Aggression as art: the enduring unnerving brilliance of Taxi Driver

It’s rare for a film released 50 years ago to be as visceral, controversial, and disturbing today as it was back in 1976. But such is the case with Taxi Driver, the gritty psychological thriller directed by Martin Scorsese, written by Paul Schrader, and starring Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle – a lonely, insomniac veteran who becomes a night-shift taxi driver to cope with his chronic sleeplessness. As he witnesses the perceived moral rot of the city's streets, his mental state progressively deteriorates, leading him to a violent path of attempted vigilantism. His descent is punctuated by his failed attempt to court a political campaign worker, Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), and his obsessive, ultimately bloody quest to "rescue" a child prostitute, Iris (Jodie Foster), from her manipulative pimp, Sport (Harvey Keitel).

To listen to a recording of our CineVerse group discussion of Taxi Driver, conducted last week, click here. To hear the latest Cineversary podcast, which celebrates this film’s golden anniversary, click here.

Let’s give Taxi Driver its props: This is widely considered one of the best films of the 1970s and perhaps Scorsese’s finest picture of that decade. It’s a work that boasts one fantastic scene and quotable line after another, most notably the “You talkin’ to me” monologue in front of the mirror. And it abides as an endlessly fascinating psychological portrait. Quentin Tarantino said it “may be the greatest first-person character study ever committed to film.” Deep Focus Review essayist Brian Eggert believes that “not knowing what precisely drives him is what makes Travis in the film so compelling… That which we know about what occurs in the film is vast, but that which we do not know is even greater…Just enough about Taxi Driver is known and maintained within the consciousness of popular film culture that we keep returning to it in hopes of figuring it out, but more importantly, figuring out what it means to us.”

This is the film that established Robert De Niro as a generational talent, marking the first starring role where he commanded universal attention. The brooding, haunting music of Taxi Driver proved to be the final score for legendary film composer Bernard Herrmann, who completed it just hours before he passed away. Not long thereafter, it won the Palme d'Or at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival, and the film received four nominations at the 49th Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor (Robert De Niro), Best Supporting Actress (Jodie Foster), and Best Original Score (Bernard Herrmann). Back in 1994, Taxi Driver was even selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the U.S. Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically" significant.

Today, the picture holds "universal acclaim" on Metacritic with a score of 94 out of 100, and an 89% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. In prestigious polls, Sight & Sound named it the 29th-best film ever (critics) and 12th-best (directors); Time listed it as one of the 100 best films of all time; The Village Voice ranked it 33rd on its "Best Films of the Century"; Empire ranked the film 17th on its "500 Greatest Movies" list and Travis Bickle 18th among the "100 Greatest Movie Characters"; Time Out named it the #1 greatest movie set in New York City; and the BBC ranked it 19th on its "100 Greatest American Films" list. The American Film Institute has recognized the film extensively, slotting it #47 on the original 100 Years...100 Movies list and #52 on the 10th Anniversary Edition, placing it #22 on its 100 Thrills list, naming Travis Bickle the #30 greatest villain, ranking the quote "You talkin' to me?" #10, and nominating the film for 100 Years of Film Scores. Industry players have honored the work, as well, with the Writers Guild of America naming the screenplay by Paul Schrader the 43rd-greatest ever and the Directors Guild of America ranking the film the 44th best-directed of all time.

Screenwriter Paul Schrader crafted the story based on his own lonely experiences in New York, writing the script following a divorce and a period of homelessness, fueled by chronic insomnia and late nights in pornographic theaters. “What I learned while writing the script is that this was about a man who suffered from the pathology of loneliness,” Schrader recalled. “He wasn’t lonely by nature; he was lonely as a defense mechanism. And he reinforced his own loneliness by his own behavior. And the pathology grew until it became malignant and violent.”

He blended these personal memories with diverse cultural influences, including the Harry Chapin song Taxi, the Robert Bresson films Diary of a Country Priest (1951) and Pickpocket (1959), and John Ford’s The Searchers (1956); Schrader mirrored the narrative framework of the latter by transforming John Ford's archetype of the alienated, war-hardened veteran into Travis Bickle, whose obsessive, violent quest to "rescue" a young girl from a perceived social underworld reflects the same dark "savior" complex and psychological instability seen in Ethan Edwards. Schrader also utilized the diaries of would-be assassin Arthur Bremer and modeled the story's "media hero" conclusion after the public fascination with Sara Jane Moore following her attempt on President Gerald Ford’s life.

