Taxi Driver — the phone call

Observation

After the date that ended in a porn theatre, Travis stands at a payphone in a corridor, working through a ladder of diminishing requests — dinner, coffee, a phone call, anything. We never hear Betsy. Partway through, the camera gives up on him: it tracks slowly right, off the man, along the corridor, and holds on a stretch of empty hallway and a door until he finishes and walks out of frame.

Nothing motivates the move. No one enters. The camera simply declines to watch.

What the sources say it is

Scorsese has been asked about this shot for fifty years and gives the same answer:

There's a shot in Taxi Driver where Travis Bickle is talking on the phone to Betsy and the camera tracks away from him down the long hallway and there's nobody there. That was the first shot I thought of in the film, and it was the last I filmed. I like it because I sensed that it added to the loneliness of the whole thing, but I guess you can see the hand behind the camera there.

— Scorsese on Scorsese (1989), sos 54

The admission at the end is worth as much as the shot. You can see the hand behind the camera — the director naming the one moment where his film stops pretending to be transparent.

The scholarly reading takes the move as a diagnosis rather than a courtesy:

As Bickle proposes dinner, coffee, a phone call, anything, the camera slowly tracks away from him to an empty hallway. Down the long hallway lies nothing and no one, a world bereft of others. This scene demonstrates a schism in his consciousness, a separation between his stated desire for attachment and his unconscious desire for isolation.

— Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese, smc 385

Connotation code by code

Camerawork

An unmotivated lateral track — the single most discussed camera move in the film, and the opposite of the film's usual grammar. Everywhere else the camera is welded to Travis's attention (Bickle sees through glass); here it detaches, and the detachment is legible as tact, as embarrassment, or as verdict depending on how you read him. All three readings survive the shot, which is why it works.

Compare the received wisdom that the camera moves toward what matters. This one moves away and finds the subject anyway: the emptiness down the corridor is a more accurate portrait of Travis than his face would have been.

Point of view

The film's Point of view contract breaks here and only here. For the rest of the running time the audience is inside a consciousness; for eight seconds it is beside one, looking at the space that consciousness cannot fill. This is the structural argument of the film made as a single physical gesture — and made without a line of dialogue, since the dialogue continues off-screen while we look at a wall.

Mise en scène

An institutional corridor: painted brick, a payphone, a door at the end, nobody. The set does no work except be empty, which is the work.

Structure

Scorsese conceived this shot before the film existed and shot it last. That makes it both the seed and the last thing planted — the image the whole production was arranged around, completed only once everything it explains had already been filmed. Useful when teaching that a film's organising idea is not necessarily its first scene.

Audience

The film's marketing sold exactly this: the loneliness, not the violence.

I never realized what that image on the poster did for the film — a shot of De Niro walking down the street with the line, "In every city there's one man." And we had thought that audiences would reject the film, feeling that it was too unpleasant and no one would want to see it!

— Scorsese on Scorsese (1989), sos 63 (In every city there's one man)

Production context

The last shot filmed on a picture that had lost four days to rain and had been shot largely as documentary from inside a moving car (sos 60). After weeks of grabbing what the street would give them, the crew ended on the one shot that had been designed before anything else.

Compare

• Taxi Driver — the mirror — the other scene of Travis addressing someone who is not there. In the mirror he supplies the other voice; on the phone the other voice exists and still cannot reach him.
• Psycho — the opening — another camera that moves on its own authority to make a claim about the person it is watching.
• Alice — the prologue — a camera move (the crane onto Socorro) used as an argument rather than as coverage.

Writing leads

• Time the shot off the disc. The published descriptions do not agree on how long the camera holds on the empty corridor.
• The Alka-Seltzer close-up is the film's other overt authorial intrusion, and it is a double allusion — to Godard and to Carol Reed (smc 385, smc 82). Worth its own note.
• Set this against the "hand behind the camera" admission: which other Scorsese shots does he describe as visible authorship?