A Taxi Driver · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A calm voice fills the taxi. The state announcer reports that order holds across the country, that a few agitators have been dealt with, that citizens should go about their day. Through the windshield, soldiers are clubbing people who were only trying to walk home. The film sets that gap in front of you and refuses to close it. Learn to watch the gap, and you have most of what Deleuze can give this movie.

Start where the film starts, because the distance it travels is the whole point. Kim Man-seob is a Seoul cabdriver with a young daughter, an unpaid landlord, and no politics at all. The opening reels move like a comedy: bright, crowded, fast. He hears a foreigner will pay big for a run south, lies to another driver to poach the fare, and goes. This is the movement-image in perfect health — what Deleuze means by the cinema of action. A man perceives a situation, wants something, and acts to change it; the cutting just serves the chain of his wanting. Problem, hustle, payoff. The sensory-motor circuit hums. Song Kang-ho plays it loose and grinning, all appetite, and the camera keeps pace with him.

Gwangju breaks the circuit. This is the film's secret subject, and it is one of cinema's great hinges. Deleuze called it the crisis of the action-image: the moment a character can no longer react adequately to what he sees. Man-seob arrives expecting a job and finds violence that answers to no plan of his. There is nothing to drive away from, no fare to win, no lie that helps. He can only look. Deleuze has a name for that condition too — the pure optical situation, the opsign — an image that hands you something to see but nothing to do about it. And the person trapped inside it he calls the seer, the voyant: not an agent but a witness, someone who endures the image rather than resolving it. Watch the comedy drain out of Song's face in real time. The hustler becomes a man who has seen, and seeing is now the only thing happening.

That radio in the cab is doing precise philosophical work. Deleuze's 'powers of the false' usually names something artists do — making truth and falsity undecidable as a way of creating. Here the power belongs first to the State. The official voice composes a false present and broadcasts it over the real one; the calm narration and the violent image tell two incompatible stories at once. This is an audiovisual disjunction in the strict sense, sound and picture pulled apart so the seam shows. And it is exactly the lie the film exists to answer. Against the forged broadcast stands Hinzpeter's camera, and behind that camera the oldest promise of the medium, the contract André Bazin built realist cinema on: the recorded image does not lie. The handheld, close, breathless coverage of the crackdown — compressed lenses, no reassuring wide shot — is borrowed almost directly from The Battle of Algiers, where the shaky image first became an argument that what you are seeing actually happened. Z and Missing fused that documentary urgency to genre, and Jang Hoon inherits the whole grammar: the image as evidence, smuggled out, set against the State's account of itself.

Most of the drama lives in the car. The cramped two-shot of driver and passenger is its own little stage, a pressure vessel where class, language, and growing trust get worked out in glances and bad translation. Deleuze would read the body in that seat as a gest — a posture that exposes a social relation rather than describing it — and the lineage is specific: Night on Earth made the fare itself a complete dramatic contract, the temporary intimacy of strangers in transit, while Salvador put a journalist in a moving vehicle so that cynicism and conscience could argue on the way to the atrocity. The cab carries all of it.

Then comes the pivot, and it is the film's finest stroke. Man-seob has fled, gotten clear, chosen his daughter. He turns the taxi around. The drive back is rendered as a solitary passage through pale morning light, the countryside quiet and indifferent — what Deleuze calls an any-space-whatever, a space emptied of its old function so it can hold a state of mind instead. Geography becomes the shape of a decision. And here the film does something the pure time-image never asks of its seers: it sends the witness back into action. The man who could only look chooses to act again, but the action is now founded on having seen. The sensory-motor circuit closes once more, transformed. That is the whole moral architecture in one U-turn.

What did the film do to film? Not a formal revolution — Jang works in a clear, commercial-realist register and trusts behavior over style. Its invention is one of delivery. It routes the political thriller's outside-witness tradition through an ordinary man with no convictions at all, so the cost of seeing is maximal, and it makes the time-image's hardest lesson — that sometimes there is nothing to do but watch, and that watching obligates you — land inside a crowd-pleaser twelve million people went to see. Arriving in 2017 beside 1987, in the wake of the candlelight protests, it became an instrument of democratic memory, mourning a witness history lost: the real driver, sought for decades, dead before he could be found. A people gets assembled out of testimony here, around an absence. Next time, don't watch Man-seob. Watch the windshield, and watch the second the joking stops.