﻿On every street in every city, there's a nobody who dreams of being a somebody.
He's a lonely forgotten man desperate to prove that he's alive.
We’re often told, especially as children as we grow up, that we need to find ourselves a
career. As a person, you will dedicate most of your life and your time, doing that job,
so you better like it. It’s what will give you purpose. Be a lawyer, be a doctor, be a teacher,
a nurse, a firefighter. Find a job that will give you purpose. But what if you become a
warehouse worker, a fastfood cook or a grocery store clerk. What if you become a Taxi Driver.
It’s not to say that you can’t find purpose in these jobs, you totally can, and I’m not
saying that these jobs are useless, they’re not. However, what I am saying is that certain jobs,
to many people, are absolutely alienating and lead to a sense of disorienting purposelessness.
It’s the case of Travis Bickle, a former U.S. Marine, who finds himself a job as a taxi driver
because he, seemingly, has nothing else to do, because he suffers from insomnia and because he
feels lonely. The fact that a need for money isn’t one of the reasons for why he’s working, indicates
that he’s not looking to survive, but he’s looking for something to do. He’s looking for a purpose.
This man has nothing and, perhaps, many people today might feel that way. Without any particular
passions or interests, this man is lost. As he said himself, he doesn’t know anything about
movies, nor about music. Music doesn’t play in his cab and the only films he watches is porn.
He’s not an idiot however and you can tell that from how he eloquently analyzes Betsy’s situation.
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Bickle is profoundly troubled. He’s unwell, lonely, he’s clearly uncomfortable,
but he can’t seem to know why. Though he brilliantly analyzes Betsy’s situation,
he has no ability whatsoever to analyze his own. Something’s off,
something’s wrong but he can’t put his finger on it, which is, to him, incredibly frustrating.
When Charles Palantine, a senator running for president,
asks Bickle what bothers him most in this country, Bickle answers:
Well. [He thinks] Whatever it is, you should clean up this city here, because this city here is
like an open sewer you know. It's full of filth and s****. And sometimes I can hardly take it.
Whatever-whoever becomes the President should just [Travis honks the horn] really clean it
up. You know what I mean? Sometimes I go out and I smell it, I get headaches it's so bad,
you know...They just never go away you know...It's like...I think that the President should just
clean up this whole mess here. You should just flush it right down the ****in' toilet.
This is the rambling of someone who’s profoundly angry, who wants change,
but has no idea how to enact it. He’s unable to successfully identify the issues that are
leading to his discontent which is best demonstrated by his vague manifestos:
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However, I believe we can identify Bickle’s source of discontent,
not in his manifestos, but in the anniversary card he writes to his parents and says:
I'm sorry again I cannot send you my address like I promised to last year. But the sensitive nature
of my work for the government demands utmost secrecy. I know you will understand. I am healthy
and well and making lots of money. I have been going with a girl for several months and I know
you would be proud if you could see her. Her name is Betsy but I can tell you no more than that...
I believe that his discontent isn’t something or someone, as he sometimes seems to believe,
but a lack of something. First, he’s lacking women, he is the classic incel. Bickle is lonely:
Loneliness has followed me my whole life. Everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks,
stores, everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man.
However, I don’t want to focus on this as it’s been discussed at length. Bickle lacks affection,
he lacks a romantic relationship with a woman and, being entitled, he blames Betsy,
and women in general, for this lack since she refuses to talk to him after their failed date.
The second lack, the one I’d like to focus on in this video, is a lack of purpose. In the letter
to his parents, Bickle says that his job with the government is so important that he can’t even tell
them what it is. Bickle wants to do something important, he wants to do something purposeful,
but he doesn’t know how to achieve that. I don’t even think he knows he lacks a sense of purpose.
But how do you get purpose?
If you’re not into art, music, cinema, if you aren’t into literature, into crafting,
into a sport of any kind, if there’s nothing that transcends you, that’s bigger than yourself,
if there isn’t a goal that you can work towards, dedicate your life to,
which affirms you as a person, which confirms your individuality, then how do you find purpose?
You can either become complacent about your sense of purposeless, simply resign and accept it,
or you can refuse it and revolt. Here are the two contrasting positions:
Wizard: Things uh, things got ya down? Travis: Yeah.
Wizard: Yeah, it happens to the best of us. Travis: Yeah, I got me a real down,
real...I just wanna go out and, and you know like really, really, really do somethin'.
Wizard: The taxi life you mean? Travis: Yeah, well. Naw, I don't know.
I just wanna go out. I really, you know, I really wanna, I got some bad ideas in my head, I just...
Wizard: Look, look at it this way, you know uh, a man, a man takes a job, you know,
and that job, I mean like that, and that it becomes what he is. You know like uh,
you do a thing and that's what you are. Like I've been a, I've been a cabbie for
seventeen years, ten years at night and I still don't own my own cab. You know why?
'Cause I don't want to. I must be what I, what I want. You know, to be on the night shift drivin'
somebody else's cab. Understand? You, you, you become, you get a job, you you become the job.
One guy lives in Brooklyn, one guy lives in Sutton Place, you get a lawyer, another guy's a doctor,
another guy dies, another guy gets well, and you know, people are born. I envy you your youth.
Go out and get laid. Get drunk, you know, do anything. 'Cause
you got no choice anyway. I mean we're all fucked,
more or less you know. Travis:
Yeah, I don't know. That's about the dumbest thing I ever heard.
Wizard: I'm not Bertrand Russell. Well what do ya want. I'm a cabbie you know.
