"God's Lonely Man"

Filmmaker Martin Scorsese's central theme of man's isolated and alienated existence can be best exemplified by a review of the plight of his three lead characters in TAXI DRIVER, RAGING BULL and BRINGING OUT THE DEAD. In these films, the central characters are men who lack the social skills to function productively in civilization. Because these characters are unable to connect with others, they do not benefit from the support of family, loved ones or other social units. Alone in the world, alienated and isolated, they are overwhelmed by their environment and by the hyper-competitive and selfish, individualism-focused modern day society. The lack of productive socialization, the pace of a me-first modern race in life and a congested and overwhelming city leads all three characters to lose the concept of rational thought and react to others and to society in socially unacceptable, destructive, criminal and at times homicidal behaviors.

 In TAXI DRIVER, Travis is a Vietnam veteran who applies for a job driving a cab during the graveyard shift. He has obviously been afflicted and disturbed by his past and by his years of service in the military. This affliction is demonstrated by his disorienting perception of reality, overgeneralization of the evils in the world and his lack of the social skills necessary for communal survival.

By taking a job as a cab driver, Travis puts himself in situation that further fuels his repulsion from the place he lives and the people who occupy that place. By being assigned the task of driving the characters he despises to and from their destinations, Travis has to confront the very same elements he sees destroying his world.

Through his narration, a voice-over of his written chronicles of his thoughts, Travis tells the audience in a disturbing and almost unaffected diatribe that he wants the rain to wash away the filth that engulfs the city he calls home. His narration demonstrates to the audience the illogic of his perceptions and shows that he is a man maladjusted to life in New York City.

Fueling the nervous energy Travis feels are frustrations of a grown man's inability to connect with others including relatives and prospective love interests. In a letter home, Travis makes up lies about his work and his whereabouts. He writes his family that he is conducting undercover and secret government work and that he cannot tell his parents the specifics of his job and his whereabouts.

Similarly, his attraction to a woman sitting in the presidential candidate's campaign office prompts him to pursue and court the object of his affection. But this, too, turns disastrous when Travis is unable to demonstrate proper courting etiquette and socially acceptable behavior. When he takes his date to a pornographic movie, his date is clearly offended and leaves him standing in the middle of the street, alone again.

Isolated from his overwhelming and always encroaching world, with no recent contact with his family and no friends to reach for support, Travis' disgust and nervous energy begin to fuel illogic, paranoia and irrational perceptions. Adding to this neurotic mindset is a group of equally irrational and paranoid cab drivers with whom Travis shares breaks. Further convulsing Travis and polluting his fragile mind are an equally eccentric group of passengers who ride his cab in the dark of the night.

When a jilted husband sits in Travis' cab and watches his wife become intimate with a lover, the jilted husband’s lethal talk of killing his wife and her lover introduce Travis to the idea of violence as a way to resolve his disgust. This introduction to violence sets Travis off on a mission to kill a presidential candidate, whom Travis meets and expresses his adulation.

Without direction, without hope for peace or serenity, without a way out, and with the added burden of his inability to connect with others, Travis journeys further into an irrational psyche. The repulsion he feels is aggravated further when he is unable to save an underage prostitute from a psychologically manipulative pimp. This chaotic chain of events and characters leads Travis to a highly disciplined preparation to assassinate the presidential candidate for whom the object of his affection works.

However, in Scorsese's surrealist perspective of New York City, the logic Travis uses in his want to kill a presidential candidate lands him in the role and hence status of a cultural and modern-day hero. The rejected and isolated homicidal maniac kills the teenage prostitute’s pimp among other criminals and hence becomes the subject of adulation. His heroics are chronicled in mass media, and the parents of the runaway teen prostitute write him about their gratitude for returning their daughter home.

A second and equally tragic character is BRINGING OUT THE DEAD’s Frank. This character demonstrates the isolation that can break the human spirit in 20th Century capitalist America. Frank is a lonely medic is assigned the task of driving around the streets of New York City, the global capitol of commerce. In this place where cultural mindsets are created and marketed, Scorsese places the tragic character of Frank, whose sole purpose is to save lives.

