Reading responses due Wed. 10/3 by 8pm
This week's readings, from the course reader:
Stern, "A Glitter of Putrescence"
Post your responses in the comments field by 8pm Wednesday night, Oct. 3. Don't forget to suggest a scene for viewing in class.
1) Sum up one key idea of Stern's chapter.
2) Describe Stern's method of analysis. (See below for details)
3) Every reading provides a critical tool we’ll try out on the film under discussion. So, suggest one scene from TAXI DRIVER for us to look at in class. What "research question" would you like to ask about that scene? Explain how and why Stern's approach or ideas might be helpful or interesting to use when analyzing the scene. Be very specific.
See the bottom of the first posted reading questions for "tips" on figuring out the answer to question 2, on method.
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Blog #4
Christina Freiberg
Lesley Stern, author of “The Scorsese Connection,” writes about the how Scorsese borrows/reflects on films that influenced him. In chapter three, “The Glitter of Putrescence,” she discusses how “The Searchers” influenced the character development of Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver.” A professor from the University of California-San Diego, Stern incorporates film theory in relation to film history. The reading is no exception. While she debates the relationship between Ethan Edwards and Travis Bickle, by comparison, Stern also ties in other movies that influenced Scorsese. As an example, “Peeping Tom” (directed by Michael Powell) is argued to help understand Travis’ reactive gaze, a gaze that gives a third person perspective, conveyed as voyeurism and subjectively.
Throughout the chapter, she structures it with opening the debate with “The Searchers.” She mostly targets the Ethan Edwards character and his personality traits. Whether the debate is about John Wayne’s performance or not, it concludes that Ethan is an anti-hero: he is a outsider, made constantly to roam. Ethan is always relentless in pursuit and salvation, as if he is never moving closer to a destination. Stern calls this an obsessive representation because Ethan is desperate to fix the past, despite Debbie’s absence for seven years. One key argument presented in the reading is Debbie’s lift at the end. As she is hoisted into the air, the gesture harkens back to the beginning of the film, when Debbie is lifted by Ethan seven years earlier. Stern debates about the gestures involuntary memory, how the unexpected movement causes a sense reminiscence of years gone by and ultimately becomes associated with Ethan’s personality and ideology.
In relation to Travis Bickle, he seems to have the same modus operandi. Like Ethan Edwards, he is in pursuit to save a girl, even though she, Iris, does not want to be saved. Martin Scorsese, who is heavily influenced by basically every film he has seen, seems to take on characteristics of Ethan. His main objective is to clean the streets of New York City, an obsessive compulsion Stern calls it. His obsession becomes deadly, tying Travis’ personality to the wanderer. He is never moving closer to his actual destination, especially in the last moment of the movie when he double takes the image in his rearview mirror. What he is looking is not revealed, but it indicates how his perception of the world will not be altered. Even after saving Iris from a life she did not want leave, he is called a hero, something that will now becoming haunting because his motives were to kill and destroy scum.
One scene to discuss the relation of Travis, which is then compared to Ethan, is the dance between Sport and Iris in her room (is really her room or just the room she uses in the brothel?). It is basically the scene John Ford could not film (with Debbie and Scar) due to the film censorship laws. The research question would raise the idea of the woman psychology/portrayal throughout the movie. Iris is a young girl who happens to be a prostitute for Sport, a man who she believes loves her. Betsy, on the other hand is a temptress, a tease so to speak. In Stern’s article, she actually list how the women in “The Searchers” are important to Ethan, whether it is on a romance level, family, or even comedical relief. The same could be applied to the scene of Iris and Sport. In the beginning of the sequence, a fully clothed Iris asks Sport that she cannot take it anymore, wishing to leave. Sport reassures that he would be nothing without her, and as they dance, he brushes her hair (the coke fingernail is another story within itself....gross) and constantly reminds her “how he needs her.” It is probably the same psychological brainwashing technique Scar used on Debbie, making these women feel so important they would never leave. Are Scar and Sport lovers or just substitute father figures to Debbie and Iris? Whatever the argument is, this helps explains Travis and Ethan’s desire to save a girl who does not want to be save.
