There have been few films that have created and sustained the sense of constant, underlying dread that pervades every frame of Martin Scorsese’s scorching urban masterpiece Taxi Driver. It slowly and almost unbearably builds in tension until it literally explodes in a bloody climax of vigilante violence that was unlike anything viewers had seen before. Scorsese’s superb direction—so confident, so intense in its mixture of classical Hollywood tropes and various European new wave stylistics—coupled with Robert De Niro’s searing performance in the title role, Paul Schrader’s relentless script, and Bernard Herrman’s pounding orchestral score ensured something unique and memorable, terrifying and disturbing.

The film shows us the sordid underbelly of New York City through the increasingly psychotic eyes of Travis Bickle (De Niro), a lonely Vietnam veteran who is unable to comprehend the society in which he lives. A loner cut adrift from the world, he is the epitome of alienation, constantly (and often pathetically) trying to connect with others, but always failing. The film forces us into Bickle’s discomfiting subjectivity: We are always with him, listening to his inner thoughts as he pours them out into a diary no one will ever read; seeing the city’s crime and poverty through his ravaged, wandering eyes; and watching him talk to himself in the mirror, enacting delusional tough-guy roles and practicing confrontation.

Scorsese spares nothing in his portrait of a city at war with itself. Bickle is a sick man, but the irony is that he is only as sick as the world around him. Captured with documentary-like realism, Taxi Driver’s New York City is a dank and squalid netherworld, its garish neon signs and dull street lamps illuminating only drug dealers and prostitutes moving amongst gaseous clouds of steam that escape through manholes in the wet streets. We understand Bickle’s perverse fascination with and hatred of the sinful and defiled around him, and the film’s tension emerges from our growing realization that it will eventually push him over the edge.

Bickle takes a job driving taxicabs because he can’t sleep at night. He doesn’t care what time of night he drives, what neighborhoods he drives through, or who his fare is. His backseat is constantly filled with the dregs of society, whether it be a politician picking up a prostitute, or a deranged, homicidal husband stalking his adulterous wife (played by Scorsese himself in a particularly creepy role). At the end of the night, Bickle wipes the blood and semen off the back seat and returns to his small, seedy apartment with only his thoughts as company. He is never able to fully communicate with anyone except himself, which is why his thoughts must finally erupt in violence. There is simply no other way to let them out.

This is not to say that Bickle does not try to take part in the “normal,” acceptable aspects of society, which is expressed most clearly through his attraction to Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a pretty young woman who works in the campaign office of a Presidential candidate. When things don’t work out with her, Bickle develops an intense obsession with a 12-year-old prostitute named Iris (Jodie Foster). He is not interested in her sexually; rather, he wants to save her, to liberate her from the life in which she is currently enslaved. When he tries to persuade her to get away from her abusive pimp, Sport (Harvey Keitel), he finds that, much to his dismay, she doesn’t want to leave the life—yet another moment of misunderstanding and miscommunication. Nevertheless, Bickle decides that he will be her savior, even if she doesn’t want him to, and what ensues is a gruesome bloodbath in which Bickle becoming an armed vigilante, determined to rescue Iris from the forces around her. Scorsese’s depiction of Bickle’s violent eruption is frightening in its intensity, unadorned with nondiegetic music or unnecessary flourish. We are drawn into the maelstrom, an unfolding nightmare in which we are willing participants, and we are detached from Bickle only after it is over and an extreme high-angle tracking shots surveys the aftermath.

The key to Taxi Driver is that it does not end there, but rather continues with a denouement that shows the unexpected and somewhat shocking results of Bickle’s vigilante rampage. It is a final, ironic, yet strangely understandable twist in a film that has otherwise been a straight descent, taking us from a surface world of crime and corruption into the perverse worldview of a self-appointed vigilante and then back again, in the process creating one of the most unnerving portraits of (anti)heroism ever committed to film.

Copyright © 2016 James Kendrick

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