CHAPTER 11

THE NOCTURNAL FLANEUR

In his poem, “Evening Twilight” (1861), Charles Baudelaire calls the waning of daylight that transforms humans into restless beasts a “friend of all criminals,” who “like an accomplice sneaks up on you softly on wolf’s paws.” The beginning of the evening gives comfort and relief only to those who have accomplished their day’s work, such as the persistent scholar and the exhausted day laborer. As daylight grows darker, immoral demons awake, setting out on their secret passages to besiege the city with their shady activities. For Baudelaire these include prostitutes, actresses, musicians, gamblers, con men, and thieves. Speaking to the fatality inscribed in the urban nights of modernity, he suggests that in this grave hour the soul should collect itself and close its ear to the restless bustle outside. During twilight the pain of patients lying in their hospital beds grows worse. Darkness seizes them by the throat and they have a foreboding of their eternal night, of that “abyss common to all.” Their sighs tell us something else about the fascinating, if also horrifying night that descends on Baudelaire’s Paris: “More and more people no longer come back in the evening to eat their fragrant soup, at the fireside, next to a beloved soul.” The nocturnal flaneurs who stroll along the city streets after nightfall are no longer an exception. Most of them have never known the sweet comfort of home, sheltering them from the night.

Baudelaire enthusiastically celebrates the night as a privileged site of transgression, and discovers in the nocturnal flaneur a specific modern, urban subjectivity. Wandering homeless through the illuminated streets, this flaneur embodies the fact that a particular aspect of bourgeois everyday culture—the night spent with family in the protection of one’s home—was rapidly becoming if not invalid, then at least no longer the norm. The implementation of street lights in the mid-eighteenth century increasingly transformed the urban night and its entertainments into a countersite to the workday, which was to become as relevant for the cultural imaginary as the moonlit landscape, the enchanted forest, or the festively illuminated ballroom. In Eugene Sue’s Mysteries of Paris (1842), Paris at night transforms into a scene and backdrop for a plethora of city stories that fatefully entangle shady aristocrats, illegitimate children, criminals, ex-convicts, beggars, and prostitutes. In G.W. Pabst’s film Pandora’s Box (1929), the serial killer Jack the Ripper poses a threat to women who walk the alleys of Whitechapel unattended and ends up killing the alluring femme fatale Lulu, whereas in Fritz Lang’s M (1931), the criminals of Berlin join forces at night to hunt down the man who has been killing children on their streets. If, in the course of the nineteenth century, the nocturnal city as the privileged scene for the workings of evil thus actually replaces the gothic forest of romantic imagination, it also emerges as the site in which the Salvation Army and other missionaries appear, hoping to save sinners from their immorality.

The network of nocturnal scenes, illuminated by artificial light, renders visible a different map of the city than the cityscape experienced by day. It exposes our gaze to the limitless freedom of the bohemia, staged by Baz Luhrman in Moulin Rouge! (2001) as a postmodern collage of citations. In this urban countersite to the everyday, penniless students meet up with destitute artists in seedy nightclubs, indulging themselves in alcohol and gambling, or falling in love with singers, dancers, and showgirls who dazzle there. In the literature and films revolving around the modern urban night we find nocturnal enthusiasts who are willing to risk everything in the hope of breaking into the world of entertainment or finally being discovered as an artist. Then again, factory and office workers merely seek out bars, restaurants, and shows after nightfall to sample a different side of life from the routine of their workplace. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch has argued, by the middle of the nineteenth century, Baroque night culture has reached its acme. The amusement parks and brightly lit boulevards of the inner city of Paris imitate the aristocratic festive culture and the theatricalities and fireworks lavishly put on display at the royal court. After the French Revolution, theater performances were relegated to the late evening, usually followed by supper or a visit to a casino, ball, or brothel. With the evening entertainment ending around three in the morning, the night enthusiast would often find himself crossing paths with the workers of the first day shift. Electric lighting, Schivelbusch argues, thus transformed the Parisian boulevards into open spaces of intimacy, rendering the interior into an outdoors. The artificial illumination drew attention to the way music halls, theaters, restaurants, hotels, and department stores had become public places of retreat.

Faced with the sea of lights in front of the window of her Grand Hotel, Greta Garbo’s Communist commissar in Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939) comes to realize that the urban night not only harbors crime, but also a life of luxury and unlimited pleasure. After nightfall, the inhabitants of the city become less restrained; they are more willing to transgress strict moral codes. A modern version of the struggle between good and evil unfolds. Replacing the ghosts, witches, and demons of gothic culture, we find an array of night enthusiasts whose movements in and through a cityscape altered by darkness allow us to recognize interconnections that are invisible during the day because they are rendered visible only in artificial illumination. Since the early modern period, the night, conceived as a terra incognita, had of course already been sporadically illuminated so that illegal activities conducted under the cover of darkness (such as the clandestine acts of Shakespeare’s lovers), could better be observed and controlled. In the course of the nineteenth century, the increased dissemination of artificial light along with a social sanctioning of night labor made the time after nightfall resemble daily life even more closely. And yet, in the cultural imaginary, the time between dusk and dawn remained a stage and state of mind mirroring and contesting the ordinary everyday. The modern subject, exposing itself to the nocturnal cityscape, encounters a world cast in a more diffuse light than by day and thus it is a more condensed world in terms of the imaginary potential it might harbor.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, the rhetorics of doubling, which informs the psychic battle played through in gothic texts, also inscribes itself into representations of nocturnal cityscapes. Fascination and fear are once more enmeshed. Joachim Schlör has illustrated how the nightlife in the modern city, although enticing with its promise of permissive pleasures of all sorts, constitutes a dangerous allure. Compared to the day, life on the nocturnal streets is less orderly and potentially always unsafe. The intoxication one can experience there may excite, but can equally terrify. Going into the night may offer opportunities for taking risks. The temptation to act out forbidden pleasures may lead to unexpected companionships, but also to radical solitude. Above all, the modern urban night is still ruled by a distinction between those who are sound asleep in their beds and the evil night enthusiasts who, since the early modern period of Shakespeare, determine life after nightfall. Both the nocturnal flaneur and the people he encounters are aligned with a degree of immorality, even if (or precisely because) any passage through the city is freer at night than during the day. If the urban nightscape emerges as a condensation of uninhibited violence and sensual delirium, moral depravity and freedom, it also calls forth emotions in people who do not return to the security of their home (or leave it soon after dinner) that only rarely find expression during the day. The passage through the urban nightscape may reanimate feelings long thought lost or awaken memories. It can lead to the discovery of hidden possibilities, to the unfolding of fantasies. Yet walking into the urban night may also unfurl an anxiety veering toward a self-expenditure that makes a return to the day difficult if not impossible.

Such an encounter entails a passage into a social underworld offering a modern rendition of a journey to Hades, an enchanted forest, or the nocturnal wilderness. It is also tantamount to an experience of the uncanny, which renders the familiar world strange because it stands under the sign of repressed desires and anxieties. To presuppose a correspondence between the nocturnal city and the psychic condition of the night enthusiast draws attention to a decisive analogy. To engage with the strangeness of nocturnal urban life also means engaging the foreignness within oneself. The nocturnal cityscape reflects the psychic condition of the one who journeys along its passages. The flaneur may find himself less inhibited as he moves restlessly through the artificially illuminated streets. And yet, because this unencumbered movement goes in tandem with the disintegration of all the certainties structuring the everyday and leads to a radical self-doubt, the question at issue is: Can the flaneur wake into a new day? Does he dissipate completely in the strangeness the urban night encompasses for him? Or does he merely tarry in the interspace between pure psychic nocturnality of madness and pure diurnal reason, constantly vigilant and on guard?