Lesley Stern and The Scorsese Connection
In chapter 3 of “The Scorsese Connection,” author Lesley Stern argues that repetition in films is a method for spurring involuntary memory and feeling in the viewer. The example of Ethan’s lifting of Debbie as both young girl and young woman is perhaps the best example. We remember the earlier scene at some level, and this connection adds depth and emotion to the later repetition. Stern is attempting add some flesh to the skeletal structure provided by Bordwell for the understanding of the viewer’s role and experience in cinema. There are conscious steps that we follow based on logic and our understanding of film convention, but there is also a more mysterious process at work that is not always so evident. Quoting Stern, “Repetition takes place across cinematic landscapes too: across films, genres, periods. Sometimes the repetitions echo as quotation; at other times it may be simply the framing of a gesture, a movement of the camera, three notes on the soundtrack – moments in which memory stirs.”
In her footnotes, she gives an example from Bernard Herrman’s score where three notes from “Psycho” play over the end credits of “Taxi Driver.” According to Scorsese, this subtly subconscious technique was meant to help us feel the continuing menace and threat of the “hero” Travis Bickle.
The idea of this stirring of memory through repetition is fascinating in that it opens up so many technical and mysterious possibilities for analyzing a film or a scene from a film. What was John Ford trying to do with Ethan’s repetition of the sweeping motion with his hand and arm? And does Scorsese’s repetition of the close-up of Bickle’s eyes suggest something other than a disturbed menace? And does this “ghosting” of our movie memory stand on its own or must it be coupled with a theme or subconscious pattern?
In writing about “The Searchers,” Stern goes on to say “…when Ethan picks up Debbie and says, ‘Let’s go home’, although there is a flash of involuntary memory that summons an association of home, of originary plenitude, there is also a memory of the film’s gradual charting of violence and salvation within the same economy. This, I think, is what I experience as a stab of recognition, an iconic ghosting over the image, registered as an intimation of horror.”
Stern strikes me as both an academic and a romantic. She shares Perez’s love of the movies as a mystical experience worthy of deeper study and understanding. She probably also loves puzzles, and is driven to identify her “stabs of recognition” as part of a more complete picture of our experience of film viewership.
A couple of scenes in “Taxi Driver” come immediately to mind relative to this issue of repetition and subconscious recognition.
First, in the opening sequence of Travis driving the Technicolor streets, we catch a quick glimpse of a figure running in front of the cab. Before we can see who it is, we cut back to a view of the road from Bickle’s perspective. The figure appears and disappears almost as quickly as Durden’s or Bergman’s famous insertions. It feels like both a warning and a foreshadowing of violence to come – a LOOK OUT! Just beneath the surface. And then, much later in the movie, the second appearance of Iris has her running in front of the cab similar to our earlier figure. As Stern understands, we remember the earlier image at some level and it gives the Iris scene a greater psychic oomph.
Second, is a series of shots related to the use of the index finger as a stand-in for both the gun and the penis. The scene where Travis leaves the diner to seek Wizard’s advice begins with the black cabbie pointing his finger like a gun and saying “See ya Killer.” Immediately after Travis sees this, he has a slow-motion scene of black pimps, punks, and prostitutes acting threatening on the street. The camera lingers on Bickle’s face and we see him thinking about each of the things he just saw. Later, after buying the guns, Travis goes to a porno movie and points his finger at the sex on the screen and then brings the finger back to his head. He will kill the scum out there on the streets and then kill himself. Later, after the big massacre of the pimps, Travis points his bloody finger at his head. Each of these scenes reverberates with the others. Whether we remember the fingers directly or subconsciously, they echo down through the story and increase the impact of the examples that follow.
Bernard Herrman’s score of course provides similar signposts, and ghost memory. Snippets of the music are repeated throughout the film, expressing Bickle’s mood and foreshadowing what is to come. As Travis descends into a deeper isolation, the jazzy intro theme is replaced with a more jarring and threatening variation. We remember the tune and pace, and we feel the connection to earlier scenes and situations.
