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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...
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…
References
Laviola, F.P. (2001, May 2). Taxi Driver, 35 Years Later. Frontier Psychiatrist, Film Projections. Retrieved http://frontpsych.com/2011/05/02/film-projections-taxi-driver-35-years-later/
Fisher, J. (2009, February 2). The Film Brief. Retrieved http://www.thefilmbrief.com/2009/01/classic-movie-taxi-driver.html
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