This piece, entitled “Flashbacks: An Auteur Is Born”, is the first chapter in Lawrence S. Friedman’s book The Cinema of Martin Scorsese. The book is a biography of Martin Scorsese that carefully analyzes each portion of his career. A large bulk of the chapter being analyzed, though, does not really play out like a biography. Instead, it examines the auteur theory and applies it to Scorsese and the other directors of his generation. It traces their experience learning about film and the influence of the original class of directors from the French New Wave genre who gave meaning to the term Auteur. In addition to this, Friedman also points out some important elements of Scorsese’s childhood and his experiences at film school that played a role in creating his style, which earns him the title “auteur.” This chapter is relevant because if we want to look at Taxi Driver as a piece of a larger puzzle that represents Scorsese’s career as a director, we must examine what exactly makes Scorsese an Auteur.
    Friedman starts out by explaining the auteur theory. The most famous advocate of this theory, Francois Truffaut, insisted that the director is the only true creator of a film. The director is an artist and each film created by the artist can be identified by certain characteristics that are unique to that director.  Friedman has his doubts about this theory as he considers it to be elitist and somewhat over-exaggerated. However, he believes that in Truffaut’s day, this theory had some truth. However, in the Hollywood era, where people value “repetition above originality”, this theory really does not hold up. However, in the mid 1970s, Friedman cites the materialization “a group of brash young directors whose sudden emergence and revolutionary filmmaking evoked memories of the French nouvelle vague of the late 1950s and early 1960s.” This group includes such directors as Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Brian De Palma, Steven Spielberg, and of course, Martin Scorsese. Friedman considers these men to be auteur as they all “made intensely personal films that bore their sometimes quirky but always unique signatures.” This group of directors attended top film schools such as USC and NYU. At these film schools, the main inspiration for these directors was the French New Wave auteurs such as Truffaut. Friedman goes on to say that the focus on these nouvelle vague films is what created “the urgency” for Scorsese and his classmates to get into the directing game.
     Later on in the chapter, Friedman focus’s more on the elements of Scorsese’s early life that would eventually contribute to his specific cinema style. Growing up in an Italian immigrant culture, religion was an integral part of his childhood. He spent a lot of time in church, studying religion. As he grew up, he formed an intense “love-hate relationship” with the Roman Catholic Church. Scorsese was “turned off by church dogma”, but he remained “under the spell of Catholic ritual and iconography.” This feeling created one of the major elements of his film style. In almost all of his movies, there are religious undertones and tributes to Catholic Traditions. Friedman cites guilt as a major theme in Scorsese’s films that can be traced back to the church.

Lawrence Friedman treats Travis Bickle as the archetypal antihero of all of Scorsese’s films, and looks at and incredibly broad range of literature to find the roots of his character.  For Friedman, Travis “embodies the dictum of Marlow, the narrator of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: ‘We live, as we dream—alone.’”  Friedman’s premise is that Travis must see his loneliness as evidence of a “God-ordained” singularity, so that he is the “avenging angel” on a mission to purge “Sodom and Gomorrah” (i.e. New York City) of its darkness.  Thus, his loneliness transforms from a liability into a “holy calling.”  Friedman argues that this would not be so unsettling if it were treated as aberrant, a case study in “abnormal psychology.”  Rather, it is the commonality of loneliness that makes Travis’s state, though extreme, all too familiar.

Friedman echoes other authors in this respect, but in particular his analysis carries the audience’s identification a step further: the “walking contradiction,” as Betsy puts it, is that Travis is “one of us” through and through, though that is precisely what he struggles to feel – like he belongs to a larger whole.  The implication here is truly paranoia-inducing: none of us belong, or to echo the sentiments of Conrad’s Marlow, we are doomed alienation, and must settle for comforting illusion.  For Travis, that illusion comes in the form of heroic fantasies.  The only real difference between him and us is that he has the courage to act them out.  Furthermore, Travis’s success frighteningly suggests that violence may be the only real solution to societal ills.  In Friedman’s view, his character is essentially engaged in the Hamlet-esque struggle of “to be or not to be:” whether to suffer or take arms against the sea of troubles.