One main idea that was discussed a lot in Stern's chapter was relating "Taxi Driver" and "The Searchers". I hadn't really seen the connection in story lines between the two films but after reading this "Taxi Driver" seems to be a remake or a re-imaging rather of "The Searchers". Travis and Ethan have basically the same mission in their respective film lives. To save a once innocent girl from powerful men. Both Scar and Sport have what Ethan and Travis subconciously want, and they both have sexual desires for the girls they are trying to save. I just think that it's crazy that I didn't realize that they are very similar movies. Stern discusses these two films by relating them to her experiences and to different films that have the same idea going on. In a way she sounds like me when I talk about films with my friends, going on about "oh this is like that one movie". The one thing that bothered me about this arcticle was how she kept talking about Ethan and his desire for Debbie. I can kind of see a surpressed desire for her, but I didn't see it as him going on this whole thing to fulfill his desires that got ended when Martha died. I saw it as him just wanting to save the last part of his lost family. I almost think that he did it and left in the end so that Martin could have the life that he gave up. In terms of Travis he always talked about the scum of the city and the hell he is in, and by saving Iris, he saved one person from the hell he is unable to escape from. In both cases the people helped people have the life they were unable to have.
The scene I want to look at again, is the scene with just Iris and Sport. Now that I see them as very similar movies, the scene missing from "The Searchers" is one between Debbie and Scar, and I want to see the difference it makes in the overall feeling of the film. I would also like to see right before Travis kills Sport because I missed the indian referance the first time and its interesting when Travis is still normal Sport sees him as a cowboy, but when Travis becomes angry, Sport sees him as an indian. I think thats an interesting connection.
In “The Glitter of Putrescence” Lesley Stern begins to talk on the relation between our two characters in The Searchers and Taxi Driver. Paralleling their goals in the film as well as their psychological processes for what and why they act in the ways they do. I was however drawn to her word usage in the title of “putrescence” I think that her glitter holds a very pliable point that can be carried over into many of the films aspect. There is a sense of depravity and evil that we come across in each of the characters, Ethan and Travis. She talked in depth about the memory of film and how its images and formal elements allow the viewer to draw upon earlier images and ideas that will add to the overall meaning of the film. She says “the viewer’s memory of the film, that is, but also of the ‘film’ as a history of cinematic images. Somewhere between voluntary and involuntary: a zone of acute memorial indeterminacy.” We are given images in The Searchers when Ethan first picks up Debbie, and then at the end when we don’t know if Ethan will kill her or bring her home. Our memory is triggered to expect one thing, a loving gesture, but in the presented circumstance we are unaware of the possible outcome of this gesture. She also goes into detail about using other films to understand and interpret certain scenes in a film. I loved her detailed scene by scene analysis as to how these two different films touch veins of the classic western schema yet have two completely different settings and time frames.
Stern’s tools for use in watching and critiquing films are two broad categories. Film memory and another way to elaborate on the viewers added memory to the film. When Stern talks about the viewer’s memory and activity, I think that it is an elaboration and a branching out from David Bordwell’s The Viewers Activity. Bordwell talked about personal ideologies and the interpretation of the film based on personal biases and standards. Stern goes in a different path and encourages viewers to use their extensive visual memory from other films to help understand and gain greater meaning from a certain film that they are watching. Stern gave many examples from her personal experiences while watching Taxi Driver and The Searchers. Specifically during the scene with Ethan and Debbie at the end of the film when Ethan raises her up in the air and Says “let’s go home”, this aroused memories from one of Scorsese’s films Who’s That Knocking At My Door, where ‘the girl’ tells the boy infatuated with her to “Go home, Go home”. This single moment in the film gave a flood of information and remembrance from a completely different film, and in that moment her experience was heightened for this film. Then Stern talked about film’s memory, or its repeated patterns, and how they add greater meaning to the whole of the film. Many scenes from Taxi Driver were used in her chapter regarding Travis pointing at things with his finger. Travis used his finger to be his rod of truth and justice. Themes of man needing to save a woman also came out in the memory section. There are two women in these films that need saving and these “hero’s” are going to be the ones who save them.
I would like to use the tool of the films memory and go back and watch sections of Taxi Driver where Travis is watching the blue films and when he is starring at Betsy. I want to pay attention to his body language and facial expressions and possibly even dialogue. Paying attention to him will add to the understanding of how he could just turn on her after being rejected the first time. Did he then consider her just another whore or porn star to be glared at with putrescence?
