Vigilantes in Modern Cinema:
Dirty Harry and Taxi Driver The focus of this paper will be the vague distinctions presented between the criminal and the vigilante through an examination and comparison of the films Dirty Harry and Taxi Driver. The inquiry will be concentrated on a character analysis of the Dirty Harry's protagonist, Harry Callahan, antagonist, Scorpio, and Taxi Driver's (anti)hero Travis Bickle. These three characters will be reviewed in their relationship to violence, justice, and purpose. To start, I must admit that the film Dirty Harry struck me as terribly unrealistic. Harry Callahan and Scorpio appeared so absurd simply because they were so incredibly unambiguous, a quality that made the film smack of propaganda. The production crew of Dirty Harry did almost all the thinking for the viewer. At no point in the film would any rational viewer have condoned the actions of Scorpio or condemned Dirty Harry for doing his utmost to stop this incredibly perverse criminal. This was an exceedingly underhanded ploy that exploited the viewer's sense of righteous indignation by concocting exceptional situations where any abuse of jurisprudence could be easily pardoned by the spectator. After recognizing the very obvious fact that Scorpio is the archetypal “bad-guy” one cannot help but notice his doubtful persona. First he kills a woman swimming on a roof-top pool, why? Perhaps she was wealthy, he was making a political statement. Only Harry discovers his note wherein he demands money from the city. Improbable, but okay, his motive is economic. But rather than working with the mayor (who had indicated his cooperation in the classifieds) he kills a young black boy. This happened right after his attempt to murder a gay couple was foiled. This villain has become very complex: a racist homophobic hippie with sniper rifle training, psychotic in his demeanor yet competent enough to hatch ever more convoluted extortion schemes. What is the film saying about the mass-murderer? That they are very unique individuals? I won't even chalk this farce up to bad story writing because it appears rather intentional to me. What was seemingly being expressed was that every criminal shares a common perverse seed and the only way to deal with these outlaws is with a .44 Magnum. This is where Harry Callahan comes in. Dirty Harry is a man who was described by an associate to “hate everyone equally”, which is precisely why he needs a larger gun than standard police issue. We immediately see how Callahan is such a boon to public safety when he thwarts a bank robbery. By firing his hand-cannon from long distance into a crowded street he succeeds in killing the fleeing getaway driver and only maiming a robber who fired upon him, who is spared simply because Harry ran out of bullets. Dirty Harry is always being hassled by laws and rights which are clearly only a nuisance because they prevent him from apprehending a psychotic moron. Scorpio even manages to evade capture when Harry follows an astute hunch that Scorpio would return to the same rooftop from where he had shot a child the previous night. I'm not sure what is more ridiculous , Harry's reasoning that Scorpio would return to that roof “because it was open”, or the fact that Scorpio actually showed up! However the movie ended in the way everyone knew it would from the beginning, Harry got his man. After firing his .44 at a child he was able to wing Scorpio and then egg him on until he could justifiably kill him (the one action that hardly anybody believed required further justification). Harry then realized that he was a complete menace to society and in a symbolic gesture he threw his badge away (which he would retrieve to make sequels). Perhaps I watched the film too critically, I may have been able to enjoy it had I viewed it simply as a vehicle for Eastwood badassery. Far from the zany antics of Scorpio and Dirty Harry is the complicated desolation of Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. This film does not offer the simple portrayal of the vigilante as a martyr of justice, but rather as a man following his own myopic sense justice to a point beyond the law; a figure that is, by this definition, a criminal himself. Taxi Driver solidly depicts of the mean streets of the 1970's, unlike the flat representation offered in Dirty Harry. Both films offer a disenchanted perspective of the counter-culture of the period, but Taxi Driver allows the viewer to see how the aspect it provides is purely superficial. We see both sides of Sport, first as the hustling pimp turning young girls into prostitutes, then later as the romantic bohemian to manipulate Iris. In Dirty Harry We only see the counter-culture represented by Scorpio and the seedy places he lurks through. Also the presentation of government affairs and American idealism is much more sophisticated in Taxi Driver. Palantine's campaign complements the reality of the streets by its total estrangement. This is completely different from the paternal concern for the population displayed in the mayoral office of Harry Callahan's San Francisco. The former offers an explanation for the depravity of the streets, while the latter regards it as something purely incidental. It is a dismal realism that is presented through the cab windows of a disaffected taxi driver on a blundering existential journey. Travis Bickle experiences the degeneracy of street culture from his isolated vantage point. His life is a constant recurrence of sights and sounds that harden him into a paranoid misanthrope. This utter hopelessness fractures his sense of reality between the crude hustler ethics of the street which he abhors and a sense of purity he observes from a distance in the idealism of bourgeois society. This schism drives him to a sense of purpose, that he must do something to become “a person like other people”, to belong, to be respected, to be loved. After another failure to connect (such failures we may assume have prevailed throughout his solitary life), Bickle snaps into the thought that such despair is something orchestrated, and decides to take revenge on the man selling false hope “like mouthwash”. This evolution of the political assassin may appear to be full of naivete on the part of Bickle, but that is not the point. What is highlighted in the film is how the estrangement so characteristic of modern society nurtures and provokes misanthropy and indiscriminate violence. Bickle's narrow sense of reality allows him to make rash assumptions about the order of the world, and feed delusions that he has been singled out in a fixed game. Unfortunately, Bickle was not singled out. Society spits out malcontents like Bickle every day. This issue has clearly not gone away, as the number of mass-shootings rise every year the question of Travis Bickle becomes more troubling. This matter will never be resolved by Dirty Harry and his police state, such a solution will do little more than widen the fractures running through society and its people. The simplest answer always seems to come from a gun, the last thing we should be doing is offering this idea as a societal virtue.