Tarantino Disses Scorsese for Compromising the Vision of Taxi Driver

Source

Well, it's funny that you mention this, because it actually ties into the issue with that movie's overall problematic portrayal of Black men I saw discussed in another article earlier, which, while I don't agree with every point the writer made there, I still saw a lot of validity in anyway (which got a number of people clutching their digital pearls when I talked about it back on the Corrie, unfortunately), which is that, while there's nothing wrong with the movie having Travis be a racist himself, and conveying that clearly to us as an audience, the problem comes when the film's overall portrayal of Black men relies on regressive stereotypes of them all being dangerous or at least irrationally angry and hostile, like when it has Charlie angrily look up at Travis when Wizard tries to introduce them to each other, for no discernible reason at all, good or otherwise, which has the counter-productive effect of making Travis's racism seem almost rational in the context of the film, which I'm sure is not what Scorsese and company intended. Don't get me wrong, because it's still a great movie on the whole, it's just a great movie despite that unfortunate flaw, sort of like with Silence Of The Lambs, and the undeniable transphobic undertones running throughout it, despite that movie's best efforts.

Anyway, here's the Driver article in question by the way, for further discussion: https://reverseshot.org/symposiums/entr

No one complains when English men are portrayed as villains in movies (e.g., the Rupert Giles school of elocution predominates the evil Empire in the original Star Wars trilogy). If a character is POC, however, there is an Assumption of Direct Representation™.

"Hey, you showed a black person being mean. You're saying all black people are mean. That's racist! Boycott this film! Racism cannot stand!"

The Assumption of Direct Representation™ is why we have so many "Mary Sue" characters who lack arcs. Women are beatified and dehumanized by the pious insistence that women not be shown to ever have traits that could give aid and comfort to the enemy. Thus, if a female character is interested in nursing and lacks aptitude and or interest in a STEM career, the writer may be accused of being misogynist.

This happened to Laurie Forest when she tried to publish a YA novel called The Black Witch in 2017. Forest fell in love with the Harry Potter series and decided to write her own book as a way to deal with homophobia she experienced. The book used words like "pure-blood" and "mixed-blood" in discussing fantasy (i.e., purely fictional) races. A Twitter guardian took offense and started a campaign against the book on the grounds that it was veiled white supremacy, writing “The Black Witch is the most dangerous, offensive book I have ever read.” To guard against such difficulties, publishers now employ sensitivity readers to ensure that nothing "off-code" might appear in a book or a board game which might enrage a vocal minority. Thus, we're left bizarre sanitized anti-stereotypes realized in implausibly perfect POC and implausibly craven non-POC characters who must now carry the weight of all the "regressive and problematic" stereotypes in the world.

Taxi Driver is an interesting example, because it shows just how early the re-coding begins. Tarantino is upset that the coding goes too far. You appear to be unhappy that it doesn't go far enough. NOTE: I've noticed that film and TV of the 70s quite often featured United Colors of Benetton lowlifes (multiracial bands of thugs) as an implicit communication that not all "X" are bad (seems reasonable to me).

And I will say that Quentin's suggestion seems odd. He is aware that the audience will see the world from Bickle's POV and thus he wants to see those stereotypes as a "justification" in Bickle's mind so that we "get" him. Sadly, too many people already get him and identify with him as a hero. Not re-coding at all would appear to make this misreading of the text even worse. You don't want to make things worse when you have a wicked protagonist, as audiences will follow villainous protagonists with amazing regularity (e.g., the Skylar White haters).

By my lights, you're kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't. If enough people of group X do fall into stereotype Y to warrant a depiction, then it seems cowardly not to show the depiction. More important, if we assume bad traits are as randomly distributed as good traits, then a randomly cast film or TV show should have 30-40% of villains as POC characters and 50% of them women (women hold up half the sky, so they should be half of the "baddie" pile too, no?), if we are to have "representation." And yet, if we were to cast by race and gender by random assignment to populate a stratified sample representing U.S. population demography, you would run the risk of being called a racist and a sexist for showing "vulnerable populations" as having "demeaning" traits. On the other hand, if you lean into stereotypes as Tarantino apparently wants to, then it seems that bad things will be encouraged. Season 8, Episode 3 of Saturday Night Live features a skit starring Eddie Murphy and Ron Howard titled "Focus on Film." Howard plays himself being interviewed about his new film Night Shift (1982). Murphy plays Raheem Abdul Mohammed who is befuddled that Howard made a movie about pimps without any black people.


