35th Anniversary Appreciation: Taxi Driver

(Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver/1976)

         

      Taxi Driver is the only “movie’s” movie that actually works. As exaggerated as that may sound, all I really mean is: Taxi Driver works on levels greater than the level of being about movies. It is on one hand one of the sickest westerns ever made; it is, on another hand, a film about the destruction of the modern psyche. It is both a tragic drama and a drugged-out, self-consciously outrageous pop spectacle. But before we call it art, let’s face the fact that this is a film with a protagonist who no longer believes in anything like art. Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro), the troubled taxi driver in question, appears to believe in gratifying impulses, routine self-destruction, and violent self-fulfillment. Stuff that people, when they go to the movies, believe in, too.

            It could have all collapsed. Paul Schrader’s script incorporates, logically, too many elements at once; politics, women’s independence, mental illness, urban drudgery, the unease of the mid-70’s. The list could go on, but at no point does this story of the lonely cab driver who slides in to psychosis become overstuffed, cheeky, exploitive, or even too cynical. This is largely due to Robert DeNiro’s performance, certainly the best of his career. From the start, he’s a guy—framed against the grey streets of New York, hands in pockets, head down, an outsider in a corrupt city—who is unstable but whom we can’t not side with. He signs up to be a cab driver, the simplest act he does in the entire film. He gets to work, driving anybody anywhere at anytime. He meets Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a girl working for the presidential campaign of Charles Palantine. He takes her out for coffee, buys her a Kris Krisofferson record—and brings her to a porno. This last bit doesn’t go over too well. Travis becomes depressed, paranoid and more reclusive as he sinks—this is the only way to describe the effect—further in to his apartment and his cab. 

(Robert DeNiro, Cybill Shepherd in Taxi Driver/1976)

            The story at this point, is mostly a tale of heartbreak and unfulfilled desire. And, as doomed as he is, with the pills he pops and pornos he stares at, the scenes involving Betsy’s rejection of Travis should affect anybody who has been the victim of dismissal and embarrassment. But this is exactly how Schrader got his story to work. Travis’s rejection comes against the backdrop of a city that looks like some dystopian future. (A dystopian film is what this might be, if it weren’t so emphatically set in the 70’s). This is a city he despises, but the place where he is stuck. During one encounter with Charles Palantine himself in Travis’s cab, he asks the candidate to “flush it down the fucking toilet.” But Palantine wants to raise the city out of its doldrums with his optimism. Travis, now stocking up on guns and obsessively working out, wants to annihilate the city. And it soon becomes apparent—especially when Betsy chooses Palantine over Travis—that the senator is too much competition. As the corny saying of the old west goes; the town ain’t big enough for the both of them.

            This is how Taxi Driver takes an unusual turn in to John Ford territory, with a demented, nihilistic spin. Travis nudges his way in to the life of Iris, a child prostitute played by Jodie Foster, whose pimp (Harvey Keitel), is a narcissistic, drug-addled hippie. Travis’s intention is to kill Palantine, rescue Iris from her horrible life, and kill the baddies who whore her out. Once again, this now-western feels like its about to go off the rails, and the last forty or so minutes does contain the film’s one failed scene, in which Travis and Iris sit in a café and Travis tries to make her see how she is being degraded. The scene is an obvious mirror of the initial café conversation with Betsy, but it feels too strategically placed, too screenwriting-workshop-ish. It also raises the question, though, of just how nuts and morally inept Travis is. Does he truly feel bad for this little girl, or is he trying to manipulate her out of her situation because it will make him and him alone feel vindication? Does he fail to kill Palantine out of some moral hesitation, or because he knows he’ll be caught? The craft of the film remains strong enough so that we don’t really contemplate these questions until the credits have rolled. Up to and including the final massacre, the film stays in the mode of an urban revision of The Searchers. Iris is the girl captured by savages; Travis is Ethan Allen, furiously riding in to the sunset.

(Robert DeNiro, Taxi Driver/1976)

            When you get down to it, the actual direction of Taxi Driver is saturated in other movies. This is what makes it a movie’s movie. Martin Scorsese knows the streets of New York quite well, but he knows the rhythms of movies even better—and even by the time of Taxi Driver, he had seen a few too many. The ongoing punches of film language thrown at the viewer—dollies, overhead pans, slow-motion, de-saturated film—would be excessive if they did not somehow look like the expressions of a sick, pop-saturated culture, one that will at some point produce a sick man who will lash out. They still look that way, and if Scorsese’s indulgences really do create such an atmosphere, then they aren’t indulgent at all. The same cannot be said for the films he began to make in the early 90’s, starting with Goodfellas. It cannot be said, either, for any of Quentin Tarantino’s style-fests, which took Taxi Driver’s profane commentary and turned it in to something deliberately insincere and purely gestural. In the 70’s, this culmination of all movies-cum-urban-western was a dawn of a new kind of film, a uniquely American film. Nowadays it’s just barely a masterpiece, reminding us that onscreen sordidness only begats further sordidness, but that superb craft transcends all.

           

Motion Studies: Across the Tenements

(Robert DeNiro in The Godfather part II/Paramount Pictures)

          The Godfather films are the stylistic apex of a director who had been dead more than twenty years before they were made. D.W Griffith created films with a static camera, characters entering and exiting the tableaus, if they weren’t bursting out of the frames, the camera only moving when people moved. He was the first filmmaker to utilize intercutting in a bombastic form, demanding that his parallel narratives be seen and believed. He moved his camera alongside klansmen on dust-kicking horses and exotic performers in ancient Babylon; he set it steady on a rich businessman drowning in a waterfall of wheat.