This chapter argues that stories about nocturnal flaneurs play through precisely the train of thought (qua mental passage) that Descartes puts on display in the first of his Meditations. These too trace a reverse cosmogony, exposing the entire world to a radical doubt that threatens to undo everything that has so far taken shape, until nothing is certain. The stories take their lead from Descartes’s proposition that the subject can know what in its essence it is, by abandoning itself to radical doubt. In his Meditations, Descartes’s intellectual dissolution of the world transforms into evidence of the subject’s existence when he claims “cogito ergo sum,” allowing the thinking of the subject to constitute itself on a secure and certain grounding. The flaneur’s passage through the urban nightscape, in turn, plays through a possibility Descartes rejects, as though to state “erro ergo sum” (I wander, therefore I am). The only certainty that opens up to the modern subject, once it is willing to put everything it encounters into doubt, consists in the following claim: Although nothing is certain, the nothingness that one attains at the end of the night, however, is.

Thus, in the stories discussed in this chapter, all of which revolve around a nocturnal flaneur, there is at stake nothing less than a rescue from radical skepticism, which in gothic texts threatens to deprive the subject of any basis for self-certainty, any grounds for self-justification. The nocturnal flaneur embarks on a different escape route from radical doubt than the one offered by Descartes’s assertion, “I think, therefore I am.” Caught between pure doubt and pure certainty, the nocturnal flaneur experiences a dissolution of the world that allows him to discern the nothingness at the heart of his self, yet in such a way that this discovery serves as viable grounds qua justification for modern subjectivity. Between the psychic nocturnality in which so many gothic texts culminate on the one hand and, on the other, the fatality that (as shown in greater detail in the next chapter) claustrophobically engulfs the world of film noir, the narratives discussed in this chapter embody a double meaning of freedom. To traverse the urban night without restraint means to arrive both everywhere and nowhere. It entails losing oneself or resolutely falling back on the claim that because one can think one’s way out of all nocturnal self-mirroring, one must exist.

The experience of the modern city, as Walter Benjamin claimed, is fundamentally informed by the shock of anonymity and inscrutability. At the same time, it draws its charm from the fascinating allure of forces that, although operating clandestinely, manifest themselves in the shape of a seemingly infinite network of meaningful traces to be deciphered by the flaneur. The nocturnal side of the modern city ups the ante on this hermeneutic challenge, in that chance encounters promise to lead the flaneur to a deeply buried meaning. To him, the nocturnal cityscape not only appears as an aggregate of ambiguous clues to be deciphered. The mystery of the dark city triggers the curiosity of the flaneur, and concomitant with it the promise that its secret might be unveiled, thereby disclosing the kernel of the fantasy that drove him from the safety of his home onto the streets in the first place. These forays in the city after nightfall render intelligible something about the readability of modern subjectivity. They touch less, however, on the question of whether it should be read, but instead whether its deepest, most clandestine layers can be read at all.

Like all the other terrae incognitae discovered since early modernity on the map of what is knowable—the feminine, the ethnic other—the night, in its enmeshment with the unconscious, must remain impenetrable to a certain degree. Only then can the project of Enlightenment, seeking to bring light into the deepest, darkest regions of knowledge, achieve its justification. Only then do those who seek to decipher the clues the night leaves behind attain their legitimacy. In Poe’s tale, “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), we find the writer exploring the unexplored zones of the city of London with his anthropological eye. In Arthur Schnitzler’s “Dream Story” (1925), we follow a Viennese doctor as he sets out to examine the dark areas on the map of psychic and physical suffering. Finally, in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), we ride with a New York City war veteran who glides through the night from one fascinating danger to the next in his mobile vehicle, resiliently self-reliant and yet utterly exposed to the infinity of the urban night.

TRACKING THE FACE OF THE URBAN NIGHT

For the narrator of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd,” the nocturnal city reveals the shock of what is unfathomable. He introduces the uncanny representation of his immersion into London’s dark mysteries with the description of a certain German book: “‘er lasst sich nicht lesen’—it does not permit itself to be read.” As a first image of that which remains unreadable, Poe offers the scene of an invalid, wringing at night with a spectral confessor figure, only to die in his bed in a state of utter desperation, “on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed” (388). From this scene, which Charles Baudelaire picks up on in his poem “Evening Twilight,” the narrator moves seamlessly to a description of his own night walks, even while foregrounding the similarity between his own situation and that of the man who takes his guilty knowledge with him to his grave. On the autumn evening when he decides to enter a coffee house in London, he has just risen from his own bed after a long period of illness. Convalescence has compelled him to leave the comfort of his own rooms, and his returning strength has placed him into a state of intense alertness, elevating his senses beyond their everyday capacities. He finds himself in “one of those happy moods which are so precisely the converse of ennui—moods of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental image departs (…) and the intellect, electrified, surpasses as greatly its everyday condition, as does the vivid yet candid reason of Leibnitz, the mad and flimsy rhetoric of Gorgias” (388).

The arrival of the nocturnal cityscape, which he initially observes through the window of the coffee house, offers a perfect backdrop for his hypersensitivity. With calm but inquisitive interest he follows the hustle and bustle on one of the principal thoroughfares of the city. At first, the throng momentarily increases with the onset of darkness, allowing him to distinguish “two dense and continuous tides of population” and because this “tumultuous sea of human heads” represents a “delicious novelty of emotion” (389) for him, command his entire attention. Like a camera, he perceives the crowd moving back and forth before his eyes as an abstract structure. Then he directs his attention to individual details. In the manner of an urban anthropologist, he starts to catalogue the “innumerable varieties of figure, dress, gait, visage, and expression of countenance” (388). Like the impartial eye of a camera, he regards the crowd moving back and forth in front of him as an abstract formation. Descending “the scale of what is termed gentility” (134), he divides up the seemingly anonymous mass of pedestrians into groups distinguished by external appearance: the tribe of clerks, the pickpockets, the gamblers and dandies, the Jew peddlers, the invalids, the prostitutes, the drunkards, the chimneysweeps, the organ grinders, and the ballad mongers, ascribing to each a fixed place on the map of urban nocturnality he is constructing. Amid the loud bustle, he locates in short order all the characters marking their transition from the day’s work to leisure.

As the night deepens, he confesses “so deepened to me the interest in the scene,” for the general character of the crowd begins to change. The more orderly portion of the London inhabitants retire to the safety of their homes, whereas the harsher types become visually more prominent as the late hour “brings forth every species of infamy from its den” (392). The rays of the gas lamps, “feeble at first in their struggle with the dying day,” throw “a fitful and garish lustre” over everything. To underscore the theatricality of what he had initially only observed through a coffee house window (comparable to a nocturnal world projected onto a movie screen), the narrator notes that: “the wild effect of the light enchained me to an examination of individual faces; and although the rapidity with which the world of light flitted outside the window, prevented me from casting more than a glance upon each visage, still it seemed that, in my then peculiar mental state, I could frequently read, even in that brief interval of a glance, the history of many years” (392). Three things account for his belief that these nocturnal scenes might offer him an insight into the mystery of the nocturnal city. First, the acute alertness, unusual for his diurnal consciousness, with which he is observing the crowd moving along this thoroughfare; second, the rapid manner this “world of light” flits before the window, through which he views this nocturnal street; and finally, the fact that the individual faces he believes to be reading take on their distinct shape as the “wild effect” of an artificial light that comes to him through the refraction of a windowpane.