A confused Raheem states that he is not sure if he should hug Howard or smack him for making a film about pimps without any black people. The joke played well in '82, but today we labor under the Assumption of Literal Representation™ which would have required Howard to do so, on pain of the Inquisition.

I am not saying that the balancing is easy, however, the Assumption of Direct Representation™ is a massive overcorrection that mangles art. We cannot tell human stories under the assumption that every character drawn from a sensitive demographic is, by logical necessity, offered as a representation of that demographic. Silence of the Lambs isn't transphobic anymore than it is phobic of posh English doctors. One villainous character with trait "X" is a slim warrant.

More important, if we cannot see trans, women, and POC as villains, we cannot see them as people. And if we cannot see them as people, we (paradoxically) cannot empathize with them. Thus, Thanos is a sympathetic villain to many, but Rey is a boring Mary Sue.

The real test for making such inferences (i.e., of hateful representation) needs to be pulled from a dataset of more than one character in one film. In the body of the artist's work, for example, how are people from group "X" represented unfavorably? Consider Stephen King's books. Devout Christians are reliably evil in his books, just as small town sheriffs are reliably good and our location, in the main, is in the state of Maine. I can make a better case of King being a bigot from his oeuvre than you can of Demme being a bigot (or "problematic" which is code for heresy--giving him the benefit of the doubt of not being a full-on heretic) because of a single character in a single film.

Criticising Scorsese in Taxi Driver for using racial stereotypes to further racist stereotypes, is akin to claiming Goodfellas use of violence celebrates violence.


It doesn't.


Was Raging Bull also an endorsement of spousal abuse?


Was King of Comedy a celebration of the comedic stylings of Rupert Pupkin?


Scorsese has a consistent history of immersing us in the world of undesirable characters. And a track record of trusting his audience enough to know what we see on screen shouldn't be absorbed uncritically.


Bickle is a paranoid lunatic. He's also a racist. This is why this world is presented to us this way and why blacks are consistently portrayed as threatening. No, this isn't to bolster his vile attitudes toward race or make them appear reasonable. It's used as a tool to put us in the uncomfortable position of identifying with an outcast, to the point we are placed on the outskirts of society with him. It is meant to cast an uneasy empathy with his destructive behavior. But this shouldn't be confused with endorsing it or perpetuating it. This shouldn't suddenly close the door on us being able to still condemn his worldview. As audience members, we should be able to juggle these conflicting elements at the same time. We still have everything we need to know that this is a story being told by an unreliable narrator. That this is Bickles hatred towards society, not Scorseses


So if there is any pearl clutching, it isn't being done by those who are able to step away and evaluate what Scorsese is attempting to do here.

While I can see what Tarantino is saying and I personally feel that artists should do their utmost to not compromise their visions---especially not for political reasons, I do think he is missing the fact that audiences can be very short-sighted about things like this. For me, part of what makes Taxi Driver interesting is that Travis' isolation is almost total, even existential. I would worry that making race more explicit than it already is in the film would have almost been a distraction from the more fundamental outcast status of the character in that it would have enabled audiences to point to the more explicit racism as a way to distance themselves from the character and story. When it is more subtle/altered characters (i.e. the way the movie actually turned out), I think the audience with tend to identify with Travis more powerfully---even when it comes to the racial aspects of his worldview---therefore producing a more compelling film overall.

Long story short, I can see what Schrader wanted originally, but I think that in this case whoever suggested the change ended up making the movie better.

Ah, the point is not that he is a racist per se, but that his racism is a side-effect of him being disconnected? If so, this kind of out-Crumbs Crumb's argument about such moves distancing us from the character/aesthetic effect. We get closer to understanding the racist by not hanging a lantern on the racism? Makes sense. I doubt most people would start their slide into racism by donning white robes and burning crosses. Just about everyone, however, gets being afraid, bullied, and isolated.

