Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) can’ t sleep, so he takes a job as a taxi driver on the night shift: going anywhere, anytime. This confronts him with all the worst aspects of a big city, against which political campaigner Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), looks like an angel. But Travis is incapable of wooing Betsy, and her rejection only weakens his already shaky mental health; he begins to spiral into obsessive loneliness. At first he plans to assassinate the candidate she works for but, in the end, he goes on a shooting spree to save a child prostitute, Iris (Jodie Foster). All of which means that the taxi driver is seen not as a mad, lone wolf killer, but as a hero.
The Legend
Seeing Taxi Driver for the first time as a teenager felt like being inducted into a new stage of adulthood. Here was a grown-up film. Not only was it set in the grim and gritty New York streets, but it was also a dense text, ripe for interrogation. It wasn’t a Hollywood adventure story or a carefully plotted Hitchockian thriller; it was narratively looser and more artistically controlled, an impressionistic psychological portrait packed with meaning. To me it was a new kind of cinema, not something I had consciously engaged with before.
It was also, of course, part of a new kind of cinema for America. Taxi Driver is one of the key movies of ‘the New Hollywood’, which took the techniques and approaches of the experimental Nouvelle Vague and applied them to American movies. Taxi Driver does this consciously: it includes a direct visual reference to Godard’s 1967 film Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle, and marries it to a ‘50s-style score by Hitchcock’s favourite composer, Bernard Herrmann, the last work of one of the great geniuses of classical Hollywood.
The journey from Nouvelle Vague to New Hollywood was a kind of hall of mirrors, but one in which the mirrors redouble and focus, aiming bright light at previously unpenetrated murk. The French had taken the street-level grittiness of the American Film Noir of the ‘40s and developed a new visual language for a poppier ‘60s. Now that approach was being reintroduced into American cinema to create a new ‘realism’, reinventing not only movies but also the vision of the country. For instance: Travis Bickle’s obsession with the .44 Magnum revolver immediately calls to mind Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry (1971); but where Harry Callahan is just a swearier sheriff out of a Western, an authority figure whose moral correctness gives him permission to circumvent law and custom to do what’s ‘right’, Bickle is a much more questionable figure.
For Travis, self-reliant frontier individualism is not freedom but a prison. Alone among millions of other individuals, he is unable to connect; he cannot make sense of his own identity and purpose in the face of an overwhelming and implacable society. Trying to stay independent, to define himself without reference to anyone else, he drives himself mad with a young man’s rage.
As Paul Schrader’s introduction to his screenplay puts it:
He has the smell of sex about him: Sick sex, repressed sex, lonely sex, but sex nonetheless. He is a raw male force, driving forward; toward what, one cannot tell. Then one looks closer and sees the inevitable. The clock spring cannot be wound continually tighter. As the earth moves toward the sun, Travis Bickle moves toward violence.
Schrader told De Niro that the gun the actor had fantasised about using when younger was a symbol of De Niro’s talent, the hidden power he could unleash on the world. (This also gives a little Freudian insight into how Schrader thought about his own talent.) But the gun is a distance weapon, and a distancing weapon; it allows the carrier to kill at a remove, a terminal intervention without interaction.
Taxi Driver is a film about a crisis of masculinity, but it is also about a crisis of America. Schrader was inspired by his own experience of living alone in Los Angeles and feeling himself lose his connection with his surroundings; he intended it as much as a comment on the shallowness of that society as he did the fragility of the individual.
Travis, mentally unstable and a danger to himself and others, is hailed as a hero because his eventual violence resulted in the deaths of criminals, not politicians. Instead of being vilified, he is lionised; he appears to be ‘better’ than he is (better adjusted, better integrated). But the last shot of the movie tells us otherwise. Travis, having had a final, chance encounter with Betsy in which he appears to have behaved like a reasonable adult, catches sight of himself in the rearview mirror and is disgusted, instinctively flipping the reflection away so that it is replaced with the teeming streets of New York. The headlines and cover stories that say that Travis is whole, healed and a hero; but he, and we, know better.
Taxi Driver, both in its subject and its substance as a work of arthouse cinema, stands against what it sees as the commercial shallowness of ‘70s American culture. It shows the bright veneer of cultural gloss over seething social discontent. Travis’s appearance is radically different to that of the characters that surround him; with his cropped hair (and then mohican), his thrift-store western-wear and army surplus jacket, what he looks like is a punk, like all my alternative friends ten years later. He looks like the coming generation, the generation that reacted to the ‘70s with anger and nihilism.
Scorsese had to fight hard to get something so apparently uncommercial released. The fact that it was then commercially successful suggests that his vision was both right and wrong. The ‘70s audience recognised its message, and were also willing to engage with something deeper than a man in a white hat gunning down varmints in black ones.
The Reality
Part of the challenge and fascination of Taxi Driver as a work of art is that it is told entirely from the point of view of an obsessive, racist, misogynist loner whose sanity is crumbling before our eyes. It sets itself the task of looking at a crisis of masculinity, rather than society or — god forbid — femininity.
