Taxi DriverYou can surround yourself with people, but that doesn't make you any less alone. Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro) is the icon of urban alienation, the loner who is alone not because he wants to be, but because he is operating on a different wavelength than the people of New York City. He can't sleep, so he decides he might as well make a little money by taking night shifts as a cabbie, taking any comers, and saving up money. For what? Even he doesn't know. Travis' actions are a compulsion born from a sense of right and wrong disparate from the world he is actually a part of.
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Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver is a masterpiece of brutal degeneration and isolation in the Big Apple, a testament of how a man who cannot really communicate with people--who tries in his hapless way to befriend and woo a beautiful woman he sees, Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), who tries to "rescue" a teenage prostitute named Iris (Jodie Foster), and even tries to seek guidance from a senior cabbie, Wizard (Peter Boyle)--all of these cries for help to make some kind of connection--as a lover, as a "father figure", as a comrade--all fall short; Travis' most resonant communication comes through the barrel of a gun. Travis claims he is a Vietnam war veteran, and it can be inferred then--if this is true--that he has seen some kind of action overseas. It's possible that Travis only believes he was a marine; although he goes through routines in his apartment, conditioning himself, training himself, preparing himself for some kind of war, he appears to have little knowledge of firearms; the first gun he requests from the squirrely gun smuggler is the same model someone in his cab talked to him about. Travis is adept at creative ways to maximize his loadout for a campaign of blood and bullets--such as his deviously clever way of using a slide bar to draw a gun from his coat sleeve--but these innovations are a result of his great deal of time on his hands, and unlikely from any special training. So why would Travis lie about being in the Marines? Probably for the same reason he writes to his parents about working for the government: to give himself a sense of purpose in a purposeless world--at least "purposeless" is how Travis sees his environs. It's hard to live life and feel that what you do is pointless, that all we do is just go through the routines and see the world turn to scum all around us, believing it should be better like the stories we see on TV, and know that it isn't--it's enough to make you want to go on a righteous rampage. So Travis sees things how he wants to see them, not too differently than those of us who balk at the conditions of the world, believing it would be better if...well, it were just better, if a "hero" came along. Travis puts the two women in his life--Betsy and Iris--up on pedestals, Betsy for her "angelic beauty" and Iris, because she is just a kid and should be at home, back in school, away from her pimp, Matthew/Sport (Harvey Keitel). But Travis is stricken by a psychological fixation on believing that the men they surround themselves with are unfit to share the company of these women he likes, perhaps because he is jealous, or perhaps because he believes that they are imprisoned by them; an irrational conclusion regarding Betsy's co-worker, Tom (Albert Brooks), who doesn't seem like a bad guy, but in truth not that far off in Sport. But because Travis believes that they are bad, that he is justified in his hatred, and that they must be bad because he dislikes them; it is a delusion which is recognized by Betsy--and by Iris inevitably--and by us, as we sense something is off in Travis. When Travis sits with Betsy in the diner and talks at length about how he things Betsy is beautiful, how he doesn't like Tom, how he needs to get "organizized", his conversation seems off and even rehearsed, one that reminds me a bit of Norman Bates in Psycho talking with Marion Crane--there is just something primal which sets you on edge. Coincidentally, both movies were scored by the magnificent Bernard Herrmann, with his contributions to Taxi Driver adding texture to the grit and grime of pre-gentrification NYC and the deep inner turmoil spiraling with Travis, alternating between the still waters of jazzy melodies to the crashing waves of brassy horns.
