Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" (1976) won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year. When people talk about this film today, they still refer to it as a masterpiece of "New Hollywood". Through the analysis of the audio-visual language and symbols of "Taxi Driver", this paper attempts to explain the reasons why the hero Travis (Travis) is a "walking paradox" and the display of the usual style of movies in the New Hollywood period.
In fact, the New Hollywood movement was produced along with the social upheaval and instability in the United States for more than ten years, and was also influenced by the European New Wave. In the classic Hollywood period, the middle class was the main body, and the ideology and lifestyle of decent people were used as the background for the film to show. However, in New Hollywood, it mainly focuses on the stories of small people. come out. The protagonist of "Taxi Driver", Travis, is a veteran of the Vietnam War. After returning home, he applied for a taxi company to become a driver. This film uses Travis's almost paranoid change as a microcosm of the story of the little people in the 1970s, to explore the coexistence of loneliness and heroism in people's hearts at that time.
Taxi Driver's strong soundtrack is one of its highlights. The film begins with a crescendo drum, and after the tense preexistence is given, it suddenly turns to a lingering and lazy jazz tune, accompanied by the illusory scene outside the car window after the rain, the street scene. The reflection caused by the accumulated water is mainly red, blue and green after toning, and the light is temporarily lingered during the undulating process of the vehicle. There is nothing else, there is no object that provides a fulcrum for the line of sight where our perspective, the camera's, overlaps the perspective of the protagonist Travis. The sense of substitution is strongly created, and we seem to enter Travis' mind. After the next drum beat, the camera is reversed, and a close-up of Travis' eyes appears. His face is reflected in red, his brows are furrowed, and his eyes move parallel from left to right. Due to the dim surrounding light, there is a front in the whites of his eyes. Strong reflections from the street. This is the first time the protagonist declares his existence and examines his surroundings in this film. Then we'll find out that the whole movie is based on Travis' point of view. Unlike the close-up of the eyes in most movies, here Travis isn't trying to break the "fourth wall" by looking directly at the camera. The loneliness of his demeanor and the rendering of the soundtrack make the post-war loneliness to the extreme.
The famous American film critic Pauline Kael (Pauline Kael) called "Taxi Driver" a "road western", in this analogy, the taxi actually plays the role of the horse. At the end of the opening street scene, a bizarre way of framing a cab rides over a smoking manhole to resemble a tall horse raising its front hooves in the desert. The modern streetscape of New York in the 1970s has become a cathartic place for the heroic end of the world. In the view of American film historian John Belton, in the counterculture social environment popular in the 1970s in the United States, "the relationship between 'individual' and 'society' in traditional concepts and their Mastery over events and history has been replaced by a general sense of social alienation and lack of power.”[1]
In the film, Travis is mainly associated with two women, who appear to have a huge gap, one is Betsy, a clerk of the political leader with decent work and good looks, and the other is a poor job and suffers. Iris, a young prostitute who oppresses and threatens. On the surface, the two seem to be incompatible. But we can see in the difference in Travis's attitude towards the two that he wants to integrate the two into one. First, he took Bessie to a porn movie theater on a date, and after his failed assassination candidate, he made up his mind to save Iris from the brothel. Travis's contradictions are reflected in his psyche towards two women, his attempts to make the pure nastier and the nasty to become purer. At the same time, this heroic rescue also makes two women share similar fates in Travis: the two men that Travis wants to assassinate are the patriarchal figures in the lives of Bessie and Iris. symbol. So Travis' so-called salvation is tied to the resistance between Bessie and Iris' female identities and the world around them. The interpretation that this article attempts to make here is that Travis' loneliness made him empathize with his situation to the two women. His loneliness has its own specific expression, that of violence. Although the two women occupy the first and second parts of the film, this article believes that the two women are not completely parallel, but have their own subordinate relationship. Bessie is the dominant party. She was the lifesaver Travis wanted to grab at the beginning of his transition from soldier to common man, whose loneliness had created a strong desire for people, but left the movie theater in a fit of rage. Later, Travis' monologue reveals his disillusionment with humanity, finding that the people he had regarded as hope turned out to be just as aloof and alienated as the pedestrians on the streets of New York. In the clip of trying to win Bessie's heart, with Travis's answer on the phone, the camera pans to the long corridor and the door to the outside world, which is exactly Travis' role for the city, He is always secretive and voyeuristic, and the voyeuristic sense of this lens also appears in many places in the film, including the dark interior of the brothel, which is also communicated by a long staircase with the scene of light outside New York, not to mention Terra Weiss' cab and his peeps at passengers through the rearview mirror.
When Travis bloodied the brothel, the newspapers portrayed him as a hero. This is enough to see the irony of social mainstream media. In many representative works of New Hollywood, the authority of the government and the official is questioned. Correspondingly, it is to reach an understanding and respect for the rebels and rule breakers in the film. This kind of value orientation cannot help but remind people. The "Beat Generation" of literature in the 1940s and 1950s. Their wounds were inflicted by the two world wars, and the trauma in Taxi Driver is from the Vietnam War. Travis has undergone a transformation from front to back, the most important and most striking of which is the Mohigan haircut, which was cut whenever soldiers were going to perform arduous tasks in Saigon during the Vietnam War. , once again announced to us the existence of the shadow of the Vietnam War.
The double role of the rear-view mirror makes the ending of the whole film possible. The rearview mirror is not only used to look at the other, but also to look at the self. We see Travis' eyes through the rearview mirror several times in the film, similar to the first close-up of the eyes at the beginning. At the end, his eyes in the rearview mirror are still frowning, and it can be seen that after all this, he still has a desperate and hostile attitude towards society. As a result, this experience of Travis has formed a closed loop. Rather than telling a story with a narrative technique, the film is more about the shaping of specific characters. New Hollywood films, including "The Godfather" and "Bonnie and Clyde", began to focus on characters, focusing on the changes in the psychology of ordinary people in the face of turmoil such as race and war during this period. Compared with the New Wave, New Hollywood does not have clear aesthetic propositions and theoretical guidance, nor does it have gangs established in a specific period, but these directors, who have received rigorous professional training in film and have a unique personal aesthetic style, have passed the reflection on the old film system. , forming a series of works of great artistic value. "Taxi Driver" creates a strong sense of conflict in the inner and outer fields demarcated by yellow taxis through the walking of a specific professional in the middle zone between different classes, adding to the American society in the 1970s. unique footnote.
[1] Belton, John. American Cinema/American Culture, 5th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2018.
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