Let's talk about DeNiro's characters in Scorsese films (open spoilers likely)

Cafe Society
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(Spoilers welcomed - don’t bother with spoiler tags)

During a recent bout with broncho-pneumonia, I decided to watch some movies that I’ve heard a lot about but had never got around to seeing. I chose Scorsese’s Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull. I found each of them very interesting, but something about each movie left me extremely puzzled. In all cases, it was the DeNiro characters. I don’t understand what I’m supposed to take away from these portrayals.

In Mean Streets, DeNiro plays Johnny Boy, the best friend of the main characters (a low-level mobster played by Harvey Keitel). Johnny Boy, a habitual gambler, has borrowed money from a lot of shady characters and seems completely reckless in his dealings with them. In the end, of course, it gets him killed.

I understand what the character issues are with Charlie (Keitel) – Scorsese is using him to show us someone who is conflicted about his life and profession on the one hand and his religion and moral beliefs on the other.

But what’s with Johnny Boy? Other than showing us someone with apparently no self-reflection at all, what are we supposed to think about him – other than that he might be brain damaged as a result of childhood abuse?

Moving on to Taxi Driver, DeNiro plays Travis Bickle, the title character, who has a hard time relating to people normally and who is obsessed with the “filth” he sees on the streets of New York. His social tone-deafness is illustrated by his taking Cybill Shepherd on a date to a dirty movie.

Frustrated, apparently, with not being able to score a hot chick and with seeing so much of what he considers degredation on the streets, Bickle decides to become a hero by saving a teen-ager (Jodie Foster) from her life as a prostitute. So Bickle prepares a military-style assault with some cool gadgets (including one built from the slider of a dresser drawer) and kills Foster’s pimp (Harvey Keitel again) and another thug. At the end, it seems that Bickle has become some kind of Bernie Goetz-type hero and even Cybill Shepherd looks upon him with kind of a newfound respect.

What’s supposed to be the lesson here? That sometimes all it takes is a brutal bloody shooting rampage based on marginal-at-best reasoning in order for someone to take his place as a functioning member of society? Was his shooting spree all it took for Bickle to feel comfortable with himself and his place in the social order? What the freak is up with that?

Now let’s turn to Raging Bull, in which DeNiro plays the real-life boxer Jake La Motta. Jake is so full of blind lust and rage that he is unable to see that anyone else around him might be operating with any other motives or desires. Eventually, he beats up everyone, including his wife and his brother (Joe Pesci), and then decides to go into stand-up comedy (which apparently really happened!).

So what am I supposed to think about La Motta? He seems awfully like Johnny Boy in that he seems to have some kind of mental defect that prevents him from interacting normally with other people.

So what am I supposed to think about these characters? Scorsese seems to have gone through a lot of trouble making carefully crafted stories about these guys, so apparently he think there’s something interesting or revealing about them. But all I can see is that here is a group of guys who are really seriously mentally defective and we would probably all be better off if they were removed from society. What am I missing?

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I don’t think we are supposed get any sort of lesson from these characters. These are studies of people from the seedier side of life. The kind of damaged characters that one might find out on the streets.

Scorsese decided to break from the usual character types hollywood films had and show a grittier reality based on his experiences. These are characters from the streets that are damaged and flawed. I think these are just character studies, not to explain them or teach us anything but just to observe.
These films give them a voice, which is as disturbibng as it is different.

Johnny Boy is a compulsive gambler and acts like many of these types always looking for the next sure thing while digging themselves deeper and deeper.

Bickle is the angry loner, the misfit. I’m sure at one time or another we have all had a run in with someone who was so odd they just stood out. These tuypes who don’t seem to have any real social skills, and yet they still try and fake their way through.
Bickle is that guy.

La Motta is a guy who comes up from the streets has a chance to make it big but is hampered by his own weaknesses from his background and character flaws.

These aren’t the stories of good triumphing over evil, or someone overcoming adversity and growing. These are people who, like many of us, don’t always learn from their mistakes, or win in the end.

They also offer a sense of facination because they come from a life many of us don’t know anything about.

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I never understood why Travis Bickel wasn’t arrested and sent to the pokey instead of being made a hero.

He shoots a pimp. Sure, the pimp was a seedy character and had an underage prostitute, that’s no reason to kill him. Then he shoots the hotel guy. Then he shoots the john.

Unless Iris later claimed these 3 guys had kidnapped her, there’d be no cause to shoot them. Even then I’m not sure you could just kill 3 alleged kidnappers and get off scot free, much less be made a hero.

After he becomes a hero, he’d be extra lucky that the secret service guy never made the connection, especially since he was already known at the campaign HQ.

Just never made sense to me, but I liked the movie otherwise. It should have ended in the hotel room, with Betsy maybe looking a newspaper clip later and barely smiling or something.

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I’m not necessarily looking for a “lesson,” perhaps, but I’m trying to figure out what reaction I’m supposed to have, and, also why Scorsese thought these guys were interesting. If it’s the case that the only thing to know about them is that they are “deeply damaged,” well, that’s not really very interesting to me. I want something more. Deeply damaged in what way? What are the potential causes? Is there anything else to them besides their damage? I want to be able to get some kind of understanding, but just knowing “deeply damaged” doesn’t really give me the basis for much empathy.