My concern is more pedestrian. If the point is to produce some result in the audience, then the imperfections of the audience (or some significant portion of it) might prove a limitation. That is, we might do a very a seemingly sympathetic bio pic of Adolf Hitler as a post-modern winking ironic gag, but if the result were that 30% of the audience concluded, "Hey, the guy really had a point," would the result be worth it? Paul Verhoeven's Hitler might look a lot like Starship Troopers. I think it is good not to lean into stereotypes so as to avoid hardening them (even if they may be demographically representative in some way). However, I don't think that the answer is to make some other demographic the permanent villain as compensation as this just supports another stereotype. I think the multiracial hooligans of 70s film and television is a fair way to communicate (for most purposes) that the point is not that the villains are not relevantly white or black or Hispanic.

I think I might be in favor of Netflix randomly assigning "races" and "genders" to characters in the same way that they randomly produce stories. Just throw a dart at a dart board and find which race, gender, sex, and religion the character shall have. Make an explicit mention at the start "the demographics depicted were chosen at random and are not directly representative of any group." If our random number generator just happened to arrive at POC baddies and non-POC goodies, however, I wonder if people could accept this as a non-racist result. "It doesn't matter that it randomly generated a derogatory stereotype! What matters is that it did. Now, run the procedure again until the villains are white male cis-gender Christian conservatives!" I think that this would be the result, because what matters today is not intention, but the perception of harm. Under Mill's old harm principle the line was drawn at physical violence, but that's long gone. Today, the line is drawn at the smallest instances of discomfort (e.g., micro-aggressions), so a "harmful" outcome (e.g., this looks racist to me) would be unacceptable.

It's a tough question. The extremes are ridiculous, but it seems quite difficult to do the balancing of "log-rolling" the equilibrium between the two without getting thrown off the log into the water.

The misunderstanding about Taxi Driver reminds me of the misreadings of the satirical movie Coonskin. It depicts black characters drawn in the most horrifically offensive ways possible, very much intended to provoke a reaction out of the audience. And besides visually it also leans into all the cultural stereotypes, portraying many of them as violent and destructive.

However, not only are the white characters often portrayed as terrible if not worse people, it juggles a difficult balancing act of still making you see the humanity in these caricature portrayals. Rabbit may be a gangster, but he shows a clear displeasure and sadness over the societal decay that is happening around him. The silhouette woman who tells the story of the miseries she and her baby have been through is heartbreaking. Barry White's Brother Bear dreams of a better, more stable future, itching to get away from criminality. Through the inital stereotypes we are shown complex human beings with both strengths and flaws. So why should they then get treated like they're one and the same?
The answer is that they shouldn't. And that's the ultimate message of the movie if you ask me. But some would say it's rocket fuel for racists and nothing else.

__________________

And then there's the fact that casting gave an important role to Harvey Keitel, a white dude, thus taking a job away from a black actor in an attempt to not be racist!

In principle, I agree with Tarantino. As the film stands, it's great and in the things to discuss about the movie, the race of the pimp Sport, shows up at around 87 or 88.

Who cares; we need to move beyond the race issue.

"Really, you're both dentists?"
Yes, we're black and we're dentists! Let's not make an issue of it."
"Son, they're not making an issue of it; you're making an issue of it."

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Another example of holding back is Bob Roberts (1992). This was the baby of Tim Robbins who decided NOT to release the soundtrack for a fear that the songs of the titular character would be played non-ironically. He was apparently ambivalent about the stability of his satire and so tried to exercise control of its consumption.

Yes, but that's because English men aren't some historically marginalized group, the same way as Black men (and Black people in general have been); quite the opposite, really.

