An annotated bibliography for the film Taxi Driver, by Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader

Chapter on Taxi Driver pp. 123-157

Grist breaks down his critical analysis of Taxi Driver into loosely related sections, in a chronological retelling of the film’s major plot points.  While not a strict scene-by-scene analysis, it covers most of the major themes and all of the major characters in the narrative, relating them to their film antecedents and not so much to political or historical context.  In terms of genre, though in many ways Taxi Driver can be seen as an urban western, Grist feels that it applies a “disabling generic revision” and is in many ways an example of New Hollywood Cinema.  Grist points out that Taxi Driver can be read as a direct response to Death Wish as well.

Also, Taxi Driver is a product of two auteurs (Scorsese and Schrader) who often draw from personal experience when making films.  In Schrader’s case, there is an obvious connection between Taxi Driver and his essay “Notes on Film Noir,” but Grist also points to Schrader’s writings on the Transcendental style of Ozu and Bresson as being equally connected with Taxi Driver.

Overall, Grist sees the film as a relentlessly bleak reading of American life in the 1970’s, appropriating themes from films before it to create a vision of a society gone horrible wrong (as evidenced by Travis’s slipping through the cracks of the social structure).  It sets up a dichotomy between willfully naïve idealism and smug cynicism that is uncomfortable, especially as it provides no closure for the audience.

Lawrence Friedman treats Travis Bickle as the archetypal antihero of all of Scorsese’s films, and looks at and incredibly broad range of literature to find the roots of his character.  For Friedman, Travis “embodies the dictum of Marlow, the narrator of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: ‘We live, as we dream—alone.’”  Friedman’s premise is that Travis must see his loneliness as evidence of a “God-ordained” singularity, so that he is the “avenging angel” on a mission to purge “Sodom and Gomorrah” (i.e. New York City) of its darkness.  Thus, his loneliness transforms from a liability into a “holy calling.”  Friedman argues that this would not be so unsettling if it were treated as aberrant, a case study in “abnormal psychology.”  Rather, it is the commonality of loneliness that makes Travis’s state, though extreme, all too familiar.

Friedman echoes other authors in this respect, but in particular his analysis carries the audience’s identification a step further: the “walking contradiction,” as Betsy puts it, is that Travis is “one of us” through and through, though that is precisely what he struggles to feel – like he belongs to a larger whole.  The implication here is truly paranoia-inducing: none of us belong, or to echo the sentiments of Conrad’s Marlow, we are doomed alienation, and must settle for comforting illusion.  For Travis, that illusion comes in the form of heroic fantasies.  The only real difference between him and us is that he has the courage to act them out.  Furthermore, Travis’s success frighteningly suggests that violence may be the only real solution to societal ills.  In Friedman’s view, his character is essentially engaged in the Hamlet-esque struggle of “to be or not to be:” whether to suffer or take arms against the sea of troubles.

This text deals extensively with Scorsese’s portrayal of masculinity and male sexuality throughout many of his films – specifically in Taxi Driver, it points to Travis Bickle’s rejection by the virginal Betsy as a major trigger in his descent into madness.  Miliora focuses extensively on Travis’s perception of Betsy as a kind of savior from the filth that surrounds him, a pure figure who can help Travis to “become a person” if he can have intimacy with her.  Yet precisely because he has not yet become “a person,” he is unable to communicate and is rejected.

Once rejected, Travis’s perception of her shifts such that she is no longer perceived as being “clean” like him, but “scum” just like everyone else.  Miliora points to Betsy as a quintessential figure in Scorsese’s oft-used “Madonna-whore complex,” who becomes filthy in Travis’s mind after she rejects him.  His response is to become a kind of redeemer-messiah figure, trying to save an actual whore, Iris, by violently delivering her from her prostitution.  Though this attempt is obviously misguided and pathological, it inadvertently gets Travis what he wants.  At the end, when he sees Betsy again, he is able to reject her because he no longer needs her.

In Miliora’s analysis, Travis is an archetypal figure in Scorsese’s treatment of gender relations, providing a blueprint for many of his later characters, all of whom are informed by a kind of “failed masculinity” that rose to the public consciousness following the return of the armed forces from Vietnam.  This is probably one of the better texts on the gender issues side of Scorsese’s films generally, particularly as it applies to the post-Vietnam sense of alienation that figures so prominently in Taxi Driver.