But it seems to me that – at least in the case of Bickle and La Motta – there is some degree of success. At the end of Taxi Driver, Bickle seems to have earned a cult hero status of some kind. But I don’t get a clear idea of what Scorsese is trying to say? Is this meant as a satire of our society?

And La Motta does have an extraordinary degree of success – he rises in his profession much more that most of us will. It didn’t seem to me that his personal problems hampered him as a boxer – just the opposite, really. And if you can call his jail sentence the downfall – he went to jail for admitting an underaged girl to his club and introducing her to some guys – that doesn’t seem like the kind of mistake that could be limited to a person with La Motta’s flaws. A lot of guys could – and probably have – done something like that.

This is true, but it seems to me that there’s a lot missing from the picture. As I said, I get a pretty clear idea of Charlie’s world, but Johnny Boy, not so much.

And we sure don’t get a very clear idea about Travis Bickle and what brought him to this stage of his life. Is he suffering from PTSD?

Oh, and as an aside – does anyone know if Teresa survived at the end of Mean Streets?

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The end sequence in Taxi Driver is a dream sequence (possibly his dying thoughts as he bleeds out from his wounds). Bickle, by virtue of finally acting out against the “whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal,” even though his means of taking action would be viewed as atavistic by most of society.

The common thread of all of these characters is that they are somehow detached from normal society, and irrevocably flawed, preventing them from ever forming good relationships. Johnny Boy doesn’t really care, but both Bickle and La Motta try to transcend their environments, but their means of doing so are even more depraved than what surrounds them. Bickle does his best to impress the girl–puts on his best jacket, tries to talk her up with witty dialogue, takes her to a movie–but he fails because he doesn’t understand what good communication (and appropriate date movie selections) are. La Motta is just a brutal animal; he wants the angelic wife, the dream home, the beautiful kids, but doesn’t know what to do with them when he has them; he knows he’s not good enough, and so engages in self-destruction (literally, after he’s arrested for sleeping with a minor).

Scorsese isn’t trying to offer any life lessons or clean resolutions. He’s making observations about the life that he came from and the sort of people he knew, and more personally, the impulses within him (and many people) that drive him to do things that are wrong or nonsensical; and there’s no way to get away from this, no way to pay it off. As the main character in Mean Streets says, “You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.” Keitel holds his hand over a candle, or puts a lit match out with his fingers, just as he keeps protecting Johnny Boy. Why? It’s his penance; whatever he does will never be enough, and it will ultimately be his undoing.

These are all great films, by the way–IMHO, Raging Bull is his best–but not easy to watch, and not readily entertaining like Goodfellas (excellent) or The Aviator (mediocre). Now that he’s won his long-denied hood ornament from the Academy, maybe he can go back to making films like this.

Stranger

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I didn’t get the impression that that’s what he was charged with. My understanding was that he contributed to the (whatever) of a minor by letting her into his club and then introducing her to a bunch of people with whom she (might have) slept with. Maybe I missed something.

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Charlie is the main character in Mean Streets so it would make sense that we would know more about him than Johnny Boy who’s a supporting character. Aside from that, I got the impression that Johnny was basically somebody who never advanced emotionally and intellectually beyond age 14. I’m sure many of us know people like that. They can’t hold on to jobs, thoughtlessly run up debts, and do a lot of impulsive and stupid things without having any hint of their likely consequences. They also often repay the well-meaning family members and friends who try to help by getting them into trouble.

Travis was a Vietnam vet and we’re led to believe that his experiences during the war played a major role in warping him psychologically.

I believe there was a brief shot at the end where we see Teresa being assisted out of the car by paramedics. (Incidentally, in the original script for Mean Streets, Teresa doesn’t join Charlie and Johnny in their ill-fated ride and there’s an additional scene at end where Charlie’s friends sneak him out of the neighborhood and leave him at the airport. The lost shot has Charlie looking at the flight directory and deciding where to go.)

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They’re interesting (to Scorsese, anyway) because they’re flawed in ways that they can’t overcome, and the angst of these flaws drives them deeper into trouble.

La Motta’s downfall (or the beginning of it) was when he beat up his brother (effectively driving him away), and was complete when his wife leaves him. He doesn’t understand why he does these things or feels so paranoid–which stems from his insecurity at not being manly enough–but his reaction is to just get more violent, ultimately doing violence onto himself for lack of anyone left to beat up on. His senseless destruction of his title belt to pull the almost worthless jewels out illustrates his ignorance and wanton destructiveness; he doesn’t even know what he has when he has it.

