Preface:This is a paper which was produced for Rei Terada’s comparative literature class “Aversion to Politics” in May 2018. In examining representations and understandings of the political in Taxi Driver (1976) I attempt to analyze the way in which the antipolitical and ideologies of disenfranchisement are intimately tied to whiteness and racist violence, and conversely the way in which it is intentionally depoliticizing to obfuscate racist violence as “antipolitical”. In this essay the use of the phrase “political #1″ refers to organization for power that acknowledges one or more major antagonisms in society, while “political #2″ is meant to articulate the concrete system and process of governance in a state or other formal structure. I am also using the terms “antipolitical” to mean the rejection of political #2 and anything associated with it, and depoliticized to indicate a picture of society without its antagonisms, the antagonisms that underlie political #1.
In Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), racism is profoundly tied to the structures of the antipolitical; antipolitical thought is something which is only accessible, or at least only used by, the “disenfranchised” white man, and this subsequently ties into the way race is imagined in the film. The mythos largely being put forward is that Travis is (and, to an extent, white working-class men in general are) disenfranchised in a way which results in apathy towards the bureaucratic processes of political #2 and a general sense of festering anger which manifests as the antipolitical. Because antipolitical is tied to whiteness, the violence which results from it is frequently enacted on black and nonwhite characters or conceived of in connection to white imaginings of Blackness. Furthermore, one of the central issues that disenfranchisement seems to cause for Travis is his concern that he is surrounded by “the scum of the earth,” which has intentionally racist connotations in the way he understands Jewish and Black characters in particular to be this “filth,” but what seems to be hidden in this complaint is the notion that disenfranchisement of white men is bad because it forces them to be “reduced” to the same level as people of color and marginalized communities. As a result, there is also a way in which the film is depoliticizing these racist tensions by obscuring them within the general category of the antipolitical, rather than acknowledging the political #1 conflicts which create and are created by systemic racism.
Travis’s reoccurring assertion that the people surrounding him in the city are “the scum of the earth” is also very racially coded; he gets along, for example, with other white taxi drivers such as Wizard and Doughboy and wants to rescue Iris and possess Betsy, so they seem to be implicitly excluded from the “filth” he sees. On the other hand, Travis reacts very negatively towards characters such as Tom (who is played by a Jewish actor, and whose character is also coded as being Jewish), in a way which goes beyond something that might be understood to be simply competing over Betsy’s attention/affection. When Travis and Betsy talk in the diner, he tells her “’that fellow you work with, I don’t like him. Not that I don’t like him, I just think he’s silly’” (Scorsese 26:06). It is also important to note that Tom is the first person that Travis threatens with physical violence: as Tom is escorting him from the building after Travis attempts to confront Betsy for not returning his calls after the bad date, Travis shouts “take your hands off me!” and moves into a stance like he is going to punch Tom (Scorsese 39:32). The way Travis uses phrases such as “scum of the earth” and “filth” to describe what he understands to be the biggest problem with the city is a way of depoliticizing the racist implications of these phrases: Travis never candidly says he means Jewish people or people of color, or even uses racial slurs, instead his language is hedged in ways which imply that there is something other than racism going on, and therefore obscures the political #1 tensions. In contrast, Betsy and her whiteness alone seem to be immune to this “filth.”
Although Travis gets along with other (white) characters, Betsy is specifically singled out in that the first time Travis sees her, he says “she was wearing a white dress…out of this filthy mass she is alone. They cannot touch her” (Scorsese 10:48).
Again, there is a way the film depoliticizes the racist implications here: although Betsy emerges from a crowd of white people, the shot immediatelybefore she steps onto the screen features a crowd of black people walking down a street. The fact that Betsy’s whiteness is so oppositional to the “filth” surrounding her further asserts that Travis understands the filth/scum to be something which is not white—to be people who are not white. Furthermore, Travis’s perception that he and Betsy are connected is heavily coded in his belief that he, like her, is elevated and she, like him, is isolated, something which he articulates in a flowery speech wherein he tells her “I felt when I walked in that there was something between us…so that gave me the right to come in and talk to you” (Scorsese 25:24). There is also a way this parallels the earlier scene when Travis is at the porno theater and introduces himself to the cashier working the concession stand after asking for the cashier’s name. When she refuses to tell him, he continues harassing her saying “You can tell me what your name is. I’m not gonna do anything” until she threatens to and then follows through on calling for her (male) manager (Scorsese 08:54). What is significant here is not only the fact that the cashier rejects his implicit claim of entitlement to her when Betsy does not, but also the difference in the way in which Travis goes about making that assertion towards the cashier, who is a woman of color. Rather than the flowery speech about connection he gives when he claims he is entitled to Betsy, with the cashier he simply demands her name (only offering his own as an act of leverage in an attempt to make her feel obligated) and refuses to accept her refusal until she calls for a male coworker to intervene in the situation. It’s also important to consider that when Travis first meets Betsy he already knows her name; neither she nor Tom introduce themselves and Betsy’s name is not said, but as he goes to leave he tells her that his name is Travis and asks her “Betsy?” (Scorsese 23:17). Similar to the way Travis more bluntly acts on his feelings of entitlement towards a woman of color (and the way that this is acted out in the sexually charged context of a porno theater) is Wizard’s story about the woman in his back seat who changed her pantyhose so “I jump in the back seat, I whip it out…I’m gonna fuck her brains out,” which results in her supposedly giving him a $200 tip and her phone number in Acapulco, implying that the woman is Latina (Scorsese 15:56). The sexualization of and implicit articulation of white male sexual entitlement to women of color, although only small parts of the film, is significant because these concepts play into the broader way race and entitlement/violence are imagined.
