Last week I saw the movie Taxi Driver (1976) for the first time. After the film, a friend I watched it with read out “slam poetry style” several of his thoughts on the film, from an “essay” (really: Discord rant) he wrote on his first watch in 2020, then pressured me to share mine. After a day or two, the following is a slightly heavily edited and expanded version of what I came up with, using it as a little Freudian case study.
Everything I say is a tentative, hesitant interpretation; I write as an exercise to explore ideas rather than to settle the issue. Proceed at your own risk. That said:
SPOILERS BELOW BE WARNED SPOILERS BELOW.
I. The Erotic Investment’s Vicissitudes
I just saw Taxi Driver — apparently it’s a movie Žižek likes a lot, which makes sense because the entire focus of the film is on the main character Travis’ relationship with the Other. But I prefer to take a classically Freudian angle, and use it as a case study on object choice and substitute objects.
To summarize, Travis starts out as depressed, listless, lonely, God’s lonely man.
The days go on and on... they don't end. All my life needed was a sense of someplace to go… Loneliness has followed me my whole life. Everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man. June 8th. My life has taken another turn again. The days can go on with regularity over and over, one day indistinguishable from the next. A long continuous chain. Then suddenly, there is a change.
Suddenly, there is a change. He makes one object cathexis (or, object choice, of a woman in this case) early in the film, and that fantasy becomes split, finding substitutes in multiple directions before its violent climax, several steps removed from the original object. As he says after falling in love:
To trace out the libidinal economics explicitly:
Travis falls for a beautiful woman named Betsy, who works at the campaign team for a presidential candidate, Charles Palantine. Travis wants to “save” her from what (he perceives as) her “unhappiness”. This falling in love is the initial libidinal investment that carries him through the rest of the film.
Betsy rejects Travis after he takes her “to a movie”, which is actually a porn film. He seems legitimately to not grasp the distinction between "regular" cinema and pornography. This loss produces an unbearable ambivalence: he still loves her, although he is frustrated in that he can no longer act on it, plus now he also hates her for rejecting him.
After Betsy’s rejection, Travis finds substitute objects in the presidential candidate himself, who rode in his cab one time, and in a child prostitute named Iris, who once asked him to save her: she hopped in his cab and asked him to just drive anywhere, but he failed to do so before she was retrieved by her pimp. The pimp chucks Travis a $20 bill after grabbing her, a bill which took on an intense energetic aura for Travis, acting as a symbol of his guilt about failing to save Iris.
Travis hatches a plan to shoot the presidential candidate, and to give Iris his remaining savings so she can go back home to her parents, thus “saving” her from her “degenerate” lifestyle. Note how the ambivalence toward the original object (Betsy) now has split into two separate objects, one hated (to be destroyed per death drive) and one loved (to be saved per life drive), both of which he can act on directly.
Travis fails to kill Palantine, so he runs off to Iris's apartment complex and shoots up the pimp and all the other participants in the prostitution ring. Notice how, since his destructive satisfaction against the president was foiled, he found a way to satisfy it in relation to the new love object (Iris) instead.
His life drive or erotic satisfaction is portrayed in a note from Iris's parents saying how grateful they are for freeing her, beside newspaper clippings on a wall in his apartment. The newspaper clippings are laudatory, calling him a hero; there's another undercurrent throughout the film of his morality, him constantly criticizing the filth of NYC, which I will discuss in more detail later. So, by being a hero who cleans up the city, he attains a moral satisfaction as well as a purely instinctual satisfaction.
The final scene, perhaps a pure fantasy, has Betsy in the back of his cab, admiring him, like he wanted, and then exiting onto a clean tree-lined city street. It’s as if his successful actions toward the substitute objects retroactively satisfied his original desire, relieving him of the energy that his original object-choice drew out.
The film itself reveals this arc, of a lonely man searching for something, anything to invest himself in. And then, he finds something he desires, and we witness the vicissitudes this investment undergoes in order for him to attain satisfaction.