Scorsese wasn't intentionally furthering racist stereotypes in TD, but at a certain point, intent is irrelevant to execution, and the execution of the racial aspect of the movie was pretty careless when it comes to the harmfulness of the stereotypes it so consistently portrayed. I mean, I know Marty & company were doing so in order to capture a certain hostile, hateful vision of NYC in the 70's (which actually was a really rough town in real life at the time, of course), but the way they used Black men as a crutch to do was excessive, unintentional or not, to the point of being just downright unrealistic at some points (I mean, I've been working pretty consistently for over a decade and a half now, and I've literally never had a single co-worker, Black or otherwise, just stare angerly at me for no reason when they were introduced to me), and it's so unnecessary too, considering how well the writing, acting, and overall direction had otherwise already captured that atmosphere as well as it did, that just makes the racial caricatures feel even more unnecessary than they were in the first place. Anyway, no movie has free reign to recklessly indulge in such harmful, regressive stereotypes and get off scot-free without any criticism, regardless of how great anyone else may think it is otherwise, and I'm not going to give Taxi Driver a free pass to do so, regardless of its overall quality, or any other movie, for that matter.

Yeah, but my issue with this aspect of Taxi Driver isn't because of the imperfections of the audience, but of the movie itself, because it so consistently portrays Black men in the highly regressive fashion that it does; like, I know that depiction doesn't equal endorsement, so I'm not saying that the movie is automatically problematic in a racial sense by portraying racist characters, or racism in general. So the problem isn't say, with the camera slowly, ominously pushing in on the pimps in the diner to represent Travis's hatred of them for the color of their skin, but with the movie's overwhelmingly negative portrayal of every Black man within it, to the point that even examples that would've been acceptable otherwise (like the group of black kids who throw bottles at Travis's cab at one point) become tainted by extension, due to the overall context of the film.

Okay, but was Taxi Driver also meant to be a satire of Blaxploitation movies, Song Of The South, or the Uncle Remus stories? Because if not, then that seems like a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison, if you ask me.

This does not address my analysis. Why is it that we don't operate under the Assumption of Direct Representation™ when it comes to Englishmen in Star Wars? It's NOT that Englishmen actually are evil and deserve to be taken down a notch for their Colonial past or some other original sin (something you promiscuously hint at when you say "quite the opposite, really").* On the contrary, my point is that we DON'T assume that anything is happening in one case, but assume that a symbolic crime is happening in the other. Why?

Why should we operate under the Assumption of Direct Representation™ when a character happens to be black? Your answer is "because bad things happened to black people in the past." OK, but why would we assume that bad things having happened in the past implies that something bad is happening right now when our villain happens to be black?

You would have to unpack your position a lot more for this statement to even make sense. Let me do the work for you to save time. Historically, racist characterizations of black people in literature resulted in negative tropes (stereotype-as-stock-character). Thus, the Assumption of Direct Representation™ is not simply a case of objecting to marginalized people to be depicted with contingently negative properties. Rather, it is a vigilance against essentializing tropes that precede the present artwork (conversations don't take place in a vacuum). Because the Assumption of Direct Representation™ is already baked into these negative tropes, being careful with depicting black as villains (such as by using a white Englishmen instead) is not to accuse the white Englishman of anything, but rather to guard against negative tropes.

The modern progressive did not invent the fallacy of the Assumption of Direct Representation™, but rather racists in the past did. The point is to avoid this fallacy by not reviving harmful tropes. Thus, your argument is wrongly stated. You shouldn't be hinting that the Englishman really has it coming, because they deserve a negative stereotype (i.e., when you say "quite the opposite, actually...").* Rather the principle of difference is that there is no relevant negative trope associated with Englishmen, right?

And it is with regard to the argument outlined above that I share some sensitivity. Quentin doesn't seem to appreciate that leaning into these tropes too heavily reactivates them. He doesn't seem to appreciate that the audience's empathic connection to the protagonist may also invite a wicked trip through the looking glass. Consequently, I am in favor of the "70's Percentage Solution" of mixing up baddies groups diverse scumbags so as to avoid essentializing any demographic in particular. I'm with you to a point.

Where I part company with you is in the unreflective commitment to the Assumption of Direct Representation™. Being insensitive is bad. So too is being overly sensitive. If you're constantly listening for dog whistles, then either you have dog ears (i.e., you're implicated in the group being signaled) or you're a paranoiac on the look out for occult evidence of malfeasance (i.e., a witch hunter). If any negative depiction of demographic X is taken to be an automatic conceptual activation of a negative trope, then we are no longer in a position to tell stories which include marginalized groups as actual people (see my prior post).

