Taxi Driver

A paranoid insomniac turns from potential assassin to vigilante anti-hero in one of the bleakest films ever made

Grade: A (95/100)

Director: Martin Scorsese
Year Released: 1976

There are some movies wherein there is very little hope, both for the characters, the overall environment, and for how the viewer perceives the tone. I can say with very firm certainty that Taxi Driver was probably the bleakest movie I've ever seen that wasn't about the Holocaust. However, this was not an issue. In fact, Martin Scorsese's modern classic about a deeply troubled Vietnam vet stewing in an unhealthy environment was so ingenious in its darkness, so perfect in its ability to suck any hope or aspiration out of the viewer. In this film Scorsese creates a pseudo-environment of the one its protagonist, Travis Bickle, inhabits every day. Travis's paranoia is so well-depicted through Scorsese's excellent direction that the viewer feels the grit, dirt, disgust, fear, queasiness, and gloom that cloud his mind and impair his proper functioning throughout the film.

Like many who have seen it before me, I cannot fully decide how I feel about Travis's character. On the one hand I find him to be very frightening in a ticking time bomb kind of way, much like I interpreted the character of Private Pyle from Full Metal Jacket; he's clearly mentally disturbed and needs some kind of professional help following the failings of the environment around him (including the aftershocks of his time in Vietnam). This side of Travis is always sort of there, from the beginning of the film where he gets his taxi driver's license and declares his record as "clean as [his] conscience"to the last shot of his agitated face in the rearview mirror of his taxicab. But his character is very well-layered, owing to Robert DeNiro's magnificent performance, Martin Scorsese's unparalleled direction, and the creative conceptive work of writer Paul Schrader. I think it's fair in assuming that I am the only 17-year-old who is even mildly delighted at sharing a birthday with Paul Schrader. But that's beside the point.

The other sides of Travis emerge within his relationship with those around him and, most troublingly, himself. Around others, particularly his other taxi-driving friends, he appears to be little more than a quiet loner who has a few low-key emotional problems. Around the woman of his obsession, Betsey (played by a somewhat bad but very pretty Cybil Shepard), he seems to be more reminiscent of a troubled man with very few social skills whose ineptitude to assimilate into proper behavior leaves both Betsey and the viewer very uncomfortable and, indeed, a little worried. While it's not one hundred percent clear that he is not concerned with hurting Betsey, his decision to try to assassinate her hero, presidential candidate Charles Palantine (whom he actually meets by chance in his cab), is both telling of an obsession that leaves him desperate to assert his frustrated power in a violent way and of the enigma of his mental state. It's hard to rationally assess Bickle's motivations as they are all so thoroughly conditioned by his very shaky conscience and mental illness; yet the viewer attempts to make a breakthrough in understanding his character, not only due to the fascination with its many intricacies, but also in an attempt to find the humanity we hope is there. This, surely, is what makes an effective and true anti-hero.

It would be enough to keep the plot centered on Travis's irrational obsessions with the woman who rejected him and the presidential candidate whom she admires, but by adding the plot of Jodie Foster's young runaway-turned-prostitute Travis is forced to go through yet another emotional metamorphosis, from a potentially dangerous attempted assassin to a vigilante hero who sets free a young girl trapped in the sort of filth and scum that disgusts Travis throughout the film. His obsession with a social, environmental, and ethical cleansing is his main motivation and perhaps a side effect of his entrapment in Vietnam, pre-gentrified New York City, poverty, and his own irrational mind. He longs to clean up the brutality and pointless crime around him, but also to cleanse himself of his troubles. This aspect of his personality is both deeply troubling (and creepy) as well as what lends him some sort of credibility as a protagonist- the fact that his violent deeds are motivated by some sort of desire to transform the world into a cleaner place.

You talkin' to him?

An interesting aspect of Taxi Driver was its reminiscence to the works of Dostoevsky, particularly Crime and Punishment. From what I understand Schrader was motivated partially by Notes from the Underground, which just makes a whole lot of sense. In many ways, Taxi Driver can be seen as a modern-day adaption of Crime and Punishment, the story of a paranoid loner who commits a crime to test himself of his own humanity, deeply disgusted and affected by the poverty and filth of his environment. While Travis Bickle can be seen accurately as a vigilante, however, Rodion Raskolnikov's motivations can only be interpreted as that of a vigilante from his own flawed point of view that positions himself as an "extraordinary man"; though to a certain extent quite different, the parallels between these (maybe) villains and their motivations are telling of a great investigation into the human conscience through literature and film.

I really loved Taxi Driver; it disturbed me and thrilled me in equal parts. Unlike other pop culture moments that become iconic to the point of dulling considerably, De Niro's fabulous "you talkin' to me?" scene remained as terrifying and fascinating as I'm sure it was to those seeing it upon its release, if not a little more due to the hype. There is so much brilliance in Taxi Driver, and so much tension, and so much uneasiness. The end of the film presented a conclusion I never would have expected- a potentially pleasant and unrealistic ending to a film you never budgeted a happy ending for. I'm inclined to believe the theory that it's all a near-death fantasy of Travis's after the shootout- the beautiful limbo state in which everything goes right for once and he can be the hero he always wanted to be- but since Schrader has disagreed with this interpretation, I suppose my own viewpoint of the end must be greatly swayed by the final shot of Travis's agitated face in the rearview mirror after smiling. Sure, he has had the rest he needed to recover slightly from the demons that plagued him, but, very much like the end of A Clockwork Orange, he is nowhere near cured.

I rented Taxi Driver for $3.99 on Amazon, but it can also be found, I'm sure, at your local video store.