In Taxi Driver violence against black people is central to both the anti-politics and the depoliticization of the film: there is, on the one hand, a way in which anti-black violence is the language of the “disenfranchised” anti-political white figures of the film, and there is, on the other, a lack of reaction and even an acceptance of this racist violence which depoliticizes and recodes this violence as being caused by something other than racism. One of the first things it is important to consider is the question of what is meant by “disenfranchisement,” and to what degree the term can be applied to Travis: if “disenfranchisement” is understood to be the result of the kinds of systemic processes which could be connected to political #2, it is hard to read Travis as being disenfranchised. Travis has an apartment, never seems to struggle when it comes to money, and gets hired on the spot for the first job he is shown applying for. If “disenfranchisement” is social, again it is hard to read Travis as being disenfranchised in this way: while he does seem to understand himself as being isolated and is unable to make the kinds of connections he wants, specifically sexual/possessive connections with women, he has a group of fellow cab drivers who seem to view themselves as friends and hold the same kinds of beliefs as Travis himself does. With this in mind, “disenfranchisement” becomes less of a reality and more of a symbolic state of mind which justifies both the antipolitical and the related violence, which again is primarily racialized/racist in nature. One of the first scenes where gun violence is brought into Travis’s consciousness is when a passenger (played, significantly, by Scorsese himself) has him stop outside of an apartment building and tells Travis that the woman’s silhouette in the second story window is that of his wife, but that it is not his apartment; he follows this by using a racial slur to describe the owner of the apartment, and then asking whether Travis knows what a .44 magnum will do to a woman’s face and genitals (Scorsese 42:20). This moment clearly has an effect on Travis, because when he decides to purchase a gun the first thing he asks the gun salesman is whether he has a .44 magnum (Scorsese 54:33). The first person that Travis shoots is a young black man robbing the bodega he is shopping in. After he shoots the man, the shop owner takes Travis’s gun and tells him not to worry about it, before beginning to beat the unconscious man to death (Scorsese 1:09:44). One of the ways in which this act is depoliticized is through the way the shop keeper so quickly normalizes and builds off of the Travis’s first act of violence; rather than indicating any distress over having witnessed someone get shot in front of him, the shop owner says that it’s the fifth time he has been robbed that month and starts shouting at the unconscious body “You wanna buy that little dope?” This, combined with the fact that the shop owner is Latino, becomes a way of displacing the racist element of the violence and shifting the motive behind the violence to something which disguises the tensions of racism and racial politics (in the political#1 sense) in 1970s New York. The shopkeeper and his reaction serve to obscure these tensions by presenting the violence as something with only an immediate cause (a response to muggings) and which cannot be categorized into a hate crime (the fact that the shopkeeper is a person of color himself and condones and expands upon the violence Travis commits is intentionally used as a distraction).
And yet racism, and specifically anti-blackness, play an undeniable role in Travis’s actions: the very next scene depicts Travis serenely pointing his gun at the television and closing one eye like he’s imagining aiming, followed by a cut to the image on the television: the face of a young black man dancing (Scorsese 1:09:53).
Even though the target of Travis’s planned massacre is a white senator, the people who Travis views as his targets and who are vulnerable to Travis’s violent actions are black people. Furthermore, there is also a way in which violence is connected to blackness, even when said violence is not being enacted on black characters: the first instance in which violence is mentioned in the film is when Travis says he heard on the radio some “crazy fucker” cut half of someone’s ear off over on 122nd street, which Wizard declares is “fucking Mau Mau land” (Scorsese 16:46).
