Stick around long enough and you’ll notice the furniture rearranging, the polarities reversing. You’ll see macho men who only feel safe with a military-grade firearm. You’ll see freedom-loving Americans in thrall to Mother Russia. You’ll see plural pronouns for individuals, gender retro-continuity, cats and dogs living together, omg, wtf, smh, stfu, etc.
In times of disorienting change, it helps to pick a mood and stick with it.
Unfortunately, the two most popular moods seem to be, on the one hand, red-faced, paranoiac rage about the least alteration of the social order, and, on the other, scolding enthusiasm that disowns the reality of fifteen minutes ago. There has to be a middle path. There has to be some basic emotional preset that would serve those in the vast center of cultural disharmony — from the well-meaning dad whose daughter just told him she’s a boy to the long-haul trucker confronted with a puzzling hieroglyphic on an interstate restroom’s door. And as it happens, this affect was modeled decades ago by two cab drivers in New York City.
Years before our age of polarization, these two lumpy, proletariat white men landed on a durable, anodyne response to whatever social change climbed into the back of their taxi. And just because they don’t actually exist doesn’t mean they don’t have something to teach us. I speak of Wizard and Doughboy from Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver, two models for comportment in the face of challenging new perspectives.
If you haven’t seen it lately, Taxi Driver is pretty spectacularly un-woke. Written by a pill-popping sometime resident of Times Square porn theaters, the film huffs Caucasian resentment like paint thinner. While two generations have turned De Niro’s psychopathic antihero Travis Bickle into a hero, because he was so cut and wore his clothes so well, fewer take heed of his two colleagues at the late-night diner, Harry Northup’s Doughboy and Peter Boyle’s Wizard.
A Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Bickle’s tortured Hamlet, these two denizens of New York City’s darker, sleazier past engage in bizarre, salty, often breathtakingly dumb conversation in the diner booth. Their dialogue is a clear inspiration for the greasy, shit-shooting side characters of Tarantino films, and remains a gold standard for WTF utterance.
As in:
DOUGHBOY:
Midgets are funny. Sometimes, I like to hold a midget.
WIZARD:
Yeah?
DOUGHBOY:
I mean, they’re funny. They always want to sit in the front seat.
That kind of thing.
The time and place of their profession leads us to assume that these two men have seen virtually everything. But for some reason, the same sensory input that pushes Bickle towards violence, strikes them differently. This much we see in the salient exchange, from which I draw such inspiration.
It takes place, as it must, in period- and milieu-appropriate language whose homophobic toxins I’ll try to neutralize while preserving the laissez-faire attitude I see these men modeling. Wizard begins an anecdote about picking up two gay male passengers whose bickering turns to shouting then physical violence, to which Wizard responds with a pungent paraphrase of the Declaration of Independence.
WIZARD:
I say: 'Look, I don't care what you do in the privacy of your own home behind closed doors — this is an American free country, we got a pursuit of happiness thing, you're consenting, you're adult. BUT, you know, uh, you know, in my f***ing cab, don't go bustin' heads, you know what I mean? God love you, do what you want.'
This sentiment moves Doughboy to share something he heard about social mores in California, where he believes the dissolution of gay couple requires the at-fault partner to pay alimony to the aggrieved ex. To which Wizard delivers what I consider the money-shot of this little teaching moment. (Directional wrylie added)
WIZARD:
(nodding, gravely impressed)
Not bad. They’re way ahead out there, you know, in California.
That’s it. A soft nod of respect for progress. A salute to the latest gadget off America’s assembly line.
Whenever you’re feeling bemused, puzzled, or taken aback at social mores you’ll probably assimilate in due time — such as an AI chatbot’s illustration of the Holy Father as South Asian woman — why not try asking, What Would Wizard Say? (WWWS). I bet he’d marvel at a woke AI chatbot as he would at any technological innovation, as he would at how quickly they managed to repave the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. He’d respond in the same spirit with which cowboy Will Parker relays the wonders of a thoroughly modern metropolis he’s just visited in the song “Kansas City” from the Broadway musical Oklahoma! (“They got a big theater they call a burlesque/For fifty cents you can see a dandy show), Wizard would simply nod and say, Not bad.
I don’t want to pretend that all the world’s problems can be solved by consulting a gritty noir-ish film of the mid-1970s. Sometimes you need to consult a gritty, noir-ish film of the early-1970s.
In those cases where the Wizard/Doughboy attitude won’t quite cut it, one must turn to the sensei of benign detachment that is Elliot Gould’s Philip Marlowe in Altman’s 1973 film The Long Goodbye.
A private eye in LA, Marlowe navigates a West Coast corollary to the grimy New York City of Doughboy and Wizard, and operates at a roughly parallel social tier, moving from county lock-up to moneyed artist colony to posh psychiatric facility, observing crazy estate agents, ruthless gangsters, corrupt officials, and female neighbors who practice nude yoga.
Marlowe takes them all in with equanimity and a quick drag off his cigarette. And he utters a line that Gould initially improvised and became a leitmotif of the film, and my personal mantra: “Hey, it’s OK with me.”
Not bad. It’s OK with me.
These are only mantras. They don’t offer much to well-meaning Americans facing more serious issues than culture-war skirmishes. (The genocidal Netanyahu regime; the Supreme Court’s ass-covering dereliction of duty; the attacks on language and reason coming from people who see some personal upside in abetting the erosion of American democracy. Plus other things for other posts.)
Some people are not not bad. Some things aren’t OK with me. My humble models for acceptance are interventions of the spirit only. They’re countermeasures against knee-jerk hate, for street use, one crazy passenger at a time. Fake it ‘til you make it. Act your way into right thinking. Adopt the right outside and your inside might just grow to fit it.
But not even Gould’s moral-relativist Marlowe gives everyone a pass. Over the course of The Long Goodbye, the private eye gets himself beaten up, jailed, run over, and terrorized on the course of running down the central villain in the story, a low-life, wiseguy former friend who beat his wife to death. At the end, when Marlowe catches the guy — who offers the smiling, hey-whaddya-gonna-do mea culpa of mob bosses and GOP frontrunners — Marlowe simply shoots him. Then he spits out his gum, turns around, and walks away.
Everyone has their limit. Even those who follow the gospel of chill ‘70s cinema lowlifes. Otherwise, do what you like, God love you. But you know, in our f***ing cabs, don’t go busting heads.