Four decades past its release, Taxi Driver’s gun-toting, Mohawk-sporting, aviator-wearing protagonist Travis Bickle is as iconic as ever. The opening scene introduces Travis as a war veteran. He tells the personnel officer that he wants to be a taxi driver. Because he can’t sleep nights, and he gets the job, and the movie begins in proper.
But who is Travis Bickle?
Even at the end of the movie, the answer isn’t immediately apparent.
We don’t know anything about his past. Travis barely speaks. When he does, it’s never about himself. All we know is that he saw some action in Vietnam and found himself alone in New York City. What did Travis see in Vietnam?
Travis suffers from loneliness. He views the inhabitants of the city as degenerate and sick and tries to distance himself from that.
Ironically, Travis isn’t a paragon of virtue either. He frequents a porno theater after his night shift because he still can’t sleep. He pops pills constantly, empties sugar jars in his coffee and soaks his breakfast in schnapps. Betsy calls him a “walking contradiction”. Yet he thinks himself above the rabble. Look how Travis silently judges Wizard as he tells an overblown tale about him hooking up with a fare. Travis causes his own isolation, by refusing to socialise with the other city inhabitants.
They’re all animals anyway. All the animals come out at night: Whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.
-Travis
Despite the irony of our Byronic hero, the audience still finds themselves agreeing, or at least sympathising with him.
How does director Martin Scorsese get us inside his head?
With the POV shot.
Because of Travis’ taciturn nature, Scorsese lets us into his mind in two ways: from his voiceover narration from the diary, and the subjective camera. Travis likens New York to “an open sewer” where “All the animals come out at night”. And we see that it’s true. As Travis drives around at night we see the city in all its depravity through his eye — in POV shot. There are couples. Women. Street walkers. Some of them children (looking at you, Bowie). The audience empathises with Travis. His rage is justified.
She appeared like an angel out of this open sewer. Out of this filthy mass. She is alone: They cannot touch her.
-Travis
Above all, Travis’ eye, favours women. Betsy in her office, viewed from his cab parked at the sidewalk. Later, Jodie and her prostitute friend. He’s infatuated with Betsy despite their being complete strangers. Somehow, in his loneliness, he conflated her beauty and loneliness with his lofty ideals. He’s built up a narrative in his head about who Betsy is.
In their conversation at the coffee shop, it’s immediately apparent that Travis and Betsy are talking about different things. Betsy keeps talking about work — about Palantine. Travis aggressively tries to steer it back towards personal topics. She’s impressed by his honesty and mysteriousness, but the enigma evaporates as soon as he brings her to a porno theater. She’s disillusioned and realises that he’s just another man using her for sex. A lowly taxi driver.
Travis is ashamed, furious and vindictive, going back to her workplace to confront her. He finally condemns her to “die in hell like the rest”. In the culmination of her character arc, Travis tries to assassinate Palantine, whom Betsy sees as a paternal figure, but Travis views as a competitor. Since he cannot have Betsy, no one can.
If Travis is our protagonist, the entire city of New York must constitute the antagonist of the story. It is the city that fuels the degeneracy and crime that constantly eats at Travis, as we learn from Travis’ rant towards Palantine.
In one scene, Travis’ eye (the POV shot) rests uncomfortably long on the black patrons in the coffee shop. After stepping outside, he stares at a black man walking past him. The shot tracks to a group of black people fighting and causing a ruckus. Travis continues to stare. Consider the later scene where Travis points his gun at the black couple on the television screen.
The story is told visually. Taxi Driver suggests. It never states things outright. It brings the film closer to the ideal that Hitchcock called “pure cinema”, aka visual storytelling of the silent era. Conveying ideas through visuals and not using dialogue as a crutch. It’s heavily implied that Travis has come to equate blacks with petty crime.
Later, Harvey Keitel’s character, Sport, and his girlfriend Iris comes to embody degeneracy.
After his failure with Betsy, Travis decides to stop being a passive observer and strike back at the city. He first arms himself with an arsenal of pistols. Then he brings his body back to peak fitness through a rigorous routine. Failing to achieve his own happiness, Travis seeks to take revenge upon the city which has wronged him, confessing to Wizard that he’s “got some bad ideas” in his head.
First, Travis destroys crime. He witnesses a black boy robbing a convenience store, and coldly murders him.
In his final act he kills degeneracy by shooting Sport, the lookout, and Iris’ paying customer.
In an ironic twist of fate, the city comes to regard Travis as a hero, when he’s just the Underground Man with a Messiah complex and a mean Mohawk. Travis chats with the other cabbies and smiles. Now that’s something we haven’t seen much of. He even meets Betsy again, but he’s clearly over her. Has he finally got it out of his system?
The city is not changed for the bettter. In the big scale of things, Travis’ shootout changed nothing. As Travis drives through the neon-lit, trash-ridden streets of New York he will inevitably grow disillusioned and disgusted with it again. He is a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.
As Travis drives away, he adjusts his rear mirror, and there is a grating noise which begs the question — how long until he lashes out again?