For his part, Scorsese said he was inspired by several previous films, including Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956), Le Samourai (1967), and A Bigger Splash (1973). Ever the cinephile, it’s easy to spot classic noir influences on the director, as Taxi Driver exudes a cynical and downbeat worldview, depicting an urban setting as rife with decay, crime, and exploitation. An especially noirish scene is when Scorsese makes a cameo in Bickle’s cab, threatening to violently exact revenge on his cheating wife spotted in a window silhouette across the street, a sequence punctuated by Hermann’s ominous score. This sequence is perhaps a sly inside baseball nod to Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Window, which we hear Scorsese name-drop. One could also argue that Betsy and Iris are unwitting femme fatales leading Bickle to danger and destruction. Additionally, DVD Savant critic Glenn Erickson called Bickle a “film noir loser hero, the kind that subconsciously wills his own failures.”

Some argue that Taxi Driver is part of the vetsploitation subgenre of films exploring the "ticking time bomb" archetype of the scarred Vietnam veteran using military training to wage vigilante wars, as seen in early titles like The Born Losers (1967), Targets (1968), and Billy Jack (1971). You could also make a case that this film could be classified in the vigilante subgenre, which focuses on individuals who bypass a failing legal system to dispense personal justice, often amidst a backdrop of rising crime and societal collapse, as evidenced in earlier works like Dirty Harry (1971), Walking Tall (1973), and Death Wish (1974).

In the years following the release of Taxi Driver, we got films with similar characters, situations, and themes, including American Gigolo (1980), Paul Schrader’s first sequel in his "Night Worker" trilogy, which explores a stylish but isolated loner; The King of Comedy (1982), a spiritual companion piece featuring a socially inept protagonist obsessed with celebrity and criminal recognition; Light Sleeper (1992), in which an insomniac drug dealer maintains a diary while navigating a lonely, late-night existence; Bad Lieutenant (1992), a gritty portrait of a self-destructive officer’s moral collapse in a decaying New York; Falling Down (1993), wherein a frustrated everyman snaps and embarks on a violent, vigilante journey across Los Angeles; Léon: The Professional (1994), which mirrors the Travis/Iris dynamic through a socially stunted hitman who protects a young girl; American Psycho (2000), which examines the internal monologue and deteriorating sanity of a man leading a double life; Drive (2011), depicting an enigmatic driver who uses sudden, explosive violence to protect those close to him in a criminal underworld; Nightcrawler (2014), featuring a sociopathic loner who prowls the city at night, driven by a dark, obsessive ambition; You Were Never Really Here (2017), wherein a traumatized veteran rescues girls from trafficking, echoing Travis Bickle’s specific trauma and mission; and Joker (2019), a direct homage depicting a marginalized man’s transformation into a violent symbol of urban unrest.

The level of graphic violence and disquieting sexuality in Taxi Driver is extreme, even by today’s standards. The film would have received an X-rating had Scorsese not agreed to desaturate the colors during the final shootout and make the blood look less realistically red. Consider that this film depicts a white man killing a black man, the gruesome shooting of several men while a preteen girl watches, and an unsuccessful suicide attempt by Bickle. Bickle is also a character with obvious racial prejudice against African-Americans. What’s more, Jodie Foster was only 12 years old during filming. Subjecting a child actress to this kind of subject matter and violence and casting her as a child prostitute remains a questionable choice. Fortunately, the filmmakers took great steps to prevent her from being traumatized by having her psychologically tested and providing a social worker on set. Still, consider that both Scorsese and Schrader were not nominated for Academy Awards for this film, which suggests how uncomfortable the movie made Academy voters.

Most controversially, Taxi Driver motivated John Hinckley Junior to attempt an assassination on President Ronald Reagan in 1981 after re-watching the film numerous times and being obsessed with Jodie Foster. The media scrutiny that followed caused Scorsese to question whether he wanted to continue to make films. Additionally, Bernhard Goetz became a modern-day Travis Bickle in 1984 when he shot four teenagers on a New York subway, justifying the violence as a preemptive strike against perceived "filth." Driven by the same self-righteous alienation as the fictional character, Goetz viewed his explosive actions as a necessary "cleansing" of a city he felt the authorities had failed to protect.