If our language norms proceed from the assumption that a negative contingent depiction of demographic "X" is functionally bad (e.g., racist, sexist, phobic), then our norms are sh*tty and need to be challenged. Not all language games are healthy. We need norms which will allow us to be sensitive without committing, conceptually, to oversensitivity (i.e., the Assumption of Direct Representation™). One bad turn (negative tropes) does not deserve another (outlawing contingent depiction on the grounds of such tropes).

If so, you have eliminated one popular explanation for why an artwork means what it means (i.e., the reader's response). This leaves us with two remaining sources of meaning. One is the artist's intention. Here, I think we have some persuasive argumentation in this thread establishing that the film does NOT have a racist intention, thus we cannot accuse the movie itself being racist for having a racist intention.

What's left? We can't argue that the film is "just imperfect," because that doesn't answer the question. We can't argue that context determines meaning, because contexts don't read themselves (they too require interpretation).

Thus, your only candidate answer here is that the film is imperfect in terms of conventions. And I have already done some work for you here (see my prior post) to identify what conventions are at work here (i.e., negative tropes). Of course, we now have to ask how we know that negative tropes are at play here, rather than something subversively anti-tropological (there are codes/conventions/rules for breaking rules as well as simply playing by them). Here lie murky waters. Do we really want to enter them? Alternatively, we can offer a simple test to determine what the film does in terms of playing with conventional meaning. We can look to audience response as evidence. Rather than being constitutive of the meaning of the work, the reader's take is a symptom of the artwork's coding (the stance here is epistemic and not ontic). To answer the question of if "the movie itself" is "imperfect" we can look to the audience's response as evidence of the coding.

So, do reasonable people of goodwill who have watched to movie hold that the film partakes in racist tropes? If opinions in this thread are representative, it would seem that it is NOT racist or dog-whistling racism. If we count your opinion as part of the group, then, at most, we have mixed opinion on the matter, which is not definitive. And this means that to make your accusation "stick," you're probably going to have to offer an analysis of the film to justify your reading of the text.
Given what is discussed above, I think that you're going to need to specifically evidence this claim. If it were perfectly consistent in doing so, why is Harvey cast as the pimp? I think you've got some proving to do here.
Right, we have to be careful here.
I wish I remembered the film better, but I have only seen it a few times. I won't bicker with you here, because I am not fresh with the film. Maybe you're right.

On the other hand, we have to ask about the coding regulating the reading of the "evidence" presented in the film. Your evidence appears to be that all blacks in this film are portrayed negatively. If we're omniscient observers, then I suppose we might ask if this is just a hard look at life on the street (e.g., black people are not evil, but the streets bring out the worst in everyone). If we're not omniscient observers, we might ask if we're being asked to see the world through Bickle's subjectivity--if so, the negative view of all blacks is how Travis sees the world. NOTE: These two possibilities are not mutually compatible--if we insist that it ain't racist, but just honest (showing us how it is--the streets are hard) we cannot also argue that it's not really showing us how it is, but how Travis sees it (i.e., he's a racist). I think our peers here are arguing the latter, no? If so, we have to ask about additional evidence indicating how we're being asked to "see" the evidence in the film. Why do they disagree? What are they seeing?

Um, how do I explain this?



Oh, that's right, I already did.


Objecting to there ever being any reason to use stereotypes of groups of people, ever, at all, no matter the purpose, is one argument (which there are fair points to be made regarding, even if I'm not necessarily going to agree across the board on this). But for you to make a claim that 'you've never seen a black man react like this before', is to make clear you are fundamentally not acknowledging the point I made.



This particular character very likely did not actually react this way to Bickle. What we are shown is an extension of his prejudices.



Like seriously, I just have to wonder if you are also under the impression that everyone at the prom was laughing at Carrie? Or that when any character in a film has a dream, that this actually happened? Because I'm sure you must be aware, when we are watching a movie from a particular characters point of view, not everything we see is reality.



