Scorsese 'Taxi Driver' and Screen Violence in Hollywood

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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

Taxi Driver (1976) allowed Scorsese to cement his reputation in the Hollywood by winning the coveted Palm d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. In it, Scorsese uncovers the underbelly of New York through Travis Bickle (played by Robert De Niro), a Vietnam veteran and a loner who is incapable to understand the circumstances prevailing in the society. He is the essence of isolation, continuously endeavoring to hook up with other people but always failing. The film compels the viewers into the uncomfortable place of identifying with Bickle, a man who is clearly on the edge and about to go over; viewers remain with him throughout the entire movie seeing and understanding the world around him from his perceptive. Eventually, he does go over the edge and proceeds on a vigilante rampage that, like “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Wild Bunch”, set new standards for screen violence. The effects, which were designed and executed by Dick Smith, involved the top of a man's hand being blown off, multiple squib effects, splattering head shots, and another man being stabbed through the palm with a large knife. Beyond the shock of the effects themselves, Scorsese pushes home the results of the vigilante violence by allowing his camera to linger on the aftermath, taking in every blood spatter and dead body. The gore of this final sequence was so graphic, in fact, that Scorsese had the scene desaturated in postproduction to take away some of the impact in order to avoid an X rating.

Because representations of violence had been so crucial to the meteoric rise of the directors of the 1970s, it is not surprising that violence became one of the central controversies surrounding their work in the 1980s. It is not that films became any less violent in the Reagan era, but rather that the ideologies behind the representations of violence shifted such that it was increasingly difficult to make films like Taxi Driver (1976) or Chinatown (1974) anymore, films that used violence to uncover ugly truths about American culture. As J. David Slocum (2001) notes, “[screen] violence both marks prevailing coherencies and punctuates changes” (18). As the 1970s wore into the 1980s, the only prevailing coherence was that audiences still had an appetite for screen violence. However, the change that was so clearly punctuated was that there were now ...