Taxi Driver. 1976. The fifth film.
Taxi Driver was Scorsese’s first real hit, which came as a surprise to him and everyone involved. There’s not much I can say about this movie that hasn’t already been said, but I’ll do my best.
While not quite a departure for Scorsese, it is the first time he’s made a movie so completely focused on an internal conflict, and gotten so bold about using images to confuse and disorient the audience rather than illuminate them. The ostensible main conflict is between unhinged hero Travis Bickle and the seedy underbelly of 1970’s New York. The city at that time really was a scary and terrible place, but as the movie unfolds it becomes clear that Travis is no different from the “filth and scum” he imagines swarming all around him. When he starts talking about how the city has a stink he can smell everywhere he goes, which gives him headaches and keeps him up at night, or about how he wants a “real rain” to come and wash away everything for good, it becomes clear that this is something coming from inside himself, way beyond a reaction to the environment around him.
He sees filth and scum everywhere because it’s what’s inside of him, and he doesn’t know what to do except externalize it. So when he harasses and frightens off a beautiful woman, the only way he knows how to fix it is to become a champion and savior of beautiful women, and to violently destroy the people who are harming them.
The buildup to that climactic scene of violence is masterfully slow, plodding, and purposeful. There’s a lot of discussion of the kinds of destruction a gun can inflict on the human body in the film, so we’ve been waiting to see it this whole time. But when it happens, there’s nothing satisfying or even particularly shocking about it. The violence is not glorified, in spite of the movie’s brutal reputation. It’s just sad and horrible, ugly and quick, almost anti-climactic. Instead of lingering on the gory details, the film lingers on the reaction of the little girl this act of violence was meant to save. We see right away that nothing good has happened, and all Travis has done is cause her further trauma she will never be able to shake off.
The iconic shot of Travis raising a bloody finger to pantomime blowing his own brains out underlines a lot of things: the futility of his actions, the blur between fantasy and reality, his need to destroy the ugliness in himself, and his failure to do so.
The too-perfect epilogue, in which Travis is praised as a hero, is a subject of some controversy, but to me it’s clearly a feverish fantasy in his head. But it’s filmed the same way the rest of the movie was: slow, dreamlike, with most of the spoken dialogue sounding oddly stilted and forced.
This calls into question not only the reality of the scene, but of all scenes that preceded it. Did Travis really blow his chances with Betty by taking her to a porno, or was he unable to see how put off she was from the start? When he tried to express his bad thoughts to The Wizard, did his confidante truly not understand, or did he understand so well that he tried to end that conversation as quickly as possible? Was Iris reluctant to let Travis help her because she couldn’t see the danger she was in, or because she could clearly see the danger Travis himself presented? It’s not just the end that is distorted by Travis’s delusions- it’s the entire film. The only thing that changes is the audience’s awareness of that fact. What’s worse is by the end we can see that there was no clarity achieved with his final violent act, and no escape waiting for him.
With a different director, Taxi Driver could’ve been the story of a man who truly was on a heroic and violent crusade. Instead it’s about a man trapped inside himself. The movie was a hit because it captured a certain timely feel of violence and uncertainty, but it stays strong because that internal conflict is still so darkly captivating. At this point Scorsese has proven himself capable of not just capturing an image on screen, but of using film to capture something invisible, something the protagonist himself can’t even see.
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