Taxi Driver -- the Narrative of Belonging

Taxi Driver -- the Narrative of Belonging

Taxi Driver -- the Movie

Martin Scorsese released Taxi Driver, his fifth feature film in 1976, but many regard it as his first masterpiece. Taxi Driver has been described as "one man's (a social outsider's) private diary of loneliness and despair" (Laviola, 2011, p. 1).

Travis Bickle is in charge of his own destiny, but he is consumed with a near overwhelming sense of paranoia that Scorsese illustrates several times in the film (Fisher, 2009). Paranoia qua paranoia is a lonely disorder that establishes and maintains a sense of not belonging anywhere -- no one can be trusted. Travis develops a fierce resolve to rescue Iris, the adolescent prostitute (played amazingly by Jodie Foster at age thirteen), from her pimps and drugs (Fisher, 2009). In this determination to carry out his moral mission, Travis has created for himself an opportunity for regenerative violence (Laviola, 2011, p. 1).

In two scenes in particular, Scorsese may have taken some stylistic inspiration from Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni that makes Travis's social isolation particularly salient (Laviola, 2011, p. 1). An early scene in Taxi Driver shows Travis at an all-night diner, dropping an Alka Seltzer tablet into a glass of water -- he stares blankly at the dissolving tablet (Laviola, 2011, p. 1). The sizzling bubbles grow larger as the overhead camera zooms in, and Travis, mesmerized, is disconnected from the other cabbies around him who try to get him to talk to them (Laviola, 2011, p. 1). If you have seen 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, you have seen this scene (Laviola, 2011, p. 1). A little later in Taxi Driver, Travis makes a call on a payphone to Betsy (Cybil Shepherd) (Laviola, 2011, p. 1). The camera does a lateral tracking shot that is similar to Anonioni's technique in The Passenger (Laviola, 2011, p. 1). The camera moves away from Travis who is still talking on the phone, to show an empty corridor -- we hear the girl of Travis's dreams reject him over the phone (Laviola, 2011, p. 1).

Scorsese combines the styles of European art house filmmaking and Hollywood to create a melding of "gritty realism and baroque expressionism" (Laviola, 2011, p. 1). Scorsese related his camera work to The Merchant of Four Seasons by the New German Cinema auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Laviola, 2011, p. 1). "It had a kind of brutal honesty about the way the camera looked at the characters -- at the actors…And it just made me realize that you can do anything, really (Laviola, 2011, p. 1). Just anything, as long as you feel honest about it (Laviola, 2011, p. 1). It's an honest image (Laviola, 2011, p. 1). It's like a police photo -- a crime scene photo" (Laviola, 2011, p. 1). In consideration of Scorsese's remark, is anyone ever as alone as they are in a police photo? Scorsese similarly uses singles shots to great effect. An example is the scene in which Travis is buying a gun from Easy Andy. Travis is shown looking at and handling each gun. Then the audience is treated to expression of Travis' private reality through the use of two POV shots (Laviola, 2011, p. 1). A close-up of the .44 Magnum caresses and fetishizes the gun, then a second close-up shows Travis taking the .38 revolver in his hand and pointing it out the window. The POV is that of an assassin -- foreshadowing Travis's transformation of himself (Laviola, 2011, p. 1). The shots from Travis' POV underscore his solitary existence and his destructive bent.