom and consequently took advantage of the vigilantly fabricated image in pursuit of an increase in the box office profit. Unlike the classical Hollywood cinema that focused more on movie stars with presentable appearances such as Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, Hollywood Renaissance is a cradle for instinctive actors, for instance the rugged Robert De Niro, the unpredictable, eccentric Jack Nicholson and the suave, gallant Warren Beatty. The casting of Taxi Driver therefore revealed another dissimilarity of American New Wave compared with the classical Hollywood cinema.
However, dubbed the Hollywood Renaissance, the new epoch of the film history did not utterly discard the archetype in classical Hollywood.

With regards to realism, Scorsese himself strives to present authenticity in his films. Although expressionism is the main thread running through Taxi Driver, the vulgar language, the crude image of New York City street scene, the struggle of ordinary people and the subversive political attitudes were all realistically conveyed in the film. Scorsese supposes that his achievement consists of honesty, as he once stated himself, “I just think I tried to depict certain types of places and certain types of people as honestly as possible.” (Emery as cited in Galenson & Kotin 2010, p.

38)
The greatly stressed mise-en-scène in classical Hollywood cinema served the sole function to manufacture realism. Albeit Taxi Driver is produced in a phase of time dominated by expressionism, Scorsese managed to preserve some realistic elements within the film. One of these elements is retained through the use of the low budget location shooting, extensively implemented in the new Hollywood. In the film, Scorsese captured the ultimate ‘New York-ness’ with a handheld camera and a hurried, slanting presentation of the scenes, providing an illusion akin to documentaries. The audiences are guided to follow Travis’ point of view to witness the vile, seedy and sinful Lower East Side life – the modern day Sodom and Gomorrah. The way he customized location shooting through the manipulation of the sets, lighting and slow motion cinematography, empowered him to efficaciously grasp the clash of two diverse styles in one film. (Kolker 2000, p. 182) For example, when Travis arrives at the pornographic theatre, the environment and the sound of the X-rated movie seems true-to-life, while the screening is fuzzy and unrecognizable. In the epilogue, the close-up shots of Travis and the mirror image of Betsy appear to be realistic, yet the window view displays a distorted blur. (Berliner 2010, p. 159) Long take is another method often applied in classical Hollywood cinema to accentuate realism, but the long takes in Taxi Driver suggested otherwise. The average shot length in the ‘60s was between eight to ten seconds (Kaplan 2010), however, started from the scene when Travis phones Betsy in an attempt to apologize until the end of the shot, there is an ninety-second long take in which a transition between the objective and subjective angle occurred – a twenty-five-second span focusing on an empty hallway. After the frenzied massacre, a bird’s-eye shot started from the disarrayed room to the standing policemen of approximately 45 seconds was taken. The absurd stillness of the scene defied the conventions of realistic blocking. (Berliner 2010, p. 159) By inspecting the scenes listed above, it is apparent that Scorsese not only articulated with abstract expressionism, but also infused classical realism into filmmaking, hence Taxi Driver certified the tight interplay of these two important filmmaking periods, rather than fairly acting as an explication of Hollywood Renaissance.
Thereupon, Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, which challenges the traditional rubrics of classical cinematic and narrative style, should be appreciated as an emblem of the groundbreaking, exploratory Hollywood Renaissance. Nevertheless, notwithstanding the progressive step away from it’s forerunners, the integration of both Classical and New Hollywood qualities in the film proved that the conventional cinema persisted to exert a considerable influence on the thriving, tentative cutting-edge force. Hollywood Renaissance should never be comprehended as an enclosed stage in the history of film – it’s dynamic development recounted how Hollywood weathered the recession and thrived to become the iconic, leading identity in the worldwide motion picture industry.