Retrospectatorship

Taking up David Greven’s throwaway characterization of the New Hollywood mood and tone as one of “pessimistic bleakness,” (Greven 145) this essay investigates the relations between Terrence Malick’s 1973 debut (Badlands) and Martin Scorsese’s ‘76 sophomoric effort (Taxi Driver, to which Greven was specifically referring) insofar as they both epitomize Greven’s thread along different gendered registers. Voice-over narration was a very prominent tool in New Hollywood’s cinematic language; with the coincidental rise of feminist and reproductive rights movements, a 15 year old female lead/21 year old actress narrating should not be taken lightly. Many such choices (previously unavailable to director’s discretion under the studio system) define the sheer independence with which the former MIT-professor-turned-auteur would craft his film (just as auteurism defines this period in general), but the manner in which he uses his tools- namely voiceover narration and postmodernist performance- in conjunction with plot differs so greatly from Scorsese that one cannot help but assume the messages they are conveying- despite both critiquing homicidal cisheteromasculine psychopathy (contemporary patriarchy)- may be completely different. The main reason for this is of course their differing choice of main characters (the murderer, Travis... or his object of desire and catalyst of his Freudian jealousy, Holly), but in reviewing an interview from each director- each held in the immediate wake of their films- it is apparent that their disparate (religio-)political views informs the contrast as much as their unique aesthetic sensibilities.

Barbara Jane Brickman investigates Malick’s craft from such a feminist perspective that it would serve completely incompatible with such a cismasculine text as Taxi Driver, proven most cogently in her argument’s primary reliance on Spacek’s/Holly’s narration as the potential for a fantastical narrative analysis: “What, I ask, would it mean to think of the entire film as Holly’s creation? What kind of new perspectives might be gained by imagining the entire film as her fantasy?” (Brickman 28) Her analysis is not without its flaws, which Malick’s 1974 Newsday interview very easily exposes; nevertheless, it still proves very interesting for a springboard. She contends that Badlands stands in direct opposition to the “new [mode of] American cinema characterized by ‘raging bulls’ or discontented, fragmented male heroes—for example, Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver (dir. Martin Scorsese, US, 1976)—representing the ‘critique of the patriarchal hero’ in 1970s film,” by way of “Holly’s narration or female authority evok[ing] an… aggressive feminism that most popular films of the era, even films by the new auteurs of American cinema, worked to silence or assuage with the resolution of heteronormative romance.”  (43) Two key terms- fragmented male heroes and heteronormative romance- discredit Brickman’s (albeit justifiable) critique of Taxi Driver through their misinterpretation of Scorsese and Schrader’s construction of Travis as an alleged nascent Jungian-American archetype.

Brickman’s conclusion that Travis is fragmented and a heteronormative critique of- specifically white- patriarchal heroism (vigilantism) undermines her claim that he stands in diametric opposition to Holly’s positionality as an unreliable narrator. Her insistence that Spacek’s performance presents a shift in feminist representation on the screen relies on the fact that the “male, authoritative voice-over” was “traditional” practice in Hollywood, but Schrader clarified that Travis is established as unreliable within the first ten minutes of the film, professing “I don’t believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention,” before proceeding to do just that “for the rest of the movie.” (Scorsese 00:10:12; Schrader 00:44:23) Greven even dedicates much of his argument to explaining the film’s elision of distinction between narcissism and voyeurism, which is supported by Schrader’s subsequent example of Travis’ existential contradiction: “He assails pornography, yet can't stop watching it.” The fact that Travis cannot acknowledge the hypocrisy in detesting such an inextricable aspect of his character, personality, and life- despite Brickman’s assertion that voice-over typically served to provide “traditional interiority,” whereas Holly’s “serve[d] more to destabilize the discourse [of the film]” (Brickman 27)- destabilizes her entire argument. Travis is, in fact, far from authoritative or reliable precisely because of his fragmentation.

Furthermore- although she did not specifically charge Scorsese’s film with this infraction, its mention in the same paragraph assumes at least some association with the following claim- her assertion that heteronormative romance was and is especially used by American filmmakers to silence and resolve their outspoken feminist characters shoots her own thesis in the foot. What is the ending of Badlands if not heteronormative romance in triumph? While the real Carin Ann Fugate served a two decade sentence before being paroled the year of Taxi Driver, Malick’s fictionalized account allowed her “freedom” under the auspices of marriage to her savior’s son. Not only is this a more explicit- even if unintentional- reference to Christianity than Scorsese’s (arguably underwhelming) “orgasmic” climax, but it profoundly reinforces the heteronormativity Brickman believes is crucial to Schrader’s script but somehow absent from Malick’s (because he used a girl’s voice). Holly’s fictionalized future is completely forged by men; the audience is supposed to find solace in her evasion of imprisonment and marriage, both involving and only made possible by men- a father and son at that- but she was only in such a precarious position because of a 25 year old man: her play husband before her real husband. Even the stereopticon scene in which Holly ponders all the what could have beens for her and her mother completely surrounds men. I am my father’s daughter. Where would I be without Kit? “If my mom had never met my dad,” comes before “If she’d never died.” (Malick 00:36:15) Naturally, after recalling her dead mother whom she never talks about, she thinks about her future husband and if he’s thinking about her. While Brickman claims this displays the “revisionary power” of “expressing a female viewpoint and a female consciousness,” this one scene could not even satisfy Bechdel.

There is nothing inherently radical or revisionary about Malick’s narrative, because the resolution is still found in the bosom of her husband. While, yes, the audience does focus on its authoritative female lead more than most films of the era, Bechdel and Wallace would still raise several eyebrows at the prospect of “feminism” being unquestioned acceptance and acquiescence to cisheteronormativity (patriarchy). It is not a love story because Holly does not and cannot love this man who murdered her father as coldly as Warren Oates murdered her dog; it is important to note that Brickman’s interpretation- that 15 y.o. Holly manipulated 25 y.o. Kit into killing her father and then escaping blame- was strongly denounced by Malick in his interview with Gelmis, hearing this line of thinking far too often. “I wanted to show in that scene that death was a mystery to her and she didn’t know how to distinguish between the death of a parent and the death of a dog, and even the death of a fish.” (Malick 19) He imagines this 15 year old girl has the same grasp on death as a toddler- as Kit, the tripartite patriarchal monster- and this alone brings into question this assertion of feminist revisionism through Malick’s pen.

Works Cited

Brickman, Barbara Jane. “Coming of Age in the 1970s: Revision, Fantasy, and Rage in the Teen-Girl Badlands.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, vol. 22, no. 3, 2007, pp. 25–59, https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-2007-014. 

Greven, David. “Psycho-Sexual: Male Desire in Hitchcock, de Palma, Scorsese, and Friedkin.” A Sense of Vertigo: Taxi Driver, University of Texas Press, 2013, pp. 145-182. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/socal/detail.action?docID=3443627.

Know The Movies. “Martin Scorsese Talking about Taxi Driver (1976).” Youtube, 9 Dec. 2019, youtu.be/HlPXgpkgKKI. 

Malick, Terrence. “Terrence Malick: In Conversation with Joseph Gelmis.” Newsday, 1974, www.johnbleasdale.com/blog/new-terrence-malick-interview. 

Schrader, Paul and Martin Scorsese. “Martin Scorsese and Screenwriter Paul Schrader Discuss Their Movie “Taxi Driver.”” WMFT Radio, 12 Feb. 1976, studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/martin-scorsese-and-screenwriter-paul-schrader-discuss-their-movie-taxi-driver?t=NaN%2CNaN&a=%2C.