God’s lonely man
Every now and again I come back to one of my favorite films “Taxi Driver”. When I first saw the film the late 2000’s the political scene was different than it is now and New York was different than it is portrayed in the film. And taxi driving was different too. By that point Taxi cabbing had stopped being a sanctuary for the dejected like like our beloved Travis Bickle and had become a stepping stone for newly arrived migrants trying to get a foothold on the American dream. As a side note when I went to get a TLC license I noticed the head of Master Cabbie had a poster of “Taxi Driver” behind his desk, an excellent touch. Taxi driving has managed to morph again as the American dream loses sway as the driving cultural myth Uber has displaced the nice profits and unique place that taxi driving had, flooding the market with gig workers who identify more with precarity than their occupation. And lastly our political configurations have managed to change such that Travis stopped being this lone figure of God’s lonely man but the Godfather (if you get the joke good on you) of lonely men, Incel’s and mass shooters.
Travis living in a studio apartment shortly after the end of the Vietnam war had spent his days driving cabs and his nights haunted by his suppressed desires. Having no outlet he becomes obsessed with two women, well one woman and a teenager. He watched them quietly from a distance in his cab like a lion would hide in a bush and wait for gazelle. Later after seeing his rejection he watched the men that had taken the love that was supposed to be for him in the same way. All times he was being driven by his two main drives, the sex drive and the death drive. He wanted to f- and to kill.
There was one brief sudden interruption to the unfolding of this narrative which was when he killed someone in a bodega for attempting an armed robbery. He treated the situation as a forgettable encounter, like he was tying his shoelace. And the owner of the store thanked him for his actions.
Soon enough he was back to his main game. At all times there is men who briefly emerge to shout or say in a cold voice something about doing violence to women. They recede back into the nether. This is the specter of masculinity that haunts us all. At other times such as when Travis calls his unrequited love from a pay phone the camera pans away to show us the audience the truth of his smallness, his irrelevance to a world that goes on without him. This is the big new world that has no place for men like Travis.
Travis was obviously disturbed, you could see it when his choice of a hobby is to stare at happy couples before breaking his tv or when his choice of a first date is to go to porn theater. But in a lot of ways he was all too ordinary. He was driven to want by physical beauty something that has seen no change to say want a partner due to their nature and if anything gotten worse. And he responded to feelings of rejection and his smallness by asserting his own presence by violence.
Watching this movie again in 2021 I realize when Travis says “women are all the same, they’re like a union” two things. Unfortunately our unions have been decimated and are no longer common features of life and that Travis was expressing thoughts that would label him an Incel. And he ended his ark with a mass shooting with personally modified arms. In so many ways this movie and this man was ahead of his time. These are the ravages fast dying masculinity clashing with this big new world.
Our globalized world capitalist system will continue to rip out every tradition including the bad ones. Such as systems where women are promised to men by keeping them out of the workplace thereby making the wife dependent on the man. Or forcing both parents to work by wage stagnation, precarity and rising rents causing tension in family ties. Or arranged marriage systems coming undone as more convenient modern methods are employed. And so more and more Travis Bickles will appear into the horizon to disappear just as quickly.