There are so many directorial choices by Scorsese to admire. First, ruminate on how Scorsese and his collaborators benefited from great timing, choosing to film on the West Side of New York City during a summer when the Big Apple was teetering on bankruptcy, a widespread garbage strike resulted in trash piling up everywhere, and an oppressive heat wave plagued the city.

The director and his team conjure up unforgettable imagery, creating a visually evocative landscape filled with steam-seeped streets, an unhealthy neon glow illuminating the nighttime urban jungle, inky blacks obscuring the spaces between faces, shady and dangerous denizens walking about, drab apartment interiors, and cab windshields splattered with dirty water or hurled garbage.

In an interview, Scorsese said: “Much of Taxi Driver arose from my feeling that movies are really a kind of dream-state, or like taking dope…And the shock of walking out of the theatre into broad daylight can be terrifying. I watch movies all the time, and I am also very bad at waking up. The film was like that for me—that state of being almost awake.”

Scorsese’s camera brilliantly captures seemingly random images of street life, kinetic vehicles, and cultural diversity on display. There’s a fantastic brief segment where rhythmic editing juxtaposes the changing cab fare meter with streetlights, facial close-ups, and other imagery in rapid-fire succession, and a later marvelous montage where we observe Travis target-practicing at a gun range, polishing his boots, burning flowers, and sharpening his knife. Other curious shots spring to mind, including the slow zoom in to a glass filled with fizzing Alka-Seltzer. And the delayed but shocking reveal of Travis’ mohawk haircut is further testament to Scorsese’s visual storytelling savvy.

One of his most impactful decisions was to consistently present Travis’s POV, especially as he observes sex workers, pimps, and various passersby. He does this occasionally in slow motion, an effect that suggests Bickle is out of sync with the rest of the world and preoccupied with what he sees as degenerates, criminals, and human threats. Roger Ebert wrote: “One of the hardest things for a director to do is to suggest a character’s interior state without using dialogue; one of Scorsese’s greatest achievements in Taxi Driver is to take us inside Travis Bickle’s point of view.”

Interestingly, Scorsese includes one scene not shown from Bickle’s perspective: Sport and Iris slow dancing and embracing in their private space. Although this choice is inconsistent with the rest of the film, having Travis absent reinforces the notion that Iris is truly being exploited by a gaslighting groomer and manipulator – not just in Travis’ mind. This knowledge makes us root for Travis in his quest to liberate Iris.

Scorsese also cleverly uses his camera in ways that further underscore Bickle’s misanthropic, unsettling nature, his inability to communicate, and the way he makes the viewer feel uncomfortable. Recall how, early in the film, the camera momentarily detaches from Travis, panning across a row of vehicles in the taxi garage before reuniting with him as he reaches the exit. Soon after, we observe a lap dissolve that essentially "jumps" the viewer forward in space, transitioning from a wide shot of Travis on the pavement to a tighter, more immediate framing of him in the same location. Perhaps most famously, Travis is shown at a pay phone pleading with Betsy to return his calls, but the camera pans right, forcing us to gaze down a bleak, empty hallway toward the street traffic in the distance – as if the camera or the filmmakers are either too embarrassed or disgusted to linger any further on this pathetic figure.

Importantly, the director includes an occasional voiceover, bringing us further into Travis’ unhinged mind and causing us to question how dependable this narrator is. Often, the inclusion of a voiceover in a film signifies that the character speaking aloud is trustworthy, empathetic, and endorsed by the filmmakers, but, as Slant Magazine critic Rob Humanick put it, “Taxi Driver doesn’t ask that we embrace or approve of (Travis’) disturbed worldview, only that we see through his eyes enough to experience this particular circle of hell.”

It’s fascinating that De Niro went full method in his approach to Bickle, securing a taxi driver's license and, during filming breaks, transporting actual passengers around New York. He completely inhabits this role and looks absolutely believable in the part. Recall how DeNiro never completely turns around to communicate with passengers inside his cab. He plays Bickle with clever ambiguity so that you’re never quite sure what truly drives his impulses or makes him tick; his portrayal teeters between the extremes of dangerous psychopath and good Samaritan, with plenty of shades of gray but also ample character flaws, like loathsome bigotry and social ineptitude.

