Violência sagrada no filme Taxi Driver : uma análise a partir da teoria mimética de René Girard

Abstract

This master’s degree essay studies the sacred violence in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). Through the movie, it asks: how does this sacred violence manifest itself in Taxi Driver? When is violence presented as sacred? What are the elements that sacralize violence? We understand sacred violence as violence transfigured as transcendental by human desire, with the power to correct and purify humanity as well as to sacralize individuals and values. Our main objective is to investigate the manifestation of sacred violence in the movie Taxi Driver by analyzing the film focused on the development of Travis’s character and on audiovisual and narrative elements of the film. Therefore, we outlined the following steps as specific objectives: a) To understand, artistically and historically, the context of Taxi Driver’s production as well as its audiovisual and narrative structure. b) To discuss the notion of sacred violence through the lens of René Girard’s mimetic theory, identifying the categories of analysis. c) To analyze the dynamics of the sacred in Taxi Driver’s violence through the analytical categories from the theoretical-conceptual reference. In the analysis, we verify Taxi Driver introduces the mimetic desire and the media as the sacralizing elements of the violence of Travis, who ceases to be a murderer in order to become a hero. The film also evidences the illusion of the purifying efficacy in violence as well as the ambiguity of Travis’s sacred violence, which embodies not only elements of the archaic and modern mechanisms of the scapegoat but also the impure violence of mimetic rivalries.