Martin Scorsese (1976)
I got interested in cinema around 1970 and there were five films released in the next few years that made an especially strong impression on me: Cabaret, The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Taxi Driver. I first saw the last-named in Leeds on Tuesday 2 November 1976 – the day of that year’s US presidential election. This was a coincidence, though I knew the plot involved a fictional presidential candidate; it seemed a more uncomfortable coincidence in 1981, thanks to John Hinckley Jr. ( His failed attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan was, Hinckley claimed, ‘inspired’ by the actions of Taxi Driver’s protagonist and designed to impress Jodie Foster, who co-stars in the film, and with whom Hinckley was obsessed.) My latest viewing of Taxi Driver is at least my fifth (and the second at BFI). I still think it’s extraordinary – and the best Scorsese picture I’ve seen – in spite of reservations about Paul Schrader’s screenplay, which grow each time I see the movie.
Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), aged twenty-six, gets work driving a yellow cab in New York City. We don’t know much of his background. He has an honourable discharge from the US marines. He no longer sees his parents. (Travis remembers they were both born and that they married in the month of July but admits, when he sends them an anniversary card that’s meant to cover the birthdays too, that he’s not sure of the exact dates.) He lives alone in a New York bedsit. He doesn’t sleep well, a main reason for his opting for nighttime driving shifts. He keeps a diary and the entries supply a continuing voiceover narrative to Taxi Driver. One of the first and most significant of these is:
‘May 10th. Thank God for the rain which has helped wash away the garbage and trash off the sidewalks. I’m working long hours now, six in the afternoon to six in the morning. Sometimes even eight in the morning, six days a week. Sometimes seven days a week. It’s a long hustle but it keeps me real busy. I can take in three, three fifty a week. Sometimes even more when I do it off the meter. All the animals come out at night – whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets. I go all over. I take people to the Bronx, Brooklyn, I take them to Harlem. I don’t care. Don’t make no difference to me. It does to some. Some won’t even take spooks. Don’t make no difference to me.’
Travis also records in his diary that he doesn’t ‘believe one should devote his life to morbid self-attention. I believe that one should become a person like other people’. He can’t, however, find a way of making social contact, let alone sustaining it. He’s isolated even sitting with other cabbies in the all-night Belmore cafeteria: when they talk about ‘moonlighting’ or ask ‘How’s it hanging?’, Travis doesn’t know what they mean. He’s instantly attracted to Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a young political worker he sees outside the campaign headquarters of Senator Charles Palantine, a candidate for a US presidential nomination. Travis takes Betsy out a couple of times but their second date goes disastrously wrong and she refuses to have any more to do with him. Concerned about his increasingly aggressive feelings towards the ‘scum’ of New York, Travis asks his fellow cabbie Wizard (Peter Boyle) for advice but the older man doesn’t understand what he’s on about. Travis embarks on a regime of intense physical fitness training. He also buys firearms from an illegal gun dealer (Steven Prince). One night, Travis goes into a convenience store moments before an attempted armed robbery. He shoots the robber dead and is horrified by what he’s done. The store owner, in contrast, is grateful to Travis, happy to accept responsibility for the shooting, and takes a crowbar to the dead robber, for good measure.
At an earlier point in the story, Travis is particularly disturbed when a young teenage girl (Jodie Foster) gets into his cab and is then dragged from it by a man (Harvey Keitel) who throws Travis a twenty-dollar bill for his trouble. Seeing the girl again, Travis finds out that her name is Iris, that she works as a child prostitute at a brothel in the East Village and that the man who dragged her from the cab was ‘Sport’, her pimp. Travis hires Iris for an hour but uses the time to try to get her to give up prostitution and return to her home in Pittsburgh. Although he fails, Iris agrees to have breakfast with him next day, when Travis renews his unsuccessful efforts to persuade her to go back to her parents and to school. At a political rally at Columbus Circle, Travis, wearing a combat jacket, armed to the teeth and sporting a new Mohican hairstyle, prepares to shoot Senator Palantine (Leonard Harris). Security guards spot Travis before he can fire and they give chase. After escaping back to his room, he hotfoots it to the East Village brothel where he shoots dead Sport and a bouncer and then, in a gunfight that leaves Travis severely wounded, a gangster. Travis means to commit suicide: he fails because the gun he’s using is now out of bullets and he’s too badly hurt to reach for his other weaponry. He’s taken unconscious to hospital, where he remains for several weeks. As a result of his intervention in the brothel, Iris returns to her parents, who write Travis a letter of thanks. Instead of being reviled as the political assassin he intended to be, he is lionised by the press as a vigilante saviour.