In his “peculiar mental state” with his “brow to the glass” (392), touching the transparent boundary that delineates and protects him from the nocturnal crowd, his attention is suddenly drawn toward a decrepit old man, whose countenance at once arrests and absorbs his whole attention. He is captivated by this stranger on account of the utter idiosyncrasy of his facial expression and examines him as though he were an unread book containing a plethora of personal dramas. Imagining the wild history “written within this bosom,” and thus treating the stranger as an embodied text whose meaning it was his privilege to analyze, the narrator confesses, “I felt singularly aroused, startled, fascinated” (392). To get to the bottom of this “wild history,” the narrator decides to leave the safety of the coffee house and follow him the entire night. The narrator’s nocturnal peregrination is tantamount to reading the old man, so that he might be able to read the strangeness of the nocturnal city over his wandering body as well.

Hurriedly, the narrator puts on his overcoat, seizes his hat and cane, and enters the dark street, no longer simply gazing at this fantasyscape, but rather experiencing it with his own body by traversing it. Perplexed at the aimless wandering of the old man, who steadily moves to and fro among the nocturnal throng of people, and astonished at his stubborn silence and rigid gaze, the narrator remains close at his heels. He is resolved not to part from this stranger until he has found an illuminating explanation for his idiosyncratic appearance and his equally curious behavior. Guided by this enigmatic doppelganger, the convalescent comes to experience the different faces of the urban night—brilliantly lit squares and narrow dark alleys, a large and busy bazaar, where he moves in and out of the shops, the colorful melee of the spectators leaving the theater, and then the London streets slowly emptying themselves of all life, until the two finally reach the outskirts of the city. Having traversed the bleak counterpart to the bright festivity of the city center, with its wretched poverty and desperate criminality, the narrator ends up in front of a huge suburban pub where gin is served until dawn.

The only pattern he has been able to make out is that the stranger regains his vitality whenever the crowd he enters increases. When, in turn, he arrives at a part of London devoid of people, his uneasiness and vacillation returns; the absence of others threatens to deplete him of his own spirits. For this reason, this singular being, as the narrator finally observes, follows the scent of his fellow night walkers, following them with a “mad energy” (396) through the darkness around him. At sunrise, both men arrive back at the thronged mart in which the narrator had first espied the stranger whom he has been following all night long “in the wildest amazement.” The city is again filled with the human bustle and activity and the stranger once more plunges into the throng of London’s populace. During the day, he can remain in this one area and does not need to traverse the entire city to find the anonymous crowd from which he draws his vitality. The brightly illuminated day, however, offers as little insight into the deeper meaning of the old man as did the night. As the “shades of the second evening” appear, he decides to confront the flaneur and, stepping directly in front of him, gazes steadfastly into his face. If Poe’s old man had been oblivious to the fact that someone was following him the night before, he similarly takes no note of the man standing before him now, and instead resumes his solemn walk.

For the narrator, the scrutiny in which his interest had been fully absorbed has come to an end. He has arrived at a reading, calling the old man, “the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd.” He adds that it is perhaps “one of the great mercies of God,” that the mysterious abyss of evil allegedly embodied by this nocturnal flaneur remains unreadable. Poe’s tale ends with the same phrase invoked at its beginning: “er lässt sich nicht lesen” (“It does not permit itself to be read.”) (396). With the onset of a second night, Poe’s narrator abstains from any further night walking. His uncanny doppelganger has allowed him to experience the thrill of anonymity that characterizes modern city life. In his effort to read what must remain indecipherable, he has chosen to ascribe an inscrutable criminality to the representative of city nights, an imputation that Baudelaire, some twenty years later, will pick up on in his own fascination for the flourishing of evil to be found on the nocturnal streets of Paris. In Poe’s story we find three attitudes toward the night in its complicity with transgression. An invalid, suffering from guilt, can die during the night and carry his secret with him to the grave. An old man can immerse himself in the anonymous crowd, an embodiment of undecipherable night walking. The narrator, convalescing from his illness and his nocturnal experience, offers a synthesis between the two. At dusk he returns to his rooms to write a story about how the mysteries of the night can be presented but never penetrated.

FLEEING HOME INTO THE URBAN NIGHT

Traversing the city at night can also, however, engender an experience of the void at the vanishing point of all fantasy work. Night walking can serve to make imagination real, bringing the flaneur to the brink of the abyss that his fantasies have evoked even while ultimately also shielding him from its impenetrable nothingness. At issue, as my reading of Arthur Schnitzler’s “Dream Story” shows, is the act of waking up from this embodied fantasy work. The premise of his novella is that his two protagonists, the Viennese doctor Fridolin and his wife Albertine, are willing to expose themselves to the nocturnal side of their desires. Everything begins with a marital quarrel about “those hidden, scarcely suspected desires that are capable of producing dark and dangerous whirlpools even in the most clearheaded, purest soul” (204). Albertine confesses to her husband that she had been tempted to leave her family for a young Danish sailor she met during their holidays the summer before. Fridolin, in turn, confesses that he had similar adulterous desires for a fifteen-year-old girl.

Their nocturnal conversation is soon interrupted when the doctor is called away to the home of one of his patients, a privy councilor who has just suffered a heart attack. What follows are two separate journeys through the night, with the doctor wandering into the nightlife of Vienna while his wife stays at home. Fridolin’s adventures over the course of the next two nights seem like belated figurations of the erotic transgression inspired by Albertine’s confession, who has visions, in dreams, of sexual humiliation and fatal desire that resonate with what Fridolin actually experiences. The way Fridolin is called into the night by an invalid on his deathbed is decisive. Once he has left the protection of his home, he seems to be carried along from one seductively threatening place to another, like Poe’s man of the crowd; he does not determine his journey through the night for himself.

At issue isn’t just whether he is following his own desire or simply acting out the fantasy scenarios that Albertine produces in her dreams while sleeping peacefully in their marital bed; equally at issue is the difference in attitude with which this couple responds to the loss of self-certainty called forth by their separate nocturnal adventures. Albertine functions as a re-figuration of the Nyx of antiquity, who holds Death and Sleep in her arms. In her dream work, she comes up with a terrifying death scene for her husband, and yet, upon wakening has no doubts about her role as wife and mother. By contrast, Fridolin experiences such fundamental self-doubt in the course of his nocturnal peregrinations that only Albertine’s imperturbable clear-sightedness is able to restore his trust in their shared family life. Like E.T.A. Hoffmann’s heroine Clara, in his gothic novella “The Sandman,” Albertine is cognizant of her dangerous erotic fantasies and can enjoy these vicariously in her dream without allowing them to erode her self-confidence. Fridolin, for his part, requires a passage through the dark city to become aware of the dark district of his psyche in the first place. On the nocturnal streets of Vienna he finds his own psychic strangeness manifested in seductive figures he encounters, all promising him erotic excess. Only his willingness to surrender to temptation ultimately brings with it an act of renunciation. At the climax of his doubts, he is finally able to wake up from the phantasmagoria that the night of his psyche had revealed to him.

