Taxi Driver’s 40th Anniversary: Remembering the Best Film About Loneliness
It’s the early 1970s. You’re 26-year-old screenwriter Paul Schrader with nothing quite noteworthy behind you. You’re New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael’s protégé, but at the same time you’re not so sure anymore—you haven’t even spoken with her in, well, you forget how long. You live out of your car as you try to gain some semblance of purpose, contemplating in an insane loop the recent rejection from the woman you thought you loved, the woman who got you to break away from a miserable marriage to be with her. And without a healthy social life to keep you grounded, how do you stay sane? To further complicate matters, you’re a Midwestern boy from a small town trying to navigate the sprawling maze of L.A. The bottle sounds good right now.
In the midst of a period of heavy drinking, a burning pain builds in your gut, and you take a trip to the emergency center. The nurse who addresses you causes you to respond, and through this clinical interaction and the diagnosis of an ulcer you realize that she’s the first person you’ve spoken to in weeks.
Driving around aimlessly, you think to yourself, “I might as well be a taxi driver.” This sets off a chain of ideas, and before you know it you’re sitting at your desk jabbing your fingers at the typewriter in your dingy apartment, a handgun sitting on your desk to motivate you to bring this feverish concept to fruition and completion. Your main character’s condition—both mental and existential—seems terrifyingly parallel to your own at times, but his story needs to be told.
By ‘76, what would become of it is a little film called Taxi Driver, thanks largely in part to Martin Scorsese’s faith in your project, and it would arguably stand as the best film about isolation ever produced in American cinema. 40 years later, it gets the 4K remastering and a re-release it deserves.
Would you be willing to suffer like that for great art?
Conditionally, Taxi Driver’s protagonist Travis Bickle (in a flawless performance from young Robert De Niro) isn’t different from many men and women. An alarming number of people suffer from the same level of solitude that Travis and Schrader experienced, with little to no ways to discover a healthy means of escape. What makes Travis a time bomb is his inherently violent nature that complicates the situation, something that many loners lack. It’s no wonder that this film appealed to men like John Hinckley, Jr., who suffered a similar isolation combined with dangerous delusions, likely looking up to Travis Bickle as an icon instead of a pitiable and cautionary result of social exclusion.
I would have to say the biggest difference between lonely men of Travis’s generation and mine is an obvious development of technology. While Travis had to suffer in his mind without any window into others’ lives as long as he didn’t leave his apartment, people today are surrounded by the lives of others through social media and countless other forms of media, which can often amplify that loneliness. You can see thousands of people connecting with each other, liking each other’s posts, with profile pic after profile pic of two or more heads beside each other with grins across their faces in a pleasant setting, while each of yours is a single headshot of you, taken by you. If you’re lucky, one or two people might throw you a like, and you’re left wondering why you’re left out.
At times it can feel like everyone around you is living the life that you want, while you’re stuck in a wheelhouse of boredom, apathy, and self-destruction arising from those feelings. We’re supposedly more connected, but when you feel unable to truly connect and those around you appear to have a piece of the puzzle that you can’t seem to find, it’s worse to feel alone in a world full of people than it is when you’re actually alone. I could go on and on about how the digital era both connects and disconnects us, but I won’t do that here. This is about Travis now.
Travis is a character who wants to connect, but his pathology keeps him secluded; he doesn’t understand how to perform anything beyond introductory conversation, as we see with Charles Palantine advocate Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), whom he manages to charm into going on a date with him, at the behest of her fellow campaigner, played by a quirky young Albert Brooks.
They have an interesting conversation at lunch, during which Betsy detects a mysteriousness she can’t place, comparing Travis to the figure in Kris Kristofferson’s “Pilgrim”: “He’s a prophet and a pusher… a walking contradiction.”
He can gather just enough confidence and charisma to get through the door of connection, but once he’s stepped through it to the other side, he doesn’t know where to go next. In Betsy’s case, once he’s through the door he takes her to a porno theater on their first official date to see a Swedish erotic film about reproduction. It’s not exactly most people’s idea of a romantic evening.
Betsy is understandably distraught and disturbed from the outset, storming out of the theater and Travis’s life, which further fuels the path of destruction where he had long been headed. His obsession turns from onf hope and compassion with Betsy to one of aggression with Palantine, the perceived king of the “Hell” in which Betsy is, according to a scorned Travis.
He once again slips into the same solitude he’s clearly known for most of his life, despite his belief that nobody should “devote his life to morbid self-attention,” as he writes to his parents, who may or may not even be alive.
