Even in the digital age, it’s possible to come to a classic film almost entirely unspoiled, and to be surprised. All I’d heard about Taxi Driver before this year was Robert De Niro’s “you talkin’ to me?” speech and the role the film played in John Hinckley Jr’s delusions, so it was full of surprises. It surprised me that Peter Boyle had a prominent part. It surprised me that there was a significant female character other than Jodie Foster. It surprised me that the film was under two hours, if barely.
Most of all, it surprised me just how surreal Taxi Driver is. From the opening shot, a waft of steam up from the streets, things play out more like a creeping nightmare than a cinema verité look at the squalor of 1970s New York. Once Travis Bickle (De Niro) begins his work as a cabbie, the sensation only intensifies. His internal monologue, the increasingly unhinged thoughts of a man trying to sound profound, starts up. The first glimpse he gets of Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) is of a gorgeous woman in white walking in slow motion. A passenger in Bickle’s cab (director Martin Scorsese himself) feels perfectly at ease describing his wife’s affair, his racist thoughts about the man she’s sleeping with, and the violent fantasies he has about murdering his wife to the driver. In a city teeming with millions, Bickle somehow keeps running into the same child prostitute (Foster). The presidential candidate Betsy campaigns for just happens to be in New York at a time when Bickle is deteriorating and looking for a target for his own violent thoughts. And, at picture’s end, no one makes a connection between the unstable ex-Marine with a mohawk who tried to assassinate a presidential candidate and the unstable ex-Marine with a mohawk who gets hailed as a hero for shooting a pimp and a mafioso, who inexplicably survives a shot to the throat.
The unreality extends into the technical elements too. Bernard Herrmann’s musical score suggests New York, but New York of an earlier era than the film is set in. Certain scenes rely on rapid-fire cuts toward and away from places or objects. Bickle’s target practice ends up confined to a square amidst black, pushing in and out, while the end of his famous speech stops and restarts abruptly as he stumbles for the right words. Strange things happen with color; sometimes the neon lights of the city turn everything red, while the climax plays out in muddy, muted tones. De Niro’s hair goes from long to a crew cut and back again – probably a continuity slip on a low-budget production, but it contributes to the illusory atmosphere. And the film comes to an abrupt stop in the way that dreams often do; Bickle drives away from his last fare, notices something in the mirror, and the city streets take over until fadeout.
That sort of ending fits something screenwriter Paul Schrader once said about Taxi Driver. In a 1976 radio interview, he distinguished between a problem and dilemma. Problems, he said, have solutions, which is why most movies are about problems. Dilemmas can be explained, they can be contemplated, they can be worried over, but they can’t be answered.
Because it is about a dilemma – the dilemma of pathological isolation and the feedback loop it creates for itself – Taxi Driver doesn’t hold up today. By that, I mean it couldn’t be made today, not by a major studio like Columbia. To get produced, it would have to present the dilemma as a problem and give an answer, even if that answer were as grim as Bickle dying for his actions. And it couldn’t get approved without a heavy dose of didacticism, lest anyone in the audience for a single moment fail to understand that Bickle is not a good guy.
Of course, if Taxi Driver were made today, and it did have such heavy-handed moralizing applied to it, I doubt it would win a reputation as a great movie. That reputation is well-deserved, because artistically, the film holds up just fine. If anything, its reflection on the dilemma of loneliness and isolation seems more apposite to an era of remote work, media bubbles, and well-publicized real-life examples of young men acting out violently. And it doesn’t need to get didactic to make its point; Scorsese’s direction, De Niro’s performance, and Schrader’s plot provide all the colors needed to paint Bickle’s portrait without a note tacked on the bottom of the canvas.
Travis Bickle could be mistaken at first for a good man, or at least a well-intentioned one. He’s plainly uncomfortable in social situations and suffering from some health issues, but he’s not wrong: the city he works in is a filthy place, literally and spiritually so far as the camera sees. His fixation on Betsy starts innocently enough. He’s no Casanova, but he tries to engage with her work and interests. Their first date is more pitiful than repulsive; however terrible his choice of venue is, this guy is self-evidently clueless about dating and romance. And Bickle does seem genuinely concerned with Foster’s character, Iris, and gives her some not-unsound advice.
But even in the early part of the film, Bickle’s dangerous qualities aren’t hard to spot, though they’re never explicitly stated. As many awful things as happen around him, Bickle is not a man put down by society. His fellow cabbies are fairly open and friendly with him and Betsy’s willing to give him a chance. The worst thing that happens to him before his date is that a concession stand worker is mildly rude about not exchanging names. Yet he’s prepared to write off the whole of New York as a living hell, including Betsy once she stops seeing him. And while he seems desperate to escape his loneliness, he cuts off all his avenues for escaping it. He rejects the (admittedly limited) advice of a fellow cabbie (Boyle). He takes no real interest in politics, music, non-pornographic movies – anything that might give him a hint of what other people like and care about. He burns his bridges with Betsy in ugly fashion.
There are other warning signs too. Though Bickle never gives voice to any particular prejudice, his passivity during Scorsese’s rant and the way he glares at his Black co-workers and pedestrians suggest he’s leaving plenty unsaid. His feelings toward women amount to a Madonna-whore complex. When Betsy rejects him, Bickle’s attitude toward her preferred candidate, Senator Palantine (Leonard Harris) grows confused. He’s the target of Bickle’s dreamed-of purge, yet the senator’s “let the people rule” campaign rhetoric seems to be one of Bickle’s inspirations. Does he think killing Palantine is somehow putting the slogan into action? Does he envy Palantine the admiration Betsy has for him, or the fact that his life isn’t a collapsing black hole? Or does Bickle even know why he’s targeting the senator?
.jpg?q=50&fit=crop&w=1500&dpr=1.5)
Sport, a Mafia associate, ends up dying by Bickle’s hand, along with his bouncer and his mob connection. But this wasn’t Bickle’s plan. His plan was to leave Iris some money, kill Palantine, and die while doing it. It’s only his failure to get close to Palantine that leaves him free, with pent-up violence and a mind untethered to sense, to kill people who would fit his definition of “scum.” And it’s only because the people he killed were, as he defines, “scum” that he gets a reputation as a hero instead of a dangerous nut.
At the end as in the beginning, it’s easy to see Bickle in that light at first glance. Mafiosi and pimps who sell children aren’t exactly sympathetic victims. Once Bickle’s out of the hospital, he seems better integrated into the fraternity of cab drivers he’s awkwardly danced around. There’s no evidenced hostility toward Palantine when he secures the nomination for president. Even Betsy seems to have a renewed interest in Bickle when she happens to be his fare for the evening.
But then he drives away from that fare, glares at some unseen unpleasantness in the mirror, and the neon-lit streets of New York wrap up the picture just as they opened it. If Taxi Driver is a nightmare, it’s Bickle’s nightmare. And when you consider everything that happened between the beginning and ending sequences of racing streets, there’s every reason to think the nightmare will repeat some day.
Rating: B+