TAXI DRIVER AND BRINGING OUT THE DEAD: GOD'S LONELY MEN
By Jerry Saravia
(originally written in 2000)
1976 gave birth to Sylvester Stallone's urban pop myth of an underdog who proved he could conquer the big leagues. That fairy-tale was Rocky, a film that put Stallone on the map and garnered the coveted Best Picture Academy Award. But the film that really caused a stir and thus riveted and angered many people was Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, the ultimate noir tale of urban alienation in the city of New York. "Rocky" was exhilarating and uplifting. "Taxi Driver" was, pure and simply, a downer. Still, the latter was a modest box-office hit that became as influential as any Scorsese film since (it is one of Tarantino's three faves of all time). 1999 gave birth to "American Beauty," a satirical, biting and ironic look at suburbian family dysfunction. It put first-time director Sam Mendes on the map and it won the coveted Best Picture Academy Award. Like "Rocky" twenty years earlier, it was also a box-office hit. 1999 also brought Bringing Out the Dead, Martin Scorsese's return to the mean streets of "Taxi Driver" with Nicolas Cage as a New York City paramedic. Given the cast and the director, it could have been a minor hit. It wasn't. Let's not forget that "American Beauty" angered and exhilarated audiences but it was all in the service of irony with a shocking finale that echoed with a tinge of hope. But "Bringing Out the Dead" was a rampant, black-humored existential joke - it was full of repetitions that varied with nuance yet without a shred of irony. And the movie was like the main character - lethargic with its share of highs and lows. In addition, it was either funny or horrifying or both - audiences did not know how to respond so they stayed away.
So why is Martin Scorsese consistently ignored by audiences or, for that matter, writer Paul Schrader who scripted both "Taxi Driver" and "Bringing Out the Dead"? Why was Scorsese's brilliant remake of "Cape Fear" his only major box-office hit? Why did Touchstone fail to promote both "Kundun" and "Bringing Out the Dead" with the proper advertising? "Kundun" was barely promoted. Of course, a film about the Dalai Lama and spirituality in a foreign land like Tibet wasn't likely to excite audiences anyway. "Bringing Out the Dead" had more mainstream elements, but it was advertised as a "Sixth Sense" ghost story involving paramedics. Not so. It also deals with a world that no longer exists, the Dantesque world of New York City before Mayor Guiliani took over and cleaned it up. In other words, a world not unlike the one shown in "Taxi Driver" 23 years earlier. Peter Biskind, who wrote "Easy Riders and Raging Bulls," said that studios would be mad to finance something like "Taxi Driver" today. He's probably right but that doesn't make the film any less worthy.
Let's look back at "Taxi Driver," a phenomenal masterpiece that is still the best American film ever made. This opinion was once shared by Roger Ebert, and I heartily agree. It is not much an authentic look at the streets of New York, which it is, but also a picture of New York as seen by its lonely protagonist, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro). Here is one sickly demented, perverted insomniac who is also a Vietnam Vet. He can't sleep nights so he decides to become a cabbie ("Well, there are porno theatres for that," says Joe Spinelli as a personnel officer. "I know, I tried that," says Travis with a smile.) Travis's fares include all the people of the streets he despises - prostitutes, pimps, lowlifes, blacks (referred to as "spooks"), homosexuals - in his words, the scum of society. Who is Travis to think he is any better? He despises the city yet he can't escape from it. We see frequent close-ups of his eyes as he scans all the pedestrians on the streets, observing and studying and offering his thoughts in voice-over narration. He sees himself as "God's lonely man," someone who believes in "morbid self-attention." All he needs is a place to go. Where does a lonely man go in a city full of people? Well, there is the blonde WASP, Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), who canvasses for a potential presidential candidate named Palantine (Leonard Harris). Travis sees her from his cab, observing her every move in slow-motion, and finally musters the courage to ask her out on a date. Betsy is charmed by this man, and also perplexed by his lack of music knowledge and pure, decent cinema (he takes her to see "The Swedish Marriage Manual," a porno film for couples). She is disturbed and doesn't return his calls. Travis is slowly boiling with anger. Interestingly, it is not because she has rejected him as much as Travis's own rejection of her life - he wants to sully her but she will not be sullied. He also wants to be alone, or else he might have taken her on a proper date. Betsy is the Madonna Whore - she is a representative of the scum, which may also include the pillars of society. "She was just like the others, cold and distant. Like the union." Furthermore, let's not forget what he angrily says to Betsy before being kicked out of the building by her co-worker, Tom (Albert Brooks): "You are in a hell. And you are going to die in hell like the rest of them. Like the rest of them!"
