Tommaso Pincio

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Like everyone, sometimes I think about Travis Bickle. I think about the moment when Travis turns down the path of no return. He tries to resolve his insomnia by taking a job driving a taxi a night, but it doesn’t help. He tries to confide his thoughts in a coworker, but he fails to make himself understood. He tries to escape his loneliness by inviting a girl on a date, but because he’s a young, maladapted Vietnam veteran who never learned how to live, he takes her to an adult theater to watch porn—probably the only kind of cinema he knows—after which the girl wants nothing more to do with him. In the end, all he has left is the city, nocturnal 1970s New York, a violent place, dirty and crude, “an open sewer” with delinquents and degenerates on every corner and filth that takes Travis by the throat, leaving him with the wish that someone would pull the cord and flush away all the scum.

The young taxi driver comes to what is a very American solution. He buys a gun, actually more than one, an entire arsenal of them, and tries them out in front of the mirror at home. He imagines running into a specimen of that New York scum and pulling out his gun before the hoodlum can lift a finger. This is the moment that, like everyone, I think about sometimes. That moment when Travis looks at the mirror and repeats, three times, “You talkin’ to me?”

According to a list from fifteen years ago, this is the fourth best scene in cinema history, meaning it is a scene that has become part of the popular imagination, a moment that everyone has seen and thought of many times during a conversation or in their own thoughts. I don’t recall exactly when I saw Taxi Driver for the first time. I know it wasn’t when it came out in theaters, because it was 1976 and I wasn’t old enough. But it wasn’t too long after, probably in the early 80s. Since then, the way I’ve thought about that scene has changed, both because I’ve changed, or rather aged, as we all do, and because times have changed. At first, these changes were so slow and imperceptible as to seem irrelevant. It was more a patina that softened that era’s characteristic grittiness, and New York’s image becoming tamer and more gentrified. Until, like that Hemingway character who describes his ruin as gradual and finally abrupt, the moment when Travis says “You talkin’ to me?” evinces a sharp turn, even a U, a complete reversal.

Illustrator Elisa Talentino

In today’s world, the most natural dimension for a moment of this sort to take shape and appear is no longer cinema but social media. In today’s world, it’s much more likely, and in a way more logical, for “You talkin’ to me?” not to refer to a movie scene destined to become iconic—to use an adjective that in the 70s no one would have dreamed of using so casually—but rather a standalone video a few minutes long that in an equally few number of minutes goes viral on Instagram or TikTok, or both. In other words, a post.

To understand that this shift entails much more than a mere substitution of one medium for another, we can simply note the fact that, according to a recent survey, we check our phones every fifteen minutes on average and we spend over two hours a day scrolling disparate content which is largely ephemeral, vapid, and most importantly, not chosen by us but displayed according to algorithms designed specifically to keep us hooked. The old adage “the medium is the message” only offers a partial idea of the epochal sea change that’s underway. What, indeed, is the medium of the day? To believe that we simply moved from one form of entertainment to another, from one medium of expression to another, from feature-length film to minute-long reels, would be naive at best.

The scene and the character in question, the protagonist of Taxi Driver, predate the cinematic medium. The man driven by psychological instability to solitude if not isolation or into a private war against a society he detests or can’t comprehend is a figure that harks back to the mid- nineteenth century with Crime and Punishment. Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov has just about everything in common with Travis Bickle, save the city that repulses him and that he deems repulsive. One lives in St. Petersburg, the other New York. Both are young men who reject the state of things, the way society is headed, which they consider unjust and corrupt. Consumed by angst, nausea for the world, they take up arms and commit symbolic suicide. One murders an elderly pawnbroker, the other a pimp who is exploiting of a young girl. Both, in these acts of vigilante justice, also kill others who happen to be on the scene. That the two characters come to different fates is immaterial. They remain cut from the same cloth, they tell the same story, but most of all they embody the same human type, an anti-hero we could call the underground man, a central figure in modern culture. In fact, in a way the underground man is the modern figure par excellence, the man who goes against the current, the rebel, the anti-bourgeois, the “maudit,” who from Caravaggio on (or rather, since the modern rediscovery of Caravaggio) has marked art, literature, film, and even philosophy, as in Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of the Übermensch.

All this to say that considering the social media post simply as a contemporary means of expression and comparing it to the means used for expression in the past—film, literature, painting—does not begin to encompass the huge shift we are witnessing. Let us turn back to the frequency we all check our screens over the course of a day. That brief fifteen-minute interval is not only incompatible with the media of the past, it is entirely senseless. Watching a movie or reading a novel every fifteen minutes is an impossible action, and if by some absurd way it were not, it would be madness nonetheless. And yet nobody considers it an insanity to interact with a screen multiple times in the space of a single hour. Such a paradoxical observation can be countered by stating that electronic screens have become an artificial extension of our body, an extension that allows us to remain in contact with others and with the world in general by overcoming physical boundaries. That is, that screens allow us to do what we have always done, only on a grander scale, broader and potentially limitless. Therefore, it would be incorrect to compare the reading of a novel with the constant use we make of screens, because we don’t turn to our devices to read a book or watch a movie. At least, not always. Most of the time, when we are looking at a screen, we are communicating something, listening to something, watching something, informing ourselves about something, and so on. To put it simply, we are in touch with the world. Is it not true that even prior to the advent of portable screens human beings were in constant contact with the world and could talk to someone or watch something every fifteen minutes or less?

