With a peek at Taxi Driver (1976)
[In a sense this follows up my June 8 entry on The King of Comedy. Some of the argument toward the end goes in a direction I’m not entirely comfortable with, but I leave this development as is. A few small edits were also done 6/25/12.]
De Niro’s special talent, and Italian-Americans’ contribution to the cultural table
Last year, maybe in the late winter, real estate mogul Donald Trump made a comment about actor Robert De Niro’s being “not the brightest bulb on the tree” or something similar. The comment was a blunt dismissal as if De Niro was obviously stupid. The spur for this comment doesn’t matter; it is completely uncalled for, and not that De Niro needs any defense from some small quarter like mine, but let me make a few appreciative comments about him that will be a good prelude for a look at two of the movies in which he’s starred.
De Niro might especially give an impression of “not being swift enough” when you hear him in DVD commentary and he seems not very elaborate or sure moment-to-moment in prompted discourse on something related to his work. But to me this reflects that he’s an intuitive artist who is much more adept at delivering his work than in talking about it. I find that sometimes he can be slightly trying to listen to, but he makes the points he needs to. He is somewhat like Paul McCartney, whose remarks, when read on the page (as in the 2000 “autobiography” of The Beatles, published by Chronicle Books), can seem banal or styled with a lot of idioms and roundabout quality yet do not say too much (unlike John Lennon’s, whose comments, often those made in his twenties, can sometimes seem a little jejune but almost always convey machine-gun wit and telling it like it is). But if you listen to McCartney giving a videotaped interview in his later years, his remarks have a subtlety that is demonstrated by the emphasis and other nonverbal expressions he gives: again, he is an intuitive worker who is good at delivering the product, but not so adept at talking about it at a sort of fully educated, academic remove.
De Niro also has a quality as an actor that I should approach from the angle of talking about his ethnicity, which might seem to some like I am straying into explosive territory. In this country, we have become so shy about talking about some aspects of ethnicities, especially regarding some groups who have been subject to more discrimination than others, that we lose opportunities to make genuine and interesting observations. When it comes to the Italians, one of those groups who in the U.S. have their own anti-defamation society, we seem especially on tricky ground. But why should we? Italian-Americans complain about creative depictions of the Mafia—even excoriating Francis Ford Coppola or Martin Scorsese for doing so. But why? Of all the ethnic groups that have had or been involved in organized-crime groups in this country—and this includes, but is not limited to, Irish-Americans and Jews along with Italian-Americans—the Italians were most colorful at it, to judge from even recent examples like John Gotti’s family. Why be mealy-mouthed or evasive about the Mafia aspect to Italian-Americans’ history? We need not imply that it has been all they’ve been about.
Another issue is personality style. I don’t think it’s being prejudicial to say that Italians, among the most celebrated European ethnic groups, are typically the most florid in self-expression—they wear their emotions, positive and not-so, on their sleeves, i.e., they won’t beat around the bush in conveying an emotional side on something of honest importance. From what other ethnic group can we learn so much about this side of self-expression? The Dutch? The Belgians?
When it comes to being an actor, I don’t know firsthand what it means to tap into your deeper emotions to deliver some portrayal of character, whether the character is a psychopath, grippingly conflicted, delightfully comic, or whatever else. But one way to analyze De Niro is to consider theories of personality that come out of psychologist Abraham Maslow and, to some extent, philosophy professor Harry G. Frankfurt. Maslow theorized about a hierarchy of needs, where the more animalistic needs—related to food, sex, and so on—formed the base of a pyramid of levels of needs, and those for our emotional side, intellectual gratification, and so on, were more toward the top. And if the needs on the lower levels were not satisfied or well addressed, those in the upper levels suffered.
Frankfurt said something of the same thing in his theory of weakness of will, expounded in his article, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person” (The Journal of Philosophy [January 14, 1971), vol. 68, no. 1, pp. 5-20). (He is also the author of the less-technical book On Bullshit, published by Princeton University Press, which made a hit and was discussed in the media in 2005; see, e.g., “Between Truth and Lies, an Unprintable Ubiquity,” The New York Times [February 14, 2005], pp. E1, E8.) At the risk of sounding too glib on a philosophic issue—weakness of will—that has concerned major thinkers for centuries, I’ll sum: In his 1971 article, Frankfurt said that a conflict in which we have trouble committing to decision on a course of action (say, a pending decision on an apparently conscious level such as, “Should I reconcile with person X or not?”) could be understood with reference to their being different levels—or different “orders”—on which decisions and conflicts can operate. When there is a conflict of a first-order type, it interferes with resolving a second-order conflict or pending decision.
