[Marq]

So here I am digging through all my old university papers, and I came across a lil' essay I did on Taxi Driver a few years back. I figured, what better place to share these long ago developed interpretations and opinions than here in Film Class! So here it is, and I haven't read it in a few years, so paron anything that sounds out of date. It's long enough, so no need to read it all or anything, just thought I'd throw it out there for any and all and myself to see.

Thematic Elements of Taxi Driver

Perhaps the most important and definitive American film of the 1970s and beyond, is Taxi Driver. Martin Scorsese, working from Paul Schrader’s intense script, creates a powerfully poignant film set within the harrowing New York City streets that are home to Travis Bickle, the ultimate anti-hero. Released in 1976, Taxi Driver touches on many themes, centrally loneliness and violence. Both thematic elements end up contributing to Travis Bickle’s altered perceptions, hatred, vicious obsessions, and his overall unbalanced mind-state. Many more themes exist within the film, but the primary thematic elements of Taxi Driver are violence and especially loneliness.

“Loneliness has followed me my whole life. Everywhere.
In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere.
There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man.”

The above quote, taken from Travis Bickle’s inner thoughts, emphasizes the film’s overriding theme of loneliness. Taxi Driver’s screenwriter Paul Schrader has said that “[Taxi Driver’s] theme was loneliness, or as I realized later, self-imposed loneliness” (Taubin, 10). Travis Bickle leads a life of insomnia, desperation, and confusion, all contributing to his perceived personality being shy but is one actually filled with rage, anxiety, and by the film’s conclusion, destructive violence. As shown by Bickle’s above quote, he is able to recognize his surroundings and his situational loneliness but he will not be able to control the denouement of his repressed life.

The fact that Travis chooses to become a taxi driver reinforces his solitude. By choosing a job where one is so tightly confined by the car doors and the monotony of faceless passengers, Travis is only feeding his psychosis by inhabiting such close space with the “night-buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies. Sick. Venal” people that he has grown to hate so much By working nights in the dirtiest parts of town, Travis is isolating himself from humanity. Despite his seemingly passive demeanor, his choices throughout the movie will not only emphasize his loneliness, but also contribute to his increasingly irrational state of mind.

Film critic Roger Ebert also makes mention of Taxi Driver as having a center focusing on “utter aloneness... the film can be seen as a series of [Travis’] failed attempts to connect, every one of them hopelessly wrong” (Ebert 2000). It is worthwhile to examine one especially strong failed attempt in order to better understand Scorsese and Schrader’s meticulous portrayal of loneliness.

Travis’ alienation with society and its rules is best exemplified during his surprising date with Betsy. Travis ends up taking Betsy to a porno movie for their date. Shocking as this may seem to Betsy, and the viewer, Travis sees nothing wrong in his behaviour. During his bouts with insomnia, Bickle actually makes a habit of going to these pornographic movies by himself as a form of entertainment (although we never actually see him really ‘enjoy’ them. He simply goes because he knows no other options for distraction). Since his only real interaction is with himself, lonely entertainment has sabotaged the rare chance he actually had for a respectable relationship with another person.

The unbearable isolation that Travis feels after his failed human interaction is painfully emphasized in his subsequent apologetic phone call to Betsy. Travis, is desperately pleading to Betsy for some understanding but as the conversation carries, the camera tracks away from Travis. In a most symbolic exercise, the camera moves from the action and comes to a slow stop on an empty hallway about ten feet from Travis. We still hear his phone conversation, but the viewer is left to stare at the desolate corridor, indicating how empty Travis truly is. The abandonment that Bickle feels is exemplified by the now motionless camera seemingly staring at ‘nothing’. “Looking at this image, we get a sense of the way everything inside Travis freezes when Betsy rejects him” (Taubin, 47). The director of the film, Martin Scorsese reinforces the importance of this scene by stating, “that was the first shot I thought of in the film, and it was the last I filmed. I like it because I sensed that it added to the loneliness of the whole thing” (Thompson & Christie, 54).

The loneliness felt by Travis Bickle in this failed attempt at connection serves as fuel for Travis’ increasing rage. Despite the implications that loneliness, alienation and isolation might create a sympathetic character, Travis is, at heart, a deviant. Marie K. Connelly argues, in her writings on Scorsese, that “anyone who has ever felt he or she has said the wrong thing, anyone who has ever felt ill at ease socially, anyone who has ever felt lonely, anyone who has merely felt anxious as a result of spending the day at home having too much time to worry - can relate to Travis’ experience at this level” (Connelly, 38). Although Travis does show some relateably sheepish qualities from a lack of social skills, it hardly makes him a sympathetic character at all. The alert viewer would recognize being misled to sympathize with Travis and his definitive violence at the end of the film. Rather, Travis remains a product of his underground lifestyle. As a consequence of this lonely life, violence becomes his answer.

