God’s lonely man: Amy Taubin on Taxi Driver

• This is a version of the introduction to Amy Taubin’s BFI Film Classic on Taxi Driver

Perhaps the place to begin is with John Hinckley III, the man who in 1981 tried to shoot President Ronald Reagan so that, as the defence explained at his trial, “he could effect a mystical union with Jodie Foster,” the actress who played a pre-teen prostitute in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Hinckley’s action assured Taxi Driver a privileged position in cultural history, making it the only film directly to inspire a presidential assassination attempt. That the assassination failed is only fitting, since Taxi Driver is a film steeped in failure – the US failure in Vietnam, the failure of the 60s counterculture, and, most unnerving, at least to 49 per cent of the population, the failure of masculinity itself.

Or perhaps the place to begin is a decade earlier, with Arthur Bremer, who in 1972 attempted to assassinate Alabama governor George Wallace but succeeded, merely, in paralysing him from the waist down. The front-page stories about Bremer, along with Sartre’s Nausea, Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Bresson’s film Pickpocket, directly inspired Paul Schrader’s Taxi Driver screenplay.

Schrader read the Bremer coverage while he was in a Los Angeles hospital, recovering from a gastric ulcer, at what he describes as the low point in his life. He was 26 years old, his marriage had broken up, the affair that broke up the marriage had broken up, he had quit the American Film Institute where he had been a fellow, he had been living in his car and he was drinking heavily. He said that when he checked into the emergency room he realised he hadn’t spoken to anyone for weeks. No wonder his imagination was captured by Bremer, who was also totally isolated, living in his car, and was stalking various political heavyweights. Coming of age in the aftermath of a decade of political assassinations (JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, RFK), Bremer had convinced himself that the surest and fastest way to get the attention he was starved of was to assassinate a famous politician. When he failed to penetrate Nixon’s security he turned his attention to Wallace.

Bremer kept a diary. Parts of it were found in his car and parts in an apartment where he’d lived before taking off on the journey that would land him, aged 21, in the penitentiary with a 63-year sentence. Scraps of the diary made their way into the news stories, and Schrader, who was already wedded to first-person voiceover narrative, found it fascinating that Bremer, an undereducated, lower-middle-class Midwestern psychopath, talked to himself in his diary just like a Sorbonne drop-out in a Bresson film.

Schrader got out of hospital and wrote the script for Taxi Driver in about ten days. “The theme,” he says, “was loneliness, or, as I realised later, self-imposed loneliness. The metaphor was the taxi, a metal coffin on wheels, the absolute symbol of urban isolation.” And who was Travis Bickle? Was he Arthur Bremer? “Travis Bickle,” Schrader replies, “was just me.”

In case there’s anyone who doesn’t know, Taxi Driver describes one stiflingly hot summer in the life of Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), an alienated ex-marine who drifted to New York shortly after the end of the Vietnam war. (This background sketch may or may not be true since we have only Travis’ word for it and he is, to put it mildly, an unreliable narrator.) Travis takes a job as a cabby. Unable to sleep at night, he cruises his taxi through a city that seems to him a hell. He becomes obsessed, in turn, with two women: Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a campaign worker for a congressional candidate, and Iris (Jodie Foster), a 12-year-old prostitute. Betsy is the Madonna he wants to turn into a whore while Iris is the whore he wants to save.

The seemingly desultory narrative is rigorously divided into three acts. In the first Travis’ rage is diffuse; he rides around in his cab, more a witness than a man of action. In the second he finds a mission and an object for his rage. And in the third he puts his homicidal fantasies into action, taking aim at one father figure (the congressional candidate) and when that attempt fails turning his gun on another (Iris’ pimp Sport, played by Harvey Keitel). The carnage that ends Taxi Driver is devastating, but it’s also voluptuous, and all the more so because of the repression and disassociation that govern the preceding 100 or so minutes.

“I like the idea of spurting blood. It reminds me; God, it reminds me; it’s like a purification; you know, the fountains of blood; like in the Van Morrison song; ‘wash me in the fountain’. But it’s realistic, too. The guy that puts the blood; I said, give me a little more, he said that’s going to be a lot, I said that’s okay.” Martin Scorsese, March 1976, a month after Taxi Driver opened in the US.

