Martin Scorsese has a reputation for making quintessential New York pictures. Yet he will dispute that himself, pointing out that even his most New York films were Hollywood pictures mostly shot in and around Los Angeles, with just a handful of days on location in the Big Apple. Even knowing that, it doesn’t change the overall feeling of a picture like Taxi Driverand how it so accurately reflects New York City in the 1970s. This was a city in the midst of a garbage strike and was years away from the clean-up that Rudy Giuliani was so proud of. This is a city of filth and urban decay; garbage all over the streets and porno theaters and prostitution everywhere you look. We are meant to be seeing the city through the eyes of the lead character, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), and because of that point-of-view, there will be very little we see that isn’t sullied by the city itself. The women, with one exception, are mainly prostitutes and junkies, the men, even Travis’s co-workers, are sleaze bags bragging about their sexual exploits or guns and drugs, and the black men are all criminals. This depiction of urban life gives us a real insight into just how Travis Bickle sees the world around him.
We are first introduced to Travis as he is applying for a job driving taxis in the city. He makes it clear up front that he hasn’t been sleeping and wants to work long hours; willing to work any day, any time, and go anywhere in the city. Through voiceover, he proclaims to have no problems picking up black people, unlike some of the other cabbies, professing a lack of racism that just isn’t factual. Of course he may just has a heavy degree of contempt for everyone, no matter the race. The only real exception is Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a woman he sees working in the campaign headquarters for a senator running for President of the United States. When he sees her, he describes her as an angel all dressed in white. We always see her that very way, too, in white, but that could be just the way he is visualizing her. Eventually, he asks her out for dinner, and for some inexplicable reason, she accepts. When he later takes her to the movies, though, he takes her to a porno theater, and she abruptly leaves, ending any fascination she may have had with him.
It is about at this part of the film that we get a true sense of just how unreliable a narrator Travis is. He calls Betsy up at work repeatedly, asking her if she was getting the flowers he’s been sending her yet we see that he has never sent her any flowers. The flowers are still in his room, dying; he will eventually set them aflame. This simple detail casts doubt on anything the film is showing us because now we wonder if it is all tainted by him. Often, we see the world through the lens of his taxi windshield, which gets repeatedly covered with garbage. He always seems to be driving around with human garbage in the backseat, with the one exception being the senator and his entourage. In that scene, he tries to communicate with the man, but by the end of the drive, he’s rambled on about washing the filth out of the city and shown the senator that he is a bit unhinged.
Travis is often shown to get overly fixated on things, too. He will get drawn into the fizzing of antacid tablets in a cup of water, Betsy in her cubicle at work, even a crumpled-up $20 bill handed to him by a pimp when Iris (Jodie Foster) tries to escape the pimp by hopping in Travis’s cab. He will hold onto that bill long after turning in his cash box and will sit in his cab staring at it. When he does take action, tracking down Iris and offering to take her away from this life of prostitution, she doesn’t want to leave, something he cannot comprehend.
Taxi Driver is often held up as a film that proves the point that movies can influence people to do evil things. John Hinckley Jr. stated that the film triggered his attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and that he did so in an attempt to impress actress Jodie Foster. Screenwriter Paul Schrader has stated that he was inspired by the diaries of Arthur Bremer, who shot presidential candidate George Wallace in 1972. Arthur claimed to be inspired by the film A Clockwork Orange. There is no doubt that films can inspire people to do things, but that person has to be already in that mindset to begin with. A nonviolent person will not sit down to watch Saw and be suddenly inspired to go out and brutally butcher people any more than a violent psychopath will be lulled into a peaceful existence by a steady diet of Disney films.
Taxi Driver also has a reputation for its controversial casting, specifically Jodi Foster, who was twelve at the time of filming, playing the role of a prostitute. I’ve heard people shrug it off by saying “It was the 70s,” as if that made it alright. That excuse didn’t work for Roman Polanski, either. The casting of Foster was so upsetting at the time that when Martin Scorsese attended the Oscars, he had bodyguards with him because he was receiving death threats over it. Jodi Foster had to attend psychological testing sessions during and before filming to make sure she was not getting emotionally traumatized by the scenes she was filming. Scorsese had worked with her before but, for his part, didn’t know how to approach different scenes with her and relied on Robert De Niro to offer her directions and mentor her. She would reflect on this film as being the one where her career was influenced the most thanks to her time with De Niro.