From the start, however, Schnitzler brings a third attitude toward the night into play. His novella actually begins with the sentences of a bedtime story that Albertine’s daughter is reading out loud until her eyes suddenly fall shut: “Twenty-four brown slaves rowed the splendid galley that was to bring Prince Amgiad to the palace of the caliph. But the prince, dressed in his crimson cloak, lay alone on the ship’s deck under the dark blue, starry night sky, and his eyes––.” The point of departure for the nocturnal hallucinations of Schnitzler’s Viennese doctor and his wife is thus the fairy tale description of an oriental moon landscape. Equally significant is the issue of sight. The object of the prince’s gaze in the fairy tale remains unspecified, because the little girl closes her eyes and thus directs her gaze inward before finishing the sentence. If the dash at the end of the truncated sentence indicates the child’s transition from the fantasy world she reads about in a book to the dream vision she will have in her sleep, out of the lacuna this punctuation mark produces emerge all the real and dreamed adventures that will befall her parents. Decisive for the trajectory of Schnitzler’s dream novella is the fact that Fridolin and Albertine only begin to talk about the masked ball they had left early the previous evening (the discussion that prompts their mutual confession) after “the day’s work was finished for both of them and no disturbance was likely, the child having gone to bed.” In the red glow of the lamp, shadowy figures become real again, and “all at once the insignificant experiences were magically and painfully imbued with the deceptive glow of neglected opportunities” (203).

At this threshold to the other night of lived or imagined phantasmagoria, which has suddenly opened up like a stage around the couple, they can focus their attention on the clandestine districts of their psyche “that barely attracted them but to which the incomprehensible winds of destiny could still drag them, even if only in a dream” (204). The disturbance of their evening serenity does not come from without, but from within, and at first only as a shared fantasy. Before their eyes, the other guests of the masked ball reappear, now as shadow figures giving shape to an as yet indistinct sense of lost opportunities. The serious conversation that ensues counterbalances the trivial memories of the previous evening, although it too is not completely without the traces of a nocturnal shadow play. Both Fridolin and Albertine speak about a sense of longing of which they have only a vague intimation, hidden as it is in the dark recesses of their mind. Yet this nebulous desire will shed light on secret districts of their psyche, even while introducing a different light into their diurnal consciousness, much as their discussion comes to cloud the “most clear-headed, purest soul” with the premonition of an inescapable fate. Although the magical and painful confession of missed opportunities they share with each other remains on the level of speculation, self-doubt is introduced. What drives Fridolin into the nocturnal street in which he will wander without a will of his own is precisely the fact that this conversation raised the specter of the possibility of adultery.

By confessing to each other that everything could have turned out differently, the certainty of the fidelity on which their marriage is based is disclosed in all its fragility. Because their secret wishes are not consummated, they remain powerful, even if Albertine and Fridolin agree to ask each other no further questions. They cannot say with certainty what would have transpired under different circumstances and for this reason they prefer banishing their desires back into the secret district of their unconscious. Yet because their conversation is interrupted at this point by the messenger from Fridolin’s dying patient, the missed opportunities they thought to have subdued will articulate themselves either as actual or dreamed adventures in the two subsequent nights. The couple thus embarks on a similar passage through the night, even if Fridolin is the only one to actually walk through the dark streets of Vienna. Moreover, the point of departure for their night journey is narrative. The adventure, which begins for Fridolin at the deathbed of the privy counselor and ends in the following night in the morgue, enacts in the real the shared confession that picked upon on a truncated sentence in a fairy tale, only to culminate in the textual transformation of both their dream experiences into a published novella, entitled “Dream Story.”

At the bedside of the privy counselor, who died before Fridolin could reach him, a series of phantasmagoric scenes sets in and confronts Fridolin with a spectacle of liberating eroticism that is consistently marked by mortal danger. In the presence of her father’s corpse, the weeping daughter Marianne throws herself at Fridolin’s feet, presses her face to his knees, and confesses her love for him. Although Fridolin does not reciprocate her offer, the idea of returning home to his wife fills him with distaste. He begins to wander the streets instead. On his way to a coffee house, he meets a ragged beggar sleeping on a bench, and then a troop of fraternity students, one of whom elbows him in the ribs. Even though the streets of Vienna never fall into complete darkness, Fridolin begins to lose the ground of certainty under his feet. After entering a narrow alley, in which “a few pathetic hookers were strolling around in their nightly attempt to bag masculine game,” he begins to reflect on all the nocturnal figures he has so far encountered. Suddenly they seem to him “like specters”—the students like the bereaved Marianne, and even Albertine, whose image, sleeping sounded with her arms folded under her head, now floated up into his mind’s eye.” Although he confesses to himself that this spectralization of his world causes him to shudder, it also “had something calming as it appeared to free him from all responsibility, to absolve him from all human connection” (216).

The freedom to distance himself from all moral laws corresponds with the spectrality of a nocturnal world that is in the process of losing its secure contours, and at the same time draws attention to the danger inherent in transgression. While looking at the sleeping beggar, Fridolin finds himself thinking about bodily decay. The scuffle with the fraternity student calls forth in his mind the idea of a duel with a fatal outcome. He does not sleep with the young prostitute Mizzi, whom he accompanies to her room, fearing the deadly consequences of syphilis he might contract. Oscillating between the frisson of anxiety and the exhilaration of freedom, Fridolin continues to roam aimlessly, as much a stranger to ordinary diurnal life as is the night herself. Ever since his conversation with Albertine, he has the impression of being homeless, of “moving farther and farther away from the familiar district of his existence into some other strange and alien world” (219). Given the way the events of this night have brought forth a loss of certainty regarding his familiar world, he is pleased to run into his old friend Nachtigal (German for nightingale) in a coffee house. Nachtigal has been engaged to play piano at a private party later on that night and, because this costume ball promises both promiscuous pleasure and mystery, Fridolin asks to accompany him.

At the costume rental shop, where he is still able to obtain a monk’s cowl at this late hour, he catches Pierrette, the adolescent daughter of the owner, engaged in an erotic tryst with two other customers and immediately longs for her youthful body. The prospect of the masked ball, however, contains a more powerful draw; therefore, covered in his monk’s garb, his face hidden behind a black mask, he drives to the outskirts of the city with Nachtigal. The spectral night into which he has disappeared appears to him not only as a distant, alien world, but also as a dark district in which the points of orientation helping him find his direction are the women he has encountered. Like stars, they illuminate his passage into the depths of his repressed desire. Just before entering the mysterious villa in which the ball is taking place, he asks himself whether he shouldn’t turn back: “But go where? To little Pierrette? To the girl in Buchfeld Strasse? To Marianne, the daughter of the dead man? Home?” Immediately he recognizes that “he would rather go anywhere but home,” so he has only one choice, to proceed on his journey through the night “even if it means death” (231). All feminine embodiments of this night serve to contest the doubts Albertine’s confession has triggered. They protect him from the void at the kernel of his self-certainty of which he has suddenly been compelled to take note, even while attributing all experiences of the unfamiliar the night has to offer back to this vanishing point.