Foster, meanwhile, is a precocious revelation as Iris. Casting a 12-year-old remains a cringeworthy decision, but it lends valuable gravitas to the depravity of the situation and the exploitative nature of prostitution. Cybill Shepherd shines as Betsy; her radiant beauty makes us believe that she would fuel Travis’ obsession. And Albert Brooks, in his debut feature film performance, adds needed comic relief touches to an otherwise disturbing and depressing narrative.

Taxi Driver is a film brimming with cautionary concepts. First and foremost, it’s about the repercussions of loneliness and the inability to communicate and connect with other human beings. Bickle, primarily a solitary figure through most of the narrative, refers to himself as “God’s lonely man,” remarking that “Loneliness has followed me my whole life.” A telling exchange is when Travis can’t seem to properly express his angst when talking with Wizard, saying, “I just wanna go out, and you know, like, really... Really... Really do something.” According to Ebert: “The film can be seen as a series of his failed attempts to connect, every one of them hopelessly wrong. He asks a girl out on a date and takes her to a porno movie. He sucks up to a political candidate but ends up alarming him. He tries to make small talk with a Secret Service agent. He wants to befriend a child prostitute, but scares her away. He is so lonely that when he asks, ‘Who you talkin’ to?’ he is addressing himself in a mirror. This utter aloneness is at the center of “Taxi Driver”…perhaps it is why so many people connect with it even though Travis Bickle would seem to be the most alienating of movie heroes. We have all felt as alone as Travis.”

Culpability by warped association is another thematic notion. Bickle’s distorted morality leads him to judge Betsy and Iris as either guilty or innocent based on their associations with, respectively, Palantine and Sport – two men Travis deems as corrupting, controlling father figures who contribute to the city’s despicable state and are deserving of his extreme form of justice. Travis first views Betsy as an angelic and alluring love interest. But when Betsy sours on him, he sours on Palatine and warns her, “You're in a hell, and you're gonna die in a hell, just like the rest of 'em.” Travis then turns his wrath on Palantine, the man Betsy is working for and the perceived barrier separating them. Next, Travis channels his energies toward saving Iris, a young prostitute being exploited by her pimp. After his assassination attempt of the senator is thwarted, Travis immediately redirects his violent intentions toward Sport. Travis makes illogical connections between both father figures, likely due to coincidence and timing. Recall that Iris enters Travis’ cab and is yanked away by Sport immediately after Palantine is Travis’ passenger. In that scene, we hear Travis tell Palantine, “This city here is like an open sewer, you know, it's full of filth and scum..Whatever becomes the President should just - really clean it up.”

Another core finding, if you look closely enough: fatalism as a defense mechanism. “Now I see this clearly. My whole life is pointed in one direction. There never has been a choice for me,” Travis says. This mindset gives him a sense of purpose and frees him from accepting personal responsibility for the violence he believes he’s been preordained to deliver. By framing his path as an inevitable destiny rather than a series of choices, he transforms his social alienation and mental instability into a heroic mission. Lacking free will, Travis is no longer a man losing his mind, but a tool of fate directed to cleanse an irredeemable city.

Taxi Driver also enjoys dabbling in cosmic irony. “The five-minute epilogue underscores the vagaries of fate,” critic James Berardinelli posits. “The media builds Bickle into a hero, when, had he been a little quicker drawing his gun against Senator Palantine, he would have been reviled as an assassin. As the film closes, the misanthrope has been embraced as the model citizen—someone who takes on pimps, drug dealers, and mobsters to save one little girl.” In the final scene, Travis appears more balanced and well-adjusted as he drops off Betsy. Yet, our last glimpse of Bickle shows a concerned face doing a double take as he suddenly notices an unseen object in his rearview mirror, insinuating that the ticking bomb in his noggin that had been turned off is now wound up again. The “bad ideas in my head” that he warned about earlier may have returned, and a new cycle of violence and unruly behavior could be just around the next turn. Schrader seconds this notion in a DVD commentary, rejecting the theory that the shootout, aftermath, and calm epilogue comprise a dream sequence; instead, he sees a circular pattern in which the final frame “could be spliced to the first frame, and the movie (starts) all over again.” Only next time, Bickle won’t be the hero.