Frank is divorced, the son of a bus driver and a nurse, and he the time and space he populates are the overnight hours that are occupied by TAXI DRIVER's Travis. Thus, Frank is also confronted nightly by the most absurd citizens of Scorsese's vision of New York City. As Frank and his changing medic partners speed through the night, Frank is trapped and isolated in his ambulance just as Travis is trapped in his isolated cab. Frank, like Travis, watches the city and must confront the characters because duty calls.

From the drunks who pass out night after night to the psychotics who cannot drink enough water, from the suicidal homeless who fear death to the addicts dying from a new designer drug, Frank is forced to help the helpless, save the lives of those whom he hears in his mind pleading for death, while regretting the lives he has lost and seeing the ghosts of those he was not able to save.

With these dynamics and his supervisor's unwillingness to fire him, Frank begins to lose his grip on reality. As his marathon shifts as a medic endlessly challenge him, Frank begins to lose hope and attempts to heal himself with the tools and medications he carries in his ambulance. In the end, his neurosis and irrational mindset drive him to murder. Voices in his mind prompt Frank to kill an elderly heart patient, whose life he initially saves.

The third character that is forced by isolation to extreme behaviors is RAGING BULL's Jake LaMotta. Jake is the middleweight boxer, who has to watch his weight so that he can fit within the ranks of the middleweight. Physically and eventually psychologically, Jake is challenged to fit into the environment and role he wants to play in life. However, these challenges become too great, and his anger and rage are directed not only to those he fights in the ring but against those whom he has to fight in life.

As Jake literally and metaphorically fights to find his place in life, his inability to fit into his family, his ethnic culture, and his inability to find his place within the prize fighting paradigms pits him against his lovers, his friends, his brother, the mob, the law and eventually himself. At the root of his conflict is his inability to communicate and to connect. This failure to express himself and his emotions result in the eruption of violence against his loved ones, his lovers, his colleagues and those who populate his subculture in New York City.

Paranoia, infidelity, lack of discipline and an inability to communicate and to connect pave the way for Jake to lose his hard-gained prizefighter title. He eventually loses his wife, his children, a relationship with his brother, his material wealth, his championship belt, his home and eventually his freedom as a human being.

Through Jake’s character, Scorsese seems to be asking where does a man’s rage come from? In Jack's world, perhaps rage is born out of his inability to fit into the places where he is placed by the laws of nature, by society and by the universe. As a fighter, he is forced to lose weight to be able to fight in his weight class. As a husband and a neighbor, his rage and inability to communicate, to love, to express himself results in threats to neighbors and domestic abuse.

Jack's rage is perhaps metaphorically the same anger and frustration that Travis and Frank both experience as citizens lost within a metropolis, where millions are sharing confined spaces, where individuality only matters when they are validated by those around them. When Frank and Travis, and eventually Jake, do not have loved ones, friends and family to be heard by, to love and to communicate with, they begin to lose their ability to survive and to deal with the harsh realities of Western society.

Travis becomes homicidal, Frank becomes suicidal and Jake begins to abuse those he loves and eventually himself when placed in a confined jail cell. These three characters, men who are articulate, skilled and dynamic, walk the fine line between using their abilities and lives to the benefit of society or to its detriment.

Travis is expert with weapons and discipline. He shows an interest in writing and recording his thoughts as a writer would. Yet, he turns his skills with weaponry to murder. Similarly, Frank is skilled in emergency response. He can save lives, but he eventually uses his skills to fool a hospital nurse as he kills a heart patient. Finally, Jake, whose rage channeled into the sport of boxing is eventually turned against his family and his loved ones. This rage lands him in a jail cell, beating himself against the walls that further isolate and imprison his soul.

Scorsese's three characters are men driven by the sheer force and madness of living in a painful world that for them doesn't make much sense. These three characters, on the edge, are easily pushed over into irrationality and pain when they find themselves isolated and not able to receive the support of others. Three characters, who could be productive and responsible citizens, are driven by the pressure of modern life into a psychotic and tormented place from where there is no return.

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