Editor’s note: Taxi Driver is one of the ten best films of the 1970s voted on by staff, friends, and readers of Movie Mezzanine. For the sake of surprise we’ll wait to reveal where this and every other film ranks on the list until the very end. We hope you enjoy.
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Taxi Driver is a rare example of a perfect artistic specimen. It’s the product of cinema’s holiest (or un-holiest) trinity: Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader and Robert De Niro. This deliciously dark-minded American troika created a dense, hellish window into the mind of an everyday murderer, a character study laced with bitterness, paranoia and brutal black comedy. None of the three aforementioned artists would ever be part of a better film, even though they went on to helm Goodfellas, write Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters and star in Raging Bull, respectively.
After a bulbous yellow cab bursts through smoke and sails past the screen, Taxi Driver cuts to eyes, hazy and narrowed. It’s a telling early shot – these eyes will provide much of our perspective for the film, but they’re not necessarily to be trusted. Through the prism of their owner, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), the world onscreen becomes something at once dreamlike and nightmarish. Bickle’s world is New York, a concrete jungle in which he can play cowboy, fetishise weaponry and watch dirty movies.
But Bickle’s life is a fantasy as influenced by fiction as director Scorsese’s picture is modeled on movies of old, particularly Ford’s The Searchers and Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man. In Scorsese’s hands, the object of Travis’s affection, Betsy (played by a never-better Cybill Shepherd), becomes a gliding angel hovering through NYC in slow motion. Then, in Travis’s darker moments – such as when he visits a brothel looking to redeem pre-teen prostitute Iris (Jodie Foster) – Scorsese shoots Taxi Driver like a German Expressionist horror film.
Scorsese’s ability to seamlessly mix documentary-like realism with eclectic stylisation is unparalleled. His actors are naturalistic and improvise heavily, bolstered by some of screenwriter Paul Schrader’s best character-shading, but Scorsese finds room for aesthetic boldness, colouring the film in reds and tobacco browns. Modern audiences used to a more classical style should return to Taxi Driver and behold a director so versed in film language that he’s teaching history as he goes along.
He always finds room for innovation, as when he reimagines Godard’s bubbling coffee cup from 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her as Travis’s mesmerising, fizzing Alka Seltzer. Or witness the scene in which Travis calls Betsy from a payphone following their disastrous second date; at first, Scorsese shoots De Niro in a medium shot. But the camera becomes uncomfortable at Travis’s painful lack of self-awareness, tracking down the corridor and looking to avoid the trauma of the moment.
It’s the moment we might first be made consciously aware that Taxi Driver has a dual perspective. Tarantino has described the film as “maybe the greatest first person character study,” when in fact it’s presented from both Travis’ and Scorsese’s POV. In the payphone scene, Scorsese intervenes to spare Travis the indignity of our spectatorship. He flits between an objective stance and Travis’s subjective viewpoint throughout the film. At times, it’s almost imperceptible – the gradual realisation that we are staring judgmentally, via Scorsese’s skewed camera lens, at a group of black men, is horrifying. We see through Travis’s paranoid, prejudiced eyes: he hates these people, and we can feel it.
While there’s a strong psychological influence in Scorsese’s compositions and autobiographical honesty in Schrader’s script, arguably the greatest success is Robert De Niro, who depicts Travis as a normal, even boring individual. He’s a blank, absorbing phrases and personality from those around him to colour in his own empty persona. When Travis tells Iris, “You’re the one that’s square, man!” after she rejects his proposal to ditch her pimp and leave town, Travis sounds like the cabbies we’ve seen him hang out with night after night.
Travis is so detached he can only watch others and imitate, or pick out normalised behaviour through his beloved television. It’s astounding how Schrader, Scorsese and De Niro manage to fill this character with intrigue and keep him from becoming entirely repellent, even in later scenes, when his insomnia-drenched madness has taken over to test our sympathies. We stick with Bickle for the same reason that so many viewers claim to relate to the character: Travis Bickle is the id of the modern man. He is an unglamorous version of all of us.