It’s hard, in a short note, to do more than highlight a few examples of what Scorsese and his cinematographer Michael Chapman achieve atmospherically in Taxi Driver. The cloud of steam and smoke that rises from the streets in the opening sequence is hellish; there are pavement-level shots of Travis’s cab moving forward that suggest a checker-yellow hearse or, perhaps, shark. Yet the blur of neon lights seen through the wet windscreen of the cab is warmly seductive – at least until the images of the Times Square ‘animal’ life outside the vehicle come into focus. Even with Travis’s alarming words about washing away the scum echoing in your head, the sight of a water hose doing its work in the summer desert of the streets is powerfully refreshing. The notorious urban squalor of New York in the mid-1970s must have made it easier for Scorsese to present his beloved home city from an alienated perspective. (In retrospect, it’s troubling to see African Americans so dominant in the low life, even if this is an ethnically accurate description of the particular time and place.) This New York seethes infernally but it’s also a ghost town: you can almost smell the sour, drab corridors in Travis’s apartment building, the fug of sweat and exhaust fumes in the shabby cab depot. There are other locations whose seediness gives off a voluptuous heat. This doesn’t transmit itself to Travis and strengthens our sense of his outsiderness. Martin Scorsese does a masterly job of dramatising his central character’s confrontation with – his distance from and his besieged proximity to – the city’s fleshpots. Without specifying Travis’s frustration as of a sexual nature, Scorsese makes it seem entirely appropriate that the appalling bloodbath in the brothel is a climax in more ways than one. This episode is unusually shocking not only because it connects strongly to Travis’s psychology but also because, and in spite of an abundance of violent words, physical violence occurs much less often in Taxi Driver than it does in many other Scorsese films (and in other American vigilante movies in vogue during the early 1970s). The schizophrenic Bernard Herrmann score – alternating between ominous percussion and a plangent saxophone melody – plays a crucial part in reinforcing the conflicting tones of the story.
The voiceover on which Scorsese relied to more or less unsatisfactory effect in several later films (including Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence, Casino and Gangs of New York) is very right in Taxi Driver. Its specificity – we know these are Travis’s diary entries – makes his narrative an acceptable, believable series of insights into what’s going on in his mind. His written words are, nevertheless, evidence of Paul Schrader’s somewhat erratic picture of Travis’s intelligence and education (he admits to only ‘some’ of the latter when he goes for the cabbie job), as illustrated by the diary entries quoted above. The word ‘venal’ sticks out in the first of these; in the second, it’s surprising that Travis uses the phrase ‘morbid self-attention’ and the impersonal pronoun (albeit clumsily). There’s a larger issue with the motivation that Schrader ascribes to Travis. This may have something to do with the difference between two of Schrader’s main inspirations for the story: Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground and the diaries of Arthur Bremer, who shot Governor George Wallace (and paralysed him for life) during the Democratic primaries campaign of 1972. Dostoyevsky’s ‘Underground Man’, an existentialist novel prototype, is an embittered retired civil servant living in St Petersburg. Bremer’s diaries make clear that he shot George Wallace not as a political statement but in the hope of attaining celebrity. The strapline on the poster for Taxi Driver – ‘On every street in every city, there’s a nobody who dreams of being a somebody’ – echoes Bremer’s motivation (and anticipates John Hinckley Jr’s) yet it’s not what Travis Bickle, even allowing that he’s a confused young man, seems to be after. There’s little reason not to take Travis at his word when he announces (in an interlude to the famous ‘You talkin’ to me?’ conversation with his reflection in the mirror):
‘Here’s a man who would not take it anymore. Who would not let … Listen, you fuckers, you screwheads. Here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is someone who stood up.’
There are other elements of the screenplay that don’t make sense. It’s believable that Travis frequents seedy porn cinemas, if only to confirm his disgust with his environment; it’s incredible that, when he and Betsy go on a date, he takes her to, in her words, a ‘dirty movie’. (Her agreeing to the date is pretty unlikely in the first place, although the combination of Betsy’s heartless curiosity and Travis’s weirdly winning manner when he asks her out muffles this implausibility.) Travis confides to his diary that, when he first caught sight of Betsy, ‘at Palantine campaign headquarters at 63rd and Broadway … She was wearing a white dress. She appeared like an angel. Out of this filthy mess, she is alone. They… cannot… touch… her’. It’s true that Travis is socially clueless but his idealisation of Betsy means that he’d surely take care not to involve her in his ‘normal’ life: he’d look to do something different, something that reflected her transcendent difference. The fact that the film they see and which Betsy storms out of seems to be some kind of Swedish ‘sex education’ number rather than standard excitative porn doesn’t help: Travis wouldn’t allow the angelic, untouchable Betsy to be sullied by contact with a skin-flick fleapit. This is hardly a minor weakness in the script: it’s Betsy’s rejection of him that increases Travis’s depression and loneliness, and sets him out on his crazed mission to clean up New York.
