Author: Paul-Edward Smits
Fall 2011
In this essay, written in the context of a 4th year Pop Culture class at l’UQTR, Paul-Edward Smits speculates on the sources and repercussions of existential angst through an exploration of Martin Scorsese’s classic 1976 movie Taxi Driver.
The American way of life refers to nationalistic principles of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, a well-known phrase from the United States Declaration of Independence. The American lifestyle does not indicate how to attain these principles. In the same way, the lack of indications can create existentialist angst for Americans. The movie Taxi Driver by Martin Scorsese, released in 1976, portrays exactly that in the life of taxi driver Travis Bickle. The movie takes subtle jabs at the main character’s reason for existence.
This essay will establish that Travis was filled with angst because he did not know how to live the principles which define the American way of life. In order to do so, I will first give a brief overview of angst according to Søren Kierkegaard, who is widely regarded as the father of existentialism. This will allow me to demonstrate with a few examples that Travis could not fit into New York’s lifestyle following his experience in the Vietnam War because he was filled with angst. I will then examine that he tried to find meaning to his life by becoming a saviour.
The concept of existentialism contains within it the idea of angst. There are at least five words that translate Kierkegaard’s use of the Danish word angest: angst, anguish, anxiety, dread, and fear. The translators of Kierkegaard’s journals, the Hongs (1967), use the term anxiety to define its result on human existence. “Anxiety is a desire for what one fears, a sympathetic antipathy; anxiety is an alien power which grips the individual, and yet one cannot tear himself free from it and does not want to, for one fears, but what he fears he desires.” (SKJP , Vol. I, 94, p. 40). Beabout (1996) explains that the Danish term angest “is both an attraction to and a repulsion from the nothingness of future possibilities.” (p. 18). Kierkegaard’s definition of anxiety truly defines the desire of Travis Bickle to fit into society.
We do not know much about Travis Bickle prior to him working as a taxi driver. He does let us know that he is 26-year-old honourably-discharged Vietnam War veteran, and that he has some education. However, we can imagine that as a soldier, Travis must have lived some form of discipline and routine as a result of being in the army. The Vietnam War was a loss for the Americans and many opposed it. Many demonstrations were held in the late 1960’s in protest to the United States’ involvement as well as to the numerous deaths the war brought. Travis was honourably discharged, which leads us to believe that he did what he had to do while serving his country. He may have also felt some form of direction while dutifully being in the American military.
After a regimented life in the army and the disillusionment of a lost war, Travis now tries to fit in with the rest of American society, but finds himself alone and sleepless in New York, a renowned place of opportunity. He is filled with the anxiety which comes from the process of striving for his masculine ideal in the American post-Vietnam era. He says that if he cannot sleep, he may as well make money doing something. Existentialism “emphasizes action, freedom, and decision as fundamental to human existence”[1]. By taking the decision to get a job as a way to cope with his desire that fuels his anxiety, Travis puts his idle time into action and tries to give his life some form of meaning, direction, cause, or at least a reason for his existence. He himself claims, “All my life needed was a sense of someplace to go. I don’t believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention, I believe that one should become a person like other people.” He wants to become a person like everybody else. This also falls in line with existentialist idea that the individual is solely responsible for giving his or her own life meaning and for living that life passionately and sincerely.
Robert C. Solomon (1974) states that “in existentialism, the individual’s starting point is characterized by what has been called “the existential attitude”, or a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world.” (p. 1-2). Existentialists believe in the use of diversion to escape from boredom. The disorientation and confusion become apparent in Travis’ social skills; he does not know how to connect with conventional American patterns of reality to become, in a way, socialized. He thinks that porno movies will remove his boredom, also that these types of movies are what everybody watches. He does not realize the seedy representation these films have within American society; that these films are not a conventional reality. Moreover, he tries making conversation with the woman who sells snacks at the porno theater. He seems to think of this as quite a conventional way of meeting and talking to women. He does not see that the woman he is talking to is very disinterested in him. To a certain point, she even considers Travis quite strange for wanting to engage in conversation with her, as her only task is to sell snacks.