His assassination plans and attempts are as incompetent as his social skills, quickly gaining the suspicion of Secret Service agents when he attends his first rally, and at least at a subconscious level he seems to come to this realization after his failed attempt, redirecting his focus once again, this time on the young Iris Steensma (a believably precocious Jodie Foster), a 12-year-old prostitute he ultimately wants to rescue.
The question then becomes whether or not he actually does want to save her, or if the true motive is a selfish sense of purpose, along with another way to exert violence through killing her pimp Sport (Harvey Keitel), an emblem of the “scum” that Travis wants to wash from the streets. We know that there’s too much rage built inside Travis for him to simply let it recede in a selfless act of kindness.
Travis, like many of us, wants to be a guiding force behind the change he wants to see in the world. Unfortunately, his narrow vision only allows him to see violence as the catalyst. He’s consumed by the notion that others around him are the “scum” he loathes, outward projections of his own transgressions. It seethes inside him, giving him that sense of purpose that most desire, so much so that when he drinks his seltzer water in the cafe with his fellow taxi drivers, he stares emptily into the glass as it fizzes and the close-up reveals specks of dirt rising to the surface, representations of the objects of his misguided hate.
It doesn’t help that when he tries to articulate his thoughts to veteran cabbie Wizard (Peter Boyle), the man doesn’t appear capable of fathoming his struggles and dismisses him, telling him he’ll “be OK.”
The film’s inevitable and infamous climax sees Travis at the peak of his psychosis, wasting away Iris’s oppressors in the whorehouse where she resides. His hair cut in a stark mohawk and donning his Army jacket, he has become a vessel of aggression, focusing blindly on not saving Iris as much as washing away the “scum.”
And in the end, when Travis is labeled a local hero and Iris returns to her parents, we’re left to question whether Travis has truly settled—even if Betsy gets in his cab at the end as a gleam of hope for a relief from his pervasive solitude—and if Iris is really better off with her parents, whom she claims caused her to run away in the first place. The latter is something suspiciously reinforced through her father’s claim in a letter to Travis that they “have taken certain steps to make sure she has no cause to run away again.” Could this signify abuse? We can’t be certain.
My favorite scene in this film comes at the true beginning of Travis’s violent crescendo, after killing his first victim in an act of self-defense, a lowly convenience store robber who happens to be black (which arguably helps reaffirm Travis’s understated racism).
Immediately following this murder, we cut to Travis sitting in his apartment, watching an episode of American Bandstand on his television, in which couples slow-dance to Jackson Browne’s “Late For The Sky”. He aims his handgun at a man on TV who somewhat resembles the man he just shot in the last scene.
Travis looks morose as ever as he gazes at the screen, and the camera closes in on a pair of shoes sitting empty in the middle of the dance floor, still and unnoticed. This is everything that Travis is: hoping to be as happy as these people while standing firmly invisible amongst them. Simultaneously, he probably doesn’t want to be these people. Jackson Browne sings “Awake again I can’t pretend and I know I’m alone/And close to the end of the feeling we’ve known.” Travis holds his hand cannon close to his head, his companion and perhaps his only way out of this isolation. Hope and pain intertwine like the couples on the screen.
I’m reminded of a rare hopeful passage that Bukowski wrote in Ham on Rye, in which he watches couples dancing during prom through the window, wrapped in gauze covering a terrible case of acne vulgaris, and tells himself that “someday I’ll be as happy as you. Someday I will have my dance.”
It’s a brief moment of contemplative melancholy calm in a sea of constant unease soundtracked by Bernard Hermann’s main theme, a moment when the loneliness feels like a meaningful crevice in which he’s settled and understood rather than a rough canyon of anger and discomfort. It perfectly illustrates that sometimes we need to marvel at that isolation when we’re deep enough in it. It’s also a contrast from the later scene where he watches an episode of The Young and the Restless on the same TV which results in him kicking it over.
There’s a lot of sublime magic and beauty in Taxi Driver, as dismal as Travis’s story may be. It’s a film about the toll that isolation can take, particularly when you’re so disconnected that you become the main cause of your loneliness. As a 26-year-old myself who’s struggled, forty years following this film’s premiere, there is a lot I find timeless about this film and pertinent in Travis that makes it obvious why it’s held up so resiliently through the years, and will continue to resonate with audiences, whether they can relate to the narrative or simply revel in its technical brilliance.