Taxi Driver — the mirror

Observation

Travis, alone in his room, draws on a mirror. He plays both halves of a confrontation that has no other participant: the challenge, the imagined reply, the draw. The sleeve gun rig snaps the pistol into his hand. The lines run in a loop — you talkin' to me? you talkin' to me? Well I'm the only one here — and the loop is the point. There is no second person in the room, and the scene knows it before Travis does.

What the sources say it is

The line is De Niro's. This is the rare production claim on which everyone concerned agrees:

In fact, De Niro's improvisation resulted in one of the most famous lines in any film where Travis stands in front of the mirror and asks, "Are you talking to me?" This scene is one about which the audience, critics, and Scorsese himself in interviews all agree about De Niro's authorship.

— Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese, smc 316

Scorsese's own account gives the scene a source and a shooting circumstance, and both matter:

Paul was also very influenced by Robert Bresson's Pickpocket. I admire his films greatly, but I find them difficult to watch. In Pickpocket there's a wonderful sequence of the pickpockets removing wallets with their hands, a lot of movement in and out, and it's the same with Travis, alone in the room practising with his guns. I felt he should talk to himself while doing this, and it was one of the last things we shot, in a disused building in one of the roughest and noisiest areas of New York. I didn't want it to be like other mirror sequences we'd seen, so while Bob kept saying, "Are you talking to me?" I just kept telling him, "Say it again." I was on the floor wearing headphones and I could hear a lot of street noise, so I thought we wouldn't get anything, but the track came out just fine.

— Scorsese on Scorsese (1989), sos 66

Three things worth separating out of that. The hands are borrowed from Bresson (Bresson's hands, Travis's guns). The talking was the director's instruction, not the script's. The repetition was manufactured on the floor by a director saying say it again — which is why the scene sounds like a man rehearsing rather than a man performing.

Connotation code by code

Acting

The scene is the wiki's clearest case of a performance authoring its own text. De Niro's contribution to Travis was not confined to the day: his shooting script carries extensive revisions to Bickle's dialogue that reached Schrader's final draft (smc 316, De Niro wrote in the margins). What the mirror adds is a performer given a physical task — the draw, the rig, the hands — and told to keep going until speech falls out of it.

Spoken language

A dialogue scene with one participant. The grammar is interrogative and the addressee is absent, so every question is answered by the same voice that asked it. Ebert reads the whole film as a sequence of failed attempts to connect and files this one at the end of the list:

He is so lonely that when he asks, "Who you talkin' to?" he is addressing himself in a mirror.

— Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert (this scan carries no page numbers)

Note that Ebert quotes the line as "Who you talkin' to?" and the Companion quotes it as "Are you talking to me?" Neither is quite the delivered line, which shifts across the take. The scene is quoted more often than it is watched.

Camerawork and point of view

The mirror is the film's whole method in one prop. For most of the running time we are behind Travis's eyes — the windscreen, the rear-view mirror, the slow pans across a street he has already decided about (Bickle sees through glass). Here the apparatus turns around and he is finally on the other side of his own gaze. One critic's formulation is worth keeping:

the film "is about a man who begins as a viewer of life, through the 'screen' of his cab window, who then goes through the looking glass to become an 'actor' in a personal fantasy"

— Julian Rice (1976), quoted in Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese, smc 397

The psychoanalytic reading takes the mirror at its word and finds it wanting: the wholeness Travis assembles there is "transitory, limited" (smc 400). The scene stages a self and the film spends its remaining hour disassembling it.

Audience

This is the scene that escaped the film. It is quoted by people who have not seen Taxi Driver and generally quoted as bravado — which inverts it, since in context it is a man failing to find anyone to say it to. Worth holding next to Scorsese's alarm at the shoot-out audience (Taxi Driver — the shoot-out): both are cases of an audience taking the confident reading of a scene built to undercut confidence.

Production context

Late in the schedule, in a derelict building, with street noise the director expected to ruin the take. The scene that became the film's signature was shot under conditions nobody would choose, from a line nobody wrote.

Compare

• Alice — the prologue — the other Scorsese scene in the wiki where a performance is built against its own script.
• Psycho — the parlour scene — two people talking; here, one person talking twice.

Writing leads

• Track the line's afterlife as Format — the quotation has a life independent of the film, which is a measurable thing.
• The Bresson debt is Schrader's, not Scorsese's, by Scorsese's own account. Worth a note on whose influence is whose (Bresson's hands, Travis's guns).
• Get the actual delivered dialogue off the disc and set it against both published quotations above.