The first-order decision, let’s say, can operate more in the area of more animal, physical, visceral, or everyday needs. Thus, if this conflict was resolved, the resolution would “resonate” through the levels on which our personality functions, so that the conflict on the higher level, or second order, could also start to resolve. So, the decision on whether to reconcile with person X may depend psychologically on resolving a lower-order problem, such as a visceral, general trouble with relating to certain kinds of people (such as women versus men, or vice versa).
The point regarding De Niro is that what makes him fascinating as an actor—and, among other things, a “master of underplaying,” as actress Cybill Shepherd says in DVD commentary for Taxi Driver—is that he elegantly wields energy from sources of the more animal or strong-emotion parts of the personality—blunt rage, strong regret, despair or sorrow—so that expressions on the more intellectual, verbal level become all the more powerful, evocative, without his needing to spray a lot of fancy-pants words to get the point across. This is something an Italian can do much more easily than someone of ethnic stock that features a lot of reserve or forever-muted emotions. And when you have the talent to convey such emotions, rather than merely being a psychologically broken-down mess, you have an artist sculpting what it means to be human on an emotional level that can serve the interests of a story in terms of what a degenerating psychopath would be like, or how a colorful Mafioso can “be himself” yet also play to the comic needs of a story, and so on.
In the 1970s, De Niro took parts that were supposedly other ethnicities than he is, which of course is Italian. Travis Bickle—the weird name doesn’t help—is someone from the Midwest , though we can’t figure out what kind of ethnicity he has from anything other than De Niro’s style. In The Deer Hunter (1978), De Niro plays a Russian-American veteran of the Vietnam War.
By the 1990s, it’s safe to say that almost always, he plays someone Italian-American, while his personality in this regard has gotten more thickened and obvious—as, I think, people generally get “more like their ethnic background,” if not a stereotype of the same, as they age, anyway. Today, I would say, it seems goofy for Travis Bickle to have been expected to be something other than Italian, especially as some of his more emotional expressions—as in the famous “You talkin’ to me?” scene in front of the mirror—have a “punky-Italian” flavor to them. And more generally, what is delicious about De Niro’s performances, I think, often derives from the Italian style of self-expression he uses.
I. Testament of a breaking-down loner: Taxi Driver (1976): a few remarks
I started reviewing Taxi Driver in the end of my June 8 blog entry. I wrote a ton of notes from my recent viewing of the ~2006 DVD of this film, which I recommend if you are interested in this movie; the extras can flesh out your appreciation of this film considerably. Martin Scorsese comments, in interviews filmed at different times, on the history of the making of this film, as well as its theme and intentions as he understood them. Producer Michael Phillips comments on some background issues; writer Paul Schrader offers insights of a more literary and psychological sort that can be fascinating (he emphasizes that the film is about the pathology of loneliness, and he references Camus’ The Stranger and Sartre’s Nausea, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky). The facts that (1) the script was written from a strong sense of what Schrader wanted to say, and that (2) the production executives who were willing to allow it to be made wanted a success from all the four principals (Scorsese, Schrader, De Niro, and Phillips) before they would green-light the film, and that (3) even in the production it was made cheaply enough that today it would be considered a sort of indie: all these things show how difficult and yet careful the making of this film was, while today it is regarded as a milestone, even if some would find its content rather a strong, almost repellent tonic.
Another notable feature is that this film has the last soundtrack composed by Bernard Herrmann, who died the night of one of the days the score was recorded (though he wasn’t conducting during the recording that day, while he had been the day before). Herrmann, who is remarkable to me for using the “voices” of instruments (along with melody, harmony, and other more theory-oriented aspects of music) to contribute to mood, has perhaps been so associated with “noirish” film classics—such as Citizen Kane (1941), Vertigo (1958), the first Cape Fear (~1961), and so on—that his touches to Taxi Driver (which Scorsese calls a “kind of a noir”) seem essential. Herrmann seems to me one of the few major film scorers, if not the only, who uses muted trumpets as much as he does. And they are heard here, giving their typical “noirish” sound, which conveys a sort of danger, darkness, seediness, to the movie that adds to its confluence of elements that make for a fearsome esthetic experience.
I’ll round out my scattered remarks on this film with a note about the traveling salesman, “Easy Andy,” played by Steve Prince, who sells Travis the set of guns Travis later uses to murder several principals of a bordello at which prostitute Iris, played by Jodie Foster, works. Prince was not an actor but apparently knew whereof he spoke in his business dealings with Travis. He gets done with his interesting Travis in a variety of guns, then, as he packs up, reels off a range of illegal drugs—is Travis interested?—and ends up with a plug for a “brand-new Cadillac, with the pink slip, for two grand”: that strikes me as damned funny.