            The Godfather films, too, were crafted from a static camera trained on tableaus of characters, colors, objects, and people overflowing from the screen, and a moving camera when someone was on the go. Francis Ford Coppola intercut with tension and  frenzy. Yet the films also had the moral beckoning of Griffith, which—unlike Griffith’s films—was kept at a cool distance.

           Watch, then, as the camera races with Vito Corleone (Robert DeNiro) across the tenement rooftops of Little Italy, at a crouch. A street fair is taking place below. Watch the cut to Don Fanucci (Gaston Mosich) as he swivels his plump, tuxedoed body away from a display of knights in golden armor, and makes his way back to his apartment. Vito has a pistol in his hand; he leaps down a short stretch of wall, finds the back door of Fanucci’s home, and lets himself in. He wraps his pistol in a white towel; as white as Fanucci’s suit. Fanucci waves to admirers and acts merry; he walks in the door. Vito hides in the darkness of Fanucci’s living room, glancing down the stairs for a moment. Fanucci makes his way up the stairs and opens his front door. Vito steps out of the shadows pointing the toweled gun at his head. Fanucci asks, bewildered, what he’s got there. Vito fires, just as the crowd erupts in applause and fireworks go off. Another shot; the towel blazes with flames in front of Vito’s face; he rips it off. He shoots the dead and bloodied Fanucci in the mouth for good measure. Vito gets out of the building, disassembles the gun, throws the pieces down a chimney and runs back to his family on the stoop of his home. Now watch as he tells his baby boy, in the stasis of Griffith and the moral irony of Coppola, that he loves him very much.

 

Internal Monologue in Taxi Driver

              (from the Taxi Driver Screenplay, 1976/written by Paul Schrader)

Despite the fictional screenwriting teacher’s declaration in Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation that “God help you if you use voice overs,” Paul Schrader’s screenplay for Taxi Driver is one of many highly successful and popular films to utilize such methods for the expression of interior monologue.

In Taxi Driver, interior monologue is used specifically to guide the audience through the psychological issues that protagonist Travis (Robert DeNiro) battles with throughout the film as he expresses them in his personal journal. As Schrader wrote of Travis in the screenplay itself, “His deformities are psychological, not physical.”

Travis early on expresses his indifference towards working his taxi shift in the seedy parts of town and with the “spooks”, but this attitude slowly degenerates into one of intolerance and believing that “they’re [the people he sees at night] all animals anyway.” As Schrader puts it in his screenplay, “Travis believes he is cursed and therefore he is.”

The main issue here is a man who isn’t properly taking care of himself besides monetarily (he works 70-80 hours a week)—his apartment is in disarray, he eats pie, sugar cereal with added sugar, white bread, drinks coffee and brandy, works nights, and complains (via voice overs) of his sleeplessness. Here is a man who could benefit from some holistic health advice, but instead he frequents porno theaters, then nonchalantly brings his new and beautiful friend named Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), without any thought of possible repercussions, to a porn movie. She quickly walks out, which is the end of their relationship. This only exacerbates Travis’ psychological tailspin.

Travis writes in his journal after the botched movie outing, “May 8, 1972. My life has taken another turn again. The days move along with regularity...“ He then proceeds to be rejected by Betsy on the street, send her flowers which she “doesn’t receive”, and call her with no response. Fed up, he barges in on her at work and causes a scene, which is broken up by the straight-shooting, normal, harmless-seeming male coworker of Betsy’s. This experience is particularly harmful to Travis because he projected onto Betsy all that he wanted her to be: a serene fountain of beauty and perfection amidst a chaotic urban jungle of filth and despair. He thought she was “different” in the same way he considers himself to be. Instead, she is just an average (except, perhaps, by her beauty) young woman working in the normal, daytime, workaday world. Travis writes in his journal, which the audience hears as voice over, “I realize now how much she is like the others, so cold and distant. Many people are like that. They are like a union.” It is classic “Me against the world” mentality, which explains his perpetual internal monologue about loneliness

So he buys guns and practices aiming and shooting them with no bullets at the mirror, slipping them out of his sleeve, and he gets in shape through push-ups and pull-ups. “Every muscle must be tight”, he writes. He goes to see a prostitute whose name, after much prying, is Iris. Then he attempts to assassinate a senator who is also a presidential candidate, but fails. The audience is left to assume that the senator’s campaign slogan, “We are the people” is meant to explain the otherwise elusive reason behind Travis’ motivation to do such a thing. In other words, if the senator “Is the people”, and the people are who Travis hates, then perhaps that explains Travis’ motivation to kill the candidate. Otherwise, why would Travis assault a senator who is, by all intents and purposes, above “the people”, especially the miscreants that Travis despises?

Schrader utilizes voice over towards the end of the film when Travis writes to his family and lies about the happenings in his life. This marks the beginning of what Travis intends to be the end of his life and his life’s purpose, but, as we all know, life doesn’t always unfold as planned.

He visits Iris and gets in a gun fight with her pimp and co., which ends in three men dead, Iris severely rattled, and Travis pulling the trigger on an empty gun to his head. The police come, and Travis is heralded as a hero by at least Iris’ family.

In the final scene, all of the internal monologue and Travis’ emotional transformation comes to a head when Betsy rides in his cab and makes a vague pass at him, but he just drives away with his classic slight grin on his face. This scene can be interpreted multiple ways. Was it a figment of his imagination? Was it a dream? A hallucination? Was it real? If it’s real, has Travis learned to embrace his lifelong loneliness? Has it dissipated? Does he view Betsy as too much of a conformist for his taste? Is he bitter that he finally reached out to one of “the people” (simply because, let’s be honest fellas, she was beautiful) and got rejected? Or, perhaps, as every man has wanted to do at one point or another, Travis was reveling in the slightly twisted satisfaction of rejecting someone who formerly rejected him.

(Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver, 1976/ Columbia Pictures)