Travis's days grow more frustrating with each passing day. He writes letters to his parents about a government job he can't discuss and a girl he is steadily dating named Betsy (both are of course lies). He grows fond of guns, and purchases a few of them including a .44 Magnum from a traveling salesman (Steven Prince). He kills a black stick-up man who is then beaten by a club-bearing grocery store owner. He attends more porno theatres. Travis also starts working out, fine-tuning his body and removing all bad foods from his diet, yet he continues to eat those bad foods. The streets continue to bother him more each day. Finally, he seeks help from a veteran cabbie, The Wizard (Peter Boyle), who can't help him. In fact, no one can. How can a man with a propensity for violence be cured by people calling him "Killer"? But when Travis almost runs over a twelve-year-old prostitute, Iris (Jodie Foster), he realizes his mission in life. Iris's pimp, Sport (Harvey Keitel), is protective of Iris and pretends to love her, though he must always attend to business. Sport (also known as Matthew) is another example of the scum of the streets, and Travis feels that Palantine may not clean up the streets of all the filth if he becomes President of the U.S. Therefore, Travis's mission is to kill Palantine. Travis shaves his head leaving only a Mohawk, packs his guns and knives and prepares for battle. The Palantine assassination attempt fails, so how can Travis relieve his anger now? Well, he can kill Sport and the mobsters so he can feel justified by saving Iris (who may not want to be saved). The bloodbath takes place as the Angel of Death sprays bullets in a massacre recalling Wounded Knee, according to film critic Rex Reed. Travis is considered a media hero in New York for killing a pimp and his cohorts - one can assume that the people of New York and the media are on Travis's side since they both regard such lowlifes as scum. Iris has returned to her parents's care. All is well. Travis is seen presumably months later chuckling with his fellow cabbies (something we had not seen before in the whole film). He picks up a fare. It is Betsy who is interested in Travis again since he is mentioned in all the newspapers (all this after being told she should go to hell). He drops her off at his apartment and doesn't charge her for the fare. His last line is: "So long." Everything seems fine, and we do not expect Travis to go out with Betsy again. But then he twitches in his rearview mirror as he notices something. Another prostitute? A black stick-up man? Palantine? Who knows, but the epilogue is clear - Travis is not cured and could easily snap back into a violent mode in the future. He will not likely change his view of those mean streets and its lowlifes.
"Bringing Out the Dead" is not a remake of "Taxi Driver" but it does revisit some of its themes. We are still dealing with the city of New York but it is no longer 1975. This is the early 1990's and New York is even more hellish and nightmarish - a world out of control in endless mayhem. The lead character is not a Vietnam Vet nor is he an unrepentant killer like Travis. Instead, he is a compassionate, frustrated, benevolent, burned-out insomniac named Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage), an ambulance paramedic in New York's Hell Kitchen. His job is to save lives during the graveyard shift, a time when the city is howling with violence and drugs. We witness the derelicts like homeless people who smell bad, junkies with brain damage, junkies who would rather join the Army, drug dealers who love UB40, clueless, sickly homeless people who can't slit their wrists, pregnant prostitutes, clueless Goth junkies and musicians, drunks, teenage girls giving birth in ghetto tenements, several cardiac arrests (Frank hates them), and so on. This world is the ninth circle of Dante's Hell, and nobody can escape from it, not even Frank. He tries to get fired by his Captain (Arthur J. Nascarella) but only gets sarcasm ("I'll fire you tomorrow!"). His partners during these three different nights include the detached Larry (John Goodman), who gorges on food to escape from the job pressures, the Bible-preaching Marcus (Ving Rhames), who uses Jesus as his own cure to stay on the job, and the psychotic, scarily volatile Tom (Tom Sizemore), who pulverizes one frequent patient with kicks to the head and a handy baseball bat. These three different partners do not help Frank cope with his own inner demons.