Soon after Schrader wrote the first draft of Taxi Driver he showed it to Brian De Palma, who passed it on to producers Michael and Julia Phillips. The Phillips optioned the script for $1000 and started peddling it to the studios. There were no takers: the Bickle script was considered too dark, too violent, its protagonist too unsympathetic. Scorsese was hot to direct the film, but the Phillips shrugged him off. After they saw Mean Streets in 1973, however, he became their first choice, on condition he bring along one of his Mean Streets stars, Robert De Niro, to play Travis. Still, financing proved elusive. It wasn’t until De Niro won an Academy Award for his performance in The Godfather Part II (1974) and Scorsese’s direction of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore resulted in an Oscar for Ellen Burstyn that David Begelman, then president of Columbia, gave the Phillips a green light. Begelman loathed the script but couldn’t refuse so much certified talent. Taxi Driver was financed for slightly less than $2 million. Scorsese, Schrader and De Niro’s up-front fees totalled only $130,000.

The violence Begelman found so disturbing in Taxi Driver had been working its way into Hollywood studio films for roughly two decades. Hitchcock raised the ante with Psycho (1960), which he made to herald the new decade and which like Taxi Driver crossed the psychological thriller with the horror film. Psycho inspired an underbelly of slasher films that climaxed in 1974 with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which like Hitchcock’s first foray into horror was based partly on serial killer Ed Gein. The studios, however, were slower to follow Hitchcock’s lead and the next major studio film to scandalise the Hollywood establishment was Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which not only glamorised the eponymous outlaws but also eroticised gun violence. Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch followed two years later.

Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch opened against a background of the war in Vietnam and “the war at home” – the civil-rights and anti-war struggles. Television pumped the horror of the war – images of bodies that bleed and burn when assaulted by weapons, bombs and napalm – into US households, where it was consumed as part of the dinner hour. The imagery of the war and of the violence at home gave a moral justification to film-makers, who now claimed it was their obligation, rather than indulgence, to show the brutality of US culture.

The bloody nightmare of Vietnam surfaced not only in Hollywood movies but also in avant-garde films and European art films. If The Wild Bunch was imprinted on Scorsese’s retina, so were Stan Brakhage’s autopsy film The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes and Jean-Luc Godard’s Week-end and Pierrot Le Fou. But if Taxi Driver owes something to French film of the 50s and 60s, it’s even more influenced by American film noir, the genre the French new wave adored. The stylistic relationship is obvious – the first-person voiceover narration, the expressionist camera angles and movements, Bernard Herrmann’s moody, jazz-inflected score. But most importantly, like film noir, Taxi Driver is rooted in post-war trauma. What World War II was to noir, Vietnam is to the story of Travis Bickle.

The war and the media coverage of the fighting also intensified America’s obsession with lethal weaponry, a gun-fetishism reflected in a century of movie-making from the notorious shot at the end of Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) in which a black-hatted bandit stares down the audience, pulls the trigger of a revolver aimed straight at the camera and disappears in the smoke of the blast. In the early 70s, the .44 Magnum replaced the .38 as the weapon that makes the man. Taxi Driver’s ode to the .44 Magnum (“You should see what a .44 Magnum can do to a woman’s pussy, that you should see”) is spoken not by Travis but by a psychopathic passenger played by Scorsese. As an example of gun-craziness it’s a jump up from the speech John Milius wrote for Dirty Harry’s Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood): “But seeing how the .44 Magnum is the most powerful handgun in the world and that would blow your head clear off. You got to ask yourself – Do I feel lucky, today. Well, do ya punk?”

Critics of Taxi Driver regard the movie as an arty but right-wing off-shoot of the vigilante films of the 70s, including the Dirty Harry series, Phil Karlson’s Walking Tall and Michael Winner’s Death Wish. But that critique ignores Travis’ blatant psychopathology. While the film evokes sympathy for Travis, it never suggests, as a vigilante film would, that he does the right thing. It’s more to the point to think of Taxi Driver as an attempt to reclaim – for the embattled white male – the urban landscape that had been revitalised by the Blaxploitation films of the early 70s. In that sense Schrader’s and Scorsese’s project mirrors, however unconsciously, Travis’ desire to clean the scum off the streets.