II. Analyze This: Mafioso to shrink: “I couldn’t get it up last night!”
By the time De Niro played the role of Mafioso Paul Vitti in this 1999 film, he was well established not only for the many roles he’d played—I’ve mentioned just a few of his varied 1970s roles—but for seeming to focus on tough guys, especially in his work for Scorsese, that were resurgent in the 1990s with his role in Goodfellas (1990) and in the less well-esteemed Casino (1995). With Analyze This, critics remarked, I remember, on De Niro’s Paul Vitti as his way of finally being able to poke fun at the tough-guy roles that he’d become so attuned to, and renowned for, playing.
De Niro in the 1970s could sculpt a character that had quiet style and subtleties, even a troubled sort like Travis Bickle, with notes including a wistful/lamenting (as with prostitute Iris) or pausy/laconic/shy flavor (with Betsy, played by Shepherd). This character wasn’t meant to be Italian (nor was the more oddball-styled Rupert Pupkin—him you couldn’t really figure out as to ethnicity at all), but glimmers of De Niro’s Italian personality could come through. By 1999, with Paul Vitti, De Niro knew he could let fly with a strongly Italian-flavored character—because Vitti was a mobster anyway—but De Niro himself, you could say, was more coarsened in personal style, as I’ve said we all tend to get with age.
But the extra challenge—or opportunity—here for De Niro is that Vitti could be a bit swashbuckling in personal style with profanity, peremptory manners, and cutting or otherwise effusive remarks—rather like any gangster De Niro might have played. But this would also fit into a comedy, of a mobster seeking psychological counseling from a psychiatrist, played here by Billy Crystal. So De Niro’s Italianate succinct expressions, making a point with a hard-nosed question, accenting hand gestures, and so on feed into a give-and-take—with Crystal’s more deliberate, intellectual psychiatrist—that can be as much shtick as a genuine exchange. The result—which some (like Leonard Maltin) have suggested is a movie with a one-joke premise, whatever its merits—is still fun, especially for seeing how De Niro carves his way through the phases of this story.
In the DVD commentary, Crystal—who functioned as a producer for the movie, which took some years in development—shows that, while he apparently appreciated De Niro’s performance, he knew after seeing one of De Niro’s performances in an early scene that “TV coverage”—doing alternate takes for a TV version—“would be a problem.” This is because De Niro laid on the profanity thick. But how could he do otherwise with this role? De Niro apparently felt that the mobster should be as close to realistic as possible within the premises of the movie, lest the movie become too much like a sitcom or such. I think he made the right choice, because what keeps the story from getting thin is De Niro’s spicy delivery as a boorish mobster who nevertheless has psychological issues he wants honestly to address with a professional.
Story premises pretty straightforward
The storyline is fairly simple: While a big meeting of the many New York Mafia families is ahead—echoing a famous, real-life 1957 meeting—in order for the Mafia to address its eroding future, Vitti’s good friend Dominic Manetta [sp?], who had been an associate of Vitti’s father, is gunned down outside a restaurant at which Vitti has just met with him. So far, so Godfather-ish. Vitti starts to interrogate little mob players to try to find who killed Dominic. Later, Vitti has what seems like panic attack at a downtown hangout. He goes to the hospital; he apparently is too macho to accept that he had something so wimpy as a “panic attack” instead of what he has interpreted his episode as, a heart attack.
Meanwhile, Crystal’s Dr. Ben Sobel has a respectable enough life in which he rather competes with, and lives in the shadow of, his successful-psychiatrist father (played by TV’s Maude star Bill Macy). On his way to his parents' apartment, he literally runs into a limo driven by two mobsters, one being Jelly, played by Joe Viterelli (the actor died a few years ago); Dr. Sobel leaves Jelly his business card, in case—he doesn’t realize he has run into mobsters—the limo driver wants to confer with him about car-insurance issues. After Vitti has gone to the hospital, he—with Jelly—tracks down Dr. Sobel and wants his help for whatever psychological issue appears to be behind his emergent panic attacks.
The rest of the story mainly has Vitti seeking out Dr. Sobel at different times, for talk about his ongoing acute issues, while Dr. Sobel is in the process of getting married for the second time to a TV reporter, Laura McNamara, played by Lisa Kudrow (whom critics and even director Harold Ramis have said is underused in this film). The interplay between Vitti and Sobel is that of a comedy of a brutish criminal innocently intruding on Sobel’s life for instances of consultations, in a way that is suggestive of Vitti’s lack of sense of personal boundaries as well as also not appreciating the professional channels through which such consultations should be followed. (I find this amusing, having dealt with manic sorts as a support-group “point man” whom some found—rightly in general—was willing to help them out, while these people did not fully understand, or ignored, the boundaries of how and when they should seek help from someone in my position.)
