This review contains spoilers.
“The idea had been growing in my brain for some time”
A cancer of thought.
A perverse, twisted and, malignant cancer of thought that is fuelled by narcissistic visions of a crumbling city’s inner turmoils.
Have you ever put too much water in the pot when making pasta? And in the first few minutes you don’t notice it but after that first few minutes you suddenly hear something hit the stove and let off a screeching sizzle, so you turn around and see the foam and water boiling over the sides. Erupting. Taxi Driver is a little like that.
Scorsese splits the film into two clear parts, what he presents to us, the audience, and what he presents to Travis, the character.
The things he presents to the audience are usually about Travis, how he’s framed, where the camera focuses on his body. Whereas what he presents to Travis is how the other characters move in and interact with the world he has set up in his head, whether or not they fit into his “utopia”.
In how Scorsese presents the world to Travis, we can see an inherent racism to the character (and more importantly misogyny, but more on that later on). Take the cabbies cafe for example, the black people in the cafe are shot from low angles as the camera slowly pushes towards them, you can see hatred in Travis’s eyes. Later on in the film, when Travis picks up Scorsese who blurts out the n word when talking about his wife’s affair with a black man, you can see that something is ignited in Travis. He’s not uncomfortable in the scene because of the psychotic man in the back seat, he’s uncomfortable because he agrees with him and he’s too socially awkward to say that. Earlier on in the film Travis uses slurs himself, a lack of education and a clear preference of those who look like him. Black characters are portrayed in a different light to white characters, as if they are part of a larger problem in the city’s destruction. The original script was a lot more focused on Travis’s racist ideologies where all the pimps at the end were supposed to be black, Scorsese rewrote the scene to change this but patterns of racism are still very blatantly sprinkled throughout.
Having mentioned how the camera moves towards the black characters in the cafe, I think it’s a good way for me to talk about how the camera dislikes Travis as a person. For the first half of the film it almost always pulls away from him, highlighting his detachment from others (as with others the camera almost always pushes in), but in the second half it begins to also push in on him as he gains more power in his mind. I think the main turning point may be when he buys the guns, the guns make him feel real, they prove his existence by handing him a power to take life, the guns mean more to him than people because people can ignore him but not when he has the shooters on his person. The camera rarely ever moves with Travis, even in tracking shots it seems to keep a distance, almost trying to keep itself away from him as much as possible. There’s a scene in the first half of the film after his rejection from Betsy where Travis is on the phone, begging for her approval, it’s embarrassing and pathetic to watch. It’s physically hard to watch, so the camera looks away from him, it moves into the hallway because the camera too, can’t take watching Travis try to piece together the scraps of something he never had. However there’s certain moments when instead of staring him down with disgust the filmmaking actually indulges Travis, it’s these moments that blur the line between reality and fantasy. For example the moment when there’s a quick replay of the same movement as Travis rewrites the wording of his diary entry, in this moment Scorsese also does something weirdly jarring- Travis is talking to himself and Scorsese chooses to not take that as a conversation scene and breaks the 180 rule, giving the audience all sides of Travis’s body and further emphasising how his lack of perspective and self awareness lead him to his final outcome… or later on in the finale of the film when the camera follows his hand in close up as he reaches for his head to do the finger gun, he’s indulged as his perverted catharsis finally reaches its climax.
Speaking of the editing, there’s lots of scenes that are edited in a way that seem as if they cut in just when the camera has started filming, there's a little thump to the sound and an odd awareness from the actors of the camera- perhaps this shows a constant reset of emotions and perspective, Travis is antisocial and can’t interact with people in a normal way therefore the situation resets every time it doesn’t go the exact way he wants it to and he has to rethink every little part of it.
Earlier I mentioned how Travis lacks perspective, he’s young and his mind has been rotted by war enabling his narcissistic and anti-social personality. For Travis, he’s still in war, he still has a duty to protect and he still has the power to take life without consultancy. The score, which might just be the best ever written for a film as it creates an atmosphere like no other, retains an almost military-esque beat to it. The drums patter like the feet of soldiers marching. He lacks perspective in that he knows no other world than what’s in his mind, but he also lacks perspective culturally. He doesn’t follow music, doesn’t follow politics, doesn’t follow movies, he doesn’t follow anything. He has no “hobbies”- he has duties to fulfil, he is such a shallow person that he’s convinced himself that he has a purpose that must be fulfilled so that he can finally die. His path is an inherently suicidal one. Travis destroying the TV is proof of his lack of value for things that are innately human in a modern society.