Which is not to say that the director and screenwriter are racists in the way Travis obviously is, but rather that they’re not above the impulse to protect what they consider their turf. Framed by the windows of his cab, New York looks to Travis like a movie. The entire cast of Superfly seems to have been assembled in Times Square. But seen through Travis’ eyes, they’ve been deprived of agency and subjectivity. ”You know the Black man you see raging in the street late in the film, I wanted that to be the opening shot,” says Scorsese. “But there was no way I could do that. It would have seemed too racist.”

Racism is the problem Taxi Driver never quite comes to terms with. And this evasion prevents it from being a truly great film, while allowing it a popularity it otherwise would not have achieved. “There’s no doubt,” says Schrader, “that Travis is a racist. He’s full of anger and he directs his anger at people who are just a little lower on the totem pole than he is. But there’s a difference between making a movie about a racist and making a racist movie.”

Travis’ racism is evident to anyone who looks at the film carefully. It’s there in his body language when he’s hanging out with a group of cab drivers, one of whom is Black; it’s there in his eyes when he’s looking through the window of his cab at the action on the street. It’s there, most overtly, when he shoots a skinny Black junkie who’s trying to hold up his neighbourhood deli. It’s not merely that Travis shoots to kill; it’s the way he puts his foot on the neck of a dying man – as if the guy were not even human.

But Travis’ racism is more often either displaced on to other characters (the psycho passenger who’s in a fury because his wife’s lover is a “n*****”) or completely suppressed. In Schrader’s original script Sport (Iris’ pimp) is Black, as are the other men Travis massacres in the hotel. “When Marty and I started working together,” says Schrader, “we got to the scene where Travis shoots Sport and we just looked at each other and knew we couldn’t do the scene the way it was written… It would have been an incitement to riot… At that point, Martin sent me out to find ‘the great white pimp’, but I never found him.” What Schrader discovered instead was that street-walkers like Iris were traded exclusively by Black pimps. So much for Taxi Driver’s much lauded documentary-style depiction of New York.

The difference between Schrader’s and Scorsese’s visions of Travis Bickle is encapsulated in their perspectives on John Ford’s The Searchers (1956). Here Scorsese focuses on the last shot: the lone figure of Ethan (John Wayne) walking away from the house and out on to the prairie, his back to the camera. “The isolation, it must be unbearable,” Scorsese says.

I suspect that one of the reasons why Taxi Driver evokes an empathetic response across culture, nationality, class, race and to a certain extent gender has to do with the fact that Travis is largely a cipher that each viewer decodes with her or his own desire. I suspect, too, that many viewers respond not to Travis’ alienation per se, but to Scorsese’s own sense of being an outsider in a glamorous city – expressed not through character or narrative, but through mise en scène. Scorsese describes Taxi Driver as a mix of gothic horror and tabloid news, but it also has a high-end noir glamour. It’s the glamour of New York that Bernard Herrmann’s bittersweet theme expresses – a glamour that has rubbed off on the city from a hundred movies in which the sound of a soaring saxophone promises danger or love.

The scene in The Searchers Schrader remembers is, “John Wayne telling Jeffrey Hunter not to look.” Ethan has come back from the canyon where he’s found the body of Debbie’s older sister, who has been killed and most likely raped by Scar and his raiding party. What Ethan actually says to the men riding with him is: “Never ask me to tell you what I saw there.” If ever there was an invitation to viewers to let their imaginations run wild, that line is it. The rape fantasy aroused by Sal Ethan’s refusal to speak drives the rest of the narrative, and The Searchers adds a blatant psychosexual component to the mix of fear and guilt that, in enlightened Westerns, characterises the settlers’ relationship to the ‘Indians’. It’s Ethan’s fantasy of Scar making Debbie his squaw that impels his decade-long pursuit.

Schrader’s Travis Bickle is Ethan Edwards come unravelled. In The Searchers Ford finally shows the fissures in the masculine ideal he monumentalised. Ethan, too, is a man come home from a war in which he fought on the losing side. A racist who can’t accept the defeat of the Confederacy and a misogynist who regards women as property and miscegenation as the ultimate crime, he is also uncommonly courageous and loyal. In the end his better side prevails, but consumed with guilt, he can’t allow himself to stay with the family he’s reunited. Says Schrader: “This is a man who’s deprived of the pleasures of hearth and home because he has blood on his hands.”