Another example of Travis’ inability to socialize is seen when he courts Betsy. At first, he takes her out for pie and coffee, which can be considered a conventional way of getting to know someone for the first time. Betsy is intrigued by Travis and agrees to go out with him a second time. On this second date, everything seems to go fine at the beginning. He offers her a Kris Kristofferson record. When Travis then takes Betsy to a porno theater, this is yet another example that he has no idea how to treat a woman properly. He is such an outcast from society that the only appropriate venue that he thinks of taking Betsy is a place of disrepute. When it comes to having a relationship with Betsy, he realizes “now how much she’s just like the others, cold and distant, and many people are like that, women for sure, they’re like a union.” In his view, Betsy is cold and distant. He does not think of himself distant with her. He thinks he has done everything right. Following this date, he tried to call her a couple of times, but she rejected his offers and his flowers.
According to Beabout (1996), “when there are no external constraints, this kind of freedom offers no guidance about how to live well. The result is a feeling of being alone, lost in a world of possibility. Having freed itself from others, the self ends up feeling alone, absorbed in itself until the self begins to run away from itself. In this way, when freedom from external constraint is crowned, it becomes a ravenous ruler, a power without guidance.” (p. 137) Bickle tried to connect with women on a normal level, but when he fails, he becomes a loner and wages war on those who provide for unnatural connections between men and women. His failure leads him to loneliness, which is symbolized when he drops an Alka-Seltzer while lunching with his cabby peers at a diner. He gazes hypnotically into the bubbling water. The sound of the effervescent water becomes more intense while all other sounds disappear. Travis has cut himself from the outside world and is completely immersed in his own bubble. Having a Mohawk haircut, which demonstrated, at the time, the emerging punk movement, a rebellious statement against society, was another way of showing that he cut himself off completely from society.
Bickle constantly wages a moral and ideological war within his own mind. Having almost hermetically sealed himself off from the outside world, Bickle’s angst built to an apex. Should he simply become another anonymous resident of New York City, or should he battle the scum with guns blazing? Bickle’s freedom to choose a cause guides him to war “because he would not take it anymore.” With its very Christian heritage, the representation of God and the father figure in the United States remain very present. At first, Bickle tries to kill the senator, the future president, the nation’s father figure. He comes to the realization that by eliminating the future president, he would be depicted as a villain. However, Bickle goes on a killing spree against the father figure of a prostitute to facilitate his desire to become a saviour.
At the beginning of the movie, Travis compares New York to an open sewer. He wishes that a flood would wash away the filth. A link can be made with Noah, the Bible figure, whom God entrusted to build an ark because God wanted to cleanse the earth from the filth by rains that would flood the earth. Bickle considers himself “God’s lonely man”, just as Noah did. His killings fall in line with his own words “Now I see this clearly. My whole life is pointed in one direction. There never has been a choice for me.” All these religious allusions may reinforce his angst. In his deceptive nocturnal outings, he seeks without ever reaching a form of obsessive redemption, maybe to give meaning to his existence. His realization of never having had a choice can show that his life did have meaning, that there may have been a higher reason for his existence. His angst may have been in relation to fulfilling the destiny set out for him.
In the end, when Betsy compares Travis to Kris Kristofferson in that, “He’s a prophet and a pusher, partly truth, partly fiction – a walking contradiction.” Travis Bickle, a walking contradiction, is a lonely outcast trying desperately to make some sense of the world he occupies while simultaneously hating it. Bickle lacks acceptance of the world he lives in, and the distance that he has with the world grows. He wanted to lead a normal life, but when he tried and failed, his fiery animosity towards the city in which he lives grew, coinciding with this is his jealousy of those who have power. Bickle hated people who had what he desired. His perceptions come from what he sees while working when “all the animals come out at night.” It does not represent the lifestyle of most Americans, who live and work during the day and sleep at night.
References
Beabout, Gregory R. Freedom & Its Misuses: Kierkegaard on Anxiety & Despair. Milwaukee, WI, USA: Marquette University Press, 1996.
Hong, Howard V., and Edna H. Hong. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Paper, Volume 1, A-E. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1967.
Robert C. Solomon. Existentialism. McGraw-Hill, 1974.
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