Some have read into the picture a criticism of Vietnam Vets in large part because the character of Travis Bickle was in the Marines, has violent tendencies, and cannot relate to his fellow humans. Throughout the film, he is usually wearing a military jacket with patches that suggest that he was in Vietnam, but his actions seem to contradict this as he doesn’t compose himself or defend himself like someone with military training. Writer Paul Schrader added that Travis’s military experience was deliberately left vague to allow audiences to fill in the blanks.
We never get a single scene that Travis isn’t seeing to some degree, allowing us to never fully trust the narrative. Martin Scorsese originally filmed two scenes that were not from his perspective, which led to a disagreement between him and the writer, Paul Schrader. Paul argued that the film needed to stay completely within Travis’s perspective. Ultimately, Martin cut one of the scenes and restructured the other one; this would be the scene between Iris and her pimp Sport that emphasized that she wasn’t feeling abused and exploited by him but saw him as family. Martin felt this scene was far too important to cut entirely out of the picture.
The end of the film ended up being problematic for the MPAA, who found it to be far too violent for an R rating. To avoid an X rating, which would have been box-office poison for this film, editing techniques were used, muting the color and altering the graininess of the print to dull the effects of the violence. Even so, it is still a shocking and visceral moment as Travis becomes a brutal vigilante gunning his way through Sport and the men in the brothel as he “saves” Iris. We find out that she ends up back home with her family, but did he really save her or just completely traumatize her? Earlier that same day, he was at a campaign rally for the senator with the intention of killing the man, but he fled when the Secret Service was alerted to the threat. He will be exonerated as a hero of the city for his acts against the men exploiting Iris. The city celebrates the violence within him when it is in the direction of justice but he came within inches of being branded as a political killer instead. We are never quite sure if this brutal moment in the brothel has satiated the demons within him or not. We get a brief moment in the epilogue that would suggest that it has not.
That epilogue has proven to be divisive, too. Travis Bickle was shot up pretty badly when he went in to rescue Iris. The camera pans upward to the sky as if to suggest that he has died. Then we are told he was in a coma for a while before being discharged, with no charges filed against him for the brutal killings. He is back behind the wheel of his cab and picks up a new fare, Betsy. The two speak amicably for a minute before he drops her off at her destination and waves the fare. Some have interpreted this epilogue as a vision of the afterlife and that Travis had died from his wounds. Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader have both gone on record to debunk that theory, but there is no denying that the way this was shot and edited strongly suggests otherwise.
This would turn out to be composer Bernard Hermann’s final score, although not his last released. Martin Scorsese insisted on having him do the music for Taxi Driver and had to convince him to take the job. The music he wrote for this picture is jazzy and occasionally intentionally jarring. His use of instruments invokes a real sense of the tenuous nature of Travis Bickle and often juxtaposes the smooth melodies of jazz with the cacophony of the outside world. Hermann would pass away only a few short hours after turning in the final composition and would be honored posthumously with an Academy Award nomination.
In more recent years, Robert De Niro has mentioned wanting to return to this character and show what his life has become in the nearly fifty years since 1976. Most everyone else involved in the making of this picture has resisted the temptation to go back and make this sequel. It’s probably for the best. Films like this are so powerful on their own that to make a legacy sequel like that would be to tarnish its reputation. Taxi Driver is one of those films that makes you feel things, and not good things, either. But it is endlessly fascinating going back to rewatch it and pick up on the little things that add nuance and flavor to the overall narrative. Martin Scorsese is a master at creating films that evoke the city and the era in which they take place. We see that again and again with the most recent examples being the 1980s era ode to consumerism, The Wolf of Wall Street, and the callous greed in Killers of the Flower Moon. Martin didn’t win the Academy Award for Taxi Driver, which almost feels criminal in retrospect, and he would continue to get overlooked at the Academy for decades to come. It would become a bit of a bitter joke referencing the sheer number of times he would have a well-received film with multiple Oscar nominations that would go on to lose in every nominated category. Taxi Driver would be no different. It wasn’t until 2006 that he would finally get the honor he deserved for his Boston crime drama, The Departed.
Academy Award Nominations:
Best Picture: Michael Phillips and Julia Phillips
Best Actor: Robert De Niro
Best Supporting Actress: Jodie Foster
Best Original Score: Bernard Herrmann
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Release Date: February 8, 1976
Running Time: 114 minutes
Rated R
Starring: Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Albert Brooks, Harvey Keitel, Leonard Harris, Peter Boyle, and Cybill Shepherd
Directed By: Martin Scorsese
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