In Jean-Luc Godard’s masterpiece from 1967, 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know about Her), the film’s heroine, Marina Vlady, is in a cafe, drinking coffee. As “life” goes on around her, she gazes into the coffee cup, where galaxy-shaped pools of cream curl. Godard’s reflective voice comes onto the soundtrack, with a commentary over the images:

“Maybe an object is what permits us to relink, to pass from one subject to the other, therefore to live in society, to be together. But then, since social relationships are always ambiguous, since my thought divides as much as it unites, since my speech brings nearer through that which it expresses and isolates through that about which it is silent, since an immense gulf separates the subjective certitude that I have of myself from the objective truth that I am for others, since I do not cease to find myself guilty although I feel innocent, since each event transforms my daily life, since I ceaselessly fail to communicate … I mean, to understand, to love, to be loved … and each failure makes me experience my solitude, since I cannot tear myself from the objectivity that crushes me nor from the subjectivity that exiles me, since I am permitted neither to lift myself to being nor to fall into nothingness, I must listen, I must look around me more than ever a the world, my likeness, my brother.”

Martin Scorsese quotes this image, but not the words, nine years later in Taxi Driver, his masterpiece about urban anomie. The true film of the bicentennial of America’s birth, Taxi Driver captured an youthful anger and urban terror that exists to this day. Scorsese didn’t bother to quote the words, however. Instead, he shows the film’s main character, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), dropping two Alka-Seltzers into a dirty glass of New York water and watching it fizz. Scorsese, who once taught film at NYU, leaves it to the viewer to look up the accompanying words and see their relevance, their virtual summary of Bickle’s emotional dilemma. In fact, on the new 30th anniversary 2-disc edition of Taxi Driver, Scorsese hints that he was simply responding to the imagery as he ransacked film history for analogs for what he wanted to do. Scorsese borrowed from everything, from Citizen Kane to Fassbinder’s Merchant of Four Seasons. What the film student discovers upon looking up the words that accompany Godard’s images is a precise summary of Bickle’s consciousness.

Like the words of the Kris Kristofferson song that the shiksa Betsy likens to Bickle, Taxi Driver is “a walkin’ contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.” The sympathetic viewer accepts them as intentional. One of the film’s many contradictions is that while Bickle is driving his cab through the urban wasteland of pimps, pushers, and prostitutes that he decries, Bernard Herrmann’s music is exquisitely beautiful, alternating between a building drum roll that is punctuated by police siren-like horn blares plus creeping strings, and a lush romantic theme out of a ’40s noir. If this world is so terrible, why is the music making us feel so elevated about it? It’s as if the film is sustaining two points of view at the same time: Bickle’s and the filmmaker’s.

The signage even comments on Bickle’s state of mind. He passes neon signs for businesses such as Fascination, and Hollywood — both of which reflect his real sense of voyeurism and his view of himself as enacting a rescue mission at the end.

Another contradiction is that Bickle, a Vietnam vet, feels put upon, but aside from a bunch of kids throwing rocks at his cab, no one is outright hostile to him. Why is he so angry? He feels excluded; what he sees all around him in Manhattan is intimacy, couples leaning against cars and whispering sweet nothings to each other. Nor is Bickle as isolated as he seems to feel. He develops friendships with his fellow cabbies and with the shopkeepers whose businesses he frequents (among them is the late Peter Boyle, who looks like he could have been a real life model for Homer Simpson).

The film traffics in reversals. The Secret Service agent chat scene is followed by the “you talking to me” scene, showing the two sides of Bickle, his meekness with authority in contrast with his fantasy of power. This is just as the conflict with Betsy is followed by the scene in which the man in the back seat of Bickle’s cab fantasizes about killing his wife with a .44 Magnum. For much of the movie, others act while Bickle simply watches, or they escape having to act by vocalizing their revenge fantasies.

Seeing Taxi Driver again after so many years is to be reminded of how exciting film was at the time, and of not only how different it is from most contemporary films, but how different it was at the time, which is why it became almost an instant classic, and was the signature film of so-called ’70s cinema. This 30th anniversary disc (Sony, $27.95, Tuesday, August 14, 2007) supersedes the previous DVD release, which was a collector’s edition from way back in 1999. Much of the supplementary material from that disc is carried over to the new edition, and much more is added.