Boundaries, manipulation, and other areas of ethics and manners
The issue of a Mafioso seeking psychological counseling has been criticized before—including what I remember as some real Mafioso’s criticism of The Sopranos for Tony Soprano’s regularly utilizing a (female) psychologist, which that Mafioso said was one unrealistic thing about the show. I think what is off the mark about this possible sort of criticism—with respect to Analyze This—isn’t so much that it may be unrealistic; on the contrary, I think it allows artistic possibilities for looking at the issue of boundaries between two areas that can be seen, in their respective ways, to be matters of (in the abstract) arcane premises, methods, and goals and (in practice) what seems like bullying and self-centeredness: the Mafia and psychiatrists. (I think this is a more tenable viewpoint with respect to psychiatrists than to psychologists, about which I say more below. Unfortunately, I didn’t mean to stray into this area too much.)
Though I would be the first to say that psychiatry—and, even more, psychology—is not simply bullying, but is about helping people with unusual, and sometimes acute and uncanny, types of suffering, it is still true that when a psychiatrist is aggressively on the wrong foot with a client, that professional’s behavior seems for all the world like bullying. So, academically speaking, what might tend to bring out a sort of social interaction where the “dark underside” of an honorable profession seems symbolized in some other, less respected area of endeavor that it interacts with? It would be a Mafia operative, seeking help from a psychiatrist in what seems a crudely self-centered, manners-mashing way: and when the psychiatrist starts getting increasingly impatient with the Mafioso, and can be high-handed or rude with him in his own way, the two very different “professionals” can seem like mirror-images: types of operators that seem all about wanting things done their own way, who can (sometimes) be starkly manipulative and unable to compromise. (The psychiatrist, of course, comes off better in this mess than the Mafioso.)
Obviously, this sort of thing can be only for limited tastes. People with familiarity with psychiatrists—and whose knowledge of the Mafia may be informed by Coppola and Scorsese movies—may find it all an interesting development of a theme. Meanwhile, the areas of psychology (which features mainly talk therapy) and psychiatry (which is practiced by medical doctors, who are able to prescribe medication) have endured changes in how much they are used and publicly respected in recent decades. Crystal’s Dr. Sobel utilizes talking therapy as a case-by-case alternative to medication, which I think was a more common choice among psychiatrists until roughly the point at which the movie was made (in the 1990s) than today; and today, talking therapy seems to enjoy less esteem among the public at large than it had for decades. Today psychopharmacology seems much more commonly aimed for for psychological ills—a complex topic that is reflected in recent media and public focus on the coming DSM 5 (the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which I find it unfortunate to be commonly seen as a standard and definition of all things psychological). All this I cannot do justice to here. In any event, those valuing psychopharmacology over talk therapy may find Dr. Sobel’s talk-therapy school of thought to be quaint or outmoded.
Still others might ask, Why doesn’t Dr. Sobel, after a while, simply call the police and get Paul Vitti out of his life? Why does he want to help him?
Dr. Sobel’s life becomes mired in complexity, though his doctor’s instincts illuminate his way out
Of course, it is Dr. Sobel’s doctorly wish to help a man who is suffering that keeps him on track to help Vitti. That and his being in the dark, as the story proceeds, as to what some of the background to Vitti’s problems are. First, Vitti seals Dr. Sobel’s commitment to him in a comic scene at a hotel bar—with giant fish tank featuring “mermaids” in the background—that starts with Vitti’s initial complaint grounding why he wants a sudden consultation while Dr. Sobel is on vacation: “I couldn’t get it up last night!” Vitti eventually explains why this is a crucial issue for him, in his line of work; and it also starts becoming clear that a special event in two weeks—the “commission” meeting mentioned at the movie’s outset—makes time of the essence for Vitti (e.g., he cannot be having panic attacks at such a meeting).
Dr. Sobel tries to assure his financée Laura that he isn’t really treating Vitti, but his being bound up with Vitti becomes further tightened after FBI operatives appear to Dr. Sobel and require him to wear a wiretap to spy on Vitti because the FBI fears a coming major bloodbath. It is at a restaurant meeting between Sobel, Vitti, and others—which echoes a flavorful scene from The Godfather (Analyze This has a number of allusions to that film and its immediate sequel)—that Sobel starts to understand that Vitti had seen his father murdered in a gangland hit about 30 years before, and that may be the clue to Vitti’s panic attacks.
I’m leaving out observations on other flavorful features of this film, but I think I’ve given enough clues to show how the film marries a somewhat broad comedy with more subtle observations on manners, psychological theory, the way of seeing “the hurt soul under the hard carapace of the tough guy,” and so on that make it an interesting comedy. Billy Crystal in his DVD commentary remarks on an idea that director Billy Wilder had for a film, that he never brought to fruition, that reflects cultural understandings from about 50 years before—a story about a mobster who confides in a psychiatrist (or a psychologist?), and then, because the psychiatrist has been made privy to mob secrets that make him a liability, the mobster has to kill the psychiatrist, or such. Something of the same “professional conflict” comes up in this film, in a scene where Vitti seems on the cusp of shooting Dr. Sobel, with performances made more serious to meet the subtle demands of the story.
