Film Analysis

Taxi Driver 1976

Synopsis

New York taxi driver, Travis Bickle constantly, almost obsessively reflects on the ugly corruption of life around him. He becomes increasingly disturbed by his own loneliness and feelings of being alienated by the rest of society. In nearly every phase of his life, he remains a complete outsider, failing to ever achieve one form of emotional contact with someone. Suffering from insomnia, he frequents the local pornography emporiums to find some form of solace and come up with a way to escape from his current existence.

The director for Taxi Driver is Martin Scorsese (born 17 November 1942) who is graduate of New York University majoring in film. Scorsese’ style includes the frequent use of New York as a setting as seen in Gangs of New York (2002), The Age of Innocence (1993), The King of Comedy (1983), After Hours (1985), New York, New York (1977) and Mean Streets (1973). He also portrays his lead as morally ambiguous, prone to violence, looking for a means to be accepted by society and are not infrequently loners or people who cannot fit in well with society around them.

(Scorsese's cameo in Taxi Driver)

The inspiration for Taxi Driver came from scriptwriter, Paul Schrader who in turn got his own inspiration partly from Arthur Bremer’s Assassin’s Diary which tells the story of Arthur Bremer, the would be assassin of the Alabama governor, George Wallace. Travis Bickle’s life is loosely based on Arthur Bremer’s adult life.

Robert De Niro plays the role of the alienated Vietnam war veteran, Travis Bickle who works long hours as a taxi driver due to his insomnia. Screenwriter Paul Schrader makes the character a Vietnam veteran because of the mood of the country during that after the Vietnam War along with the trauma that most soldier’s suffered after the war accorded well with Bickle’s paranoid psychosis. Travis is a byproduct of the violence of the late 1970s who is determined to ‘wash all the scum off the streets’.

Emphasis on realism of character and theme

Scorsese emphasis on realism of character is portrayed by Travis Bickle’s character who is an ex-Marine from the Vietnam War. Scorsese wanted to show viewers the sort of physical and psychological trauma that war veterans go through, by means of creating a character that reflects a tortured soul who has trouble fitting back into normal society. Unable to conform to society, Travis just spends him time alone, driving his taxi through a city rife with corruption and crime. Travis’s taxi emerge into the cinema frame out of a cloud of steam as if it is being born into the world of the film. Throughout the film Scorsese shoots both Travis and his yellow taxicab from every angle possible, ensuring all components of the man and the machine get their own close-up at least once. They are one and the same; cruising the less desirable parts of New York and slowly being changed by the city. The taxi picks up dents from hurled objects and stains from the passengers in the back seat, Travis picks ups some disturbingly peculiar ideas about women on what they want and what they should do.

Sexuality and Violence

Travis falls for Betsy, a woman who works in the campaign office of Senator Palatine. He becomes increasingly obsessed with her and decides to go in to the office posing as a candidate supporter to ask her out for coffee. He takes her to a porn movie on their first date where she finds his behaviour appalling and refuses to meet him again. Not long after Betsy rejects him, Travis encounters a passenger who delights in telling him about his intent to murder his cheating wife. Ever impressionable, Travis expresses his anger feelings of rejection from Betsy by planning to hurt her by assassinating the politician - Palatine she is campaigning for. Travis buys guns from an illegal businessman and uses it to shoot down the robber when he is going to the shop that he used to visit. Travis then encounters child prostitute Iris who he had seen often on his routes and decides to help her get out of a life of prostitution by confronting her pimp. He sees the act of getting Iris out of prostitution as a small way of him cleaning up the streets and also helping the girl reclaim her purity. This goes in Scorsese's style of portraying the female character as an angelic figure in the eyes of the lead. This was also seen early in the way Travis viewed Betsy and his growing infatuation with her.

Upper class vs. lower class

There are a variety of people in New York City that are divided into different status levels. We can see from one part of the town, The Bronx. Lots of people from the lower social class gather and stay there together. There is also discrimination towards those of different social statuses. For example, when Travis dresses up neatly like he is from the upper class during the election, he receives good treatment but the opposite occurs when he is driving the cab, he is asked to drive away instead of blocking the street.

Besides that, New York City is a place that has a higher criminal rate due to the libertarian socialism. They stress on human rights and freedom of choice. Gun licensing is a norm and practically a lot of them own one piece or more. Even they don't have a license for a gun; they still get one as long as they have money to go through the improper channels of procuring one. Prostitution in New York is a common phenomenon to them. Some places are listed as 'black areas'. For example, during  the conversation between Travis and another taxi driver, Wizard. There is a guy behind them that is being caught by the cops. At the opening of the film, when Travis goes to apply for the job of a taxi driver, 2 guys behind him are arguing with each other. 

Racism is also one of the issues in New York City. Discrimination always happens among the black people and the white people. The black people always bully and insult the white people while the white people hate the black people so much. The grocery shop owner gets robbed by black people and Travis accidently shoots them down in order to help the owner. The owner then starts to hit the dead or half dead black people after Travis leaves the shop in fear. When Travis drives pass the alley the black people throw glass bottles at his cab.

Taxi Driver conforms to familiar convention such as those of continuity editing and narrative motivation, providing a ground against which elements of innovation can be measured. The narrative of Taxi Driver fails to establish any clear - cut motivation for Travis Bickle's actions. The voice - over narration from a diary kept by Travis Bickle is the main highlight of the film by allowing you to follow how the story flows.

The scene where Travis’s rampage ends uses a shot that creates a feel that evokes the imagination of Travis’s soul departing into the night. It’s a deliberately ambiguous ending, but the outcome is that the film ends with the audience in Travis’s world. Shots of the streets of New York seem to suggest at Travis’s collapsed state of mind.

Scorsese shows us the world through Travis’s eyes, an unhinged individual who is all too ready to respond to the aggressive stimuli around him. However, once we’ve seen the world the way Travis sees it, on a purely emotive level there is something disturbingly seductive about God’s lonely man and his deranged crusade. In this regard Taxi Driver is dangerous cinema and it’s all the better for it.

The introverted world of Bickle, which is created by Scorsese, De Niro, Schrader and director of photography Michael Chapman, represents a time when movie studios took risks and heralds the end of the era of New Hollywood.