Now, just because Scorsese doesn't offer us a moment where we see this angry reaction as actually being (what was likely) completely benign in the real world, or show him waking up from a day dream, doesn't mean we are forced to accept it as a real world occurence.


In short, you mentioning this has never happened to you, only means you are not Travis Bickel

So I was eventually able to read that article, as the link provided doesn't work, and while I don't agree with everything she writes, I also don't entirely disagree either. She makes some valid points


The important distinction? A willingness to actually wrestle with Scorsese's intent with the film, and the techniques he employs. She makes clear she understands the scene in the cafe is being viewed through the lens of Bickels prejudice, but takes issues with the absence of voice these black characters continually have throughout the film. There is never any moment that these men are given a chance to clarify they are more than a threat. This seems to be the bulk of her problem.


Now this could obviously easily be waved away by the fact that Scorsese need not supply some kind of valve to release the tension generated by all of Travis' simmering prejudices. His New York is one dictated by fear and hatred and loneliness, part of which is fueled by his racism. There is no specific need for him to wave his hands around and make a show that the audience should not be taking everything at face value. That black men aren't really as he views them. Because, duh.

But this writer also points out another of his defects that make him such an unreliable narrator, is his view of women. And yet, both Fosters and Shepherds characters are given moments away from his gaze where they are fleshed out as being more than simply objects that need to be persued sexually, or saved from their bad choices by him. They don't exist solely through his vantage point. She asks the question, why is there no moment with this other black cab driver, as there is an opportunity for this as they all sit around the table. And that isn't an unfair question.


My suspicion is Scorsese did not want to dilute the constant 'new York city as hell' tension he builds in the film, which is one of its more impressive elements. But then maybe it is also fair to criticize how the bulk of this tension seems to rest solely on the backs of black men.


This is something that a discussion can be built upon.


But the fundamental difference of her approach is she isn't simply taking singular moments completely out of their context and intent, isolating an instance of racial stereotyping, and then using anecdotal evidence to discount the reasons of employing this stereotype. She is engaging with the material instead of simply reacting to it. She is placing it in the context of general black representation during American films of the 70s, and not just fretting over Scorsese's potential misstep.


It's all about nuance...although her suggestion that maybe the two pimps should have been eating bagels is stupid

In my last post, I noted two ways we might read the text. You appear to have read the text in terms of option 1 (the movie is literal). The response you get from Crumb is option 2 (the movie is the subjective POV of Travis).
Notice that your interlocutor mocks believing that what we are shown in another film actually happened (i.e., people laughing derisively). I think this denial gives you some leverage as this position asks that we read against accepting the surface evidence of the text. You didn't see what happened. What happened, didn't really happen. Don't believe your lying eyes, those characters were not really black (or if they were, they were nice). But if they were not all laughing at her, did they even cover her in pig's blood? How much of the film is in her head? Likewise, we can ask what really happens in Taxi Driver under this reading. Maybe Travis never gets past talking to himself in the mirror? Maybe, like we learn at the end of St. Elsewhere the whole story takes place in a snow globe? Where do we draw the line? Maybe Nurse Ratchet wasn't such a hard case (we are, after all, in the POV of the mental patient).

A refutation of philosophical skepticism is that it does not matter if we're a brain in a vat (or hospital in a snow globe), because the only reality we can refer to is the one we're in. If so, perhaps the only reality in the film we can judge is the one we're shown (because we can't say which if these fictional events really happened and which didn't).

Does the film communicate to us that the protagonist is hallucinating or imagining some details? Do we, for example, get to see a scene from another POV which offers proof that he is not seeing what is happening in the world? If not, or if the evidence is thin, you might effectively argue that reading two is dubious and apologetic, demanding that we read against what we're shown in the text as an event occurring in real time.

Carrie definitely communicates that to us: we see her POV focusing on individual faces, with a kaleidoscopic effect floating around it. So unless you want to argue that a number of ancillary characters suddenly sprouted four extra flying heads, it's pretty clear that at least some of it is POV and hallucinatory.