While violence can be seen as a plot element rather than a theme, for Travis violence is a state of mind, an answer to his woes, and an alternate reality to persue. After being brushed off by Betsy, Travis immediately begins a fetish for violence. The next passenger that Travis drives in his taxi is fast-talking paranoid husband who alludes to ghastly violent paybacks on his cheating wife and her lover. The explicit diatribe by the passenger seems to startle Travis but what he is hearing actually “refers to the bad thoughts in his head, the thoughts he can’t bring himself to put into words - leaving him in the end no choice but to put them into action. Travis is a classic case of the repressed returning as apocalypse.” (Taubin, 50). The alienation that Travis Bickle feels is the root of his increasingly violence-focused mind-set.

“The days move along in an endless chain, one day
indistinguishable from the next... And now there is change”

The change that Bickle is referring to is the newly formed obsession for violent release he feels. He decides to purchase some guns in what is “the most stunning example of gun fetishism in the history of cinema” (Taubin, 53). With several guns now in his possession, Travis is prepared to enact his rage on the Senator whom Betsy was campaigning for. During the preparation, the two themes of loneliness and violence combine for what is the most recognized and quoted scene of the film. The scene involves Travis talking to his mirror image while aiming the guns that are strapped to his body. The dialogue includes: “you talkin’ to me?... Who you talkin’ to?... Are you talkin’ to me?” and especially the line “...Well, I’m the only one here”. Roger Ebert considers this final line to be the truest words in the film (Ebert 2000). The image of a shirtless Bickle practicing drawing on himself in the mirror emphasizes the dialogue as the absolute thematic element of Taxi Driver. Travis Bickle, so lonely as to be communicating with himself in his desolate room, while also realizing the power of his weapons, allows the viewer to sense that Travis has made the connection that his loneliness will cease to exist through planned violent behaviour.

While Travis’ planned assassination of the Senator does not materialize, the concluding scene of the film is his violent apocalypse in response to repression [see endnote 1]. On a mission to “save” a young prostitute, Iris [see endnote 2], Travis puts his subconscious homicidal fantasies into action. During a brutal shoot-out in darkened hallways, staircases, and bedrooms, the climax of the film is also Travis’ climactic release. Using all the gunplay he’d practiced with the mirror, bloodshed erupts because, for Travis, anxiety can be eradicated only by death (Taubin, 72). Travis is overwhelmed by what he has done, and feels isolated from the carnage he has caused. Just as the camera represented his loneliness while he pleaded with Betsy on the phone, the camera again works to reinforce the themes of the film. A slow overhead tracking shot encapsulates the culmination of the massacre, taking in images of dead bodies, used guns, and bloodied walls and floors, while at the same time embodying Travis’ disassociation with all that has happened.

The film’s last minutes give the anti-hero a moment of gratification through Travis’ becoming a tabloid hero for saving the young prostitute from a life in hell, and also by coincidentally encountering Betsy, and in effect having the last laugh (in that Betsy now slightly admires his deed). However, the final seconds of the film remind the viewer that there is no catharsis for Travis. We see him alone in his taxi, driving in the same grimy neighbourhoods, completely alone. The denouement of violence has finally happened for Travis, but our last image before the end crdits roll, -is of him giving a paranoid stare at himself in his front rear-view mirror as a musical note is distorted on the soundtrack. We are strongly reminded of the moment he decided to “change” and practiced his gunplay, also in front of a mirror. A life of loneliness and violence is far from over for Travis Bickle. A cycle of hatred, altered perceptions, alienation can only continue for this character.

Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader, along with Robert DeNiro, combined the create a masterful study of the lonely, alienated American male and the violent lengths he will go to in order appease his incurable mind-set.


[endnote 1] - a murder of a corner-store customer between the planned Senator assassination and the final massacre acts as a bridge between violent outbursts, but there is no implication of Travis having planned the incident. Rather it is a primer for his final release.

[endnote 2] - Iris is a very important character in the film. While not discussed much in this essay, she exists to further Travis’ anger at the ‘scum’ of New York (primarily Iris’ pimp, Sport), and as motivation for another theme of the film: Travis’ obsession with saving (via violence) of others.