Taxi Driver (1976)

August 20, 2022 7:01 AM

Suffering from insomnia, disturbed loner Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) takes a job as a NYC cabbie, haunting the streets nightly, growing increasingly detached from reality as he dreams of cleaning up the filthy city. When Travis meets campaign worker Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), he becomes obsessed with the idea of saving the world, first plotting to assassinate a presidential candidate, then directing his attentions toward rescuing 12-year-old prostitute Iris (Jodie Foster).

Also starring Harvey Keitel and Peter Boyle.

Written by Paul Schrader. Directed by Martin Scorsese.

96% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.

Currently streaming in the US on Netflix. Also available for digital rental on multiple outlets.

posted by DirtyOldTown (9 comments total)

Jodie Foster’s sister Connie was her body double.
posted by Ideefixe at 10:50 AM on August 20, 2022

I'm not even sure how to begin talking about this movie; Travis Bickle isn't exactly the prototype of the disturbed and disturbing loner who turns into a mass murderer--that would be Charles Whitman--but he served as an example of this type of character in popular media, for future characters (Watchmen's Rorschach, whose opening journal entry is based both on Bickle's opening monologue and another real mass murderer, Son of Sam; the recent version of the Joker leans heavily on this movie and Scorsese's The King of Comedy) as well as for real-life would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley Jr., who, incidentally, is now free and on Twitter. The pimp-and-prostitute-populated version of Times Square featured in this movie has been non-existent, thanks to the "Disneyfication" of that area, for longer than it existed, at least since this movie came out, but I think that people still come to NYC expecting to see it; there's a certain segment of people who want it to be true, both in flyover country (some parts of which are considerably more crime-ridden than NYC or most big cities, on the average) and even in the Big Apple itself, among nostalgic long-term residents who insist that it was more dangerous, sure, but also less boring. Also made De Niro and Foster's reputations.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:19 AM on August 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

Taxi Driver has one of the best shots in any movie I have ever seen. When Travis is on the phone with Betsy, pleading for a date, the camera slowly pans right until Travis is out of the frame. It was almost like I was looking away because I couldn't bear to watch something so pathetic.
posted by Stuka at 2:13 PM on August 20, 2022 [4 favorites]

Echoing HJ’s sentiment about not knowing how to talk about this movie anymore. And I wrote essays about it in college! The way the culture has commodified and normalized Travis Bickle as some sort of loner anti-hero is deeply disturbing. I hate that it basically got remade as a Joker movie.

Everybody involved in the making of Taxi Driver was working at the top of their game and just making themselves legends the whole time. Scorsese’s direction is stylish and moody without getting in the way. De Niro’s performance is absolutely mastery. Bernard Herrmann’s final(?) score!
posted by wabbittwax at 6:57 PM on August 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

The pimp-and-prostitute-populated version of Times Square featured in this movie has been non-existent, thanks to the "Disneyfication" of that area, for longer than it existed, at least since this movie came out, but I think that people still come to NYC expecting to see it; there's a certain segment of people who want it to be true, both in flyover country (some parts of which are considerably more crime-ridden than NYC or most big cities, on the average) and even in the Big Apple itself, among nostalgic long-term residents who insist that it was more dangerous, sure, but also less boring.

I remember reading an NYC location scout talking about how they'd get directors coming into town and saying "take me to the REAL New York!" and when prodded would say "you know, from Taxi Driver and The Warriors!" and they'd have to explain that that New York was an exaggerated picture of a version of the city that hadn't existed in twenty years.
posted by Pope Guilty at 5:46 AM on August 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

"During preproduction, I headed uptown, just talking to people on the street, looking for the great white pimp, and in the middle of it all I ended up at a working girl’s bar and struck up this conversation with this girl [Garth Avery] who was kind of strung out and very, very thin. Very close to this character that I wrote. I asked her to come back to the hotel — we were staying at the St. Regis because it was cheap — and told her I’d pay her, but it was not about sex. Around 7 o’clock in the morning, I slipped a note under Marty’s door that said, “I’m going downstairs to have breakfast with Iris. You must join us.” We watched her pour sugar on top of her jam, the way she talked, and a lot of that is in the diner scene in the movie."

Taxi Driver: The Oral History
posted by hoodrich at 3:15 PM on August 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Thanks for reminding me of Taxi Driver. I'm going to rewatch it.
I loved the movie Joker. And I want to see one of the main inspirations again.
posted by jouke at 6:52 AM on August 23, 2022

In the middle of re-watching for the Nth time.

Travis hitting on the woman working the concession stand in the porno theater. Dear god, has there ever been a more awful attempt at flirting. Oh yeah, when he takes Betsy to the porn theater.

Cherry-cheeked Cybill Shepherd is so goddamn adorable.

I can't stop giggling about how much Albert Brooks looks like a young George Costanza.

Watching Travis give his spiel to Betsy in the coffee shop this time, it seems so clear that he's rehearsed it. He's just hollow, like an alien imitating human emotion.
posted by Saxon Kane at 9:56 PM on August 24, 2022

I was about 27, and when I was in the hospital, I realized I hadn’t spoken to anyone in almost a month. So that’s when the metaphor of the taxi cab occurred to me — this metal coffin that moves through the city with this kid trapped in it who seems to be in the middle of society but is in fact all alone. I knew if I didn’t write about this character I was going to start to become him — if I hadn’t already.