Attentive cinephiles perceive plentiful examples of prescience and foreshadowing layered throughout the film. Taxi Driver continually hints at things to come later, with mirrored motifs and callbacks. For example, Travis’ fellow cabbies give him the nickname “Killer,” which proves apropos. We observe several different characters – Travis, the cabbie Charlie T, and Sport – use their hands as finger guns, prefiguring the real handguns we’ll later see used. We hear Travis say, “Someday, a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets”; in a subsequent scene, we observe his windshield doused with water from a hydrant. Tom says earlier, “If a thief screws up on the job, they'll blow his fingers off”; later, we witness Travis actually shoot the fingers off the timekeeper character. In his cameo, Scorsese says he’s going to use a .44 Magnum on his wife, one of the same types of guns Travis ends up purchasing. That same unnamed passenger uses the “N” word when referring to his wife’s lover, feeding into Travis’ growing racism toward African-Americans.

One of Taxi Driver’s greatest gifts to us, 50 years onward, is its opacity as a trustworthy text. Scorsese and Schrader provide ample evidence to intimate that Travis is an unreliable narrator. Cases in point: We are not even sure he is talking to Betsy on that payphone. The flowers he supposedly sent her have apparently never been delivered, as we see decomposing bouquets in his apartment. He claims to be an honorably discharged Marine, but this may be all fabricated; the olive drab M-65 field jacket he wears, featuring a "King Kong Company" morale patch and a pinned parachutist badge, could have been purchased at a resale shop. We observe Travis watching American Bandstand on television, but the song they are dancing to is not the same song we hear (Jackson Browne’s Late for the Sky). Travis constructs a false identity for his parents, claiming he is involved in sensitive government work to mask the reality of his mundane taxi shifts; he further fabricates to them a successful romance with Betsy, ignoring the fact that his social deficiencies have already destroyed the relationship. These blatant lies prove that his narration is a performance of normalcy, used to hide his growing instability even from those closest to him. Truth is, we can’t even trust the denouement: The supposedly heroic conclusion in which newspaper headlines celebrate Travis’ vigilantism could actually be a feverish "death dream" or a psychological projection of his need for acceptance; ponder, after all, how implausible it is that Travis would be legally exonerated for all the violence he caused or would not eventually identified as the attempted assassin of Palantine. We can’t even be sure that’s Betsy in the backseat in the final scene.

Yet it’s Taxi Driver’s “aggression artistry” that perhaps lingers longest in the conscious and subconscious. The “Are you talkin’ to me” moment is legendary, but the most impressive sequence from a direction standpoint is the shootout, which begins with a tracking camera shot of Travis approaching the “timekeeper” (who rents out the rooms to Johns) and shooting his fingers off with the .44 Magnum; we see quick images of the corridor and a door, behind which is a stunned Iris and the bespectacled mafioso. Over the next several seconds, we observe an array of medium close-ups and mid-shots of Travis pointing and blasting his gun, juxtaposed with reverse shots of Sport returning fire and dropping dead. Travis drops the .44, and the camera tilts up to his face. There is a semi-overhead shot from the top of the stairs, and we witness him fire three more rounds with a smaller gun. The wounded timekeeper follows Travis up the stairs in a heated rage. We get a slow-motion shot of the mafioso emerging from the room upstairs, sending a bullet into Travis’ shoulder before the mohawked vigilante deploys another firearm hidden up his sleeve and blows away the mobster – who falls back into Iris’ room as she screams. Travis drags the timekeeper into the room with him, and then we’re served another rapid-fire volley of medium close-ups opposite mid-shots as Travis stabs the old man’s hand with his secret knife. A frenetic tilting camera shows Travis shooting the timekeeper in the face, followed by Iris’ horrified reaction. 

Attempting suicide, Travis pulls an empty trigger and collapses onto the couch. Free of music up to this point, Hermann’s woozy score suddenly ignites, replete with dreamy harps and shrill horns, and the camera shifts to slow-motion mode. Police officers, weapons brandished, enter the space. We got an extreme close-up of Travis finger pistoling at his head (is he begging the cops to shoot him dead?). Next, there’s a fantastic overhead shot that pans the room counterclockwise, revealing every inch of carnage, tracking itself out the doorway (is Travis dying and his spirit leaving his body?). Retracing the path of violence, we digest a slow dissolve montage of grotesque imagery from a steadily moving camera – viscera on the walls and stairs, and lingering shots of bloody, bullet-ridden dead men that could actually be more distressing than the brutal shootout itself. Few filmmakers have ever orchestrated extreme violence more masterfully than what Marty accomplishes in this seven-minute symphony of savagery.