Frank's problem is that he feels guilty for not saving a homeless, asthmatic girl named Rose (Cynthia Roman) - she has haunted him ever since. Frank has not saved a life in months, and his mounting frustration at a job that expects him to be a savior continues to prove daunting. He drinks gin and copious amounts of coffee, smokes a chimney, and even injects himself with amino acids, vitamin B and glucose but nothing seems to work. The man can't sleep, he can't function, and he gets more and more strung out than a desperate heroin addict would. His eyes are sunken and swollen - he has seen too much death. What can someone like Frank do?
At the start of the film, Frank does save one life - a cardiac victim named Mr. Burke (Collen Oliver Jobnson) who is mispronounced as dead. "No shit," exclaims his partner, Larry, in a deadpan manner. Burke is the reason Frank continues on with his job. And he keeps seeing this victim's daughter, Mary (Patricia Arquette), outside the hospital. She has her own ways of coping by smoking cigarettes or spending a night at the Oasis (an apartment belonging to Cy, the neighborhood drug dealer). Mary feels distraught and disheveled and is a former junkie who has overdosed a few times. Frank and Mary connect in a strange way, though she is somewhat standoffish to him at first. Most peculiar is a scene where Frank and Mary are riding in the back of the ambulance and not a single word is exchanged between them. When they finally have a talk about her father, Frank admits that he was once married but that his wife could not handle his job (he was a paramedic for five years). Interestingly, he says that in his profession, he learned to block out the blood and guts that he sees (something he currently is having a problem doing). In a nice bit of foreshadowing, Frank says that sometimes there is a moment where "everything just glows" (the last scene in the film has an ethereal moment of morning glow). Mary's own admission about her life is that she wanted to run away, whether it was at a convent or a crack den - she needed an escape. That is why both Frank and Mary connect - they feel the need to escape from everything but are not sure how.
The nights continue for Frank. He keeps seeing Rose everywhere (one stunning shot shows various women in the street with Rose's face). He also keeps running into Noel (Marc Anthony), the former junkie who we learn was shot in the head by Cy and his goons. Noel feels he has been left in the desert to die and wants water as if his life depends on it. When Frank runs into Cy (smoothly played by Cliff Curtis) and tries to rescue Mary, Cy gives Frank a relaxant that knocks him out cold. We then enter Frank's mind as we see a synergistic montage of images which range from shootings in the street, speeded-up images of ambulances and people running, an amputee walking with his elbows, a couple arguing, before seguing to Frank pulling the souls of the pavement - the very people he could not save. Then we are treated to a hallucinatory sequence where Frank is seen in a flashback trying to save Rose, the asthmatic. The scene is daylight and it is snowing, though it is shot in reverse so that the snow seems to be coming up from the ground. Rose is seen collapsing in front of a meat market where slabs of beef are seen hanging. Frank fails to save her, and her dying last words are "Rose. My name is Rose." Frank wakes up and leaves with Mary in tow.
After finally getting a good night sleep at Mary's apartment, Frank is back to work, and still not getting fired by his boss. His new partner, Tom, drives him up the wall with his bloodthirsty attitude ("Look up in the sky, it is a full moon. Blood is going to run tonight, I can feel it. Our mission: to save lives.") Nothing can keep Frank going on a particularly bad night, not even a damn cup of coffee ("Our mission is coffee, Tom.") He keeps seeing Rose. The drug dealer, Cy, has been impaled on a fence after a shootout at the Oasis. Frank saves Cy's life, yet the old man, Mr. Burke, is driving Frank closer to the edge of insanity. Frank thinks Burke is talking to him and pleading with him to take his life. Frank does Burke's bidding in a sequence so startling and disturbing that nothing in TV's "E.R." can prepare you for it. It is a complex moral act, one that could be deemed as immoral since the Angel of Mercy has become the Angel of Death. The "grief mop" has not just beared witness, he has taken action. Instead of saving a life, he takes it away. After Burke's death, Frank brings the news to Mary. For a moment, Frank sees Rose and asks for forgiveness. Rose says (in Mary's voice), "It wasn't your fault. Nobody asked you to suffer. That was your idea." Finally, Frank rests his head in Mary's arms as the morning light pours in.