The empty-hallway shot is of course iconic, but there's a moment in the opening scene of the movie that crawled deep into my skin when I first watched this and gave me the heebie-jeebs. I never see anybody talking about it, but it was, weirdly, the moment that made me feel like Martin Scorsese was in a league of his own. (I'd seen a few of his movies before, but Taxi Driver will always be the Scorsese movie for me.)

It starts at about the 2-minute mark in that clip. All throughout the scene, you have a window in the top-right, a frame within the frame, in which two people are having a loud, raucous conversation of their own. But at that moment, the camera slides up Bickle, moving from a framing shot of the man he's talking with to more of a POV shot, and a third person slides into view beyond the window: a sleeping woman, framed behind the two men. A frame within the frame within the frame. And as it slides up to her, a man walks up behind Bickle, uncomfortably close to both Bickle and the camera, blotting out the entire frame.

There's such claustrophobia packed into that one small visual, simultaneously ornate and barely commented-on. So much is packed into that composition, but it flits by, one moment among many. If it's unnoticed, it's because there's nothing to notice: there's a lot of human life packed into that shot, yet none of it means a thing. High-density, low-information. And that's the hell that Travis Bickle is consigned to, and the hell that Paul Schrader, in that quote of his I'm excerpting, was clearly living through himself.

When I watched this movie, I was... 22? 23? Living just outside New York City, in any case, in the worst and cheapest apartment I will hopefully ever have to live in; commuting to work at a start-up where everyone else was making 6+ figures and I got a $500/month stipend, which I managed to make cover rent, transport, and food; dating someone who lived in Hartford, CT, which was itself a miserable city that was slowly driving her insane; and generally feeling lonelier and more adrift than I'd ever felt in my life. I didn't have PTSD like Bickle did, but apart from that, so much of the world he lived in resonated with me, even if my particular hell was half cities and half Internet.

I never took a date to a porno, and I don't have the psychological makeup to be a crazed "purify the city" kind of racist psychopath, apparently, but the first time I watched this movie, I spent the first half of it largely sympathizing and relating to Bickle. I didn't relate to the screeds, but I definitely related to that sense of being completely stuck outside society while simultaneously drowning in it. I related to the kind of idealism that he clings to, which to me felt (and feels) like the kind of idealism that you reach for when you don't have the first idea of how to view the world in pragmatic terms; the better life you imagine winds up being completely deranged, not just because it doesn't map onto reality in the slightest, but because you don't have the first clue of how you would map your hopes for the future onto the world you see before you, which feels like it simply doesn't have a place for you in it.

That sympathy turned slowly into horror and dread, of course, but a lot of it on my first watching was feeling like I could have slipped in that direction frighteningly easily; I'm not sure if that's actually true, but it sure felt like it at the time. Bickle was missing something that I wasn't, but neither he nor I knew what that thing was.

What really spooks me about this movie now, coming back to it from a later and better life, is how clearly the throughline is drawn from Bickle's alienation to his political extremism. Of course his idyllic fantasies consist of borderline Nazi shit: the entire world seems alien to him, and the thing he fantasizes about is its having space for him after all—including the part where he heroically vanquishes all the parts of it that look least like him. A lot of fascist fantasies are basically "knight saves princess," after all, where the princess is perfectly subjugated to him and all of her would-be captors are antitheses of the hero's "nobility" and "purity." Bickle clings to these unrealistic fantasies because he has no reality to moor himself to; but his version of that fantasy comes right out of a porn house, hence his fixations on sexual impropriety. (A lot has been made of the ambiguity of how Jodie Foster's character feels when he "saves" her from a pimp who she doesn't seem to despise, but on another level there's the plain fact that, when Betsy rejects him, his new fixation on a "feminine ideal" targets a literal child—but without altering that same basic "hero saves and then claims damsel" narrative. Taxi Driver doesn't have to spell out the implications of how that story ends, but it taps right into that creepy paternalistic sexualization of underage women just the same.)

Watching Travis give his spiel to Betsy in the coffee shop this time, it seems so clear that he's rehearsed it. He's just hollow, like an alien imitating human emotion.

Oh, totally. And it's creepy as hell, but in a way that I still find painfully tragic. Because on the one hand, yes, he's talking to her like she's a character in a porno (and needs as much depth of connection as a porn actress needs before the fucking begins), but on the other hand, he's talking to her that way because he flat-out doesn't understand how humans talk to one another, because he himself hasn't had a single conversation with more humanity involved in it than that brief exchange with the guy who gives him his job, where he flashes brief recognition that Bickle used to be a marine. Don't get me wrong, it's a big flashing red siren and Betsy's right to run hard and fast, but I think that the fascinating and horrific thing about this movie is how keenly it understands the depths to which Bickle is alone, and how effectively it portrays his entire arc from within that place of empathic recognition. (Like Schrader says, he wrote this about himself.)

The first time I watched this movie, I had a Bickle moment of my own and read the ending as a largely happy one. Aw, look, he didn't assassinate the politician! He took his rage out on some people who were doing sex crimes instead! Maybe I wanted to see it as proof that Bickle was still trying to do something moral, though of course he's not: he's just desperately snatching out at any opportunity that presents itself. In retrospect, the horrific thing about the ending is exactly that he's praised for his actions. When you've never been accepted in your life, and suddenly the thing you're accepted for is this, what do you decide is the big lesson? Where do you decide to go next?

Anyway: it's probably weird that the shot I got hung up on is a tiny technical choice made within an establishing scene, but it was and is. The entire film is just electric, though. Even leaving aside its subject matter, man! What a movie!
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 12:14 PM on January 15, 2023 [1 favorite]