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Taxi Driver

Retrospectives - June 2003

USA, 1976. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Written by Paul Schrader. Photographed by Michael Chapman. Edited by Tom Rolf, Melvin Shapiro. Music by Bernard Hermann. Released by Columbia Pictures. 113 minutes.

Starring Robert DeNiro, Cybill Shepherd, Peter Boyle, Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel, Leonard Harris, Albert Brooks, Harry Fischler, Murray Moston.

So I fidgeted around for a week trying to watch "Deliverance" for this month's retrospective, sometimes actually playing the DVD, but never managing to concentrate. It's one of my favourite movies, but I couldn't seem to settle down and watch it. Got depressed. Had bad thoughts running through my head, like maybe I've lost the passion, or have passed my peak too early, or have become too used to letting crap like this invade my brain, and must be going crazy.

Being in the mood for a gritty film from the 1970s, and needing some kind of temporary therapy, I decided to watch "Taxi Driver". It has some of the most boldly memorable images in cinema history, it's made from the kind of obsessive first-person viewpoint that is bound to draw you in no matter how detached you've been feeling from the screen, and it's a movie that reminds us what people who are going crazy really look like.

The brilliant thing, the scary thing, is that it doesn't actually look that weird. Not at first. We remember Travis Bickle as one of the great deranged loners of modern fiction -- he loses the ability to communicate with people, organizizes himself into a fanatical military routine, becomes infatuated with a string of women who do not want his attention and ends up causing a bloodbath in a Harlem whorehouse. He doesn't start out that way. Watching that first scene in the taxi depot, I remembered seeing the movie for the first time, not exactly knowing what was going on with Travis or the murky depths to which he would sink. He doesn't look like a legendary madman, just a quiet guy, kinda self-conscious. We notice his expression subtly look for approval as he cracks that joke about his driving license being as clean as his conscience, but at least he makes the joke. We can see that his clothes are a little raggedy, but he's a guy with no money in the big city, and everyone around looks pretty much the same. He mentions having been in the marines, but some guys came back from Vietnam as catatonic wrecks, and he isn't one of those. He stands upright, speaks clearly, knows what's going on.

The descent into insanity is a slow one: Travis is a loner from the beginning of "Taxi Driver", but he's frank and intelligent about his situation, and determined to change things. "All my life needed was a sense of direction," he scrawls in his diary. " I do not believe one should devote his life to morbid self-attention, but one should become a person like other people." The opening passages are about how he attempts to do that: Instead of slumping around unable to sleep, he fills time by driving the night shift, and rather than sit and watch as the girl of his dreams goes about her business, he gets up the guts to go and make a move. It's an uplifting moment, when Travis marches into the campaign office and asks Betsy out. He doesn't stumble, come across as sleazy, act desperate -- in fact, he's charming, and we think that maybe this guy isn't so weird after all.

But superficial charm is easy and substance is hard to fake, and before long we realise the extent to which Travis is on the outside looking in, noticing the rhythms of normal life but not quite knowing how to join it. He takes Betsy to a hardcore porno movie, and doesn't understand when she walks off, freaked out and disgusted. "This is a movie a lot of couples go to," he mutters with confusion, thinking he was doing what he was supposed to do. He puts pictures of a shallow presidential candidate all over his apartment -- at first, because Betsy is working to elect the guy, and Travis aspires to become interested in things that are supposed to be admirable. When Betsy leaves, the interest is gone but the posters are still there, and for Travis the natural progression is to develop hatred of the images and turn them into fantasies of assassination. Travis keeps driving the streets, and his internal monologues turn from detached disappointment to violent rage. "Some day a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets," he muses early on. Later, armed with a .44 Magnum and a sense of purpose, he thinks he is that rain: "Listen, you fuckers, you screwheads, here is a man who would not take it any more! A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit -- here is someone who stood up!"

You could call "Taxi Driver" a character study, but it doesn't so much study as immerse itself. Martin Scorsese has always been a director whose camera takes forbidden looks, shifting around, sneaking in, leering. The movie is not uncomfortable because it creates a feeling of alienation, but because it brings us so deep under Travis's skin. We become used to the rhythms of his endless drives around the filthiest parts of New York, decorated by violence, vice and garish neon light. Just as the torment of his personality refuses to leave him, the movie stresses us out with a dreary, hypnotic narration, and the famous Bernard Hermann score, whose percussion is loud, commanding and scary, and underlined by a queasy saxophone track, unrefined and sleazy. Robert De Niro's performance in the lead role is one where every gesture counts; he gives us a man so withdrawn that we get transfixed without even realising it, noticing all his little ticks, trying to figure them out, and finding ourselves locked in to that process by the time his eyes have become vacant blobs.

The filmmaking works insistently to submerge us in a nightmare state. There are the slow motion point-of-view shots where Travis exchanges glares with threatening faces on the streets, the famous shot where the camera moves away from a hallway phone conversation because the atmosphere of humiliation is just too strong, the directness of the "You talkin' to me? I'm the only one here!" conversation in the mirror. When the ending comes, and Travis has embarked on his John Wayne quest to save a teenage prostitute from her captors, we may know that he is beyond hope, but we cannot turn away.

There is also of course the epilogue, where Travis has recovered from his injuries, is back at work, has newspaper clippings all around his apartment and seems to be able to talk to Betsy without losing control of his emotions. What's it all about? I've heard it described as a fantasy sequence to show Travis's continuing delusions, a comment on how the media makes heroes out of the most unlikely people, a sick attempt at a grace note that ends up sending the wrong message to potentially disturbed people. All credible explanations, but I don't think it matters. The movie needs that quiet scene to make its effect stay with us. If it hurtled to a violent last scene and ended with a solemn silence, we'd be startled in a proper and artistic fashion. A happy ending is more shocking -- there's more frustration and disbelief in it, and it sets up that terrifying little edit right at the finish, where Travis takes a quick paranoid look out the rear view mirror, and makes clear that everything we've seen could happen all over again.

Paul Schrader wrote the movie when he was living out of his car and spending days at a time without having real conversations. The driving force behind the screenplay, he says, was to put his narcissistic loneliness into context; to show himself, and viewers of the movie, that it was a stage of something altogether more terrifying. You can tell that "Taxi Driver" came from something real; it draws us in with a conviction that makes us feel like we're living it. It's an awesome, bleak, vividly visionary masterpiece, a movie with the power to educate us about life on the darker sides of the soul, or to steer us away from living that life. I've seen it tens of times, probably -- sometimes I can relate to it, other times not at all, but the experience is always encompassing.

COPYRIGHT© 2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani

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