The Definitives Mission...

The Definitives are an ongoing archive featuring film appreciations posted at an average of one or two a month. More analytical than a simple review, The Definitives focus on the respective film’s production, talent involved, possible “reads,” and its place in film history. With equilibrium between old and new movies, these scholarly articles will attempt to include something for everyone. Most importantly, they will hopefully give you a new outlook on some of your most cherished films, and perhaps introduce you to some new favorites.

The Definitives Archive

Current Deep Focus:

Taxi Driver (1976)

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Much has been put forward about Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and its meaning. Travis Bickle, Robert De Niro’s loner New York City cabbie, has been called an attack on the failed deliverance promised by the 1960s, as boiled down into one man’s troubled psyche. Others see the film as a warning to society at large personified by Bickle, who was inspired by Alabama Governor George Wallace’s would-be assassin Arthur Bremer, to not cast away those who might be psychopaths less it becomes too late. Bickle has been seen as a religious avenger singularly compelled by his sexual repression and violent impulses. Freudian theorists interpret the film’s gun fetishism and the way Bickle fawns over firearms as a response to his castration anxiety. While the film has rarely been misread as a product of racism, Bickle’s apparent hatred toward African-Americans has been described as his desire to reclaim the urban sprawl for the white male. But then again, he might just be a flaneur, wandering a city that drives him to madness.

As theories about the film diverge, each of these readings has its merits, which is certainly why the film endures as a permanent classic. Travis Bickle and thus Scorsese’s film is a blank slate onto which we project our own meaning, making the film strangely and uniquely universal, in spite of the artful treatment and shocking subject matter. People seem to identify with Travis’ status as an outsider, yet within the film his precise psychopathy remains elusive because Scorsese does not judge or examine his case study with overt detail. We watch aghast as Travis attempts to take a woman to a porno theater on their first date or as he slowly deteriorates into a mohawked political assassin, but then he also seems to display moments of goodness in his desire to rescue a preteen street walker. Bickle and the film are as much enigmas as they are overexposed notions in the mind of cinephiles, referenced and replayed enough so that we have their scenes memorized. The film has become so iconic that it’s almost a cliché, but so significant that its enduring power cannot be denied.  

Just as Taxi Driver arouses uncertain interpretations, the film itself opens in a haze. Sewer steam billows from below as, in the first shot, a taxicab emerges from out of the fog. This eerie title sequence gives way to Travis, who enters a Checkered Cab dispatch office looking for a job with a mist following behind him, as though he has materialized from nothingness. Most of what we learn about Travis comes forth during his subsequent job interview: he is 26-years-old, he served in the Vietnam War and was honorably discharged s in 1973, and his education is sketchy at best. He stands at a distance from the dispatch interviewer who, as most characters do throughout, senses something is wrong. But Travis is willing to drive a cab in the worst neighborhoods and at any hour, so he gets the job. Looking down at the dispatcher, the scene is from Travis’ perspective, as is the majority of the film. As a result, we must watch Travis closely; he is an unreliable narrator lost deep in his own syndrome of paranoia.

The script was born from an ultimate low period in screenwriter Paul Schrader’s life; he had hit rock bottom, was drinking heavily, and lived in his car in a bout of self-imposed loneliness after relationships with both his wife and girlfriend collapsed. It was during this deprived interlude where Schrader read media coverage on and the diaries of Arthur Bremer, who shot presidential candidate Wallace in 1972 only to leave him paralyzed from waist down. Schrader found himself understanding, to a degree, how someone in his own state of terminal loneliness could decline into someone like Bremer. From these roots, the script was completed in 10 days, channeling his detached, frustrated, angry mental state into the Bremer-like figure that would be Travis Bickle. While borrowing ideas directly from Bremer for Travis’ construction, he also used filmic sources: John Ford’s The Searchers provided a loose structure in which Travis is akin to John Wayne’s troubled hero Ethan, a war veteran character bearing heavy demons and desperate to rescue a girl who has been violated by a villain. Film noir lent Schrader further insight—just as WWII informed characters in films noir from the 1940s with their cynical worldview, America’s identity-crushing loss in Vietnam would inform Travis, whose seeming postwar shell-shock left him in a state of psychosis. 

But, as with much about Travis, we have to question if he ever actually went to Vietnam. His generic army coat could be picked up at any army surplus store, his knowledge of guns is perhaps the result of his extremism, and anyone who watches too many Bruce Lee movies could suddenly jump into his martial arts stance. That we cannot be certain of Travis Bickle or his origins makes him all the more fascinating, and frightening, as what little we learn about him is dissolved by what we see, his personality typical of a narcissistic personality disorder. His interactions with others have strange results; he is all but incapable of making small talk with his fellow cabbies—they know something is wrong him, call him ironic nicknames like “ladies man” and “killer” and laugh, while they also keep a safe distance. Travis is someone to tiptoe around, others realize, as he is borderline: meaning, the wrong conditions (all present in the film) could push him over the edge. And so, when his narration, read staidly from the Bremer-esque diary he keeps, admits “All my life what I needed was a sense of someplace to go,” it becomes a chilly affirmation that Travis is headed toward the film’s inevitable violent outburst.


 
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In the Works:


The 400 Blows (1959)
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Mon Oncle (1958)
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Adaptation (2002)
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Chinatown (1974)

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Amadeus (1984)

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The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

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The Lord of the Rings Trilogy