Taxi Driver (1976)

Directed by Martin Scorsese; written by Paul Schrader; shot by Michael Chapman; scored by Bernard Herrmann; Columbia Pictures, 1976. Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), an insomniac Vietnam veteran, takes a night shift driving a cab, fails at a courtship with a campaign worker, arms himself, fails to assassinate a presidential candidate, kills three men to "rescue" a twelve-year-old prostitute, and is written up in the papers as a hero.

This is the hub note. Everything Taxi Driver–related links from here.

Why it is in the journal

Because it is the cleanest demonstration in the wiki of a film that never leaves one character's head and never once agrees with him. Almost every other note here can point at a shot in it.

Scenes

• Taxi Driver — the mirror — "You talkin' to me?" Improvised by De Niro, shot late, in a derelict building, over street noise.
• Taxi Driver — the phone call — the camera tracks away from Travis to an empty hallway. Scorsese imagined this shot first and filmed it last.
• Taxi Driver — the shoot-out — the massacre, the priest's-eye view, the red tint that bought an R, and an audience that cheered.

What it demonstrates

Codes

The film is the wiki's canonical case of Point of view — the whole city arrives through one man's windscreen and rear-view mirror, and the film's judgment of him is carried entirely by how it shows what he sees (Bickle sees through glass). Camerawork is borrowed wholesale from Hitchcock's The Wrong Man for its paranoia (The Wrong Man taught the camera to be paranoid); Colour begins in the neon-and-steam palette Michael Chapman got by pushing night-rated stock (Chapman pushed the night stock) and ends under a tint applied to appease a censor; Non-diegetic sound is Herrmann's last score, finished the night he died (Herrmann finished the score and died that night); and Editing carries the Camera as voyeur logic of the overhead shots (Overhead shots are the priest's-eye view).

Conventions

A neo-noir Formula — the returned veteran, the corrupt city, the doomed rescue — run through a Character the film refuses to explain. Structure is a diary: Travis's voice-over dates its own entries, and the film's Chronology is the calendar of a man losing one. Iconography arrives second-hand, from The Searchers and from Pickpocket (Bresson's hands, Travis's guns). The Conflict never finds an opponent that deserves it.

Contexts

The returning veteran, 1976 — what the film says about Vietnam by never saying it; Values in the argument over whether Travis is sick or ordinary; Control in the red tint Scorsese agreed to lay over the bloodbath to escape an X ([[The red tint over the bloodbath]]); Commerce in a poster line that sold loneliness (In every city there's one man); and Personal context in a director who described the film as the feeling of walking out of a cinema into daylight.

Disputes worth keeping

Schrader and Scorsese do not agree about their own film. Schrader says Vietnam is incidental — Travis is Sartre's Antoine, existentially lost, and "it's not meant to be a story about Vietnam" (smc 394). Scorsese says the opposite: the war is the thing that makes the reflected gutter look threatening (sos 62). The film supports both readings and settles neither. Note it; don't resolve it.

Sources for this film

Scorsese on Scorsese (1989) for the director's own account, chapter by chapter; Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese for the scholarship, especially Michael High on trauma; Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert for the first-audience reading and the sacramental overheads; Mary Pat Kelly — Martin Scorsese: A Journey for the oral history.