Another of the ways anti-blackness is reflected through the way race is imagined in the film is through looking at the character of Sport, Iris’s pimp. In the original script Sport was a black man with a much smaller part (the scene where Sport and Iris dance together, for example, was ad libbed), and subsequently Travis killed only black people in the final shoot out (Macnab).
This moment, for example, which comes after Sport tells Iris not to forget how much he “depends” on and “needs” her, and then tells her to let him hold her and declares “I only wish every man could know what it’s like to be loved by you” implies a sense of intimacy and a complex (though obviously problematic) emotional attachment between the two characters (Scorsese 1:30:56). While Iris is twelve and Sport is undeniably a bad person for what he has done and is doing to her, the inclusion of this scene seems to be an intentional way of attempting to complicate the fact that Sport is a full-grown adult taking advantage of a twelve-year-old sexually, emotionally, and most likely financially. This is problematic in and of itself, but the fact that this complication of the dynamic was not a part of the original script in which Sport was a black man creates the implication that there is something more morally nuanced about a man pimping out a child if he is white.
Ultimately Taxi Driver (1967) articulates violence, specifically racist violence, as a tool of the antipolitical. Travis’s violence is caused, in part, because of his racist views, but the reason his violence is escalated from thought into increasingly violent actions is because of the way is actions are perceived by the antipolitical world around him. If the other taxi drivers had not contributed to a language of racialized violence, if the bodega owner had called the cops instead of taking Travis’s gun after he shot the mugger and then proceeding to beat the body, if Travis had been arrested and convicted for the final shoot out the entire narrative of the film would have shifted: as much as the film focuses on Travis, the way the larger society responds to and praises his actions speaks to the power antipolitical thought has. Ultimately, the film serves as a paradox of antipolitical and depoliticized thought in regards to racism: there is, on the one hand, a way in which racism and racist violence are articulations of antipolitical thought, and at the same time the recoding of racist thought and actions as being antipolitical in nature becomes a way of disguising the actual political #1 conflict involved in the creation and enaction of systemic racism, and therefore a depoliticization.
Exhibit A why parents should have as little input in their children’s education as possible
I’m so glad this was posted in disagreement with these statements because I’m yelling. however I don’t think these people are being generous in their definition of ‘conflict’ at all - studio ghibli films have conflicts, in fact they can have very prominent ones. there is more to conflict than an altercation or a physical fight… mixed feelings is a conflict. helplessness is a conflict. lack of choice is a conflict, too much choice another. not knowing how to proceed… all conflicts lol
I disagree. Things can be interesting and beautiful and worth telling with literally no conflict at all. One of my favourite poems, Edgar Allen Poe’s The Bells, is literally just a description of different types of bells. And it’s gorgeous, it evokes emotion, it’s good.
If a kid wants to write a story with no conflict, I see no issue with it. What, are we going to put rules on creative writing? Gonna tell Edgar Allen Poe that he’s wrong and a bad writer?
The Bells isn’t a *narrative*
It doesn’t have characters, in a setting, doing things. Purely descriptive pieces of writing, like an essay or some kinds of poems, don’t need conflict because they aren’t *narratives*.
But if you’re teaching children the pieces of a *narrative*, then yes, they contain some form of conflict. Conflict, even small internal conflicts, are what create motivations and drive actions.
Context: Matthew Salesses is a Korean American writer and professor who is making a specific critique of Western storytelling’s emphasis on conflict and how this is affecting his daughter. Korean, Chinese, and Japanese narratives often uses change or contrast instead of conflict. His daughter does not deserve to be penalized or “corrected” for her cultural storytelling practices.
So, I’m not an expert on Korean storytelling by any means. I will not pretend otherwise.
However, this feels like we are confusing the more everyday definition of “conflict” for the literary use of the term conflict. The examples in that article *have conflict*- notably internal conflict.
These both have clear internal conflicts. They are more subtle than what a lot of us are used to (which also isn’t unusual for very very short compositions.) But man vs self- grappling with indecision, doubt, grief- these are a form of conflict.
Now, I can see an argument that this form of change or twist falls outside our normal ideas of what constitutes conflict, but I think the brevity also makes the whole narrative fall outside our normal ideas of narrative structure. And that’s very interesting and cool and these are beautiful pieces of writing.
Now, maybe the teacher in question was being very specific about the type of conflict they wanted in this story. Maybe they very clearly wanted an external conflict, or a more pronounced conflict. That isn’t conveyed in these tweets.
But also- on a school assignment, it is perfectly reasonable for a teacher to require that specific features are included if you’ve been learning about that in school.
