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xemplary of the pessimistic bleakness of the New Hollywood, Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver is one of its director’s most poetic and disturbing films, awash in a melancholy longing for some unattainable state of transcendence. This longing is unsurprising in a protagonist devised by Paul Schrader, the screenwriter, who wrote, in his prior phase as a film critic, a book about “transcendental style” in the cinema of Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer. Schrader’s titular character, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), drives his striking, dingy yellow cab through an Expressionist New York City in which steam rises up malevolently from the streets, giving vent to gathering tensions . From the opening shots of the film, in which Travis’s cab juts into view like a mythic barge astride a sea of streets, to the final moments, in which the film speeds up as Travis looks into his rearview mirror and directly at us, as watchful of his unseen cinematic audience as he is of himself, the film alerts us to its own stylized, irreal, metatextual qualities and sensibility. This is not a film set in a real place, though the 1970s Manhattan it evokes is verisimilitudinously grimy and vibrantly raw; not a film about living, breathing, authentic characters, though the characters on display have become part of our pop mythology; not a film that allows us any release or narrative closure, though by the end Travis has been established as a victor over the “excremental city,” as Robin Wood describes it.1 Taxi Driver broods over certain key themes, chief among them the contemporary condition of American male identity. It depicts this identity as fundamentally split, C H A P T E R F I V E A S E N S E O F V E R T I G O Taxi Driver P S Y C H O S E X U A L 146 essentially multiple and fragmentary. The various untethered parts of the self each actively spy on each other and on themselves as a whole. Travis’s subjectivity consists of a number of warring components, each equally paranoid and disconnected . What unites all of the different selves within Travis is a fundamental bewilderment over his own male identity, especially its gendered, sexual, and raced aspects. Taxi Driver depicts American manhood as a stranger to itself. As many critics have noted, this is a film that foregrounds paranoia. As we discussed in Chapter 1, Freud drew illuminating and still controversial connections among jealousy, paranoia, and homosexuality—his tripartite monster. He postulates in his 1922 essay, “Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia, and Homosexuality,” that within the process of jealousy lies a sense of terrible grief. It is easy to see that essentially [jealousy] is compounded of grief, the pain caused by the thought of losing the loved object, and of the narcissistic wound; further, of the feelings of enmity against the successful rival, and of a greater or lesser amount of self-criticism which tries to hold the person himself accountable for his loss. This aspect of Freud’s argument—the grief in jealousy—has been greatly deemphasized , the focus most often placed on his linkage between paranoia and homosexuality . This linkage has been the basis for what we can call Paranoia Studies. Paranoia is at the heart of “the culture of surveillance” in Foucauldian theory and also the difficulties inherent in postmodernity, with its collapse of “grand narratives ,” disorganization of aesthetic hierarchies (high and low forms of art), and endless self-referentiality. While paranoia’s importance cannot be overstated, and will be crucial to the argument I make in this chapter, what I want to attempt to recover is the importance of jealousy, which Taxi Driver illuminates, in the triad of jealousy, homosexuality, and paranoia. It is misleading to unhook jealousy from Freud’s view of the links among the three. Patrick O’Donnell helpfully summarizes the traditional profile of the paranoiac and his symptoms, which derives from Freud’s classic study of the Saxon supreme court judge Daniel Paul Schreber. These symptoms include megalomania; a sense of impending, apocalyptic doom; racist, homophobic, or gynophobic fear and hatred of those marked out as other deployed as a means of externalizing certain internal conflicts and desires (the scapegoating of otherness thus is essential to the ongoing work of paranoia); delusions of persecution instigated by these others or their agents; feelings of being under constant observation; an obsession with order; and [3.133.86.172] Project...

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