II. The Moral Investment
In many reviews, Travis is accused of being a narcissist, and I think that's true insofar as love is inherently narcissistic. But more importantly is that he's not well integrated into the symbolic register — he cannot speak well, he remains silent, and also his superegoic = moral judgments prevent him from taking other actions that might satisfy his biological drives, like sleeping with a prostitute, because they’re “dirty”.
This city here is like an open sewer, you know, it's full of filth and scum. Sometimes I can hardly take it.
This means his capacity to attain satisfaction through cultural means, through his relationships with other people, is limited. His ego is assaulted on all sides: failures of reality (the loss of Betsy), unsatisfied moral imperatives (the filthy city), unsatisfied drives (and yet he must do something). So he finds himself in a state that I want to describe as obsessional neurosis. And once his weak ego can no longer bear the pressure, he acts out in accordance with the pleasure principle = narcissistic fantasy.
What’s interesting though is that his plan to “act out” was premeditated, so in that sense he had some ego participation prior to the violent rampage. Perhaps he felt that, given the constraints, realistically the best solution was to follow the delusional impulses. Since he is refused access to the symbolic on certain levels — his ego cannot find or tolerate alternative paths to satisfaction which involve the social, i.e. he cannot speak or communicate — he retreats to the imaginary, thus becoming a grandiose narcissist. His “reality” becomes determined by fantasy rather than perception. Private, subjective reality overtakes shared, objective reality.
Travis’s general failure to literally distinguish between a porn film and a movie you take someone to on a date speaks again to his lack of access to the symbolic register, in the sense that social codes are not known to him. But it's still strange insofar as there's no reason he should fail to make that distinction — why is he refused access to the symbolic? This points to the conclusion that he cannot know for some reason, i.e. there is a traumatic repression taking place. So we must ask, what is Travis repressing?
We don't know much of Travis’s background except that he's lying to his parents about having a government job, that he's relatively uneducated (no college?), and that he was a marine in Vietnam. I think reviewers are tempted to focus on military trauma as the source, but lying to his parents seems more significant to me, insofar as it reveals this explicitly Oedipal element of his parents having expectations, him having immense “unconscious guilt” over his failure to satisfy those expectations, and him producing repressions and reaction-formations to ensure that guilt is not felt consciously.
Dear Father and Mother: July is the month I remember which brings not only your wedding anniversary but also Father's Day and Mother's birthday. I'm sorry I can't remember the exact dates, but I hope this card will take care of them all. I'm sorry again I cannot send you my address like I promised to last year. But the sensitive nature of my work for the government demands utmost secrecy. I know you will understand. I am healthy and well and making lots of money. I have been going with a girl for several months and I know you would be proud if you could see her. Her name is Betsy but I can tell you no more than that... I hope this card finds you all well as it does me. I hope no one has died. Don't worry about me. One day, there'll be a knock on the door and it'll be me. Love Travis.
The letter reveals not his reality but his parents’ expectations of him. He lies about dating a girl his parents would like (perhaps his initial erotic investment was determined not just by her beauty, but also by her being the kind of girl that would satisfy his parents), he lies about having an important government job, he lies about making lots of money.
Where does he tell the truth? The last line: “one day, there’ll be a knock on the door and it’ll be me.” Why doesn’t he say “one day, I’ll come back home”, why is it so literal? The image that comes to mind is not a happy Travis returning to his parents’ house, but a police officer delivering the news of Travis’ death. “There will be a knock on the door, and it’ll be [about] me.”
Given the nature of all these parental ideas, these grand expectations he believes are placed upon him by his family, one can ask: why is Travis a Taxi Driver at all?
What Travis says:
Personnel Officer: So what is it? Why do you want to be a taxi driver? Do you need a second job? Are you moonlighting?
Travis: I... I just want to work long hours. What's moonlighting?
[…later…]
Travis [in journal]: I'm workin' long hours now, six in the afternoon to six in the morning. Sometimes even eight in the morning, six days a week. Sometimes seven days a week. It's a long hustle but it keeps me real busy. I can take in three, three fifty a week. Sometimes even more when I do it off the meter. All the animals come out at night - whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.