Upon entering the mansion, Fridolin is overcome with an almost unbearable longing at the sight of a naked woman whose face alone is covered with a black mask. To the uninitiated stranger, however, access to the secret rites is denied. After the mysterious woman has indicated her willingness to sacrifice her body so as to save him from punishment, Fridolin is thrown out of the villa and driven to an open field on the outskirts of the city. Thus abandoned, he is forced to return to the scene where his nocturnal adventure began—the marital bedroom he shares with Albertine. Because he remains in the dark regarding the fate of his masked savior, he believes to have retrieved a degree of self-certainty. He vows to himself to seek an explanation for his adventure the next day. What he finds in his marital bed, however, is a clarification of a different kind. He wakes up Albertine, who he found laughing out loud in her dream, and she relates her own experience of this night. By disclosing her own transgressive desire, she pits against Fridolin’s adulterous fantasies dream representations in which her husband is humiliated, tortured, and executed.

In her dream work, she had picked up the story over which her daughter had fallen asleep, recasting it as her wedding night. Rowing a galley through the dark night, slaves bring Fridolin, dressed like a prince, to her house. Suddenly it becomes day, and after her fiancé has left her, the Danish sailor about whom she had confessed her secret desire the night before, approaches and takes his place. In her dream, she reconceives individual fragments from the previous day, and there fulfills what in reality had been a missed opportunity. As though her dreamwork had seamlessly transported her from the images that rose before her inner eye in the reddish glare of her bedroom lamp to the orgy in the mysterious villa, she has also rewritten the plot of her husband’s adventure. Briefly interrupting her account, she proceeds to describe how a man in a monk’s cowl takes Fridolin prisoner and leads him to his execution. Instead of a masked woman, she sees Fridolin standing before her naked and enchained.

If, throughout his passage through nocturnal Vienna, Fridolin had consistently imagined himself to be an adulterer, in his wife’s dream he remains faithful to her. In contrast to her husband, Albertine does not find self-doubt reflected in her imagined nocturnal passage, but rather achieves a form of certainty. “It seemed natural that you couldn’t be other than faithful to me externally, in the face of all danger” (248) she explains to him. In her dream vision, she saw him nailed to a cross in punishment for refusing to be the lover of the queen of the land. Explaining why she had laughed out loud as she was about to awake from this dream, Albertine finally offers the image that also serves as the navel of the “Dream Story” itself. She confesses that she had wanted to laugh in his face for his willingness to suffer a horrible death out of loyalty to her. At that moment, however, she had taken note of the fact that “we suddenly lost sight of each other,” leaving her with only her voice as the last corporeal expression left to restore her certainty that she is not completely alone in this night: “Then I hoped you would at least hear my laughter, just at the moment when they were nailing you to the cross. And so I laughed, as loudly and shrilly as I could” (249). Following Freud’s claim that a dreamer will wake from her dream only when she has reached an unbearable affect, one might ask: What is so terrible about this laugh that it forbids Albertine to tarry with her dream vision?

For her husband, the clarification her account offers is also more unsettling than the confession that had driven him into the nocturnal streets of Vienna in the first place. Fridolin immediately has the urge to take revenge on a wife who, in her dream, has proved herself to be unfaithful, cruel, and treacherous, even while he is overcome with an inexplicable urge to kiss her. Torn between intense hatred and an equally intense desire, he finds himself confronted with a twofold enigma. He can neither read the brutal dream representations that his wife has drawn from the nocturnal side of her psyche, nor does he understand the clandestine sacrifice of the masked woman that allegedly took place that night in the villa on the outskirts of the city. He immediately gives up trying to interpret his wife’s dream, resolving instead to revisit the different places he had been that night. Observing them in the sober light of day, everything is indeed altered. Upon returning his costume, he discovers that Pierrette has a new lover. Arriving at Marianne’s home, he finds the bereaved daughter in the process of packing her suitcases. Looking for Mizzi, he learns that the prostitute from the dingy alley has been admitted to a hospital, whereas his friend Nachtigal is said to have left the city under mysterious circumstances. Finally, returning to the villa in an attempt to find out what happened to his beautiful savior, he receives only a firm warning to cease all further investigations.

Under the persistent influence of the impression of the night before, Fridolin’s day has become uncanny, a wan illusion. At home, during lunch, he attributes cruel mimicry to Albertine’s affectionate gaze, convinced that it is merely the clever façade of a vengeful wife. Upon leaving the apartment again to go back to work, he comes to believe that “all this order, all this regularity, all this security of existence was nothing but an illusion and a deception” (257). Everywhere he goes, he suddenly notices things that compel him to doubt everything; indeed, radical skepticism is the only certainty left for him. At nightfall, he once more leaves the safety of his home, this time to visit the morgue. Having read in the newspaper about the mysterious suicide of a baroness, he thinks he now knows where he can find the masked woman who he believes sacrificed her life for him. Yet he also admits that ever since he had read the notice in the newspaper, “he had envisaged the suicide, whose face he didn’t know, with Albertine’s face. In fact, as he now shuddered to realize, it had been his wife that he had imagined as the woman he was seeking” (265). His passage into this second night thus proves to be an attempt to make legible the unfathomable spot in his wife’s dream vision. In his nocturnal state of mind, his sleeping wife has become an embodiment of all the threatening forces that keep him from staying at home at night. She emerges as the vanishing point of his own dreamlike adventures in the nocturnal city.

Standing before the corpse of the unknown woman in the morgue, Fridolin hopes to bring together into one meaningful whole both nocturnal figures who have come to stand in for the night’s mystery—the face behind the veil of the masked woman and the face of his sleeping wife, who, after her dream account, he feels he can no longer trust. Instead, Fridolin reaches the acme of all his skepticism. The explanation he hopes to achieve by looking at this dead body fails to materialize and he is forced to admit instead that “it was now a face without expression; empty. A dead face (…) And he knew immediately that if it were her face, her eyes, the same eyes that had shone at him yesterday with such passion and life, he would not, could not—and in the end he didn’t really want to know” (268). The only certainty he can achieve at this midnight hour is the certainty that he knows nothing. He has reached the navel of his dream performance, the unfathomable point of his own fantasy work. The mysterious woman who stands in for the dark region of his desire that he found reflected in the nocturnal cityscape cannot be read. One last time he seeks refuge in his imagination: “As though compelled and directed by an invisible power,” he slowly and tenderly begins to touch the forehead, cheeks, shoulders and hands of the deceased, enlacing her fingers with his own, “as though in love play” (269), until he has almost convinced himself that from under the half-closed eyelids, a distant colorless gaze was reaching out to him. Only the warning words of the anatomist, who, unnoticed by Fridolin, has also entered the hall, finally bring sobriety.

He now looks in astonishment at the figure who no longer holds any fascination for him, yet who for that very reason continues to embody all the inscrutable events of the previous night. As an emblem for the death of his transgressive desire that, in his fantasy, the mysterious woman had promised to fulfill, this speaking corpse marks the transition from doubt to certainty. Leaving the morgue, he has achieved the evidence necessary to reassert himself in his world: “He knew, even if the woman whom he had sought, desired, perhaps even loved for an hour, was still alive (…) what was lying behind him in that arched room, illuminated by the light of flickering gas flames, was a shadow among shadows, dark, without meaning or mystery like all shadows—and meant nothing to him, could mean nothing to him except the pale corpse of the past night, doomed to irrevocable decay” (270). His choice of trope not only renders his nocturnal wanderings readable, but also helps resolve the two feminine embodiments of his dark desire. If Albertine emerges as the figure standing behind all the seductresses whom he had encountered in the previous night and whose erotic charm was imbued with fatality, he is now able to sever death from his dream work. Relinquishing knowledge he now recognizes as being forever beyond his grasp, he achieves certainty and is finally able to return home. If the nocturnal wandering of this couple was triggered by a shared admission of hidden desires and sustained by Albertine’s account of her dream vision, Schnitzler’s “Dream Story” culminates in a third confession. Fridolin is finally able to disclose his night story to his wife because he is now certain that she is inclined “to take whatever might have happened not all too seriously” (271).