The 2-disc set comes with a terrific new transfer. I don’t know for sure, but it appears as if the bloody climax is as Scorsese originally intended it, not the muted, browned out one that Columbia released to keep an R rating. The sound options are DD 5.1 in both English and French, with English, French, and Spanish subtitles. The film itself is divided into 28 chapters. Supplements on disc one include two audio commentaries, one from screenwriter Paul Schrader and the other by scholar Robert Kolker, a specialist in the films of Scorsese, Kubrick, and others of like mind. In addition, the original screenplay is on offer (a feature carried over from the previous disc). There is also a feature in which one can watch the movie while excerpts from the script pop up. Finally there are trailers for 10 movies: Ghost Rider, Vacancy, Perfect Stranger, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Revenge, Donnie Brasco, The Contractor, Bobby Z, The Last Time, and Yellow.

Kolker’s commentary is detailed and extensive. I don’t buy his main premise, that Bickle is so mad that a lot of his moments are imaginary, such as his call to Betsy or the anniversary card to his parents. He also says that Bernard Herrmann died when the film opened, when in fact he died the morning after recording the film’s music score. Kolker does point out something that seems obvious once he reveals it but which I’d never noticed, that the second half of the movie is a subtle remake of Ford’s The Searchers, with Bickle the “cowboy” rescuing the maiden from the “Indian.”

Schrader’s yak track is sporadic but still interesting, even though he must be bored out of his mind with talking about this movie over the years at the expense of his other work. There are long gaps between his chat, as if an interviewer’s question was excised. Nevertheless, Schrader is the only person on the disc to address the idea that the film supposedly inspired John Hinckley to shoot Ronald Reagan as a way to impress Jodie Foster. His response is just right. Among the other points Schrader makes are that the film is circular, i.e., that Bickle’s rage will rise again.

Schrader also reveals such tidbits as that George Memmoli, the “Mook” guy from Mean Streets, was originally going to be the angry businessman in the back of Bickle’s cab, but was injured on the set of another movie, and so Scorsese took his place. He tells a funny story about a real life hooker who served as a model for Foster’s Iris (called thus because of her opening up and closing down), and reveals that in the original ending the massacred pimps were all black, but their races were changed at the behest of Columbia, which feared riots. Finally, Schrader says that “interesting characters lie, they lie to themselves.”

Disc two begins with a gallery of photos and advertising, carried over from the first DVD, as was a storyboard-to-film comparison with an introduction by Scorsese, who is also interviewed in the new feature called “Martin Scorsese on Taxi Driver.” In these he reveals that Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons, Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano (1962), and Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man were the main influences on the film’s staging and visuals. In fact, Scorsese says that The Wrong Man has probably influenced all his films. Scorsese also notes that he first came upon the script when Brian DePalma gave it to him. Producer Michael Phillips elsewhere says that he had to guilt trip Scorsese into making the film. Has Scorsese ever initiated a project other than the autobiographical Mean Streets, or Gangs of New York? Everything else appears to have been pushed on, forced on, or pleaded from him. Can it be that our “greatest living director” doesn’t really want to make movies, or doesn’t really have anything left to say?

The rest of the supplements on disc two are “Producing Taxi Driver,” a video interview with producer Phillips, “God’s Lonely Man,” in which Kolker and Schrader discuss Bickle’s psychology; “Influence and Appreciation,” in which various colleagues such as Roger Corman, who produced Scorsese’s first Hollywood movie, and Oliver Stone, who was a student of Scorsese’s at NYU, wax eloquent about the man; “Taxi Driver Stories,” interviews with various guys who were cabbies in the 1970s (Stone should have been in this segment, too, since he was a cabbie in Manhattan for a while); “Making Taxi Driver,” a feature length making-of that is carried over from the previous disc; “Travis’s New York,” a visual essay with DP Michael Chapman; and “Travis’s New York Locations,” an interactive map that contrasts scenes from the movie with how the location looks today, with some comments by Mayor Ed Koch and others. These features are playable with optional subtitles. All are interesting and enhance our appreciation of this classic and its makers.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 16th, 2007 at 6:08 pm and is filed under Reel Politique - Film columnist DK Holm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.