Since he can’t properly interact with anything in the world, Travis picks the next best thing as his way of passing time. Obsession. This is where his deep rooted misogyny comes in. Travis sees women as prizes to be protected and saved, but not in the way a knight would protect a queen, more like a king helping up a peasant who’s fallen over. He uses obsession as a way of distraction, he doesn’t actually love Betsy, he doesn’t love a single person, it’s just a temporary way for him to feel human because this is how he imagines “love” works in the “real world”. When Iris first comes into his cab, there’s a close up shot of Travis’s eyes, what you see in those eyes isn’t anger. It’s jealousy. Travis wishes he was that pimp. He wishes he had that sort of power over a vulnerable woman because she would not be able to reject him. But after meeting Iris properly, he decides not to be the pimp but to be a hero. He decides he’s gonna save her from getting groomed, albeit not for her own safety but rather to fulfil his own needs as a man that means and does nothing. That way he gets to go out and he gets to go out with a name that’ll be remembered. Of course saving Iris is his “second option”, it’s only after the political assassination attempt goes wrong that he decides to do it. He opts for the smaller fame, but for the bigger medal in heroism. There’s one scene in the film that doesn’t involve Travis and straight from that you can just assume it’s fantasy, it’s when our long haired pimp speaks to Iris and they dance together. The words said by Iris is what Travis wishes she said to him and the words said by the pimp are what he wishes he could say to her.
The oddest part about the narcissism in Travis is how he puts himself on a pedestal. There’s plenty of people in the film who offer him a hand, who offer to be his friend or be by his side and he pushes all of them away. He knew what he was doing when he took Betsy to the porno theatre, he knew what message he was sending off to her. Maybe not consciously, but he knew. Gods lonely man my ass. He isolates himself on purpose because he thinks he’s better than everyone, he believes he’s the hero the city needs. The scenes of Travis at the shooting range box him up, unnaturally and uncomfortably framing him in different, increasingly smaller positions along the screen wherein his little box is the only thing visible to the audience and the rest is consumed by darkness. This is how Travis sees the world, his world in his mind is the box, everything else is a void of darkness.
Towards the end of the film we get one of the most iconic cinematic images ever, Travis with the mohawk. I’d like to compare this scene to another film, The Phantom of The Opera (1925). This reveal of Travis with the new look reminds me of the unmasking in Phantom, both equally horrific moments as they reveal the horrid, villainous creature of their respective stories. Before the camera moves up when it settles on Travis’s body there’s the monstrous roar of a motorcycle, a somewhat startling little snippet of sound that underlines the reveal as something much, much more sinister.
I think Taxi Driver might just be the single most disturbing film ever made. The finale is ugly, ugly is putting it lightly, it’s horrific, it’s unflinching and it makes me want to curl up in a ball and cry. The massacre itself is maybe the most shocking thing I’ve ever seen in film but the aftermath is even more depressing. Maybe, Travis has passed on and his brain is filling in the gaps in its last 7 minutes of life (which would be the happier ending). Either way Iris was likely sent back home, Travis was hailed as a hero for being a psychopath and enabling the cycle of abuse that probably drove Iris out of her home in the first place. However it’s the moment with Betsy that makes me doubt the (already unlikely) reality of the situation, in the back of the taxi she becomes a floating head, almost angelic, Travis has moved on but she clearly subtly wants him back- in what world would a sane woman feel that way towards a psychopath like Travis and in what world would she get into his taxi after all that’s happened. But then again, who’s to say what’s real and what’s not.
I think the film can be summed up in one moment, when Travis stops the robbery and he walks out, the cashier continues to yell profanities and beat the clearly dead body. Nothing is sacred. Beat the dead until there’s nothing left but mush, keep going and going into hatred, let it fuel and justify your nonsensical decisions, blame society for it and get away with it. Beat the body until it’s not even a body anymore.
It’s easy to see why Taxi Driver has become such a phenomenon in online “incel culture” as it brutally portrays a racist, misogynistic and, lonely psychopath who gets what he wants in the end. All these depressed saddos online wish they could be Travis because his suicidal path yields the outcome he wanted for himself- that being the important part there- for himself. I don’t think Taxi Driver is a critique of society as a whole but rather the selfish and greedy individuals whose lack of perspective allows and enables the cesspool of hatred they’ve created in order to glorify themselves. To Travis, he’s a hero, to the rest of the world… he’s a nobody.
He’s nothing.
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