Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film, Taxi Driver, seen through the maladjusted protagonist, Travis Brickle, is both of seeing and of being. Taxi Driver affirms Laura Mulvey’s idea of the “male gaze,” a combination of the interaction of looks, fetishism, voyeurism, and pleasure in (Hollywood) cinema. Mulvey outlines three different looks within film: of the director and camera, of the spectator, and of the male protagonist. Film, as Mulvey argued, perpetuates the “male gaze.” In the film, emblematic of the “male gaze,” Travis is presented as the dominant male while most female characters are treated and seen as objects of sex and desire—cheapened, eroticized, submissive—though he one female, Betsy, is treated and seen with reverent affection. In addition, …show more content…
This imbalanced, caustic landscape slowly fractures him emotionally and psychologically. New York, Travis tells Senator Charles Palantine, a presidential candidate, is an “open sewer,” “full of scum,” and sees it as an ordinary horror. Most neighborhoods are overrun with prostitutes and dangerous criminals, markedly dangerous. Yet, unlike other taxi drivers, Travis is willing to go anywhere, to any neighborhood, indifferent to potential harms. As such, he looks upon and identifies a broken human race, while also subsists and supports his desire for …show more content…
And she thus calls for its eradication. The “male gaze” has an interconnected yet incongruous effect on the spectator—one, fetishistic scopophilia; the other, the identification process through a narcissistic investment of ego libido. The pleasure of looking at objects, or scopophilia, a term derived from Sigmund Freud’s theory of the fetish, turns the women on the screen into erotic spectacles, into passive subjects, for the active gaze of the male protagonist and of the spectator. The second effect determines how the spectacle should be looked at (836). As such, in the pleasure of film there exists an active/male and passive/female dichotomy. The gaze corresponds to desire, particularly the desire for self-completion through another. There is a struggle over the gaze: one gets to look, to be the master of the gaze; the other is looked at and is put on display. Woman is the “image”; man is the “bearer” of the look (837). Woman is made into an object of eroticized looking. Emblematic of the “male gaze,” Travis is presented as the dominant male while most female characters are treated and seen as objects of sex and desire—cheapened, eroticized, submissive—though he one female, Betsy, is treated and seen with reverent