Lesley Stern uses a technique of comparative cinema, arguing that Scorseses' "Taxi Driver" belongs to the same genre, and actually echoes the Ford's "The Searchers."
She blends this with a Freudian analysis of the captive narrative present in both films.
Coming from a background in film history, Stern picks through the Searchers, Taxi Driver and an earlier Scorsese Film "Who's that knocking at my Door?" She identifies relationships between the two films in terms of genre identification (as Taxi Driver is "God's lonley man" wandering in another kind of desert), as well as the psychological connections between the three films in terms of the tainted captives.
In terms of Taxi Driver, I think it's interesting to look at two scenes that use misidentification of person to reflect a character's change of state.
Travis both misidentifies Betsy, at first thinking that she is "Alone..." and later recants and changes his mind to believe she is like the rest of the "filth" he sees. This is two turning points in the film. The third is when Sport fails to recognize Travis the same way he did when they firt met. This is really the final turning point of the film.
In relation to this and the Searchers, it seems an easy yet subtle narrative signifier to show ambiguity and change of character. Ethan doesn't know Debbie (although on this point I disagree wih Sterns viewing of the scene, as I think Ethan is still teasing), Travis doesn't know Betsy, Iris doesn't know Travis, Debbie pretends to not know Martin. This misidentifications are Significantly posed though, and contained in their scenes. They carry emotive weight, and signal significant changes in direction each time. They call the direction of the characters in their searching into stark question. All without speaking a single word of "Hey, you've sure changed, are you OK?"
pu·tres·cence (py-trsns)
n.
1. A putrescent character or condition.
2. Putrid matter.
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1.in a state of progressive putrefaction
2.the quality of rotting and becoming putrid
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In Chapter 3, A Glitter Of Putrescence, Stern compares the subject matter of The Searchers with Scorsese's Taxi Driver and his first film, Who's That Knocking On My Door?. Taxi Driver is more of a conceptual comparison, or a character comparison, as both John Wayne and Robert DeNiro are men who feel an obligation to liberate a young girl that they have a strong connection with from oppressive evils that exist in that time. For Taxi Driver, its the pimps, and for The Searchers its the indians (an odd comparison perhaps?)
What I think the article means by putrescence, though, is not in the villan's, but in the heroes. At some point in both films we are brought to almost side against them, most notably when Travis Bickle is going to assassinate a Presidential Candidate and Ethan Edwards tries to kill Debbie, the girl he is trying to rescue. They both think, though, that by killing these people they will in some way be doing a good thing. Debbie has been corrupted by the indians and the world would be better off without another politician. Still, their methods are pretty rotten, and eventually some form of redemption is reached for both of them and they become solidified once again as a hero/anti-hero for the audience (I say anti-hero because, frankly, John Wayne scalps someone and Robert kills three people and tries to kill himself afterwards)
The author talks about how they weren't really a fan of westerns to begin with, but you find all kinds of elements of the western in a lot of American work and that becomes more notable when you compare the westerns of the past and how their stories have been evolved to match the culture and environment of the present day.
Just a thought, about a particular resemblence in the two movies, are the ways that both of the main characters present their firearms. Travis practices whipping out his pistols in the ways that a master gun men might, and every time John Wayne takes out his pistol he nonchalantly spins it on his finger before he aims.
In “A Glitter of Putrescence,” Lesley Stern utilizes a largely psychoanalytical approach when contextualizing specific characters such as Ethan Edwards and Travis Bickle, and/or the pastiche of the work of John Ford by Martin Scorsese. As Stern points out in her introduction: “”Taxi Driver” remakes ‘The Searchers’ in part through resurrecting the character of Ethan Edwards in the figure of Travis Bickle, but also through its filmic exploration of pathological narrative” (33). Stern’s notion of what makes a pathological narrative profound; the actions of a film’s characters, the manner in which they are coded in particular shots, and how either engenders meaning for the narrative in sum appears to be the overall purpose of her study--inasmuch as chapter three of her book is concerned.