Antiheroes in the Big Apple
Both Travis Bickle and Frank Pierce serve as antiheroes in Scorsese's world. Lately, we have not had many antiheroes - they are a forgotten staple of our cinematic culture. In the past, whether dealing with Watergate or the Red Scare, films often dealt with people in extraordinary situations beyond their control where their morality was put to the test. Film noir has always been correlated with existentialism, a world where God does not exist and man places more importance on his own existence, his feelings, his guilt, his emotions. There is also an acceptance of consequences as a result of said actions. In films like "Double Indemnity," "D.O.A.," "Detour," "Scarlet Street" and "Chinatown," the lead characters were involved in situations way beyond their control, and the surprise element was always seeing how they would act. 1945's "Detour" dealt with the most desperate of situations - a man assuming the identity of another while driving his car and wearing his clothes and escaping from the authorities since he could be blamed for the accidental death of another. "Chinatown" had detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) exposing an affair that resulted in murder and scandal (not to mention Gittes's reputation) in what finally ends as the most fatalistic for any detective - the loss of power to combat evil.
Lately, we have had neo-noir in the "Pulp Fiction" mode where antiheroes are hip and know everything about pop culture. The difference, as characterized by writer Paul Schrader, is that today, the antihero is not concerned with guilt or morality or consequences of his/her own actions. No, today we have the ironic antihero, the one who merely says, "Who cares?"
This is certainly not the case with Travis Bickle, a man defined by nothing except his loneliness. He wants to belong to something, he wants to be loved and love someone, but his intention is to remain isolated - a self-imposed isolation. The most unique example is when Travis is on a public phone talking to Betsy (who has not returned his calls). The camera stays on him and then slowly pans away to an empty hallway. Every shot exemplifies his loneliness, particularly when he is driving a taxi. When he picks up a psychotic cab fare (chillingly played by Martin Scorsese), Travis is photographed in a separate medium shot rather than a two-shot with the cab fare. The difference between Travis and most antiheroes is that his fatalistic path is his own doing rather than anything predestined. Or as Schrader said in the documentary, "He is reinforcing his own doomed condition, to be sure he never gets to where he is going." In the case with Frank Pierce, he wants to save lives and forget Rose - two impossibilities in a man who is growing more wearisome and enervated with each passing day. His catharsis is not bloody, only an act of supposed mercy to the very victim he had saved. After being told he did not need to suffer, we realize all this could have been prevented if Frank had chosen to. But then there would be no movie. He finds peace, but who's to say that at the end he is at peace?
State of enervation and lethargy
Film Comment critic Kent Jones had once spoken glowingly of Quentin Tarantino's "Jackie Brown." He characterized it as a film about "the enervation of having to make a living, of working as a bailbondsman or as a stewardess for a crummy Mexican airline." He further points out, "there is a difference between enervated filmmaking and precise, alert filmmaking about enervation." "Jackie Brown" certainly fit the bill since it was a slower, more character-based crime drama than "Pulp Fiction" or "Reservoir Dogs." This study of human enervation is also at the heart of "Taxi Driver" and "Bringing Out the Dead." The only way this can work is if we feel the enervation and the sense of tiredness through the point-of-view of the characters. Travis's loneliness and growing hatred of the streets is clearly felt through the subjective point-of-view and his voice-over narration. We learn what New York and the people around him mean to him. One of Travis's passengers is Palantine whom Travis bluntly opines about what really should happen to the filth in the city ("It should be flushed right down the fucking toilet.") Every shot is more or less seen from his point-of-view - as cinematographer Michael Chapman pointed out, "it is a documentary of the mind." Sometimes those streets look beautiful, often awash in neon and bright lights (Times Square certainly looks more inviting than the real thing. The sequence where the taxi seems to be floating down the streets as we see neon signs like "Fascination" and movies on a marquee like "Return of the Dragon" and "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" can serve not as just the symbols of beauty and violence but as precursors for what is to come). But one senses that Travis has had enough of the dirt, the scum, just about everything. Travis is not just becoming more and more alienated (again, a self-imposed alienation), he is becoming physically enervated by the ills of society ("Twelve hours of driving a taxi and I still can't sleep. Damn. The days go on and on.") Yet that enervation gives way to pumped-up violent fantasies made manifest by his rage, his need to kill. A catharsis where the violence is his only outlet to express something genuine. The irony is that he gets the attention he wanted by way of the media for exploiting him as a savior. And if you think the famous finale does not have the religious underpinnings of typical Scorsese, consider the shot where Travis is shot in the arm by the mafioso before blowing the guy away - scribbled on the wall behind him is the phrase: "Jesus loves you." Again, beauty, fascination, violence and then love.
