Taxi Driver (1976)
Character study of a radicalized deadbeat in 1970's New York, directed by Scorsese, written by Schrader, starring DeNiro.
Rober DeNiro plays Travis Bickle, a mentally unwell burnout who works as... well, a taxi driver. We don't learn very much about who Travis was before he took the job. We are told he suffers from insomnia. We know that he served in the Marine corps, or at least that's what he's telling people and no one ever challenges him on it. Considering we learn later that he's not above lying about working for the government, I'm not quite willing to take it on face value. If we do, however, both points to the distinct possibility that part of his mental decline might be due to untreated PTSD from whatever he experienced during the Vietnam War. We, the viewer, however, never get to know him as anything other than a completely hollow person. Travis Bickle is a man with practically no interests, no social life, and no ideals, apart from a vague notion that the world is rotten and aught to be fixed.
Travis has a couple of acquaintances from work he clearly doesn't enjoy interacting with on more than just a surface level. He hits on a couple of women he clearly isn't interested in on the virtue of not much more than the vague notion that a man isn't complete unless he has a relationship, and both of these women show him a lot more good will than he deserves. The closest thing he has to a hobby is watching softcore porn in back alley theaters, and for all we see, he doesn't even have the motivation to actually jerk off to it. Travis is, plainly speaking, a void of charm, personality and agency. He is a nobody wanting to be somebody, completely ambivalent to who that somebody should be. Like many men before and after him, it doesn't take that long for him to to settle on violence as the fastest way to get there.
Is Travis Bickle a tragic character? A comedic character? A hateable character? He doesn't quite have enough personality to pass as either, which, I argue, is the point. His only character traits are frustration at the world around him and self pity. In some ways, Taxi Driver is a movie about radicalization, but in essence, there's not even really anything there to radicalize him. Nothing resembling actual ideology or conviction manages to stick to him. He doesn't have ideals, he doesn't have passion, all he has is frustration and an environment that happily enables violence. And make no mistake, the picture Taxi Driver paints of 70's New York is a rather gloomy one. Poverty and crime reign supreme and all the politicians can offer are empty platitudes. Yet Travis never once entertains the idea to improve these conditions with kindness, rather than violence. We learn that, despite his dead end job and squalid living conditions, he has more money than he knows what to do with and yet he decides to spend it on an arsenal of weapons rather than anything charitable.
It's hard not to think that, if Travis had found literally anything to do with himself, he might not have become a murderer. If he had been capable of picking up a book. Actually listened to the record he bought for a woman as an emtpy gesture. Even just had a good wank to the Scandinavian porn movies he watched, once in a while. Yet all of that was ultimately beyond him because it would have required a degree of curiosity and self reflection he simply didn't have.
All of which is leading up to the final punchline, of course, that once he does give in to violence, society finally starts respecting him. Which is a rather brutal joke, indeed. After failing to assassinate a presidential candidate, he ends up shooting a random pimp and the landlord of a tenement building renting out rooms to prostitutes. All of which makes his community treat him as some heroic vigilante, in a sense, proving him right. The world will respect an empty man, a violent, man, a hollow man, as long as his violence is directed against those they consider beneath them. Had he actually succeeded in killing the politician he would have been seen as a terrorist, having killed a couple of small time criminals, he's seen as a hero. Personally, I rather strongly disagreed with the decision to have him survive his rampage at the climax, although maybe denying him the right to become a martyr, having him return to his same old dead end job as a cabbie in a world that, god knows, didn't get any better for what he did, was the logical conclusion.
Either way, Taxi Driver is a rather good movie, built around an absolute beast of a performance by Robert DeNiro. The tale of a man cynical and vapid enough to to treat violence as an escape and a society cynical and vapid enough to actually admire him, rather than condemn him, for it. It's a cycle that feeds itself. Travis Bickle is a mass product, an asset to be utilized whenever a disturbed lone gunman is needed and assured to only ever turn against his fellow lowlifes when he isn't. The world will embrace a violent man, as long as his violence is easily directed, poses no threat to those who are comfortably locked away in gated communities ans behind bullet proof glass, punches down, not up. And will make sure there is no shortage of useful idiots ready to do just that.
letterboxd.com