I was at once disturbed and moved to reconsider one particular shot in John Ford’s “The Searchers” by means of Stern’s initial comments on the moment when Ethan grabs and lifts the young adult Debbie: “[Ethan] lifts and holds her at arm’s length. I [Stern] hold my breath. No matter how often I’ve seen ‘The Searchers’ before, I do not know, at this very moment and for a split second, whether he will kill her or fuck her” (78). Stern sets into motion here one of the central tropes of her study which looks to the following: 1) the redirection and self-hatred of Ethan’s asexuality from the adult Martha to her young daughter Debbie, since Debbie must in part double for Ethan as a love interest once Martha is dead; 2) the subjugation of white, female sexuality inasmuch as it can be bifurcated into a dual threat of bodily representation of impurity and theoretical paragon of purity for the fence-straddling, ostensibly “racist” hero Ethan. Indeed, I would like to contextualize this sequence with the sequence of Travis and Iris at breakfast to probe for additional oxymora visual codes of attempted redemption and repressed sexual deviance (?).
If time permits, I would also like to beginning chipping away at Stern’s reading of Travis and his relation to the filth of the outside world as he sees it. In “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,” Judith Butler elucidates a dichotomy of inner and outer boundaries of the body to contamination via filth, although her explanation is partly a synthesis of Julia Kristeva’s theory of Abjection: “For inner and outer worlds to remain utterly distinct,” Butler argues, “the entire surface of the body would have to achieve an impossible impermeability. This sealing of its surface would constitute the seamless boundary of the subject; but this enclosure would invariably be exploded by precisely that excremental filth that it fears” (170). If one were to assay Travis and his abjection to the outer filth of his apartment through the lens that Butler supplies here, then I believe one can receive an ameliorated understanding of the earlier claims I have made in class regarding the inner conflict within Travis: he kills to in one way save himself and the world from invariably exploding. For Travis, the idea of murder as filth or "abjection" is an idealistic moral construct, and thus not pragmatic for those like him who must coexist outside the periphery of the inside (safe) spaces within the film.
In her article, "A Glitter of Putrescence," one of the main ideas Stern discusses is the concept of rescuing a woman who does not want to be saved. In order to closely examine this idea, she compares and contrasts the motivations of Ethan Edwards and Travis Bickle, both of whom are vigilantes with a strong impulse and/or desire to act. Each man is also motivated to kill for the sake of contempt against a certain type of person, or as Travis would say, "scum." Ethan Edwards is a racist, who at first would rather kill Debbie than save her, fearing that she has already been contaminated by Scar. For much of the time Debbie does not want to be rescued, after having lived with the Comanche people and feeling a strong connection to them. Despite this Ethan is obsessively determined to bring her home safely. Stern suggests that Debbie not only represents a memory of Martha, but also the object of Ethan's sexual desires. I disagree with this interpretation. I feel that Debbie is strictly Ethan's living memory of Martha. It is this memory along with racial contempt and personal revenge that fuels his mission.
Travis, however, feels the desperate need to save Iris, who has been similarly "captured" by what he thinks is the scum of the universe. In contrast to Ethan, Travis is not strictly a racist. Instead, he feels that everyone is in the same category, referring to all that he despises as simply "them." In his delusional mindset he is unable to distinguish one group of people from the other. To Travis, Sport is simply another pimp on the street. Therefore, Travis is driven to kill not by a combination of racism and revenge, but simply revenge on Sport for being scum. Stern suggests, "Like Ethan, Travis conceives of his murderous mission as an act of pious salvation," which confirms Travis' statement about being God's lonely man (Stern 90). Like Ethan Edwards he is obsessed and believes fully in what he is doing. At the same time Iris does not want to be saved. This is seen when she talks with Travis in the cafe, defending Sport as well as her decision to do what she does for a living. Her reluctance to be rescued is also seen during the shootout, when she pleads against Travis' intervention. Nonetheless, Travis remains determined in his quest for revenge and rescue.
One moment in Taxi Driver that may be worth another look is when Iris tries to get in Travis' cab. She is immediately snatched away by Sport, whom she is trying to flee. Later in the film when Iris and Travis are talking, he asks her if she can even remember what happened that night. Stern suggests that the scene in which Iris tries to get into the cab is when Travis becomes obsessed with the idea that she wants to be rescued. Furthermore, he assumes that that is the reason she chose his cab. I want to review this scene to look closely at the way Travis reacts to the situation, when he comes to this realization.