"Bringing Out the Dead" focuses on subjective feelings as well, and envelops the audience in Frank Pierce's weakened, lethargic states far more excessively. When Scorsese does not show his trademark whirlwind camera moves inside ambulances and in the streets, he keeps it stabilized in scenes between Frank and Mary. The static shots inside hospital rooms or outside the ER bring out the lethargic state of Frank so vividly that audiences will feel the urge to exit the theatre (the film could have been called "No Exit"). One friend of mine had a similar reaction when she saw the film - after it was over, she said, "I could not wait for it to finish." She hated the film but I think she hated what she had to endure for Frank's sake, merely forgetting that we are suffering along with Frank. Like the German Expressionists and the late director Robert Bresson, the subjective feelings and emotional states are preferred over an objective reality. The paradox is that most of "Bringing Out the Dead," and certainly "Taxi Driver," is almost too realistic for its own good, causing us to reflect on our own reality world inside the cinema instead of escaping from it. "Bringing Out the Dead" is almost more surreal than real, and it becomes more obvious towards the end when Frank's emotional states grow more frenzied and druggy. We see lots of canted angles inside ambulances and plenty of stroboscopic flashes of neon and light, sometimes in time-lapse motion, sometimes in slow-motion. Scorsese is not trying to be flashy for the sake of style - the style fits with Frank's endless disorientation. This is not entertainment nor is either film fun to sit through. The notion is to expose pain and suffering in people who feel shut out or isolated from others, especially in big cities. When Frank grows weary of hearing about yet another cardiac arrest, he shouts his thoughts with a fine line between humor and desperation: "Why does everything have to be a cardiac arrest? Whatever happened to chest pains, difficulty breathing, fractured hands. Come on, people!"
Music underscoring action
Music is also integral to the emotional lives of these characters. In the case with "Taxi Driver," we hear the late Bernard Herrmann's last musical score that combines some jazz with the staccato, piercing violin rhythms that Herrmann is best known for. This gives the impression that something horrible and corrupt is about to happen in the Big Apple, a foreshadowing of violent events to come. There is also the only song used in the film, Jackson Browne's "Late For the Sky," as we see Travis Bickle watching "American Bandstand" on television. The lyrics go something like this: "How long have I been sleeping? How long have I have been drifting?" But look at the scene carefully: Travis is withdrawn but he also hates the show yet he can't stop watching it, possibly even be fascinated by it. He is also holding a gun. Beauty, love, fascination that give way to violence. Same thing with Betsy - someone he could love and is fascinated by but is compelled to sully her and be verbally violent with her. How long can Travis drift into his subjective reality before being objective about it?
In "Bringing Out the Dead," Scorsese chooses pop and rock and roll songs to underscore his character's private hell. Scorsese has said that when he rode in ambulances, he noticed the paramedics played a lot of rock songs, perhaps to ease the tension of whatever ghastly horror they may come up against. In the film, there is not one song that does not seem out of context. Consider the Martha Reeves song "Nowhere to Run," played during Frank's ambulance ride with Marcus. Listen carefully to the lyrics as you hear them: "She becomes a part of me. Everywhere I go, your face I see. Every step I take, you take with me." These lyrics coincide with Frank's obsession over Rose whom he sees everywhere. The other lyrics help to capture the existential nature of the subject as in the following: "Nowhere to run to, baby. Nowhere to hide." Also noteworthy is "You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory," a song rather fitting since Frank shouldn't have to wrestle with the memory of Rose's death. The main song, Van Morrison's "T.B. Sheets" (a song Scorsese was initially going to use in "Taxi Driver"), also captures Frank's inner life as if he is suffocating from all the noise, all the anguish, both on the streets and in the crowded E.R ("Let me breathe. Don't worry about it, don't worry about it.") "I want, I want, I want a drink of water" are lyrics that fit with Noel's own desperation for a drink of water, and there are many other examples. "T.B. Sheets" is spread throughout the film and its purpose is to suffocate the viewer with its endless guitar strings and riffs.
