Taxi Driver — the shoot-out

Observation

Travis goes to the building where Iris works and kills the men who run her: the pimp on the street, the mafioso on the stairs, the bouncer in the room. He is shot through the neck and hand. The killing is close, clumsy and slow, more struggle than marksmanship. He puts a bloodied finger to his temple and mimes firing at the arriving police. Then the camera lifts off the floor, rises through the ceiling that ought to stop it, and drifts back out along the corridor, over the stairs, out of the building, looking straight down.

What the sources say it is

Scorsese's stated intention for the violence is specific — and specifically not heroic:

I wanted the violence at the end to be as if Travis had to keep killing all these people in order to stop them once and for all. 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: 'Three men killed by lone man who saves young girl from them'.

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

That is a director aiming at tabloid banality and a screenwriter aiming at ritual — and the finished scene is legible as either (Schrader and Scorsese disagree about the ending).

Connotation code by code

Camerawork — the priest's-eye view

The overhead retreat is the film's most-discussed shot, and Ebert traces it to a specific, verifiable source in Scorsese's biography rather than to film history:

One is the "priest's-eye-view" often used in overhead shots, which Scorsese has said are intended to reflect the priest looking down at the implements of the Mass on the altar. We see, through Travis's eyes, the top of a taxi dispatcher's desk, candy on a movie counter, guns on a bed, and finally, with the camera apparently seeing through the ceiling, an overhead shot of the massacre in the red-light building. This is, if you will, the final sacrifice of the Mass.

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

That reframes a shot usually described as "detached" or "godlike" into something narrower and stranger: liturgical bookkeeping. The film has been laying objects out on flat surfaces and looking down at them all along (Overhead shots are the priest's-eye view); the bodies are the last set of implements.

Scorsese, characteristically, is less reverent about the crane that carried it:

we were preparing for that crane shot at the end that pulls back, which is still too long — I just, it's one of those things — I had a crane, I wanted to use it, you know

— Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert (unpaged)

Both things are true. The shot means what Ebert says it means and it exists partly because there was a crane on the truck.

Colour

The bloodbath as released is not the bloodbath as shot. To keep the film out of the X bracket in the United States, Scorsese agreed to desaturate the sequence with a red tint:

But to avoid an 'X' rating for its American release, which would have reduced its box-office earning potential, Scorsese had to agree to putting a red tint over the final bloodbath.

— Scorsese on Scorsese (1989), sos 68

This is the wiki's best example of Control leaving a visible mark that later gets read as style. The muted, coppery look of the massacre is routinely praised as an artistic choice. It was a censorship settlement (The red tint over the bloodbath). Both facts belong in any account of the scene, in that order.

Non-diegetic sound

The coda — Travis back in the cab, apparently recovered — closes on a musical citation:

Scorsese ends Taxi Driver with a reference to Bernard Herrmann's score for Psycho to imply that Travis is more sociopath than hero.

— Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese, smc 4

The film's last argument is made in the orchestra, by the composer of Psycho (1960), in what turned out to be his final work (Herrmann finished the score and died that night). See Non-diegetic sound.

Point of view

The rise through the ceiling is the second and last time the film leaves Travis's head — the first being Taxi Driver — the phone call. Both departures are the film's own voice, and both say the same thing: look at the space around this man. That the film reserves its only two authorial intrusions for a corridor and a stairwell full of bodies is not an accident.

Audience

The scene did not land as designed, and the director says so plainly:

I saw Taxi Driver once in a theatre, on the opening night, I think, and everyone was yelling and screaming at the shoot-out. When I made it, I didn't intend to have the audience react with that feeling, 'Yes, do it! Let's go out and kill.' The idea was to create a violent catharsis, so that they'd find themselves saying, 'Yes, kill'; and then afterwards realize, 'My God, no' — like some strange Californian therapy session. That was the instinct I went with, but it's scary to hear what happens with the audience.

— Scorsese on Scorsese (1989), sos 63

A two-stage design — approve, then recoil — that stalled at stage one. The best single case in the wiki of an intended reading and an actual reading pulling apart in the room, and a useful corrective to any account of Values that assumes a film controls its own meaning. Scorsese had watched the same thing happen to The Wild Bunch and built the scene anyway (sos 63).

Production context

An R rating bought with a colour filter; a crane the director now thinks he over-used; a 1.9-million-dollar picture that took the Palme d'Or at Cannes the same year (sos 68).

Compare

• Psycho — the shower scene — the other scene in the wiki where violence is cut to control what the audience is allowed to see, and where Herrmann's strings do the work.
• Taxi Driver — the mirror — the rehearsal for this.
• Killing the protagonist — Travis survives, which is arguably the more disturbing choice.

Writing leads

• Find a pre-tint frame if one is published. The comparison would make the Control case visible rather than asserted.
• The coda: real, or Travis's dying fantasy? Ebert links the question to The King of Comedy's ending (unpaged). Worth a note that holds both readings open.
• Count the overhead shots across the film and check Ebert's list against the disc.