Taxi Driver

dir. Martin Scorsese, 1976

June 22, 2009

Travis Standing

Here in the first decade of the amused-to-death new millennium, the great American anti-hero has all but disappeared from our movie screens. But, by the 1970s, the bad hangover of a mostly failed social and political revolution informed popular culture. Such big screen icons as Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino (riding on the heels of Paul Newman’s Sixties-based opening salvo) centered their images on frustrated men who knew they were being oppressed, then blew their tops upon finding a target they deemed at least semi-responsible for their soul-sapping disillusionment.

This frame of mind reached its logical, violent conclusion with a Martin Scorsese-Paul Schrader-Robert De Niro collaboration called “Taxi Driver,” a movie that, 33 years later, can still get you looking over your shoulder when you’re walking down the proper sidewalk.

Scorsese and his cohorts created a white-knuckle picture that addressed the effects of loneliness in a teeming urban environment, and it rings resoundingly true because all three men knew where Schrader’s protagonist, an isolated New York City cabbie named Travis Bickle, was coming from. They were, in fact, Travis in three persons, albeit hanging on the cusp of random, bullet-spraying desperation, and their cumulative self-awareness is terrifying.

It’s no wonder that, in the wake of this sweaty, deeply disturbing essay, Americans lost their taste for cheering on the crazy guy. The fun is bound to stop when you meet the enemy while looking in a mirror.

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It’s difficult to synopsize “Taxi Driver”’s plot; this is a picture that refuses to be compartmentalized. Written by Schrader in a mere 10 days - coke adds life, for a while anyway - the script simply monitors Travis as his life slowly and inevitably winds its way down a psychological vortex.

Schrader’s heavily narrated format was inspired by the diaries of Arthur Bremer, a loner who took it upon himself to shoot Alabama Governor George Wallace during Wallace’s 1972 bid for the Presidency. De Niro’s interior monologues are heard as soliloquies, the sad, sometimes darkly humorous musings of a man who’s decided to write down his own thoughts, even if he’s incapable of fully understanding them.

Much is made in modern-day film development offices of the classic three-act structure— a narrative in which a question is asked, and the answer eventually arrives in a relatively logical form, with coherent revelations dotting the roadmap to salvation. But “Taxi Driver,” like so many of the great character studies of the 1970s, virtually abandons this format, with special emphasis on disregarding the possibility of deliverance.

A yellow cab becomes a metaphor for Travis’ vagabond life, with new and often unsavory passengers directing him to his next corner, his next street leading to nowhere. There’s certainly something going on in Travis’ head, and Scorsese’s overripe color pallet (provided by the brilliant cinematographer, Michael Chapman, who also shot the glorious Weegee-scapes of “Raging Bull”) makes his fantasy a reality. However, the audience is never quite sure what Travis is up to, because Travis himself is so utterly flummoxed.

Hints are dropped during the film that Travis was wounded in Vietnam, but it's never stated outright, and the halting manner in which he speaks suggests a lack of education. But that’s not much to go on.

Initially, he seems inappropriately enamored of a young prostitute (Jodie Foster, age 12), but then it appears that he simply wants to save her from the clutches of Sport (Harvey Keitel) a seductive pimp who uses the girl the way he uses everyone else— for his own profit. That quest, however, eventually seems to give way to Travis’ obsession with Betsy (Cybil Shepherd) a classy political campaign operative who Travis feels is uncomfortably close to one of her co-workers (then-comedian Albert Brooks).

It’s easy to question Travis’ decision to take the well-heeled, ice-blonde Betsy to a Times Square porno movie on their first - and only - date. But Schrader intended to illustrate that Travis has such a low self-concept, he unconsciously sets himself up for defeat. His own sense of worthlessness has overridden the impulse to better himself, and that leads to his reliance on firearms and finding someone who, in his mind, needs to be eradicated as much as he does.

Travis with Gun (shrunk).jpg

As Schrader points out, Japanese society, with its tightly structured codes of conduct, all but encourages its troubled souls to off themselves. Americans, on the other hand, “free” as they are, turn the weapon outward, looking to make a statement as they’re overrun by the clamor of a behemoth culture run amuck.

It’s possible, then, to view the hellish scene in which Travis’ fare (played by Scorsese himself) profanely rhapsodizes about what he’s going to do to his philandering wife with a .44 Magnum, as an Apple Pie moment. After all, if you bring millions of guns on the stage, somebody has to shoot them.

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Bernard Herrmann’s score (the man responsible for those shrieking violins in “Psycho,” Herrmann died of a heart attack just hours after completing work on “Taxi Driver”) shifts between menacing orchestral stabs and an oddly smoky jazz saxophone piece. Herrmann's grasp of the picture is apparent; there’s a sensuality to “Taxi Driver”’s images that fully suits his aural seduction.

Scorsese, at this point in his career, was capable of conveying deep emotion through casual pans and simple shots that gradually move, within a single camera set-up, from slow-mo to full speed. "Taxi Driver"'s pulsating, ready-to-burst look is intoxicating. Ironically, though, the climax Travis reaches is anything but life-affirming.

Marty & Travis (shrunk).jpg

The iconic moment in “Taxi Driver” is, of course, De Niro’s hugely disquieting monologue as Travis pumps himself up for his eventual killing spree. This sequence displays a form of cinematic mastery that’s all but escaped Scorsese in his ensuing, hyper-histrionic years (the trailer for his upcoming opus, “Shutter Island,” looks like something that could have been pounded out by the aptly-named Wes Craven.) This development - a brilliant filmmaker’s gradual inability to determine when enough is enough - is our, and Scorsese’s, great loss.


Note the elements that give the scene its pop while rooting it in real life— the dull echo as words bounce off the walls of a decrepit room, congas playing in the street, half-heard conversations pouring through the window, an airplane passing overhead, a clock ticking. Travis may be alone, but he isn’t talking to himself; he’s talking to a world that blithely moves on without him.

The crowning touch of the sequence, however, is Scorsese’s brilliant decision to increase tension by cutting on the metallic snap of the gun. De Niro is unnerving, to be sure, but his wild-eyed performance is only part of what makes this one of the more forceful depictions of loneliness in all of cinema.

When, at the end of the scene, Scorsese disorients the viewer with a couple of short-range dissolves, then inserts a bizarre jump cut of Travis repeatedly turning toward his prey, it’s a heart-sickening moment. You realize there’s no turning back now, that Travis will never receive the simple sense of connection that’s his right as a human being. You mourn this troubled young man's transition into being just another one of the living dead.

Paul Tatara

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