This is not an act of rebellion against his parents. He’s not driving out of spite for what they asked. Instead, it’s a rotated attempt to satisfy their demands: if he can’t be a government official, at least he can address his sense of guilt at failing to be an official, by putting himself into face to face contact with the streets, which he one day hopes will become clean, that someday, someone will clean it up. But he cannot bear to act on those parental demands directly; they’re too painful, have too much a sting of failure. He must remain a Taxi Driver.
Travis’ meeting Palantine makes his desire for clean streets seem closer, and he voices his concerns to Palantine directly:
Travis: Whatever becomes the President should just - really clean it up, know what I mean? Sometimes I go out and I smell it. I get headaches1, it's so bad, you know. It's like - they just never go away, you know. It's like I think that the President should clean up this whole mess here. He should flush it down the fuckin' toilet.
Travis wants Palantine to clean up the streets, but Palantine’s seeming refusal or failure to understand the weight of Travis’ moral condemnation shifts Travis’ attitude towards him. This candidate proves himself unworthy to stand in for the father who would execute the act of moral judgment, which leads Travis to realize he must take matters into his own hands — and the only way for Travis to overcome his impotence is to kill the father who prevents him from acting.
Travis: Listen, you fuckers, you screwheads. Here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is a man who stood up!
Once Travis makes this decision, he is suddenly able to carry on a long conversation with a Secret Service agent, and to convince the agent that he’s interested in job opportunities with the government. It’s as if he’s been reintroduced into the world of speech, now that whatever was “blocking” him is no longer a problem; he’s disavowed his castration (= become psychotic), and all that remains is to remove the threatening father from the picture.
Palantine takes the place of the father, in a dual form: the “punishing”, castrating father who demands he get a good job and date a nice girl, forcing him to lie and hide behind false pretenses, and the “rivalrous” father who prevents Travis from acting and holds Betsy, the love object or mother substitute, as his “hostage”. Travis’s attempt to kill Palantine is thus overdetermined, both as his impetus to achieve his moral goals, and as a final attempt to “free” Betsy, even though she was already lost to him in reality.
But his failure to kill Palantine, to kill the father, leaves Travis in a position where all the energy summoned for the task must go somewhere. So he seeks out the “rivalrous father” surrogate, Iris’ handlers, and goes to murder them instead, this time successfully. The ending sequence where Betsy is finally giving him what he wanted in the cab is evidence that this tension has lifted, and that he was finally able to free (himself) of his desire.
However, he fails to kill the “punishing father” as well, which means he also fails to overcome castration, and can return to “normal”, neurotic, dissatisfied, lonely life. Had he succeeded, he would’ve likely become permanently psychotic. But insofar as he returns to “more of the same”, he cannot change that dynamic, cannot overcome the Oedipus complex. A different sort of change most occur for that to happen.
As my friend put it in his original essay that inspired this response:
The very last thing that happens in the movie: he's driving alone in the car, and this weird sound effect happens, a reversed ticking noise, very loud and very clear. He looks up at his rearview mirror and stares at something. then he adjusts it, and the mirror comes back to his face.
That tick and the adjustment of the mirror back to the first shot of the entire movie implies that this is a cyclical story. It forces us to see this not as a redemption arc but to compare how he is at the beginning of the movie to the end, and know that he's going to become violent again.
I don’t think this is necessarily true, that Travis will become violent again, but I agree that it shows nothing really has changed. His desire has come and gone, and now things are back to where they began.
III. Anti-Heroes & Anti-Villains
Modern reviews tend to compare Travis to the Joker (2019), but I think this comparison is misguided. An interesting comment a different friend made about The Joker is that the Joker actually kills TV star De Niro, who acted as Travis, as explicit father surrogate. So in that sense, the two are similar — both Oedipal (perhaps with Travis himself acting as the “father” for the Joker).