Travis is an unreliable narrator. He claims to have sent Betsy flowers, and yet his apartment is full of unsent bouquets in increasing stages of putrefaction. Is it really her he is talking to on phone, in the famous shot where the camera is forced to veer away from him in embarrassment and film an empty corridor instead? Did he ever really talk to her in the first place? Did he ever even serve with the Marines in Vietnam?
To watch the film is to sit with the worldview of a self-hating man who projects his nihilism and antagonism. Scorsese has said that he believes the film comes from a fundamentally feminist position, one that sees this form of masculinity as inherently poisonous. It is essentially a dramatisation of Germaine Greer’s maxim: ‘Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.’
...it takes macho to its logical conclusion. The better man is the man who can kill you. This one shows that kind of thinking, shows the kinds of problems some men have, bouncing back and forth between the goddesses and whores.
This can sometimes seem like the film is wolfing down its cake while shaking its head and complaining about how awful the cake is. It gets to include all kinds of transgressive language and imagery in the cause of telling us how bad it all is — which we already know, because otherwise it wouldn’t be transgressive.
Now, that language is getting less transgressive by the day. We are more aware of the Travis Bickles among us than we ever were. They are less lonely now. As Schrader has said: ‘They’re all talking to each other on the internet. When I first wrote about him, he was talking to nobody. He really was, at that point, the Underground Man. Now he’s the Internet Man.’
One of the editors on Taxi Driver was Marcia Lucas; her next project was a goofy kid’s sci-fi film made by her husband George, and that’s not the only link between Taxi Driver and Star Wars (1977). George Lucas was, at least in part, inspired by the comparative mythology of Joseph Campbell. In A Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) Campbell argues that certain heroic legends from around the world share the same basic narrative structure because they are fulfilling the same basic social purpose: they provide a metaphorical structure for the passage from childhood to adulthood. The journey of the hero — in which he leaves home to defeat monsters and returns with a prize for his people — is a model for the process by which self-obsessed and coddled children overcome their fears and narcissism to be become integrated into their society as engaged individuals, using their talents for the benefit of all. Campbell suggests that ‘it may well be that the very high incidence of neuroticism among ourselves follows from the decline among us of such effective spiritual aid.’
When George Lucas reinvented the hero’s journey in Star Wars he set in stone the structure of every Hollywood action movie since: the Call to Adventure, the Belly of the Whale, the Meeting with the Goddess, the Atonement with the Father, and the Magic Flight in return to the real world. Did Star Wars establish new rites of passage for the modern world? Well, Campbell might have been describing the present-day Star Wars fandom when he went on to say: ‘We remain fixated to the unexorcised images of our infancy, and hence disinclined to the necessary passages of our adulthood.’ But, in fairness, he warns against trying to fit these ancient patterns into modern life; society has so thoroughly changed that they can no longer be relevant.
Travis Bickle, like Luke Skywalker, has all the characteristics of a mythological hero. He is a young man from a distant rural backwater recruited into a war he barely understands; he wants to defeat the dark father, storm the evil castle and rescue the princess. He wants to be a knight errant, wandering the wild wood on his big yellow destrier. Like Galahad, he is appalled at the corruption around him; like Perceval, he wants to resist it; like Lancelot, he wants to rescue the virgin. He believes he is the main character not just of his life but of the world, and is frustrated by the world’s refusal to agree with him.
This hero’s journey cannot work in the real world. Bickle’s failure and descent into madness comes from his failure to treat the mythology as metaphor; he does not recognise the opportunity to ascend into adulthood. And Hollywood’s version of the hero’s journey has lost all contact with Campbell’s theories of initiation rites and integration into the grown-up world. It has become entirely focussed on the enchanted individual, the lone hero standing above and against society. This is the reverse of Campbell’s intention.
Taxi Driver wasn’t just part of the beginning of something, a new American arthouse cinema; it was also part of the end of something. After Star Wars, the Hollywood blockbuster took over the movies. Taxi Driver doesn’t just stand against Hollywood blockbusters: it says that the myths they enshrine can be actively dangerous, and might spawn a whole generation of Travis Bickles. The Internet Men.
1976 was considerably less alarming if you were a child. Apart from Brotherhood of Man who were almost as disturbing as Travis Bickle.
1976: The potency of cheap music
Strange how potent cheap music can be. It can preserve a moment, trapped in vinyl, and it can last a lifetime, accompanying, inspiring, supporting. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.
Travis Bickle, Luke Skywalker, Internet men. I can see how Bickle spawns Mr. Internet. But what is poor little Luke doing in there? Surely he is pure and innocent as any decent american hero should be! Bickle warns us of heroes to come. Luke comforts us of heroes that were.
I must confess I never expected to read the phrase “Travis Bickle, like Luke Skywalker…” but fair play to you, valid point.