Stern’s chapter uses a comparative analysis on The Searchers and Taxi Driver to realize their intrinsic structural connection despite their seemingly different categorical placements and time of production (1956 vs 1976). Stern regards Taxi Drive as being a remake of The Searchers when concerning the similarities of Ethan Edwards and Travis Bickle as well as their moral positioning. In terms of Stern’s approach, she vividly yet appropriately romanticizes this connection by saying “in part through ‘resurrecting’ the character of Ethan Edwards.” It really does feel as though Ethan is inside the mind of Travis or that Travis is some sort of reincarnation of Ethan.
Both characters share a unique impulse to rescue a woman who does not want to be saved. However, both characters also share a similar motive, which is that they seek revenge through the pursuit of an alternative goal: Ethan for Scar from Debbie, Martha and the rest of the slain family, and Travis for Sport from the forced relationship with Iris and her prostitution. Both characters also receive a moment of redemption for their wild and vigilante ways but in very different follow-throughs. Ethan’s moment happens when he lifts Debbie in the same similar fashion as he did when they were in the cabin several years earlier. Stern cites another analyst, Andrew Sarris, who says “A man picks up a girl in his arms and is miraculously delivered of all the racist, revenge-seeking furies that have seared his soul.” What makes Scorsese’s revitalization of Ethan Edwards affirmatively original, is the way in which we align with Travis during his story, he speaks to us, versus the way in which we are kept in the dark about Ethan’s feelings, thoughts and overall knowledge. This kind of perspective allows us a new kind of access into the mindset that both men seem to share.
I would love to revisit the “Breaking points” for each of these characters and find exactly where it was when Ethan and Travis became obsessive about their goals. I believe Ethan’s breaking point was somewhere right after he found Laurie buried in the canyon and as he takes his rage and frustration out on the buffalo. Travis’s breaking point seems to be when he sees Iris again and she gets into his cab but gets taken out by Sport. At this point he makes it clear in his mind to take action and so he tails her and finally pays a visit to Sport.
“A Glitter of Putrescence,” by Lesley Stern compares The Searchers and Taxi Driver through close analysis of intertextuality. Stern proposes the idea of how Taxi Driver is influenced, if not somewhat along the same lines of the western The Searchers. This article describes different situations in each film, plus other films, that relate to each other and show intertextuality. For instance, Stern talks about the idea of going home for both pieces. In Taxi Driver the author talks about Travis and his determination to save Iris and get her off the street and back home. On the other hand, in The Searchers Ethan has a dilemma in which he must decide whether to bring Debbie home or to kill her since she has changed so much. However, I do believe that Stern may have some filmmaking and/or film critiquing experience, especially since she mentions working as a film teacher. These backgrounds, plus her interesting experiences as a film viewer, make for an interesting article about the intertextuality of Taxi Driver and The Searchers.
One scene I would like to look more closely at in Taxi Driver would be the scene in which Travis talks to the bodyguard at Paletine’s address. It’s very interesting how Travis approaches him and then asks about joining the CIA, before handing him the wrong mailing information. Perhaps there is more to look at in that scene.
In her essay “A Glitter of Putrescence”, Lesley Stern focuses on what she considers to be a strong link between Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Ford’s The Searchers. She writes about how Scorsese has borrowed ideas from Ford and incorporated them into his films. One of these points she mentions is the idea of rescuing a girl from a life she should not be in. In The Searchers Ethan goes on a journey trying to rescue Debbie from Scar and in Taxi Driver Travis wants to save Iris from life on the streets as a prostitute. Stern consistently covers this idea of saving someone and relates these ideas to her own experiences, not in the sense that she was rescued, but when she has had to talk about film at various points in her life. It would seem that she considers all audiences to be able to relate to a character or events in some way, and I would completely agree with this. Stern’s method of analysis is to look in detail at the structure of films and to compare these, focusing on the similarities.
The scene I would like to look at from Taxi Driver is the final massacre scene as I think it is very different to the violence we see in The Searchers and it also relates to what Stern talks about in terms of being able to relate to the characters and situations. Are we able to relate to anyone in this sequence?
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