Without interrupting him, she does indeed listen to the report her husband has to make of everything that happened to him in the last two nights. As the gray light of a new day begins to shine through the curtains, he bends over to “those large bright eyes in which the morning also seemed to be dawning.” He asks her, still unsure, yet hopeful, what they should now do. Albertine hesitates briefly and yet the answer she gives asserts with unequivocal certainty that they can now again trust each other. “I think we should be grateful,” she explains, “that we have come away from all our adventures unharmed—from the real ones as from the dreams.” Having overcome her doubts, she can stay tuned in to the dark district of desire. When Fridolin asks whether she is certain of this, she adds, “Just as sure as I suspect that the reality of one night, even the reality of a whole lifetime, isn’t the whole truth.” She protects the navel of their shared fantasy, the unplumbable spot that must remain in the dark if their ordinary everyday is to reassert itself. Her certainty consists in acknowledging her doubt. She is the one to recognize that any trust in a shared tomorrow must factor in the incessant exchange between day and night. She assures her husband that “now I suppose we are both awake … for a long time to come.” But before Fridolin can add the words “forever,” Albertine again interrupts him with her clear-sighted warning that one should take heed of all too simple certainties: “Never second question the future” (272).

Although the nocturnal aspect of desire can be negotiated, it can never be expelled from the day. The passage between waking and dreaming remains open, not least of all because the nocturnal knowledge each subject carries deep within can be neither fathomed nor refuted. This richly strange, painful, yet alluring knowledge must be contained cautiously in the unconscious and listened to in one’s dreams, so as to prevent it from invading the diurnal self unexpectedly. Yet Schnitzler’s “Dream Story” does not end with Albertine’s measured reason, but with the voice that also formed its beginning. Dreamless and silent, the couple lies next to each other, waiting together for the day to arrive, until “there was a knock on the door, as there was every morning at seven.” Their new day begins with a “bright childish laughter from the next room” (272). Perhaps everything that happened was nothing other than their daughter’s dream.

TARRYING IN THE URBAN NIGHT

As Wolfgang Schivelbusch notes, in the course of the eighteenth century the space where the audience sat during theatrical productions became increasingly darker until first Wagner (in his opera house in Bayreuth) and then movie theaters worldwide, insisted on complete darkness. If the projection of light onto a white screen in a darkened auditorium can fruitfully be conceived as the light at the end of a tunnel, the play of light and shadow that this new medium puts on display repeatedly plays through a salvation from darkness that is, however, rendered possible only through darkness itself. As Martin Scorsese explains, the idea of Taxi Driver (1976) was born from his conviction that films induce a type of dream state. The shock one feels when, upon leaving the dark movie theater, one finds oneself again in broad daylight, can be intense. “I watch movies all the time,” he admits in his interview with Ian Christie and David Thompson, “and I am also very bad at waking up.” Making the film, he adds, “was like that for me—that sense of being almost awake” (54).

Part III ends with a reading of Taxi Driver because, comparable to the gothic texts brought into conversation with each other in the previous four chapters, the scenes Scorsese’s hero (played by Robert De Niro), observes through the windows and mirrors of his cab are imbued with the nocturnal tone of his subjective vision. Scorsese stages the New York cityscape of the mid-1970s like a phantasmagoric scene reflecting the state of mind of Travis Bickle, who rides through the night because, like the city slicker who narrates Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, he cannot sleep. Although the film merges Western with neo-noir, serving as point of transition to Part IV’s in-depth discussion of the night in classic film noir, my discussion of Taxi Driver also pulls together the rhetorical claim made for gothic nights in general. The point of connection between Lady Macbeth’s wandering along the halls of her castle in her sleep and the plethora of psychic peregrinations of gothic characters from Shelley’s Frankenstein to Schnitzler’s Viennese couple is the way their confessions draw attention to the textuality of their night vision, the aesthetic production of their nocturnal knowledge by someone who reconceives them after the event in a different medium, whether novella, novel, or cinema.

Going into the night in Taxi Driver is tantamount to entering a movie theater. We not only follow Scorsese’s disaffected Vietnam vet as he moves ever farther into the heart of darkness of his war trauma. His psychic passage through the night also puts Scorsese’s conception of film as a nocturnal medium on display, at whose navel pure nothingness appears: that essence of poetic imagination, that impossible vanishing of the world into pure textuality that Blanchot calls autre nuit. The night that Travis traverses in his cab is one in which, owing to the diffuse electric illumination of the streets, is predicated on a blurring of the contours of the world and as such offers a stage for his battle against all the accomplices of darkness, the criminals and prostitutes. On the level of the cinematic medium, however, this night also veers toward a point of unfathomability. When, at the end of his passage, Travis moves beyond the phantasmagoria sustaining his will for purification, Scorsese’s visual language reverts to a pure celebration of the cinematic image itself. In the last shots of the film (as discussed in more detail in the following) we return to a scintillation of colored lights, blurring into each other, only to ultimately dissolve into the dark background that made their appearance possible in the first place. The opening credit sequence, in turn, establishes this correspondence between the night as stage and aesthetic medium. Against the black screen, a white cloud of smoke emerges and almost fills the entire frame, before a New York City yellow checker cab moves out from behind it. As it drives out of the frame, from the right side to the left, it leaves behind as its trail the title of the film. For a few moments we see, in red letters, the two words Taxi Driver superimposed over the smoke cloud. If the ominous taxi thus produces the film’s title, this mobile heterotopia also stands metonymically for the film narrative about to unfold before our eyes.

FIGURE 11.1 Taxi Driver. Final credit sequence. Digital frame enlargement.

To underscore that we are dealing with a purely subjective vision of a passage through New York City’s nocturnal world, the next cut moves to a close-up of Travis Bickle’s open, vigilant eyes. Although Robert De Niro’s face is first illuminated by the passing street light, only to fall back into a shadow, his eye intensely scans the street as though following a clandestine trail. The reverse shot shows the world he is viewing as a kaleidoscope of red, blue, and white lights, blurring into one another. Unfurling before our eyes is no ordinary urban night, but rather the vision Travis imposes upon it. For a brief moment we see juxtaposed the lights behind the window pane and the reflection of the taxi driver’s eyes on this glass. Then this flaneur’s gaze is dissolved so we are left with a blurred image of the dark pavement of Broadway seen through the rainy windshield of the taxi. After a few moments, a windshield wiper clears away the rain. Only then do clearer contours of the nocturnal cityscape come into focus. The editing performs our encounter with an escape from the phenomenological outside world. While the taxi continues to glide through the night, we again see only its blurred contours. These become increasingly indistinct until the first recognizable night scene emerges from this formless visual chaos, marked as our driver’s purely subjective vision. Pedestrians are shown wandering along a sidewalk. The opening credit sequence returns once more to the images with which it began: an extreme close-up of the eye of this flaneur and the cloud of smoke that trails behind his cab, as though he were a demonic figure.

