Taxi Driver

Taxi Driver has evolved into many different films to me over the 20 years I've been studying it. I first became aware of it from seeing posters of Robert Deniro with that iconic mohawk at used CD stores that doubled as suburban head shops. I was a horror nut from an early age and had a book about the make up legacy of Dick Smith that contained some lurid photos of the work the maestro contributed to Bickle's siege on the whorehouse. I would ask my father about the film and he seemed at a loss as to how to describe its narrative to me, instead choosing to extol the virtues of the remarkably intense Deniro performance. What I've learned in the interim is that there is no way to explain Taxi Driver to a 12 year old and certainly no way a 12 year old could ever understand what the film is saying, yet, my reach has always exceeded my grasp, so in the summer after seventh grade I rented it and decided to see what all the fuss was about.

My first viewing was, unsurprisingly in retrospect, a colossal let down. A crashing bore that seemed to never go anywhere and ended just when it was getting good. The thing about being an American male growing up in the 80's and being addicted to film and television, is that you were taught not only that might makes right, but that the solution to any and every problem is violence. My idols were Schwarzenegger, Stallone, VanDamme and Seagal. These men portrayed simplistic characters with very little shading. They were righteous and just, they were wronged, then they punished those that wronged them. That story structure was an exceedingly palatable through line to an impressionable, ignorant kid entering puberty and I ate it up with my silver spoon. Imagine my consternation and confusion at being presented with a lead character that was scrawny instead of steroidal. A central figure fundamentally incapable of expressing himself verbally instead of a charismatic leader of men who incessantly spouts pithy one-liners. My inability to comprehend the character of Travis Bickle at the time was as indicative of my tender age as it was a judgement made on the general tone of the films I grew up on.

Once I entered my tumultuous teens, I began to understand Bickle's isolation in a more profound, yet still narrow sense. Like Bickle, I also hated the things I saw, the way I saw people treat each other and how they behaved. I was becoming more educated about film and even though Taxi Driver's themes were still beyond me, I was well versed in the Scorsese oeuvre up to that point and could watch the film as a purely cinematic exercise in beautiful art. The shot composition, the blocking, the saturated color scheme and the performances in Taxi Driver are all prime Scorsese, rivalled only by Raging Bull and Goodfellas. So I spent the rest of my teens grooving on Taxi Driver's look and its sounds. I was at least qualified to appreciate the pretty pictures and the grimily seductive Bernard Herrman score. I wore a Taxi Driver shirt, had an over sized wall poster and even sported a Bickle mohawk of my own one summer. I giddily contributed to compounding its cult status despite having nary a clue about its social and psychological significance.

Throughout the first half of my twenties, the film faded into the background as music became my prevailing artistic interest. It was regularly referenced by me and my friends though, mostly through quoting our favorite lines apropos of nothing. A buddy would call and ask what I was up to and I would reply "I don't know nobody named Iris." in Keitel's lilting tone, to which my friend would respond "He called you names! he called you a.... little piece of chicken!" and so on it would go and oh, how we would laugh. But the tail end of the 90's saw a curious cultural shift. And then there is change, to paraphrase Travis Bickle.

The Columbine school shootings seemed to initiate a spate of similar crimes and before long, there was an epidemic of angry, disgruntled men wandering into places both public and domestic, deciding to rectify their considerable qualms with the world through an outburst of automatic weapon assisted assaults on the unsuspecting and the innocent. It seemed this would happen every other month and it had a profound effect on me at the time (still does). This trend coupled with the bizarre DC Sniper case that gripped the Country's imagination with fear and distrust for what seemed like an eternity caused me to recall the plight of one Travis Bickle and occasioned me to begin revisiting the film in earnest. Perhaps through Schrader's prescient characterization, I could begin deciphering some of the root causes of this sickeningly prevalent strain of malignant behavior.

Watching Taxi Driver became a sad, solitary pastime as opposed to the in-joke producing chuckle machine it once was. I started to see how easily one could let loneliness as a defense mechanism dictate the anti-social manner in which they would interact with others, only widening the gulf between them and their fellow man. People have an intense desire for not only companionship, but purpose. I personally believe that the disembodied redundancy of the instantaneous internet age has robbed the comfortable youth of this country of any sense of direction or meaning. Look no further than the crazed mug shot of Jared Lee Loughner or consider the actions of Cho Seung Hui to follow the evolution of God's Lonely Man. Travis Bickle, so cut off from the world he doesn't know what movies its inhabitants go see or what music they listen to or even what positions politicians take on what issues, has evolved into a hyper-aware, overstimulated automaton that is always plugged in and never without something to infuriate them. Any one of the numberless iterations of social media can light any one of a billion fuses at any given time.

Take the scene in which Travis watches an insipid soap opera silently in his apartment while holding his comfort totem, the 44 caliber handgun. He puts his boot on the crate the TV rests atop and begins slowly pushing it away, symbolically pushing away his tenuous connection to the human relationship presented on the screen and indeed the connection to the world that television itself represents. It reaches a tipping point and the tube crashes to the floor, emitting sparks and smoke, utterly destroyed. Travis leans forward in his chair, putting his head in his hands like a soul sickened version of Rodin's The Thinker as Bernard Herrman's score swells and undulates, chillingly approximating Travis' mental collapse. To me, this is the core of the film. It is a man choosing to distance himself from the world and reaching that breaking point where he can't reestablish a connection to it. The same thing is happening today with computer screens, but I doubt anyone out there is capable of severing their connection to it like Bickle did with his pitiful cathode contraption. People filled up past the point of bursting with images, words and ideas they can't handle have their own psychoses amplified by the dissenting views they can't help but seek out. They WANT to be further enraged and closed off from normal human discourse, like Bickle wanted to drive in the worst areas of town and see the venal criminality in action because it justified his world view and the reactionary attitude he chose to take toward it.

I'm sure my understanding of the film will change and mature even more as I grow older and understand people and the world in a larger context. Taxi Driver is a challenging, fascinating film with a brilliant script, directed by one of cinema's living legends at the peak of his powers featuring one of the greatest performances an actor has ever contributed to the medium. The recently released bluray is an indispensable addition to the library of any serious student of film and will be teaching us about the darkness inside us all for generations to come.