Taxi Driver (1976)
Directed by Martin Scorsese, written by Paul Schrader, 1976.
Plot
Travis Bickle is a 26-year-old insomniac ex-Marine who takes a night job driving a cab through 1970s New York because he can’t sleep anyway. The city he drives through is all neon, sex workers, drug dealers, and rain on windshields — he calls it an “open sewer” and keeps a diary full of disgust.
He tries to date Betsy, a campaign worker for a presidential candidate; the date ends badly when he takes her to a porn theater. Rejected, he fixates first on assassinating the candidate, then on “saving” Iris, a 12-year-old runaway prostitute played by Jodie Foster. The film climaxes in a bloodbath at the brothel where he guns down her pimp and the men with her. The coda — Travis hailed as a hero in the press — is famously ambiguous: some read it as fantasy from a dying man, others as the actual sick joke of American media.
What It’s About
Paul Schrader wrote the script during a period of clinical depression, living in his car, reading Sartre and Dostoevsky. The DNA is obvious: Travis is the Dostoevskian Underground Man dropped into post-Vietnam Manhattan. Same sickness of consciousness, same sexual humiliation, same curdled moralism turning violent, same diary-as-monologue form. Schrader has said he was basically rewriting Notes from Underground and Nausea at the same time.
The film is also a Shadow story in a Jungian sense. Travis projects everything he hates about himself — the loneliness, the sexual shame, the impotent rage — onto the city’s filth, then decides he’s the one who has to clean it up. The “savior” turn toward Iris is the same impulse as Raskolnikov’s: I am elected, therefore the killing is holy. Scorsese shoots it like a fever dream — slow-mo, saturated reds, Bernard Herrmann’s jazz score going feral.
What keeps it from being just a psychological case study is Scorsese’s refusal to judge Travis or exonerate him. The camera drifts away from him during his phone call to Betsy, as if even the film can’t bear to watch. You’re inside his head and you want out.
Connections
- Fyodor Dostoevsky — direct father of Travis; the Underground Man template
- Crime and Punishment — the self-elected avenger who kills to prove his own exceptionality
- Franz Kafka — shared nightmare register of a city that refuses to make sense
- The Trial — opaque institutions, the individual circling meaninglessness
- Nausea — Schrader read this while writing; the disgust-at-existence through-line
- Martin Scorsese — Travis is Scorsese’s first full portrait of the alienated Catholic male he’d return to in Raging Bull and The King of Comedy
Lineage
Predecessors: Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment; Sartre’s Nausea; Bresson’s Pickpocket and Diary of a Country Priest (Schrader’s stated model for the diary voice); John Ford westerns (Travis as corrupted gunslinger).
Successors: Joker (2019), You Were Never Really Here, Fight Club, Falling Down, and the whole “alienated-male-with-a-gun” subgenre that became an American idiom.