Taxi driver Movie analysis

Taxi Driver (1976)

Analysis by Zulfi

5/5 (Majestic)

In Taxi Driver,Travis Bickle is a canvass on whom New York draws its many hued, myriad layered painting. The layers comprises of dirty violence, child pornography, false modesty, spurious existent love and many others. It is a vulgar but great poetry etched on a character’s portrayal.

Travis (Robert Deniro) is a taxi driver who opts for the night shifts. Night life is the true life. In the day, you wear your nice tuxedo and manipulate your wavy hair to attract the customers, depending on whatever you are selling. But in the nightfall, you are reduced to tugging loose ties and subjecting yourself to some fun. This fun couldn’t be adulterated like the job, you do. You would like to have it as frank as it could be gotten. But the truth comes in many ways. The truth of men preying on the wayside selling girls, of thugs robbing shops, of groups of friends discussing their day in a whole heart out manner. And in Travis’s car, he sees the truth in its more concentrated form. He could see the politicians frank talk, cheated husbands’ nightly snooping activities, men’s perverse thoughts and what not.

But Travis is a very straight arrow. He is staid and composed. He watches pornos every night but doesn’t get swayed in them. His moral compass is steady. His idea of women is completely different from what he watches in those degraded movies. He approaches a girl, Betsy, who works at a campaigning office for the presidential candidate and proposes for a coffee. She is a knockout, gorgeous lady. She likes him instantly because he looks the decent species. But when he takes her to one of those cheap movies, she retreads her tracks. She avoids him. Travis is appalled. He is stung by rejection. He tries to get her back but he knows that his is a long gone case. He rebukes her in her office. But he knows that he couldn’t forget her. He is stung by the infatuation. He couldn’t forget her even if he could.

Travis is a figurative representation of a man who loves a woman thinking he would win her and when he loses, he can’t accept it. Scorsese tells the whole story from the POV of Travis. It’s his inner mind that we are exposed to. We should come out to notice that he is getting frustrated by the rejection and approaches his friend for some help. He doesn’t tell his friend what’s bothering him. He just tells that he has this strong force to do bad things. Now, he plans to kill Palantine, the presidential candidate, for whose office Betsy works.

             He clinically goes in his way to prepare himself physically. He exercises thoroughly to shine his sinews. But while he does that he comes across a below age-level sex worker, Iris (Jodie Foster), and her pimp, Sport (Harvey Keitel). He knows that the fellow is exploiting the girl and gives his piece of mind to the girl. Look how Travis approaches Sport. There is that tough look in him, a staring back stance in him that he could handle himself. After the failed attempt of the candidate’s assassination plot, he goes on a rampage in the motel, where Iris works killing Sport and others in the melee.

            Scorsese directs this masterpiece with such a flair of brilliant visuals, which is almost dripping with them in his every frame. Each scene depicts the hard and real background of New York with the glaring lights of advertisements and signposts to the wayside brawls of low-lives and thugs. The final brutal scene of shootout in the narrow staircase of the rickety hotel is probably one of the first gore ridden urban battle images. The queer and eerie background score plays a perfect spoil to the mental happenings of Travis Bickle, who is brought to life by the amazing showmanship of Robert DeNiro. His every expression conveys the words and meaning of his mind’s workings. When a customer in his cab creates in him the prejudice against blacks, DeNiro drives home the point by his wordless consideration of them in the next scenes. His psychotic smile and histrionic regard for the secret service agent leaves the viewer with a intriguing feeling.

            When I said Travis Bickle’s moral compass is steady, it was meant in his view. He thinks he is well behaved. The thought process behind Travis’s actions revolves on the way he wants to show the ladies that he is someone to be considered with respect and he sees no point as to why Betsy doesn’t love him. The reason he wants to murder the presidential candidate is to show Betsy that he isn’t a coward and could do things, she couldn’t even imagine of him. In the final scene of the movie, we see Travis offering his cab service to Betsy, who goes moon eyed over him, post the killings in the brothel. We all know it is an illusion. But I feel it all happens in his mind, while he is still recovering in the hospital, probably in his semi-comatose condition. He relates the gangster’s shooting he had done, which gained wide spread speculation for his bravery in the media, to Betsy’s getting impressed by him. He probably daydreamed the sequence of her getting shocked by his nerve to kill a presidential candidate. When that doesn’t work, he works out the alternative. Scorsese’s movie relates the centuries’ long struggle by men to win and rein over the force of the opposite sex’s attraction. But if you try it harder, it always results in mayhem like it did in case of Bickle.