Taxi Driver

Travis Bickle is a creep. There is no doubt about it. If you met him in real life, you would react exactly the same way that the other character's in the movie Taxi Driver do; perhaps you might initially be taken by his idiosyncrasies and shy charm but sooner or later you would either consciously or subconsciously sense his deep pathological self-loathing and run for the hills. Every attempt that Travis makes to connect with other people eventually goes completely wrong. He starts off by quite charmingly seducing Betsy, a campaign worker for Senator Palantine, for a date, and then when they meet he takes her to a porno movie theater (Travis Bickle frequents them and sees other couples there, so why not?) By chance, he drives Senator Palantine in his cab and tries to talk to him about the problems of New York City to impress him but ends up rambling and revealing his insane and violent thoughts and only ends up unnerving him. He tries to make small talk not with not with other participants at a political rally but instead with the secret service agents, who very correctly sense that Travis is a deeply disturbed individual. We and the characters in the movie sense that Travis is a ticking time bomb and by the end of the movie where he explodes into a murderous rampage at a whorehouse we are disgusted, but not surprised.



Yet as we watch the movie we are with Travis Bickle the whole way. Scorsese's direction brilliantly puts us resolutely in the perspective of Travis Bickle as we see and experience things through his eyes. We see black people and pimps the way he sees them, with foreboding camera moves and slow motion which imply thinly veiled disgust (and perhaps jealously of what he sees as their success with women, 1:37 of the above clip). New York City is filmed with dreamy, dark, and over saturated colors where we can just sense the same filth that Travis Bickle feels about the world around him. We even experience Travis's disconnected and disassociated gaze at his coffee being sizzled with alka-seltzer, oblivious to the meaningless small talk that surrounds him (2:04). We sympathize with his feelings of loneliness, his inability to connect with other people, and the feelings of rejection he feels from his peers and the opposite sex. Of course most of us handle it better, we turn to our friends and family or make positive efforts to socialize and fit in, and eventually in the end just get over ourselves, but there will always be school shooters or postal workers going nuts or other people exploding into random acts of violence in order to get back at their feelings of disconnection and rejection, or maybe even actually as a way to feel connected at all after all their other attempts fail.



When Travis himself explodes into violence, the killings are shown with great detail and almost relish, with close-ups, fast cuts, and slow motion. Its as if Travis finally gets to express the emotional torment he tries so hard to hide throughout the film and is more elated at that opportunity then he is horrified at what he is actually doing. When he is finished, he calmly sits down on the couch, looks up at the ceiling in almost kind of post-orgasmic relief or calm, and makes a gun gesture with his had and playfully shoots himself. He's finally finished and he can finally have some peace within himself, even if it came at the cost of the lives of others.

Taxi Driver infamously influenced the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in real life by a man named John Hinckley, who saw Taxi Driver and became convinced that he should try to kill the president in order to impress Jodie Foster. Many criticized the movie and called for censorship. But I think these calls were misguided and that movies like this don't cause violence. Instead, they reflect the violence of the real world, which will always be present with or without the presence of violent art, and attempt to make sense of it. Taxi Driver is a movie that does this brilliantly, taking us inside the head of someone that may have more in common with us than we may initially think or be comfortable in admitting afterward. Paul Schrader, the writer of Taxi Driver, had this to say about the situation:

"You are not going to get rid of the John Hinckleys of this world by censoring art. They are more triggered by a lot of things out there, they’re triggered by commercials, by advertisements, on fashion…What will happen if you censor genuine studies of this pathology, you will still have the pathology, you just won’t have the study. In other words, you will still have Raskolnikov, but you won’t have Crime and Punishment. That’s all that will happen. You will lose the work of art that comments on the character, but the character will still be going along his merry way. Because he really wasn’t created by art. And art, when it’s done right, really is a curb and helps these people put their lives into perspective to the extent that they can. Many of them are beyond that point anyway."