A Review of Taxi Driver

In director Martin Scorsese’s earlier movie Mean Streets, the main character puts his finger through the flame of a candle in church, contemplating what hell must be like.

The opening scenes of Taxi Driver take us through the lurid, neon-smeared colors of New York City on a rainy night. Steam comes out of a manhole as the taxi drives by a menagerie of New York City low life. The taxi driver, Travis Bickle, doesn’t have to ask what hell is like -- it is a man-made hell that Bickle feels demands a final judgment. As he drives he muses, “All the animals come out at night. Some day a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets.”

Through his glass window Travis sees the possibility of another world embodied in the cool impeccable person of Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a campaign worker for a presidential hopeful. Travis manages to take her out for coffee. “Where are you from?” he asks her. “Upstate,” she answers crisply. The word separates them finally and completely.

In the scene where Travis originally tries to pick up Betsy he exhibits a certain lower-class masculine bravado that makes Cybill’s smooth and protective co-worker look weak and indecisive. When she finally accepts a date with Travis, he makes the outrageous mistake of taking her to a porno flick which she walks out of. That even Travis could make a mistake that large is hard to imagine. He doesn’t talk to her in the language he uses with his fellow cabbies in their early morning hangout, so he must be somewhat aware of propriety. He tells her he sees couples going to that theater all the time. But, surely, Travis, who noticed Betsy as an “angel in white” on the crowded streets of hell, must have noticed that the women going into the theater didn’t look like Betsy. While the incident in itself is hard to swallow, the situation highlights Travis’s confusion about himself. He never knows whether to play a knight or villain in the scripts he creates of his life. It’s also an interesting contrast with an earlier scene in which he attempts to make human conversation with a concessions girl at another skin flick. When he asks her name she threatens to call the manager.

When he encounters men who are his dream vision of himself, the politician Betsy works for and the politician’s secret service man, he is totally self-effacing, playing up to their ideas of the common man. Even so, he’s not able to disguise his madness, which foils his attempt to assassinate the candidate, who has come to represent his failure with Betsy -- the man at home in a world he can’t enter. Travis is powerless to do anything but play to their expectations. When confronted with the self-assurance of these men he has no idea who he is. Inside he hates them and plots fantastic revenge.

A wronged husband, played intensely by director Scorsese, plans revenge on his wife in the back of Travis’s cab. Travis remains silent. He translates Betsy’s shut down as a betrayal similar to the husband’s and incorporates the man’s revenge into his own fantasies. He too is a jilted lover, a man of action, a man to be taken seriously.

In Mean Streets, Robert De Niro, who here plays Travis, played another bumbling violent character, Johnny Boy. But Johnny was part of a community. Travis is completely roofless, alienated even from the reality of his own existence. He explains himself in terms of his dream world to his parents. He is doing secret government work; he writes on a horrible comic greeting card he bought for their anniversary.

In Taxi Driver there’s no community to absorb some of the shocks of the city. Travis is left alone with his fear and violence. When he tries to get advice from an older cab driver the advice makes no more sense than Travis’s garbled attempt to communicate the danger of his growing rage.

The community of Little Italy provided Johnny Boy with a Catholic structure. Even though he rebelled from it, there was a structure. And there was the protector, Charlie, who sacrificed himself because of Johnny Boy’s foolhardiness.

Travis rages about the filth of the city he drives through. He raves that it should be flushed down the toilet. But he is finally unable to distinguish between what is truly evil and what is an insult to his humanity, although the two categories probably often correspond.

Having failed to kill the politician, Travis turns elsewhere for revenge. He decides to rescue a young prostitute from her pimp. The girl, who looks like a young albeit declasse Betsy, is rescued in one of the all-time bloodiest screen scenes. The bumbling Travis becomes a minor hero. His act is glorified because he has killed underworld characters and saved a 13-year-old from further exploitation. Yet, one wonders if anything could have been more destructive to her than the violence she witnessed in the course of her rescue.

Scorsese has said that all the blood in Taxi Driver was a necessary guilt offering. What is Travis guilty of? He was a marine, probably in Vietnam. Is he trying to absolve blood guilt by more blood, or is he trying to take care of the guilt of the city he sees every night?

Taxi Driver shows that the distinction between heroic and criminal killing is often tenuous and raises the question of what happens when America’s trained killers return home to find situations and people they like no better than those in Southeast Asia.

Sharon Gallagher was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.