Travis Bickle | Wanderings and ... wonderings.

The Selfie is the new ‘Decisive Moment’.

Ellen

Many of us have been guilty of the ultimate faux pas when it comes to ‘adulting’ (or one’s departure from it). Yes, the selfie, the pursuit the Snowflake and Y2K lot get up to. The folk who partake in such behaviour are usually the tossers who acquire Gameboy watches or sit in cafes bashing thoughts into a rusty typewriter when they have a perfectly operational laptop at home. “Working hard,” is the caption, the image a flipped shot of a checkered shirt and scruffy beard holding aloft a smug face you want to clobber with a shovel.

The selfie goes way back, though. Way, way back. Some might consider the earlier examples art forms due to their self-reflexive dimensions and knowing playfulness.

Joseph Ducreux, for example. Well, it’s a painting we’re talking about but … ‘life-like’, a self-portrait but premonition to a selfie future. And the bloke became a meme. He also looks like Emperor Palpatine.

self-portrait-of-the-artist-in-the-guise-of-a-mocker-joseph-ducreux-20f58ce9

Portrait de l’artiste sous les traits d’un moqueur.

Or the inimitable snap from/of Robert Cornelius, a self-portrait from 1839 and quite possibly the world’s first portraiture.

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The selfie is the need to be *in* the world and be seen to be so, evidence of ownership and the experience, though there have been stories of folk photoshopping backdrops into their snaps.

I experience a certain sense of shame every time I succumb to the zeitgeist. All the delicate painstaking effort Ansel Adams put into a single snap and here I am posing with a bottle of Coke Zero in a budget airline departure lounge. There’s that classic meme featuring Neil Armstrong and a random lassie in a bathroom. Sums it up, really.

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I am forever reminded of Travis Bickle staring in the mirror, the definitive portrait of solipsistic absorption.

I’m off to take a selfie with the cat.

Further reading:

https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/new-york/articles/history-of-the-selfie-a-photo-phenomenon/

https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/robert-cornelius-self-portrait-the-first-ever-selfie-1839/

New York – Twin Cities.

The Big Apple is venerated as the most filmed city in movies, a hustle-bustle urban jungle of possibilities, both magical and harrowing.

It seems there aren’t films made *about* New York City very much anymore; they merely take place there, the protagonists unaffected by the milieu. Perhaps it’s a post 9/11 reluctance to confront the contentious ‘symbolism’ that the city continues to offer. Only Spike Lee’s 25th Hour (2002) confronts NYC in its role as ‘snapshot city’, and attempts to deconstruct its myths and contradictions.

My first trip to New York in 1997.

Taken in 2000 on a $10 camera.

New York is represented in two modes of cinema – it’s a decrepit urban hell or a serene cloud to naval gaze on – guzzle down coffees, discuss Dialectical Materialism, be ‘arty’. The dichotomy is illustrated in two films made three years apart, Taxi Driver (1976) and Manhattan (1979).

Taxi Driver (1976).

If ever the topography of a city mirrored a protagonist’s crumbling psyche it’s Taxi Driver (1976). Travis Bickle here represents purgatory, New York a steaming cesspool of ‘animals’ and ‘filth’. The city is an ill-thought-out maze, a cruel, shallow, uncaring conurbation from gutter to canopy. An utter dump, it’s where people lose their minds.

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Manhattan (1979).

This movie is paradise. I’d love to live like one of these characters. A bloke in it willingly quits his job because he can. He doesn’t worry over council tax or credit card debt or rent or any of that trivial shite – he just spends the remainder of the movie see-sawing between a neurotic journalist and a 17-year-old high school student. The city here black and white, lit up in fireworks and George Gershwin. There is no crime, there are no social problems. There are only parties and conversations. NYC is a lucid dream.

A film-maker from different backgrounds and experiences will of course develop his own vision of metropolis as distinct from another’s, but this city is ridiculous in its contrasting representations to the extent that one wonders if it’s the same place subjected to the camera. The theme goes beyond a depiction of class divide – its wholly disparate districts captured on celluloid – and channels two states of mind. New York is *the* kaleidoscopic dwelling.

Wanderings and … wonderings.

Tag Archives: Travis Bickle

The Selfie is the new ‘Decisive Moment’.

New York – Twin Cities.