Humor amidst the horror
There is some understated humor in Frank's comments towards Mary's need for a cigarette: "It's okay, they are prescription." He also makes comments like, "Do you want to go somewhere? Get a falafel?" Other nice bits of humor that could be lost in most viewers the first time out include the constant reference to the hospital as Our Lady of Misery (rather than Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy). There is also a cop named Gris who threatens people with his sunglasses; the running gag of Noel constantly running away from the hospital; Frank telling Noel he will promise death to him using anything from nerve gas to lethal injections; a horrifyingly funny sequence where Frank and Tom persuade a homeless person not to slit his wrists; Larry's inability to deal with the smell of the "Duke of Stink"; the conversations between Marcus and the dispatcher named Love (Queen Latifah); the fake resurrection of a Red Death goth victim; and I could go on and on. The problem is twofold - most Scorsese films teeter between comedy and violence in such a quick snap that it makes it hard to know how to react. Like Steven Spielberg once said of Scorsese, "he plays the audience like a piano. Sometimes, you don't know whether to laugh or to be scared." Spielberg may as well be describing "GoodFellas," which is full of what I may call "screeching halt" emotions. But "Bringing Out the Dead' is so heavy on the dark aspects that the humor is easy to miss. At one point, a nurse (played by Aida Turturro) says that she has kicked a patient out to make room for Mr. Burke. A doctor makes the comment that Mr. Burke's eyes are fixed and dilated and considers him plant food. Even Frank makes a snide comment that Burke prefers the nurses at Misery - "He says they are the best."
"Taxi Driver" has its moments though the humor quotient is at a minimum. Some humorous bits take place inside the Belmore Cafeteria where Travis's cabbie pals talk about homosexual partners and alimony, police chasing suspects on crutches, cab fares slicing cabbies's ears off and women changing their pantyhose in the middle of the Triborough Bridge. The humor is in the details. For example, one cabbie describes a one-legged suspect on crutches and is asked if the suspect was chasing the policeman or the other way around. The Wizard (Peter Boyle) has one famous speech which fits as pure existentialism as he tries to talk to Bickle. He talks about a person becoming the job, and that everyone becomes something since he has seen it all in his fifteen years as a cabbie. The Wizard also states that he chooses to do what he does, namely driving a cab at night for ten years.
Travis: "I don't know. I don't know. I really, you know I really. I got some bad ideas in my head."
The Wizard: "Got out and get laid. Do anything. Because you got no choice anyhow. I mean we are all fucked. More or less."
Travis (chuckles): "That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard."
The Wizard's statement is evidently the thoughts of anyone living in New York who feels life is only about work and nothing else. There is nothing to look forward to, nothing to take away from the city life - in one word, hopelessness. Even Frank Pierce evoked a more hopeful response, advice he could have given to Travis: "The city does not discriminate. It gets to everybody."
There is also some choice bits of office comedy with Albert Brooks as another canvasser, Tom, Betsy's co-worker. He tells a story of a thief who had his fingers blown off (a foreshadowing of the violent finale) by a mobster. There is also a comment about the political phrase, "We are the people " as opposed to "We are the people." Betsy mocks the job they are doing as the equivalent of selling mouthwash.
The urgency of Taxi Driver and Bringing Out the Dead
The reason "Taxi Driver" remains as eerily prophetic today as it was in 1976 is because its character study of loneliness and self-imposed alienation remains timeless. Most of us might understand what Travis Bickle is going through because he chooses to remain in that alienated state. It can be argued that people today are as lonely and unhappy as ever before. For Travis, the seeds of violence and frustration may be a result of the Vietnam War, a veteran who fought for his country and was then forgotten. How does one act after returning from the bloody warfare of the jungles in another country? The answer is simple: He becomes a soldier in the streets. The city has become a jungle, only the Vietcong are not his targets. The targets are the ordinary folk who represent the scum that Travis despises so much. It is doubtful that Travis would have used one of the most famous lines in movie history in Vietnam. "Are you talkin' to me?," asks Travis in front of a mirror as he prepares for the mean streets. As Ebert once correctly indicated, it is not that line but the one that follows ("Well, I am the only one here") that proves far more resonant. It encapsulates Travis Bickle to a tee.