When my students write an ode, and we’ve been studying figurative language, it’s perfectly reasonable to require them to including some figurative language in their poems. That’s not to say that poetry without figurative language is invalid and lesser. It’s just how writing assignments work. You learn about a technique, then you practice applying the technique.
I think it would be awesome if writing classes incorporated more multicultural approaches to structuring narratives. But “we are learning to identify and analyze conflict in stories. Write a story with a conflict in it” is a very normal writing assignment.
Yeah, conflict doesn’t always mean two or more people fighting; it can mean a single person feeling *conflicted* about something.
It’s helpful to think of “conflict” in this sense as “a problem to be resolved.”
So let’s take The Wind Rises! It’s a purely Japanese story: a semi-biographical story about the man who designed the Zero plane for WWII, told by Hayao Miyazaki.
You might think the conflict here is WWII. But believe it or not, in spite of a couple of glancing references to it, it’s almost not present. No, the conflict in The Wind Rises is “I want to design a wonderful plane that will become legendary, but my time on this earth is finite and Japan is literally still using wooden engines and gliders.”
To resolve this conflict, he learns about modern planes and begins to design. That simple. It’s not a fight. It’s a problem to be solved.
But that’s not uncolonial enough for you, so let’s talk about Anansi. You know, the West African spider god. There’s a story about how he came to be the owner of all the stories in the world, and to do so he had to capture the four most dangerous creatures there were. The conflict is epistolary: Anansi must capture creatures, four times. It’s a slightly different setup than we’d normally expect from a Western story (although structurally it bears some similarities to the Labors of Hercules), but there’s still a conflict.
Conflict is universal.
Except it’s not…
An example of a Kishotenketsu would be:
I went to the park. I met a cat. The cat scratched me. I still like the cat.
Want smaller?
I went to the park. I walked. I returned to find my wife. I was happy.
It’s easy to impose on others what you think is “correct.” But the thing is that the conflict narrative you’re citing came from Percy Lubbock (1921). He was excised from history because, you know, can’t have a gay man, even if he was closeted for most of his life in Literary canon.
So they usually cite the next “safe” person. Kenneth Rowe. Kenneth Rowe was a university Professor and taught Shakespeare and Aristotle, while getting them wrong, and plagiarized most of his book. He’s credited with the 5-act structure and put conflict at the center, but really, do you want to support a Plagiarist?
You see, they have to cite him, and not Joseph Esenwein–Christian and a Reverend to Boot, so would seem like the safe choice, because Esenwein specifically argued that this plot structure was ONLY for short stories, and should not be used for long works like novels.
The thing was, he took and credited Selden Whitcomb, who argued that the structure he used and Esenwein copied was–and get this, an emotional Line for Silas Mariner’s *main* arc. And ONLY for Silas Mariner.
You might think that’s not a big deal, but it is, because you see, at the time Kenneth Rowe was arguing this for film, the longest film was about 18 minutes. So it suited a short story format.
Though not famous, Lajos Egri, who was not credited until the last edition of Syd Field’s work, a Jew, so clearly not safe for the white christian US patriarchy, especially during the Hays codes. (Note that he’s pro child marriage which Jews are not usually, but it makes it into his book, so trigger warning). He took from Freytag (he hated him for his anti-Jew sentiment so alluded to him, but gave no credit), He also alluded to Kenneth Rowe by correcting an Aristotle citation. He added all of the modern-day character demands by adding in
Syd Field took from Lajos Egri.
Now, you might be thinking here: Conflict always existed, otherwise it wouldn’t be interesting. Ah, it’s likely a myth of the 1970′s-1980′s, because none of those books really argue that, oddly enough. Some other myths come from them. Particularly, there is no unique idea comes from Lajos Egri because he was clueless about how people come up with new ideas.
Why the 1970′s-1980′s? The computer revolution. And the sheer amount of official websites stating that likely wrong information was handed down in the 1970′s-1980′s, including wrong quotes.
About here you’re thinking… but before that?
Shakespeare and the Monarchy–Morality, to copy what Aristotle said that the center of plays should be morality.
Then the printing press changed it to Emotion–thus John Locke and the whole sensibility and gothic novel movement.
The Rotary Printing press, all hell broke loose. They started to argue for things like the Morality Tale–John Bede is called that. They argued for emotion. They argued for reality through realism. It was such that figures like John Ruskin chose the center of paintings to be “emotion” and was a huge fan of the Pre-raphalite movement, and liked realism for books. Genres were also not set in stone either. Early sensibility, as argued by Lucy Worsley, became the romance genre eventually. True crime and the advent of Newspapers became mystery, though it wasn’t called that early on.