The narrative, in the course of which Travis will rescue a young prostitute from the world of crime, emerges like the red letters of the film’s title from this smoke cloud. The nocturnal passages of Scorsese’s taxi driver are thus framed by a film language that explicitly foregrounds its own aesthetic representation. Although Travis’s eye transforms the nocturnal world of New York City into a stage for his transgressive fantasies of violence and retribution, he remains caught in a dreamlike state of mind like Fridolin, who acts out his erotic fantasies on the streets of a nocturnal Vienna. Yet in contrast to Schnitzler’s flaneur, Travis has not fled the safety of a home, but rather has chosen to dwell in his cab as though this were his private movie theater. From here he can view the world as a screen on which his internal demons can take shape. The film’s plot is divided into eleven days and nights, in the course of which Travis plunges into a maelstrom of paranoia, increasingly enjoying the loss of all self-certainty. During the day, he takes note in his diary of the changes in his spiritual condition, as though his diurnal self were drawing up the emotional turns his nocturnal self can then enact. During his job interview, he had explained to the boss of the taxi company that he is suffering from insomnia, and yet, even after he starts driving twelve hours straight, willing to go everywhere in New York City at night, sleep will still not come to him. Instead he is compelled to search during the day for the words that might describe what he experiences at night.

During his first night, Travis drives past a theater near Times Square called “Fascination,” and disgustedly compares the nocturnal creatures he sees through his rear mirrors and windows to the criminals that Charles Baudelaire enthusiastically claims set out on their secret night-time passages to besiege the city. “All the animals come out at night,” he murmurs in his voiceover, “whores, skunk-pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies. Sick, venal.” The camera pans down to the rain-covered pavement and Travis announces the desire for radical purification, which he will proceed to enact: “Someday a real rain’ll come and wash all this scum off the streets.” Like the other nocturnal flaneurs, he too is compelled to wander the streets after nightfall so as to explore the dark district of his soul. And yet, in a far more pronounced manner, the nocturnal side of his desire inundates his days, absorbing everything with its lethal charm because he can find no sleep during the day either. In lieu of those dream visions withheld from him, Betsy, wearing a white dress, appears to him one day at the headquarters of the presidential candidate Senator Palantine. As he notes in his diary, “She appeared like an angel out of this filthy mess. She is alone. They cannot touch her.” He approaches her and invites her to the movies, yet makes the terrible mistake of taking this light figure to one of the porno theaters he visits during the day when he is unable to sleep. Appalled, she turns away from him again, forcing him to recognize that as she is “just like the rest of them.”

Along with his phantasmatic angel, Travis loses the only psychic support for believing in the possibility of goodness in the midst of New York City’s moral depravity. Following the logic of radical skepticism he tells himself that if this figure of light is, like all the others, so deceptive that he cannot put his trust in her regarding the redemption she seemed to promise him, then he has no more certainty. The passage into a state of radical doubt that this sleepless Vietnam War veteran experiences must, however, also be read in conjunction with a development of the urban night that sociologist Murray Melbin compares to the conquest of the last frontier. According to him, electric lighting and the night shifts this renders possible represents an attempt to assimilate this last piece of wilderness to the business of the ordinary day, just as the lawless prairie was once colonized in the legends of Western lore. Melbin points out that an electrification of American urban centers sets in concurrently with the announcement by the U.S. Census Bureau in the 1890s that all contested territories on the frontier were now completely civilized. In the mythic narratives Hollywood brings to the screen, the notion of dark districts continues to hold its charm because it is there that the American hero can take up his fight against evil. Taking up a battle in the name of a day purged of all immorality, however, means targeting certain figures as criminal representatives of an urban night. By claiming that it is necessary to defend the day against these embodiments of transgression, one can thus justify the desire for battle.

In the one dark district left, Travis will meet the young prostitute Iris and assign to her the role in his fantasy life that Betsy rejected. If he succeeds in rescuing her from the moral depravity into which she has fallen, his existence will again have achieved meaning. Her pimp Sport who, with his shoulder-length hair and turquoise rings, resembles an urban Indian, calls Travis “a real cowboy.” So as to execute the man he has declared to be the scum of the earth, Travis accepts this interpellation and take on the role adequate to what he perceives as the last American wilderness. Having targeted Sport as the scapegoat for his own discontent with the nocturnal side of the city’s moral life, he can write in his diary: “My whole life has pointed in one direction. I see that now. There never has been any choice for me.” Seeing himself as the lone cowboy who takes up battle against the nocturnal forces of the city, he speaks of himself as the “man who wouldn’t take it anymore.”

With this recognition he embarks on a different, albeit equally phantasmagoric project. He buys several handguns, assembles his battle gear, and submits himself to a strict physical regimen to once more become the marine he was in Southeast Asia. In what is undoubtedly the most memorable scene in Taxi Driver, he stands in front of a mirror in his apartment and speaks to his own reflection. Asking his mirrored double over and again, “you talkin’ to me?” before pointing his gun at him. To underscore how Travis is caught in a psychic state incongruous with his diurnal self, the film’s editing performs its own discontinuity among spoken word, image, and body movement. We hear Robert De Niro uttering the same sentence fragments several times, while the depiction of him turning toward the mirror is interrupted and repeated as a looped movement. Then the key words of his diatribe, “here is someone who stood up” serve as the voiceover for an image of him lying on his bed, sleeping restlessly.

This disjunctive repetitiveness in the representation of the film’s focalizing protagonist mirrors how, now that a psychic darkness has come to permeate Travis’s day, he imagines himself to be the hero in a rescue mission. His only certainty is his faith in his ability to combat evil. At the vanishing point of this loop of self-reflections lies the nothingness for which he yearns, should his doubt be confirmed that even this resistance is nothing more than an illusion. The scene ends by returning once more to an image of Travis, standing in front of the mirror, pretending to shoot his reflected double, then once more hiding his gun under his sleeve. Turning back toward the mirror, which means turning back to the camera as well, he smiles demonically while proclaiming “you’re dead.” Scorsese takes his allusion to the night as the last frontier one step further. In homage to the classic Western, his nocturnal cowboy assumes the appearance of the enemy he seeks to destroy. Imitating a ritual deployed by actual marines in Vietnam before a particularly dangerous mission, Travis shaves his hair into a Mohawk before he sets out on his path of redemption through violence. Because he fails to assassinate Senator Palantine (the proxy target for Betsy), he directs his violence at the actual accomplices of the night. He drives to the brothel on the Lower East Side in which Iris works and shoots both her pimp as well the john who is with her. Although severely wounded himself, he survives his journey into this urban Hades, will be hailed as a hero by the newspapers, and continues to drive his taxi through the night.

If, he had only one certainty at the apex of his doubts, namely, to actually enact the violence he had formerly been playing through only on the stage of his inner eye, the decisive shift from voyeur to perpetrator takes place in a scene that thrives on the murky interface between personal furor and the demonic quality of the film image itself. One evening, he picks up a customer who asks him to stop the taxi in front of a building and wait there with him in the dark. For the first time in Taxi Driver, we see Travis’s head from behind. In Scorsese’s directing of the scene, the ominous passenger and his taxi driver appear like two spectators in a cinema, one sitting behind the other, discussing what they are seeing. The stranger asks Travis to look up at the lit window on the second floor, where we see the silhouette of a woman behind a white curtain. Laughing demonically, he explains that while the woman in the window is his wife, it is not his apartment but that of “a nigger.” After only a brief moment of hesitation, he adds, “And I’m gonna kill her.” The irony of the scene consists in the fact that Scorsese himself plays the furious husband. As the passenger sitting in the back seat he is giving directions to the cabbie even while, as the actual director of the film, he is directing De Niro, his principal actor.