The thing about the Joker is that he has no superego, or I should say his Oedipal dynamics are completely opposite. For the Joker, his actions are completely a destructive reaction against the unconscious superego guilt, rather than an attempt to find a way to satisfy the superego while also satisfying his instinctual fantasies.
In other words, the Joker wants to overcome the father not to follow a greater moral imperative, but simply so that he’s no longer beholden to any moral imperative at all. His morality is purely “negativistic”, denying, as opposed to Travis’ merely “negative” morality, of “the city is bad [but can become good]”.
This rebellious attitude, of saying “no” to the Other’s morality rather than “yes” to one’s internal morality, makes the Joker a more fundamentally childlike film. The crowd cheers as the Joker rebels in a reaction-formation, whereas the crowd boos as Travis actually satisfies his moral imperatives in an "antisocial" way. The Joker is an anti-hero, Taxi Driver Travis is an anti-villain.
As “anti-villain” is an unusual term, I made a chart to illustrate the difference:
What we see in the Hero quadrant is the character of “conventional morality”. The character is driven by the same things that drive the audience. They can identify with him, and identify his imaginary success with their own personal fantasies.
The Villain is his opposite, who represents the denial of conventional morality, and thus gains the audience’s ire. He wants to destroy good things, often for no explicit reason other than hating good things, or because he can gain some ego = non-moral satisfaction by doing it. Many times, the Hero proves his moral worth not by taking up a positive stance, but through a double negation, of denying the Villain his success at being evil.
The Anti-Hero is a more popular character in recent times, as “conventional morality” itself becomes nearly impossible to fully avow. He does not attempt to prove his own moral worth in a positive sense, but does prove his disagreement with the state of things, his moral worth in a negative sense, by breaking things. This gains the audience’s love, because the audience is presumed to also want to break conventional things. Consider how “subversion” itself has come to take on the form of a moral imperative. You must go against the hierarchy, you must destroy the patriarchy, etc. The Anti-Hero speaks to this fantasy of evil Other = Convention vs heroic Self = Reaction, loved for being anti-moral rather than productively or collectively moral.
The Anti-Villain is a different sort of thing: attached to morality, he carries out his own ideas of goodness, and the audience hates him for it. Most viewers see his moral stances as pathetic or weak, despite any resonance they might have with the viewer’s own ideals. And Travis himself is pathetic and weak, despite the final outburst of the film. It’s hard to love Travis. Despite that, it’s undeniable that he acts out of his own ideas of what is Good, even if those ideas bring him untold suffering, and prevent him from achieving his own personal satisfaction.
This creates some confusion in a world of moral relativism, where he cannot be held to fault for his idea of Goodness. So the critic can instead find recourse in his character. As my friend wrote, “he's truly a hateful, lonely, violent person” — and while this may be true, there are plenty of hateful, lonely, and violent characters that an audience has no problem identifying with, insofar as they act out the proper moral ideas.
Why is that? If the Anti-Hero allows the audience to revel in a child-like, spiteful, reactionary enjoyment, the Anti-Villain instead holds up a mirror. He asks “you think you are good? Well, I also think I am good. And yet you hate me [and love yourself]. Why is that?” Thus the Anti-Villain becomes the most challenging character of the four quadrants, both to depict well and to grapple with as viewer. Both parties must resist the temptation for the Anti-Villain to slide into becoming a pure Villain (if he were more ego-driven) or pure Hero (if he were more able to act).
It is through this vehicle that Paul Schrader, the writer for Taxi Driver, makes his cultural critique: not “what kind of world do we live in?” but “what kind of values are we producing?” and “how can one live a good life today given the constraints of the world around us?” Only once we reach this level of abstraction does it make sense to bring in, e.g. Travis’ history in Vietnam, and issues of urban decay, etc. But these topics have been covered in great detail elsewhere, so this is where I’ll leave you.
Note that headaches here could be a physical manifestation of this inability to satisfy his parents’ wishes. A psychical symptom, in other words.