The deep, lasting impact that Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket had on Paul Schrader has been well-documented throughout his career. It not only famously inspired Schrader to write the screenplay for Taxi Driver, but he went on to explicitly reference the film’s ending in the finales of three of the films he went on to direct: American Gigolo, Light Sleeper and, most recently, The Card Counter. The tortured loner whose existential suffering leads to a circuitous journey toward an enigmatic yet transcendent redemption is a linchpin in much of Schrader’s work, and much of that is modeled after Pickpocket’s protagonist, Michel (Martin Lasalle). With Taxi Driver, Schrader and Martin Scorsese conceived of a Dostoevskian übermensch similar to Michel, but Travis Bickle was equally informed by the American western—particularly the virulent racist and vengeful anti-hero in John Ford’s The Searchers, Ethan Edwards.
Like Ethan, Travis is a perpetual outsider, seeing himself as a moral enforcer and the lone figure who’s willing to go far enough to restore order and justice to an unruly world. The savagery that Ethan associates with the Native Americans is akin to that which Travis sees in the pimps and pushers who fill the New York City streets at night. And, most obviously, Ethan’s obsessive journey to rescue his niece from the Comanches who kidnapped her and killed most of his family is directly mirrored in Travis’s attempts to rescue the sex-trafficked 12-year-old Iris (Jodie Foster) from her pimp, Sport (Harvey Keitel).
Travis’s dreams of a rain coming to “wash all this scum off the streets” even have similarly racist implications as Ethan’s anti-Comanche diatribes, punctuated by first person perspective shots of Travis glaring at two black pimps at the diner he and his cabbie acquaintances hang out at and a later shot that sees him aggressively staring down a black man he passes after leaving the diner. And, of course, there’s the young black man robbing a convenience store whom Travis guns down.
Scorsese has rightly deemed Ethan a “poet of hatred,” and that character’s self-loathing and rampant xenophobia surfaces in a more modern incarnation through Travis’s increasingly warped vision of the urban jungle that was mid-1970s New York City. If the hell of war against Native Americans served to corrupt Ethan’s mind, the Vietnam War did the same to Travis. But where Ethan is a highly skilled cowboy and gunman and Michel has perfected the craft of picking pockets, Travis is almost shockingly inept at virtually everything he tries his hand at, outside of driving his taxi. Whether in simple social interactions or his increasingly committed attempts to take down a presidential candidate or to convince Iris to escape from Sport, Travis’s gracelessness becomes a defining feature of his character.
DeNiro perfectly embodies this characteristic as his consistently awkward physical movements and a tendency to hold silences and stillness for at least a couple beats too long maximize Travis’s persistent sense of alienation, while also giving rise to undercurrent of black comedy that runs throughout Taxi Driver. Because of the film’s gritty verisimilitude, sustained tension and persistent aura of existential despair, the dark humor is often overlooked, but it’s clear that Scorsese and Schrader are being at least a bit tongue-in-cheek in their portrait of the post-Vietnam “cowboy” as a feckless outsider. And indeed, they cleverly, and often amusingly, invoke this status through a series of escalating microaggressions.
Both when Travis makes a joke to his potential new boss at the cab company and when he tries to converse with the snack bar worker at a porn theater, he’s instantly, and harshly, shut down. Even though his attempts at being kind to or connecting with others are genuine, he’s so excessively awkward and desperate that he’s inevitably very off-putting. The most extreme example of his discomfiting efforts at normalcy comes when he takes Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a campaign worker for Senator Palantine (Leonard Harris), on a date to a porno for their first date. He was thoughtful enough to buy a record for her but can’t understand why his choice of venue would upset her nor why she refuses to speak to him after. Even when Travis thinks he’s being slick when chumming it up with a Secret Service agent, he unknowingly gives himself up as a suspicious target within seconds.
Travis’s series of unfortunate events imbue him with a rage that gradually becomes as misdirected as it is inherently toxic. And with the help of Bernard Hermann’s mournfully melodic jazz score and Michael Chapman’s moody cinematography, Scorsese captures Travis’s woozy tunnel vision of a scummy, grimy New York City that had gone bankrupt just one year before the film’s release. The subjectivity of the camera, whether through glimpses at the rearview mirror of Travis’s cab or the smooth pan from his POV as he first gets his hand on a 38 snub-nosed revolver and points it out of a window, helps the film inhabit his delusional view of the world.
But what’s especially singular and prescient about Taxi Driver is how baseless and directionless Travis’s paranoia and rage are. His complete changes of heart toward Betsy and Senator Palatine—he sees her as an untouchable angel and him as just what the city needs when he’s chasing after Betsy, but lumps them in with the rest of the city’s disposable trash as soon as Betsy rejects him—speak to his utter lack of any consistent, or even definable, ideology.
Virtually eulogizing himself via voice over at one point in the film, Travis says “Here is a man who would not take it anymore,” but the “it” he speaks of is malleable, spiraling off from the grimy nightlife of the city to include those whom he believes have somehow wronged, or even simply misunderstood, him. Travis is in many ways, then, the nascent version of the 21st century incel vigilante—his chaotic inner turmoil causing him to strike out at targets both innocent and evil (first Palatine, then Sport) for causes both absurd and honorable. Because Scorsese and DeNiro so effectively convey Travis’s mindset, it’s no wonder the character has been an inspiration to ineffectual wannabe vigilantes since John Hinckley Jr.
That Scorsese and Schrader also foresaw that this sort of aggressively anti-social, hyper-violent behavior would be valorized by the press and the public—whether or not the ending is in Travis’s head or not is essentially beside the point—is quite a feat. But if the western has taught us anything, it’s that America has so often falsely worshiped and mythologized lone gunman as saviors of our communities for centuries that it should be no surprise that the reverence of the vigilante continues to this day. As the finale of Taxi Driver shows, the delusions of these volatile, destructive men frequently extend to the public sphere. So, even if Travis Bickle did die in the film’s final shootout, the myth he left behind would only ensure someone else would’ve soon filled his absence.
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