What do I know? I mean, I don't even know what the fuck you're talkin' about.
Travis: Yeah I don't know. Maybe I don't know either.
Wizard: Don't worry so much. Relax Killer, you're gonna be all right. I know I seen a lot of people
and uh, I know. Travis: That's the dumbest thing I ever heard.
Wizard embodies the man who gave up finding a purpose, who’s just living a purposeless
life and got complacent about it. He’s trying to justify how things are,
why he’s feeling that way, why Bickle feels that way, but he’s not convincing anyone, not Bickle,
not the audience, not even himself.
Wizard resigned, he got in the habit of doing the job. He doesn’t feel the lack of purpose
because he lost all need for purpose. He doesn’t believe in purpose anymore.
However, a lot of his speech, the fact that you get a job and you become the job,
is not that far from the truth. In a way, we are defined by what we do, how we spend our time
and energy. The fact that we become our job is not necessarily a bad thing. Work defines a large
part of our interaction with our community, so it does make sense that it would define us in a way.
This only becomes a problem when our job is alienating.
Marx laid out the purposefulness of work in four points:
I) I objectify my individuality through production. When I produce something,
it’s an “individual manifestation of my life”. When the product is created,
it’s direct evidence that my “personality is objective”. This affirms my individuality.
II) Through this objectification of my individuality, I have the enjoyment of knowing
that it “created an object corresponding to the need of another [person’s] essential nature.”
Your individuality made someone else happy.
III) Because of that, I become the mediator between you and “the species”, meaning that,
because my individuality answered your need, I become, in a way, essential to you, or,
at least, to your growth. I become singularly important to you.
IV) “In the individual expression of my life I would have directly
created your expression of your life, and therefore in my individual activity I would
have directly confirmed and realised my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature.”
Through work, therefore, you “confirm and realize your true nature” and this can be felt in many
ways. Some jobs can absolutely make you feel that way. You can do these things without being paid,
through voluntary work for example, or by making videos on YouTube for people to enjoy.
However, Marx says, when there’s private property [I.e capitalism],
production, or your individual activity, can be corrupted.
When you work for someone else, when you take their orders, when you comply to company policy,
your production isn’t an expression of your life or your individuality. When what you
do is devoid of any individuality, when you’re replaceable, when you’re just, as people say,
“a cog in a machine”, then your work doesn’t “confirm and realize” your true nature.
The classic example is that of the opposition between a factory worker and a carpenter. A
carpenter making his own chair, works on it, puts his individuality in it, makes it a manifestation
of his life. With enough work and passion, he could recognize his chair out of any other chair,
because that chair became an extension of himself.
However, the factory worker who screws 324 identical chair legs in
81 identical chairs in one day, does not manifest their individuality whatsoever.
If they resign their position, it won’t impact the world whatsoever. Their individuality,
their personhood, is of no importance in the production chain. This alienates a worker.
All of this to say, the movie Taxi Driver isn’t randomly titled Taxi Driver. It’s titled this
way because Bickle’s sense of purposelessness, the driving force behind the movie, comes from
the fact that he’s a Taxi Driver. Someone who is but a mere tool for people to go from point A to
point B, someone who can’t put any individuality in his work, especially since he doesn’t even own
the cab he drives. Someone who takes orders from his clients, from his bosses, someone for whom,
to his clients and his bosses, is nobody, is a nobody. Bickle knows that. He’s nobody.
So what are your options if you’re Travis Bickle,
a New York Taxi Driver who has little to no interests or passions, little to no education.
What do you do about the fact that you can’t find a purpose?
Well, as I said earlier, you can either abandon and become complacent or,
as alienated workers should do, revolt.
Bickle is not convinced by Wizard’s speech and decides to revolt. However,
there is no goal to his revolt. It’s an aimless revolt.
This revolt gives Bickle purpose. Even though it’s aimless, even if he doesn’t have a goal in mind,
he feels like he can do something, he can have an impact.
What will that impact do? What will it bring? Shooting a politician?
Shooting up a brothel? He doesn’t care as long as it affirms his individuality.
And what is purpose if not that, an affirmation of who you are, the process through which you exist.
And what enables this revolt and its impact? The answer is: Power. Symbolized by the guns,
power is what allows Bickle to affirm his existence, to have an interaction with the world
that actually matters. As a nobody, a taxi driver, an alienated worker, Bickle had no power, he was
a replaceable cog, someone whose individuality was completely stripped from him. With power, however,
he reclaims his individuality. His outburst of violence is a way to break through his
powerlessness, break through his his alienation, break through his invisibility as a nobody.
Bickle was never able to affirm his individuality, to confirm his self through the world,
so he forced this confirmation through a violent interaction with the world. Every bullet he shoots
screams “I’m alive! I’m here! I exist! I can change the world for better or for worse”.
On every street in every city, there's a nobody who dreams of being a somebody.
He's a lonely forgotten man desperate to prove that he's alive.
Bickle wasn’t born a nobody, nobody is born a nobody. People are turned into nobodies through
the erasure of their personality, through the erasure of their identity, through the erasure of
their self when they sell their energy, time and bodies to a boss. When you go to work, 8h a day,
5 days a week, if not more, when you obey your boss, wear the clothes they want you to wear,
use the words they want you to use, smile when they tell you smile, you are not yourself,
you are not free. When the product you make or the service you give is not yours,
when it’s not a reflection of your personality, when you work solely so you don’t starve or get
evicted, when your work’s sole purpose is to make a profit for your boss, your main
interaction with the world, your work, is not a confirmation of your identity, but a denial of it.