In the last half hour of the film, Scorsese and Schrader join forces in sacrificing credibility in favour of unarguable instant impact. Travis with a Mohican haircut and dark glasses is the film’s most famous image but also perhaps its worst mistake. His appearance is so conspicuous in the crowd watching Palantine’s rally that it’s hard to believe the security men don’t take an interest in him before he gets into position to shoot the candidate. It’s even harder to believe that no questions seem to be asked in the aftermath of the brothel showdown as to why Travis was kitted out so unusually. Manny Farber, listing serial ‘plot impossibles’, sums this one up nicely:
‘A taxi driver who’s slaughtered three people, been spotted twice by the FBI, and has enough unlicensed artillery strapped to his body to kill a platoon, is hailed as a liberating hero by the New York press.’
There’s a final, supposedly potent irony that’s weakened by being pushed too hard. Travis, recovered from his injuries, returns to work as a cabbie and the old, halting conversations with Wizard, Doughboy (Harry Northup) et al. They tell him he’s got a fare. Travis gets into his cab and Betsy is in the back. They talk a little as he drives her home. He doesn’t charge her for the ride. She gets out of the car and he drives off. The way the scene is played, it’s not by chance that Betsy is in the cab: the idea seems to be that, now that Travis is a celebrity, she’s ready to renew their acquaintance. If so, it’s an unconvincing cheap shot: we also learn from this final scene that Palantine won his party’s nomination and that the presidential election is ‘next week’. Wouldn’t Betsy have other things on her mind just now?
Objections to the storyline have sometimes been dismissed on the grounds that the film is not just an account of Travis Bickle’s obsessions but that what unfolds on screen is what is taking place inside Travis’s head. Martin Scorsese himself has talked about trying ‘to incubate within the viewer the feeling of being in a limbo state somewhere between sleeping and waking’ (which chimes also with Travis’s chronic insomnia). There’s no denying that Scorsese sometimes succeeds in creating this effect but the it’s-all-in-Travis’s-disturbed-mind interpretation doesn’t hold water. The bland, shallow satire of a political campaign isn’t something this protagonist would imagine (and there are a couple of bits at Palantine HQ that involve Betsy and her colleague Tom (Albert Brooks) but not Travis). It suggests, rather, an aspect to the material in which the director and screenwriter are relatively uninterested. It’s understandable that Senator Palantine doesn’t remotely resemble the ‘Dixie-crat’ segregationist George Wallace: a seriously controversial politician would unhelpfully complicate Travis’s story. But Palantine is too generalised a figure, his vaguely demagogic words contradicted by a milque-toast liberal look and manner. He’s a political cartoon that belongs in a different kind of movie.
Taxi Driver is remarkable for the fact that Travis Bickle is a character study, not a case study. (Pauline Kael described the film as a ‘two-character study – Travis versus New York.’) This is probably Robert De Niro’s most famous role and, along with his young Vito Corleone in The Godfather part II, his finest performance. Scorsese quickly establishes the film’s dominant point of view with close-ups, repeated throughout, of Travis’s eyes, burning with a mixture of fearful puzzlement and menace. Those eyes reflect the greatness of De Niro’s acting in Taxi Driver: his powerful expression of Travis’s troubled mind is rooted in how strongly he has internalised the man’s jumbled thoughts and feelings. De Niro is especially impressive in conveying Travis’s social égarement – for example, in his first encounter at the brothel entrance with Sport, who mistakes him for a cop. Travis insists that he’s not (‘I’m hip’: ‘Buddy, you don’t look hip’ is Sport’s laughing reply); towards the end of the conversation, he awkwardly shifts position as if trying to stand in the way he thinks a ‘person like other people’ might stand. In moments when he seems deeply absent then jerks unnervingly back into his surroundings, De Niro brilliantly suggests Travis’s quasi-fugue states. He makes Travis affecting in his loneliness, occasionally and unaccountably charming, and often funny (not always unintentionally so). Manny Farber may be right that ‘the Bickle character goes in and out of normality as the Star System orders’ but Robert De Niro’s characterisation is so persuasive that he does much to obscure the contradictions in the writing of Travis.
Although Jodie Foster, Peter Boyle and Harvey Keitel are outstanding, the whole supporting cast is admirable. Diahnne Abbott, De Niro’s wife at the time, has a memorable cameo as a girl selling snacks at the porn cinema: she doesn’t want to be interrupted from the fan magazine she’s reading and, when Travis makes a clumsy attempt to be friendly, immediately calls the manager. Martin Scorsese himself appears on screen twice: as Travis first catches sight of Betsy entering the Palantine campaign offices, Scorsese is sitting outside, also watching this golden-girl vision. Later, the director turns up as perhaps the most alarming of Travis’s fares (and the competition is keen). This Scorsese, a polar opposite of the Betsy-gazer, sits in the back of the cab, watching the window of an upstairs room and telling Travis what he intends to do to his unfaithful wife with a gun.
10 February 2017