Bickle might have PSTD (we know that he’s been a Marine, and presumable gone over to The Bad Place) but that’s hardly the start of it. In the beginning of the film, he’s a more or less average guy who just doesn’t have any friends, can’t sleep, and lives in a shitty Manhattan studio, i.e. your typical New Yorker. He doesn’t seem to have an interest in guns or violence, and in fact at first recoils at the notion of buying a gun for protection. His first act of real violence–shooting a robber–seems almost an accident, and he’s almost apologetic about it, even as the store owner is brutally beating on the unconcious or dead robber. His most intimate conversation in the film–or at least, the person who is most revealing to him, who solicits his interest–is with a man (played by Scorsese) who is going to his adulterous wife and describes what he’s going to do in graphic detail. He tries to connect with other people–Betsy, Iris, The Wizard–but that only succeeds in making him feel more isolated, as if he has no connection or influence. His talk with Peter Boyle, where The Wizard offers him meaningless platitudes in response to his appeal for help from “these bad ideas in my head,” is the breaking point. He asks for help, and finds that none is to be had; if he’s going to fix anything, he has to do it on his own, by the means he knows.

Diagnosing his pathology as PSTD is reductionist; he might have seen some bad stuff in the service, but he was almost certainly detached long before. Note how he sends letters to his parents (in which he lies, meaninglessly, about his job as a federal agent that he can’t talk about) but never reads one from them himself. Either they don’t write him, or whatever they write to him is equally meaningless and unworthy of narrating. There’s no easy lesson or moral here, except that it’s hard to make connections, and even harder when you don’t have any to start with.

Stranger

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Really? That one got by me.

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This, of course, is a possible interpretation, but one I’ve never heard supported by Scorsese, De Niro, or writer Paul Schrader.

The “hero” coda is an ironic one. The world sees Bickle as a hero, but we know that he’s not. Society will valorize violent impulses when they’re meted out on “scum”, but we know his victims were ones of access and convenience, not of a singularly higher moral purpose (except in his own twisted idea of rescuing Ivy). Even someone who “knows” him (Betsy) is willing to reassess her view of him because of his “heroism”.

My suspicion was that he was in the hospital for a while, and during that time, the drama of Ivy’s story and her reunion with her parents was fodder for the local tabloid press. By the time De Niro’s injuries had healed, he had a major component of the city on his side for doing the “decent” thing (in a primal, wish-fulfillment type of way), and because nobody would be mourning the 3 that he killed (“they had it coming”), it would’ve been politically unsound to press charges. It’d be easier just to release him and let the incident and furor fade away in people’s minds.

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My understanding was that he hides his whereabouts from his parents, and so they are unable to communicate with him.

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After the mess: the taxi driver is found in the sofa and the blood, he is pointing his finger to his head, and going ‘poof’… as if he kills himself.

Then the eye of the viewer goes up in the roof, and sails away as if the soul was leaving the body.

Then everything is back to normal. But the taxi driver is a hero. They call him The Killer. He drives his loved one home. But suddenly, the taxi driver sees himself in the mirror and -

The End
These scenes have had some to speculate that the taxi driver actually dies during the shoot out. Not too far fetched, and an interesting thought.

[Edit: Typos.]

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It’s a minority opinion.

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If you say so. It seems pretty obvious to me; it fulfills Bickle’s hero fantasies (including the previously unobtainable Betsy’s worship), and in the end scene he doesn’t appear to be scarred, nor does anyone treat him differently. Are we really supposed to believe that he goes on a shooting spree and Betsy falls for him?

Stranger

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Strange I see Bickle a little differently. He was tracking the politician to kill him. When he got thwarted he killed the OTHER pimp. They were interchangeable.

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My memory may be a bit rusty, but doesn’t Mean Streets open with Super-8 like footage of a home movie. It features all 3 characters that go on the car ride in the end. IIRC, it looks like she and Charlie have gotten married and are moving in to their home. She’s also pregnant. So I took it that all 3 survived the car crash.

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I’m reviving this old thread because I just came across this interview with Paul Schrader

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the Goodfellas scene late at night with Tommy’s mother (played by Scoreses mother) and the painting was all adlib except the painting. And that was based on a real painting. Really good scene.

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Nobody mentioned the most astonishing scene in any of these three filmw, indeed one of the most astonishing scenes in any movie - De Niro’s “Are you talking to me” scene in Taxi Driver.

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I’m going to have to disagree with the OP on a couple of points.

I actually found the characters like Johnny Boy and Travis Bickle very interesting (I’ve never seen Raging Bull), because they remind me so much of the people I grew up with in those silly, fucked-up backwater towns. At an age when most people are getting to the next part of their lives, finding careers, starting families, and settling into adulthood, these people are severely damaged and hopelessly alienated. That’s always kind of fascinated me. I’ve always asked myself what makes those people tick. What would it be like to be those people for a day? What would they call a normal afternoon? Was it abuse? Physical, psychological, or sexual? Was it drugs and alcohol? Probably. I learned three things at a very early age just looking at these people:

  1. Don’t drink too much.
  2. Don’t even touch drugs.
  3. Yes, marijuana is a drug.

Would Johnny Boy or Travis Bickle be that much worse off in prison? Personally, I think they’d kind of enjoy it. Prison life couldn’t be any worse than their life on the streets. I mean, it wasn’t like Bickle was getting laid outside of prison, was he? Scorsese was the master of forming that character, and DeNiro was the master of bringing it to life.