By drawing our attention to what the camera does when it isolates a fragment from a larger image and allowing it to fill the frame, Scorsese is also reflecting on his own cinematic medium. By guiding Travis’s eye toward the shadow of the woman behind the white curtain, he—as actor and director—confronts us with the logical consequence of the paranoid gaze that was installed in the opening credit sequence: What if everything is only an imagined representation, which I perceive on that screen I take to be my world? The framed window functions as a self-referential inset, a film image inserted into all the film images of nocturnal New York that Travis has been enjoying through the windowpane of his taxi. The inclusion of this moment of self-reflexivity is significant. By compelling Travis to perceive the world not as his own projection but as the vehement phantasmagoria of a stranger, Scorsese finds a visual rendition for the decisive psychic turn in his protagonist. Against his will, and against the solitude he so vehemently protects, Travis is suddenly drawn into the projections of another. Still waiting in front of the building, the stranger continues to share his violent fantasies, confessing in detail what he is going to do to the face and body of his adulterous wife with a .44 Magnum pistol. The camera tarries with the two men in the cab, and while the stranger keeps reiterating “you must think I’m pretty sick,” the camera moves to a shot of the back of Travis’s head, then back to his face, and finally back to an image of the woman’s silhouette in the window, accompanied by Scorsese’s voice, declaring “You don’t have to answer. I’m paying for the ride.”

The mise-en-scène underscores two points. The stranger, played by the director himself, functions as yet another double of the flaneur through whose subjective gaze we have been viewing nocturnal New York. Yet because Travis never actually turns around to look at this man directly, the customer speaking to him from behind exists only as a reflected image on the surface of the rearview mirror, which he keeps adjusting to get a different visual angle. In contrast to the mirror scene, in which Travis was able to enjoy the image of himself as an urban warrior, the presence of this double compels him to partake in someone else’s violent fantasy scenario. He is forced to recognize that the man sitting behind him, although sharing the space of his private movie theater, is caught up in an imagined murder scene separate from his own, even while mirroring back to him a disfigured version of himself. The stranger’s diatribe also thrives on a desire to obliterate what has been targeted as morally degenerate and at the same time foregrounds the issue of visual pleasure. His perverse anticipation of the violence he is about to commit culminates in the question, “Did you ever see what a .44 Magnum can do to a woman’s pussy? That you should see.”

Throughout this scene Travis remains silent, as though too enthralled by the performance to speak, and yet it marks the moment of transition from merely gazing at the world to taking action in it. The stranger’s speech triggers the decision to leave his taxi (as Poe’s narrator leaves his coffee house) and penetrate with his own body the night that, in his diary entries, he had cast as a site of catharsis. In this seminal scene, which functions as the navel of Scorsese’s dream story, the nocturnal cityscape is also staged as the outside from which film images emerge. As the site of the film image, this night proves to be a site that can only be manifested as a film image, because it requires darkness to take on appearance. Scorsese’s demonic screen folds into that of his hero, even while revealing that it is ours as well. Owing to this uncanny encounter, Travis will go out and buy the .44 Magnum his double invoked, using it to kill the men whom he holds responsible for the moral depravity of the city that keeps him awake at night. In Schnitzler’s “Dream Story,” the corpse of the woman who had committed suicide is used by Fridolin as a screen figure onto whom he can project his fantasies about his wife’s adulterous desire. In Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, the criminals from whom Travis saves Iris serve as a screen for the stranger, who, having entered his cab, forces him to confront the phantasmagoric figures he has been obsessively gazing at for what they are—images coming out at him through a windowpane, a white curtain, a mirror.

Scorsese has pointed out that at the end of the film although Travis “seems to be in control again, we get the impression that any second the time bomb might go off again” (62). Neither his cure nor his relapse into furor is certain. He might simply keep driving through the night. In the final scene of the film, we see Travis chatting with the other taxi drivers in front of the Regis Hotel. Then Betsy unexpectedly gets into his cab and he drives her home, refusing to engage in conversation with her, but also not allowing her to pay him the fare. In his rear window he catches a last image of her standing on the pavement before he blithely drives back into the night. Cruising through the neon-lit cityscape, his gaze suddenly alights upon something and we see a demonic flicker in his eyes as he readjusts his rear mirror. The camera tarries with his eyes, withholding from us what Travis has noticed. Then the screen splits in half, and during the closing credit sequence we return to the non-mimetic representation of Broadway at night where everything started.

FIGURE 11.2 Taxi Driver. Final credit sequence. Digital frame enlargement.

This time the contours are blurred not because it has begun to rain but because the images Travis is looking at through the window and the images that come to be reflected on this transparent surface are perfectly blended. Out of this doubled reflection of his gaze emerges the impossible site of a purely aesthetic production of visual signs that Blanchot calls autre nuit. It is the night of the cinematic world, the navel of the dream visions that arise from Travis’s insomnia as well as those that make up Scorsese’s cinematic dream. On the windowpane through which we—together with Travis—gaze out at the sparkling lights on Broadway, we receive film images of the night from both sides, inside and outside, static and in movement, doubled and mutually intertwined. Not day and night, but rather the strange and the familiar merge with each other, then one of the two image layers vanishes seamlessly from our sight. The reflection on the windowpane and the image strips that we could see through this transparent surface are reassembled into one unified image. Without our noticing, we have left the taxi and we are standing outside on the street, looking at the black silhouettes of pedestrians hailing a cab. Then the screen dissolves into pure darkness.

Travis has left our field of vision and vanished into the neon-light and dark shadows of Scorsese’s New York night. He remains in his nocturnal prairie, in that formless nothing to which the world viewed on screen returns when the film narrative has reached its end and the lights in the audience come on again. He tarries in that night of the world in which, as Mary Shelley claims in her preface to Frankenstein, all images are contained, waiting to be given form. We in turn have been gently released from this night and, having woken from this film dream, we stand outside the alluring play of phantasmagoria. In contrast to Schnitzler’s “Dream Story” and the child’s laughter, which calls all of his players into a new day, there is no dawn at the end of Taxi Driver. Instead we have a different kind of awakening. If Travis stays behind in a night that recedes from our grasp, then he does so not least of all so that we might awaken from his fury. As we move back into the day outside the movie theater, we regain our self-certainty.

FIGURE 11.3 Taxi Driver. Final credit sequence. Digital frame enlargement.

In their varied passages to the end of their psychic night of doubt, the flaneurs since Poe have discovered different ways of responding to the loss of a stable and secure justification of the self so characteristic for modernity. In a night that will not let itself be read, Poe discovers a loss of self that is tantamount to the emergence of writing itself. Schnitzler’s Fridolin arrives at a trust in the loyalty of the other that can only be accepted, not justified or explained. He can do nothing other than trust in the clear-sightedness of his wife. In Taxi Driver, the act of falling back on the coherence of cinematic representation serves in turn to sustain a pleasurable doubt. Even though at any moment, Scorsese’s insomniac might have a relapse into his paranoid delusion, there is a point outside this play of nocturnal self-reflections for the camera and for us, the spectators. Travis may have abandoned us and taken his specters with him, but he is still there, tarrying in the darkness, while we are irrevocably outside.