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What ‘Taxi Driver reveals about Urban Isolation

Understanding the Impact of Isolation in Scorsese’s Urban Nightmare

Syed Zain
Counter Arts
12 min readAug 5, 2024

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Taxi Driver poster via Columbia Pictures

The first thing that people often note about Taxi Driver is the powerful and unsettling score by Bernard Herrmann, which features a haunting saxophone melody. This, combined with the nightmarish portrayal of New York City in the mid-1970s, the stark use of shadows, vibrant colours, and omniscient camera movement, creates a unique cinematic experience.
The movie opens with what could be mistaken for an opening of a horror movie as the credits appear in deep saturated reds and a vehicle bursts through the smoke-ridden street.

This ominous opening sets the anxious tone that we see sustained throughout the movie; the smoke subsides as we see the eyes through which we are going to see the broken world. We see the streets in a very high contrast with extremely blown out colours; the result is a luminescent one but at the same time one that is overwhelmed by the darkness. This is a perfect metaphor for how Travis views this world because even though there is just as much light, he chooses to focus on the darkness. The smoke in slow motion gives the streets a more monstrous and sentient quality; through the imagery alone, these streets are pictured to be menacing, and what we have in this opening is the…

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Counter Arts
Counter Arts

Published in Counter Arts

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Syed Zain
Syed Zain

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