Travis' greatest shortcoming is that he cannot really feel or connect with others--is he crazy, or is it the whole city? Certainly the climax points that meter one way definitively, but there's a sense of pity for Travis...not the killer, but the lonely man. Travis narrates his implosion, his journal scrawled in pencil, read to us as he writes it down, the only thing he can bear his soul to which won't just ignore him or not take his calls anymore. This lack of contact--this isolation--has left Travis with a lot of confused sentiments about social situations, and about love in general. When the manager at the cab company suggests that he goes to porno theaters if he can't sleep, we find that Travis already frequents these places. There is no sense that he gets any enjoyment out of going there, but in his mind, the display of "sex" is the closest he can understand to what "love" is. His attempt to take Betsy to this movie is a catastrophe, but his reaction is likely genuine, that he doesn't understand why she was disgusted...but he does not apologize, because he doesn't know that he did anything wrong; in his mind, he is not guilty. But let's say that Travis was actually in the Marines; his behavior--his inability to feel connected with people--might be the result of post-traumatic stress disorder. Although he doesn't display any flashbacks or the like, his detachment is so sharp that it is borderline sociopathic. His delusion of what the world should be, his need to be the "white knight" to Iris and save her from her pimp justifies his war on the bad guys. His self-medicating coping methods--taking speed and drinking from a bottle in a brown paper bag--also suggest that he, like many vets, do not always get the right treatment for the horrors they have faced, and are forced to resort to ineffective--or even self-destructive--means to deal with the pain. From go, we sense that Travis' path is on a persistent downhill slope, leaning backwards until it slips out of grasp and crashes and explodes, like his unfortunate television set. Without a focus, without a direction, Travis feels that his life has no meaning, that he has no meaning. He prepares for his war, but his enemy is his displacement, not some slimy politician or a slimy pimp (what's the difference?); if he can't have one, he'll go for the other. In his final bloody gauntlet, moments from earlier in the film--slyly hinted at from his interactions with a fellow cabbie to a story Betsy tells Tom about a disfigured newsstand vendor--come back as though dark echoes reverberating just under the skull, a kind of malignant relapse of the collective unconscious of violence, as Travis apes the behaviors and actions of his world in this final explosive outcry. Much has been said about the nature of Taxi Driver's denouement, whether it is real or imaginary. I suppose it's possible that it's like what Wizard says, about how a man takes on a job and becomes that; so why wouldn't things go back to what they were, bloody massacre or no? But there is that last look Travis gives in his rearview mirror, to something we never really identify, which always makes me think that there is more that Travis sees than meets the eye--and has been for a long time.
Recommended for: Fans of a psychological study of a man who begins to mentally erode as he struggles with the ironic alienation and isolation that comes with life in a massive city, where you can still feel completely alone, and where the pervading sense of justice and loneliness can overwhelm your sanity.
Travis' greatest shortcoming is that he cannot really feel or connect with others--is he crazy, or is it the whole city? Certainly the climax points that meter one way definitively, but there's a sense of pity for Travis...not the killer, but the lonely man. Travis narrates his implosion, his journal scrawled in pencil, read to us as he writes it down, the only thing he can bear his soul to which won't just ignore him or not take his calls anymore. This lack of contact--this isolation--has left Travis with a lot of confused sentiments about social situations, and about love in general. When the manager at the cab company suggests that he goes to porno theaters if he can't sleep, we find that Travis already frequents these places. There is no sense that he gets any enjoyment out of going there, but in his mind, the display of "sex" is the closest he can understand to what "love" is. His attempt to take Betsy to this movie is a catastrophe, but his reaction is likely genuine, that he doesn't understand why she was disgusted...but he does not apologize, because he doesn't know that he did anything wrong; in his mind, he is not guilty. But let's say that Travis was actually in the Marines; his behavior--his inability to feel connected with people--might be the result of post-traumatic stress disorder. Although he doesn't display any flashbacks or the like, his detachment is so sharp that it is borderline sociopathic. His delusion of what the world should be, his need to be the "white knight" to Iris and save her from her pimp justifies his war on the bad guys. His self-medicating coping methods--taking speed and drinking from a bottle in a brown paper bag--also suggest that he, like many vets, do not always get the right treatment for the horrors they have faced, and are forced to resort to ineffective--or even self-destructive--means to deal with the pain. From go, we sense that Travis' path is on a persistent downhill slope, leaning backwards until it slips out of grasp and crashes and explodes, like his unfortunate television set. Without a focus, without a direction, Travis feels that his life has no meaning, that he has no meaning. He prepares for his war, but his enemy is his displacement, not some slimy politician or a slimy pimp (what's the difference?); if he can't have one, he'll go for the other. In his final bloody gauntlet, moments from earlier in the film--slyly hinted at from his interactions with a fellow cabbie to a story Betsy tells Tom about a disfigured newsstand vendor--come back as though dark echoes reverberating just under the skull, a kind of malignant relapse of the collective unconscious of violence, as Travis apes the behaviors and actions of his world in this final explosive outcry. Much has been said about the nature of Taxi Driver's denouement, whether it is real or imaginary. I suppose it's possible that it's like what Wizard says, about how a man takes on a job and becomes that; so why wouldn't things go back to what they were, bloody massacre or no? But there is that last look Travis gives in his rearview mirror, to something we never really identify, which always makes me think that there is more that Travis sees than meets the eye--and has been for a long time.
Recommended for: Fans of a psychological study of a man who begins to mentally erode as he struggles with the ironic alienation and isolation that comes with life in a massive city, where you can still feel completely alone, and where the pervading sense of justice and loneliness can overwhelm your sanity.