In the 19th century, everyone could choose whatever they wished to be the story-driver. Some later ones were futurism, but massive trauma, flattened the landscape in the shape of WWII. Up through today, there are still minority groups fighting really really hard for the ability to switch the plot driver around. These are women, queer, PoCs, disability–but historically the people who have fought back against the other story drivers have been white cishet men. You might be wondering how that came to be…
So you see, the reason that Percy Lubbock up there made a treaties about conflict at the center of stories was because he was railing against the Modernists, who were anti-imperialism, especially after WWI. This appealed a lot to marginalized groups domestically within the UK, US and abroad. But this did not lock well with the elite in power. This is why about 100% of those books I mentioned by those authors slam the modernists or mention only the male modernists and fail to mention PoCs, queers or women. The only capacity women are ever mentioned in the books, (because excise PoCs and queers–except maybe Selden Whitcomb up there who was very kind to women and even mentioned the braided form which comes from Indigenous people, though not credited) is to be taught their “superior” story structure.
I’mnot covering Freytag because he’s an asshole. Grade A genocidal asshole. If he’d bothered to study, he’d have liked Kishotenketsu a lot. It’s in fact his ideal story structure. (He argued for emotions at the center of stories, not conflict). Also, he’s a shadow, but no one ever gives him credit, probably because he was a German and Germans weren’t fashionable after WWI.
So you see, the conflict narrative came from a long line of men trying to put down women and other marginalized groups, who were arguing for much, much older story drivers. I suppose when you’re in power, and the minority groups are talking crap about you, morality isn’t fashionable anymore. Nor memory. Nor repetition. Nor emotion. ‘cause then you’d have to question your power base.
Does this mean that conflict as a story driver is unusable? No. There are definitely things that came from bad intentions that can be used well. I think conflict is good for horror, mystery (though I like ones that mix in morality too). What if you changed the Romance story driver to emotion–the highest emotion you could get–or discovery? What if the story driver worked against the plot line to create a new effect? To me, that excites me as a writer. Different story drivers can work in tandem with other story drivers, too, keeping the reader thinking, emoting, etc for longer than a pure conflict narrative. (i.e. why WW1984 failed. It hit all of the beats, to the time stamp, had conflict, had escalating conflict, but completely failed.) Giving oneself the flexibility to realize that discovery is fun–like the center of Spirited Away is 100% about discover and then maybe memory–getting the highest emotion from cutting away the conflict. (The “ten” part, BTW), gives writers freedom to play and surprise the audience.
In the early 2000′s BTW, conflict has been getting downgraded for a type of discovery argued over and over throughout the 20th century by mostly women: Self-realization. It’s become a part of the story driver too. Some remakes and book adaptations have added elements of it in order to connect with the audience more.
Morality was always a story driver lurking in Star Trek, for example.
Toni Morrison in the 1980′s specifically argued against conflict as the center of her narratives, favoring morality–which has roots back to Griot’s stories.
It’s worth it to decolonize the story driver because, you connect with your audience more, you get a wider audience to read your work, and if your story fails to make the audience feel or think anything, you’ve definitely failed. So why not maximize what your story can do and look at the true history of Eurocentric storytelling? I mean, seriously, when someone brilliant as Virginia Woolf is telling you Percy Lubbock is too reductive, you might want to listen to her. When EM Forster, a gay man is being torn to shreds by straight people, for tearing down Percy Lubbock, but they refuse to mention Percy Lubbock for credit, you might want to listen to him. And why not blow the retconning out of the water and stare into the face of Eudora Welty? Why not give yourself the freedom to read it not as a contemporary person, but also a person of their times and a person of a different country and get into their headspace? I think there is so much more magic to books/stories and poems if you allow yourself the flexibility to read them in different ways. Didn’t you read Ain’t I a woman and how it was edited? And the difference it makes between the versions? Give yourself that freedom and re-enjoy some of your old books in a new light. (I really understand Jane Austen after learning about sensibility v. sense).
And if you seriously want to fail that and want to stick to your whiteness, Lucy Worsley has a really great series on the history of Romance in UK and also about Mysteries, you should check out.
BTW, Conflict narrative was also exported elsewhere, but there are other culprits often at play at the same time.
That’s me also. I see the holes which I’m working on filling… I got hired off of that post for a contract job. lol My cousin is begging me to write a book. I think it would be a good companion to Matthew Salesses‘s book. You know, as a fellow Korean adoptee. He says they exist. I do the academic research and putting into context to prove they exist so everything has history, time, and geography. Teachers have also used the post for their class.