Scorsese talks about the details of production and how he ended up working with Paul Schrader on Taxi Driver.  Some of the original storyboards for the film are included.  Scorsese also tells that the inspiration behind much of the visual loneliness in Taxi Driver is from his experience growing up in New York – how his personal experiences had a dreamlike quality to them, which he wanted to capture in the film.  Yet this “dreaminess” is for Scorsese not a positive quality, but connotes disease and decay, which become Travis Bickle’s triggers first for uneasiness, then for violence.  He is Scorsese’s own “avenging angel” fantasy, come to rid the streets of scum and riffraff.

Speaking of the general sense of paranoia Travis experiences, Scorsese directly credits Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man as a source of formal inspiration.  He also claims that there is no boundary between reality and fantasy in terms of how they are treated in film, and that applying this principle forcefully in Taxi Driver is what gives Travis’s insanity credibility.  He also credits John Ford’s The Searchers with providing a model for the post-war male who cannot find a place to belong.

Scorsese confirms the prevailing attitudes about the film centering on loneliness and its consequences, but says little about the cultural context of its narrative.  He views the film in a very personal way, identifying with Travis’s loneliness, and expecting the audience to feel likewise, such that when the violent act comes at the end, there is both attraction and revulsion.  Catharsis is needed, but when its form is realized, it becomes sickening and ironic, no better than the problems it sought to solve.

Travis Bickle is a time bomb, but Nyce asserts that “our criminal excesses grow out of our normality.”  Travis’s normality is clear in his desire for a normal life, and in Nyce’s opinion, it is his extreme naïveté that prevents him from fulfilling this desire.  From this inability to grow up sprouts an “extremely distorted idealism” that leads Travis to feel powerless, awash in anxiety and a “guilty conscience.”  For Nyce, the locus of the film is the growing obsession to expunge the conscience of all that Travis has seen and been part of; the “scum in the streets” becomes the scum in his mind.  As the narrative progresses, the protagonist ironically becomes both more pathological and more naïve.

Nyce calls attention to Scorsese’s use of subjective, expressionist camera-work as a means of communicating Travis’s perceptions of the world around him – there is very little that is “healthy and life-enhancing” within view.  The sights and sounds passing by in the taxi’s window are intrusive sources of anxiety and guilt.  Many seemingly straightforward point-of-view shots are in fact explorations of Travis’s inner turmoil, which grows until he cannot contain it any longer.

In Nyce’s view, the ultimate expression of rage at the end of the film is simply the culmination of Travis’s failure at communication.  Similar to other writers who see Taxi Driver as being more generally about the state of community in America in the 60’s and 70’s, Nyce is indeed concerned with the film’s depiction of alienation between people – but beyond that, the disjunction here is specifically one of cultural vocabulary.  Travis cannot speak the “common language” as it were, so he cannot “be like other people” as he wishes to be.  This is ultimately what drives him to a breaking point, where he can only self-determine by lashing out.

Connelly’s premise in her chapter on Taxi Driver is that it must be understood as a Modernist work of art.  She makes comparisons between the film and two T.S. Eliot works, The Wasteland and J. Alfred Prufrock, pointing out the desolation, despair, and general attitude of pessimism that pervade.  She calls attention to Taxi Driver’s complex narrative form and its irony, pointing out that it can be read correctly in multiple ways – sometimes contradictorily so.  Further, the film is highly allusive, particularly owing debts to Lang & Hitchcock (especially Psycho).

Connelly calls Taxi Driver a “variant of film-noir,” pointing out the sense of powerlessness against “corrupt universe,” yet in this case the primary source of tension is internal to the protagonist.  In this way the film taps into the social paranoia of the post-Vietnam era, when people “ceased to be shocked” but were still anxious and afraid.  Travis Bickle finds release for this anxiety by trying to be a hero: he fantasizes, gets ready to “clean up the city” and develops a new aggression – yet targets a politician first, showing himself to be delusional.  Ironically, ends up a hero by fluke of circumstances.

In Connelly’s opinion, Taxi Driver is primarily an exploration of loneliness – it calls attention to the importance of community by its very absence.  Superficially the audience cannot relate to Travis, yet upon closer inspection, his pathology is just “an extreme form” of a common state of alienation.  He is powerless on all fronts, inept and alone, because he has no purpose.  When he creates a purpose, it is not for the common good, as he has no sense of community, but instead meant to eliminate the sources of fear in his surroundings.