Such an argument would be a plausible rebuttal if screens were just screens, like the kind from which taxi driver Travis Brickle looked out at us and asked “You talkin’ to me?” Too bad it’s not that simple. The screens we interact with are more than just screens. Before, when we sat in that dark theater, we all knew that, despite looking us in the eyes, Travis wasn’t talking to us, and none of us except the most insane spectator would have dreamed of replying. Meanwhile, if a modern- day Travis posted a video akin to that scene in Taxi Driver, he would receive countless responses, and that would be the presumed and desired outcome.

I’ve expressed myself in a figurative sense, but we needn’t rely on hypotheticals. This is already happening, every day, every hour, every minute. Every second on this planet there is a person speaking into a screen without having anyone in front of them besides their own reflection, and posting a video of that monologue on one or more social media outlets where others will watch it, judge it, and potentially comment on it, either with admiration and support, or with mockery, insults, and threats. This world dawned on a precise date, and that is June 7, 2010, the day that Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone 4, proclaiming it “the biggest leap since the original iPhone.” Many features of that model represented major advances, but one stood to alter the newly-born social networks, Instagram in particular, and the way that humans see each other. I am referring to the advent of the front camera, thanks to which the lens became no longer simply an extension of the eye, an open window on things; now, the lens could be reversed, made into the eye of another, a ghost or a surrogate mirror. It may seem like a trivial Columbus’s egg, but since then, nothing has been as it was before.

Discussions of the front camera’s emergence are typically limited to measuring its role in the advent of the selfie. The most alarmist blame it for the death of photography as a means of representing reality and its transformation into what is known as “post-photography.” That reality has become something “instagrammable,” or in any case something malleable, not to be accepted and represented as is, but adapted, modified, and improved so that it appears more beautiful or evokes positive enough reactions to go viral or generate engagement is not simply a matter of photography, but a Copernican revolution that distorts the value of truth and thus our very sense of existence.

Upon closer inspection, in fact, it is erroneous to say that people check their screens once every fifteen minutes. What they are actually checking is a device that fulfills the function of screen and mirror at once. To think that our phones become mirrors only when we activate the front camera to take a selfie is an illusion. That surrogate mirror is always there, like a ghost in a haunted house, and it manifests in forms that transcend photography, to mathematics, the algorithms that profile us based on what we do with our screen-mirrors in order to present us with content that resembles us better and better, or to be more precise, resembles the perception we have of our selves, because the algorithms act as an additional photo filter, beautifying our image.

Now that we have seen the false mirror on our screen, let’s return to Travis Bickle and his predecessors, from Raskolnikov to Caravaggio to the underground man, but also to men and women in general, men and women from another time, not in profound conflict with society like Travis and similar figures, but everyday men and women, people like us. Let’s try to imagine them looking at themselves in the mirror every fifteen minutes on average the way we do today with our screens. If watching a film or reading a book every fifteen minutes is impossible and senseless even just in theory, looking at oneself in the mirror with the same frequency would certainly be abnormal, unhealthy, but by no means theoretically impossible or fundamentally senseless. Rather than dwell on the sense of it, however, we should ask ourselves what mutations are caused by looking in the mirror every fifteen minutes.

By a perhaps not random coincidence, this is the same duration of the universal fame Andy Warhol prophesied in the same years and in the same city where Travis Bickle drove his cab. “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” So was the Pop Art icon right? Yes and no. Fame is essentially within reach for anyone now, but in a world where ephemeral fame is within everyone’s reach, no one is really famous anymore. Not the way they used to be, at least. In Travis’s world and even more so before him, being famous meant becoming an image, and if there’s one thing that indisputably differentiates us from the people of previous eras is that only a very limited minority of our ancestors became images, and moreover, infrequently, on exceptional occasions. Today, regardless of our level of celebrity, we are all fated to become, or could potentially become, images at any time. This cannot be a situation of no consequence. Homo sapiens, like every other species living on this planet, does not have a reversible eye like the lenses on our telephones. Constantly seeing our own image is an inconceivable experience in nature. For millennia, humans had no images of themselves. They could only imagine themselves, that is, presume their similarity to the other humans in their environment, akin to pets that give the impression of resembling the humans who adopted them. If Travis and his ilk were made to feel different, if they were social outcasts, it was precisely because they had a partial image of themselves. They looked around and, not having a constant reflection of who they were, presumed they were like everyone else. This imagined similarity was a prison for them, because deep down they felt that they were different. They sensed a profound and irreparable difference that led them to rebel, to defy, to lead extreme lives, to view others as a threat.

There is a line in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground which sums up this divide perfectly: “I am alone, and they are everyone.” In the world of front cameras and posts, precisely because we are all images, we have a massive amount of information at our disposal that causes us to see ourselves as more different from other people than we actually are. Which in turn leads us to actions unlike those of Travis and those like him: it leads us to overlook fractures, to seek constant repair, consensus, acceptance. Whether this is bad or good is ultimately an idle question. After all, blaming one’s era has never produced great results. Surely, however, it is crucial to be aware of the extent of this Copernican revolution whereby, even if we’re as alone as Travis Bickle, we want to be like them, like everyone.

Tommaso Pincio
Translated by Jamie Richards