Taxi Driver: An Exemplary Portrait of Disillusionment

One day last September, I met a shy freshman girl in the school cafeteria. We'll call her Brooklyn. All the popular girls sat in their cliques, gossiping aimlessly about some baseball player they found cute, and guess who got left out? On a whim, I invited Brooklyn to my group's table, and she and I became fast friends over the next couple of weeks. I'm more than excited to see her again this upcoming year, and I've since sworn to do everything I can to make outsiders at my school feel welcome, something our always-connected yet never-intimate internet culture has unconsciously stigmatized. That was my junior year of college, and rewatching Scorsese's Taxi Driver yesterday, I had a thought some might find offensive: our culture first creates outcasts and then acts as if they're the problem. Look at how many articles have been written on the topics of incel culture and toxic masculinity. And take what I say with a grain of salt, because none of this is meant to excuse the atrocious behavior of Travis Bickle, nor any character or real-life person resembling him. Nevertheless, having once been a very lonely and isolated person myself, I can sympathize with Travis on some level. I sympathize with his frustration. I sympathize with his disdain for the sleaze of the city. I sympathize with his desire to be loved. I even sympathize with his anger. He's not entirely wrong, which is part of why he scares me. I see more of myself in him than I would care to, and because of Scorsese's impeccable direction, it's too often impossible to look away.

I've always had a soft spot for character studies, and Taxi Driver might be the sub-genre's defining title. An uncomfortably intimate examination of Travis and his scorn for the depravity of the night, it's more exhaustive than almost any other movie like it. I felt as though I were getting to personally know him throughout a weeks-long story, from the good to the bad to the dangerous. In some ways, I understand Travis's disdain for the world he lives in. In others, he disgusts me. I think that's the point, and the intimate focus on character of Taxi Driver is only one reason it works so well, not to undersell its importance. For much of this movie, we're trapped inside a taxi cab with Travis as he monologues to his customers about his hatred for the city's degeneracy, expositing layer after layer of himself for both them and us to make a judgment call on his person. The city itself, a bright but sleazy vision of New York, is beautifully realized, and Taxi Driver captures the nightlife of the 70s in eye-popping and shockingly detailed color. It's almost as if you could reach out and wipe some of the grime off the cab windows or burn your finger on one of the neon signs if you're not careful. The devotion to tone is stunning.

Immersion seems to be at the forefront of Scorsese's design, and he commits wholeheartedly to an exhaustive audio-visual portrait of New York. Bernard Herrmann's saxophone-heavy score is brilliantly appropriate, melding perfectly into the world as if a jazz musician were actually playing on the sidewalk. I love how depraved Taxi Driver can be, and what I mean by that is this: this movie shoves your face in the filth and sleaze of 1970s New York City and then dares you to say that Travis's often-unhinged reaction to it is unjustified. Travis is the type of guy who journals a lot, and Scorsese uses his writing as voiceover material, giving us a window into this disturbed man's mind. The scope of Taxi Driver is hyper-powerful, an often-uncomfortable and always-intense fixation on the worst parts of the city and the hurting people we would prefer to ignore. It's dipping both us and him into the degeneracy of the city and just waiting for Travis to do something drastic. It's a brilliant portrait of disillusionment painted with a brush both broad and yet somehow uncomfortable and specific at the same time.

Taxi Driver proves how uncomfortably thin the line between folk hero and monster can be. Was the person you killed loved by many or hated by most? That’s what will too often decide the killer's legacy, the exact reason why we look up to John Brown while demonizing John Wilkes Booth. I might go so far as to call this movie the definitive character study, and Robert De Niro’s performance as a troubled man walking the line between heroism and villainy is nothing short of mesmerizing. For many out there, his bitter loneliness will be all too sadly familiar. Taxi Driver likewise captures a city's nightlife in a way few other movies have. You see the detail put into the creation of this city. You hear the fittingly jazz-heavy soundtrack. It’s almost as if you could reach out and touch New York City or smell its filth. It’s almost as if it could start to drive you a little crazy if you let it. This movie ends ambiguously, like so many of Scorsese’s other films. Is Travis the hero, or is he a monster? Does he find redemption or sell his soul instead? Depending on who you are, where you come from, and who you hung around growing up, you’ll probably feel differently, and that's not a bad thing. Taxi Driver offers no easy answers and only hard questions we’ve been discussing for 49 years. Not bad for a movie named after an entry-level job.

Taxi Driver - 10/10

Isaiah 1:21-26