idea ·Taxi Driver (1976)

Schrader and Scorsese disagree about the ending

Ritual suicide or tabloid item? The writer and the director give incompatible accounts of the same scene, and the film supports both.

themes
structure
atomic
authorship
dispute

Scorsese, on what he wanted from the massacre:

Paul saw it as a kind of Samurai 'death with honour' — that's why De Niro attempts suicide — and he felt that if he'd directed the scene, there would have been tons of blood all over the walls, a more surrealistic effect. What I wanted was a Daily News situation, the sort you read about every day.

— Scorsese on Scorsese (1989), sos 63–sos 66

The disagreement runs deeper than the staging. Schrader denies the film is about Vietnam at all:

I didn't really make him a Vietnam vet. . . . It's assumed he has some kind of searing memory and that he's had some familiarity with weapons, but it's not meant to be a story about Vietnam and Vietnam is never discussed.

— Schrader (1990), quoted in Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese, smc 394

Scorsese's account is the opposite: the war is exactly what makes the reflected gutter look threatening, and he ties it to an uncle who ran two blocks when a car backfired (sos 62). For Schrader, Travis is Sartre's Antoine — existential, not traumatised (The returning veteran, 1976).

Do not resolve this. It is the most useful thing about the film for teaching Themes: two of its three authors describe a different film, the third (De Niro) rewrote the dialogue (De Niro wrote in the margins), and the finished object sustains every reading. Intention is evidence, not verdict.

Go on, then

scene Taxi Driver — the phone call Travis begs Betsy down a payphone and the camera walks away from him, into an empty corridor. Scorsese thought of this shot first and filmed it last.
idea De Niro wrote in the margins De Niro's annotated shooting script rewrote Travis's dialogue, and the changes reached Schrader's final draft. The film's most quoted line has no screenwriter.
idea Overhead shots are the priest's-eye view Scorsese's flat overhead inserts come from watching a priest lay out the implements of the Mass on an altar — not from any film.
idea Bickle sees through glass The windscreen and the rear-view mirror are the film's two apertures. Travis is a viewer before he is an actor, and the film is careful about which passengers he is allowed to see.
idea Bresson's hands, Travis's guns The gun-handling sequences copy the pickpocketing in Bresson's Pickpocket. The debt is Schrader's; Scorsese admits he finds Bresson hard to watch.
idea Chapman pushed the night stock Taxi Driver's wet neon look came from over-developing night-rated Technicolor stock — a 1970s laboratory habit, not a lighting package.