Travis is a man out of touch, but he’s also a man out of control. He’s the person we fear we could become at our most unhinged, unable to dampen our innermost desires. He’s everyone that’s ever longed for the unattainable love interest; every working man or woman devoid of purpose, lost in “morbid self-attention;” everyone who’s ever ached to make their presence felt in the world; and everyone who’s ever felt irrational, even violent rage. It doesn’t matter that most of us wouldn’t go to Travis’ extremes – Scorsese’s particular audience positioning means we can judge Travis while we simultaneously relate to him.
A premium character piece filled with disturbing violence and sexuality, Taxi Driver also features a lot of fine dialogue. Onscreen, it’s pure gutter-poetry – the language of the New York streets, with all its varied ground-level inhabitants – but the noirish voiceover is beautifully literary. Everyone knows De Niro’s “You talkin’ to me?” monologue, but Schrader’s ace is his narration.
Lines like “All the animals come out at night” and “All my life needed was a sense of someplace to go” are effective, bite-size treatises on the human condition. It’s a strong voice that can battle with a Bernard Herrmann score for dominance over the soundtrack, especially when that score is so wry and erotically-charged. Herrmann’s combination of wailing horns and marching percussion is seedy and thick with foreboding, the sound of underground jazz lounges well after dark. His music here – the last he would finish, as he died literally hours after completing recording sessions on Taxi Driver – is the colour of Michael Chapman’s cinematography: blood-red and black, thick like treacle.
Three years after Taxi Driver, Woody Allen’s Manhattan would romanticise New York completely out of all proportion. Martin Scorsese’s 1976 portrait of the city is a hell – dark, claustrophobic and smeared with garbage, there’s no love in this place. Unsavoury characters abound: A memorable cab fare (actually a terrifying Lucifer-like Scorsese) talks of shooting his adulterous wife’s vagina with a .44 magnum, while Travis’s fidgety armourer has a sideline in grass, hash, mescaline, downers, uppers, crystal meth, nitrous oxide and brand new Cadillacs.
Travis’s fellow cabbies are no better, an assortment of creeps and night-owls amongst whom Travis can appear normal. But Bickle is always the most fearsome figure onscreen, gnarled with repressed sexual energy and totally unpredictable. The very first images of Travis see him emerge from a fog; next, he appears for his cabbie interview like an infant, grinning and spouting naive comments (“What’s moonlighting?”). It’s as though the character’s just been birthed, dropped into this scenario with zero cultural awareness and a total lack of comprehension of modern life. He’s dangerously unknowable – we can’t ever totally anticipate his actions. Even he can’t: as he confesses to king cabbie Wizard (Peter Boyle), “I got some bad ideas in my head.”
By the time Harvey Keitel appears as manipulative pimp and ostensible villain Sport, we’ve grown to fear Travis’ capabilities. Sport and his criminal associates are a less uneasy presence. Travis is home here, too, even if he doesn’t recognise it. Travis needs New York – it feeds his sicknesses, his neuroses.
In turn, he’s part of the city’s framework, keeping things shuttling on in his own small way. There’s a feeling that everyone in Taxi Driver’s New York is trapped in some awful purgatory, and Travis – “God’s lonely man” – remains watchful over all, a perverse guardian angel of the city. He feels like an eternal presence, lingering on well after the credits, the way Taxi Driver itself is a perpetuating thing, quite obviously a grainy product of ’70s Hollywood, but still as relevant this year as it has been every year since it was made.
One thought on “History of Film: ‘Taxi Driver’”
Excellent stuff. I really loved how you pointed out how Scorsese isn’t afraid to shift style and perspective in Taxi Driver. We see the grimy NYC of the 70s through Bickle’s eyes, but then Scorsese also lets us witness his madness deepening. That is such a remarkable skill and probably the most underrated aspect of his masterpiece.