Unfortunately, life imitated art. John Hinckley, an admirer of "Taxi Driver" and an obsessive over Jodie Foster, attempted to assassinate President Reagan back in 1981. His reasons were that "Taxi Driver" inspired him and that he needed to protect Jodie herself, assuming that he thought she was Iris and not an actress playing the part. Obviously "Taxi Driver" caused a maelstrom of controversy over the responsibility of the artist when it comes to violence. Scorsese rightly said he could not take responsibility for every person that enters a movie theatre. Although I believe that art, or something as vivid as cinema, cannot be used as a scapegoat for real-life crimes (I myself never felt a need to kill somebody after seeing a movie), I do firmly believe that had the film's colors not been desaturated during its violent climax, it might not have inspired anybody to do anything. The initial footage had colors that were so incredibly violent that the MPAA balked and asked for it to be trimmed or desaturated. Somehow, the very violence that Travis perpetrated against the criminal element should have been seen as the actions of a mentally ill man. The reports from screenings of the film were that the audience was cheering Travis on, seeing it as a "Death Wish" fantasy. This is a shame because Travis's actions are nothing to cheer about - he is Iris's dubious savior but he is nothing less than a killer (or did the audience forget he killed a stick-up man at point blank range?) In that sense, the irony would have been more fully realized if the audience understood that Travis's media hero status was also erroneous. I understood it, but I am sure most people will misinterpret it.
It is possible that "Bringing Out the Dead" will long be forgotten in the Scorsese canon since it does not measure up to the greatness of such solidly intense films like "GoodFellas" or "Raging Bull," or especially "Taxi Driver." "Dead" is the equivalent of say Elia Kazan's "The Last Tycoon," a film that people know of its existence but rarely discuss in the same light with "On the Waterfront" or "A Streetcar Named Desire." Nor is it fair to compare "Dead" to "Taxi Driver," though there are obvious similarities. Calling the film "Ambulance Driver" is to forget its existing virtues. There is none of the grisly, scary violence of "Taxi Driver" or "GoodFellas" or "Casino." The focus is on the aftermath of violence, as in the agonizing bullet wounds of a nearly dead drug dealer or the impalement of Cy on a fence. The latter is the best example of what "Bringing Out the Dead" ultimately accomplishes which is to show horror mixed with humor and a spirituality in death or near-death - to see its purity and how strangely beautiful it all is. Consider the beginning of the extraordinary scene of Cy's impalement, which starts with the discovery of a pool of blood in an apartment flowing with the remains of an exploded fish tank, as we hear the strains of UB40's song "Red, Red Wine." This leads to Frank's discovery of Cy impaled on a fence after jumping out the window. The spiritual essence and purity is evoked when Cy points out the beauty of the sparks from the blowtorches in the night sky, as we see the Empire State Building in the distance. "Taxi Driver" has been associated with this same purity but the purification is mostly Travis's. "Taxi Driver" is a realistic, ghastly horror film. "Bringing Out the Dead" is a spiritual drama etched with horror on the margins.
Ultimately, Scorsese's films almost always close with an image of loneliness. Travis Bickle isolated in his cab as he drives off into the night. Ace Rothstein alone in a room wearing oversized glasses as he makes sporting bets in "Casino." The Dalai Lama looking through a telescope in his new home in "Kundun." Jesus Christ dying on the cross in "The Last Temptation of Christ." At least Frank Pierce rests in a woman's arms at the end of "Bringing Out the Dead." That is about as close to an optimistic ending as you will get from Martin Scorsese.
Sources:
Sight and Sound. Dec. 1999, Review by David Thomson.
Film Comment. May-June 1998.
Film Comment. January 1998. Review by Kent Jones.
Taxi Driver Documentary. Video/DVD. 1997. Columbia Pictures.
New York magazine. Interview by James Kaplan. March 4th, 1996.