Ethan, the lone wolf, becomes Travis, the psychopath, trying to work out on his own what it is to be a man. Isolation intensifies his pathology. Like Ethan, Travis is driven by fantasies of rape and revenge in which he plays many parts. Schrader says there was a lot of pressure put on him (though not by Scorsese) to change the scene in which Travis takes Betsy, the woman he worships as “an angel”, to a porn movie on their first date. He was told no one could be so stupid. But Travis wants to rub Betsy’s face in the muck and show her how bad he is. Taking her to a porn movie is a kind of rape. When Betsy gives him the cold shoulder, he redirects his desire towards Iris. This is where the model of The Searchers kicks in. Travis makes it his mission to rescue Iris from her Scar – Sport, the hippie pimp who wears an Indian bandanna – even if it costs him his life.

In addition to his desire to forge a “mystical union” with Jodie Foster, John Hinckley also claimed, as part of his insanity defence, that sometimes he almost believed he was Travis Bickle, and that the movie, which he had seen 15 times, had driven him mad. Whether the jury believed that Hinckley was mad to begin with and the film was merely icing on his paranoia, or whether they believed the film itself was the cause of his madness is unknown. But in any event Hinckley was acquitted on grounds of insanity. In 1999 he begins a programme of release from the mental institution where he has spent the past 17 years. (Bremer, who could not afford anything approaching Hinckley’s high-powered defence, was judged to be sufficiently sane to be responsible for his actions and is rotting in jail where he’ll probably die.)

“I felt like I was walking into a movie,” said Hinckley, describing his state of mind during the shooting. There is no way to judge whether a film could drive someone to commit an insane act in real life. But what I would claim is that Taxi Driver’s power derives from its most hallucinatory scenes – the massacre in the hotel at the end and the “You talkin’ to me?” sequence where Travis challenges his own mirror image. Both involve some derailment of Schrader’s screenplay and of Scorsese’s carefully storyboarded production plan.

Threatened with an ‘X’ rating because the film was too bloody, Scorsese, rather than making cuts, chose to make the blood less red. So the massacre scene is optically printed on a sandwich of colour and black-and-white stocks, making the image more grainy and degraded than in the previous 100 or so minutes. When Travis gets out of his cab to begin his “rescue” mission it’s as if he’s walking into one of the porn movies he watches obsessively when he can’t sleep. Finally his long-impacted murderous desire is at one with his action, and his paranoid vision is so encompassing it colours the mise en scène itself.

The hallucination Travis enacts in that scene – and which results in real death – is the hallucination of masculinity. It’s the search for that image of ideal, masculine wholeness that subtends the entire history of the movies. It’s also what makes Scorsese’s raids on the cinematic image bank not merely an aesthetic exercise in reflexivity but an expression of a dilemma that’s both excruciatingly personal to Travis and bigger than Travis himself.

By the mid-70s the ideal image of white masculinity was under siege. It wasn’t merely fissured as in The Searchers, it had cracked apart under the pressure of the feminist and civil-rights movements. In this context Travis’ paranoia can be read as a hyperbolic version of the doubts and defensiveness the average guy was feeling – continues to feel – about being a man.

The emblematic scene in which Travis confronts his own image in the mirror doesn’t exist at all in the published version of the screenplay, and in the shooting script it’s indicated only by a one-line description: “Travis talks to himself in the mirror.” De Niro improvised the scene, drawing on the routine of a stand-up comic he’d seen in a downtown club. Scorsese, who was worried the monologue would be inaudible because the location was so noisy, just kept the camera running while De Niro repeatedly challenged and drew his gun on his own reflection.

To put it crudely, the issues of identity and identification played out in this scene are insanely entwined in Travis, who as a paranoid has problems with boundaries and with splitting. When Travis looks in the mirror, he sees himself and he also sees the other on whom he has projected everything he despises in himself. Thus what Travis is doing when he “is working out what it is to shoot or be shot” is rehearsing a murder that is also a suicide.

It’s an action in which the audience is wildly implicated. The angle at which Travis takes aim at himself is only about 10 degrees removed from the angle at which he would be shooting directly at the camera, i.e. at us. Travis’ disassociation, moreover, reflects the latent madness in the situation of viewers who lose themselves in a film, experiencing the fear and desire, love and hate of the character on screen as if it were their own. And when the character is madly confused about his identity, identification packs a double whammy.