Summary
The film opens with suspenseful music and a giant cloud of white smoke, from which emerges a yellow taxi cab in New York City, as the title and credits appear. We then see the eponymous taxi driver Travis Bickle’s eyes in a tight-framed close-up, his gaze shifting here and there as colored traffic lights play off his face and a smooth saxophone riff plays. The audience is transported to the gritty New York City of the 1970s, as rain water spills down the windshield of Travis’s car at night, the lights of nearby cars shot in a blur, to give the shots an almost dreamlike quality. People walk across the street in red light, and the gaze of the camera is distinctly removed from the action around it. Thus, we know we are aligned with and privy to Travis’s perspective, as he drives around, observing the city from a distance. We continue to see Travis’s expressive eyes in close up.
We see Travis enter the taxi depot. A harried man at the front desk yells at another worker in the back room, and Travis tells the man that he is suffering from insomnia. While the man tells him that there is a pornographic movie that might help his insomnia, Travis insists that he tried that, and when asked what he does, tells the man that he rides around on the subways or buses, and that since he does that he feels like “he might as well get paid.” When the man asks him if he’ll take a shift uptown and in Harlem, he responds, “Anytime, anywhere,” and when the man asks if he will work on Jewish holidays, he repeats, “Anytime, anywhere,” a slight smirk spreading across his face. The man agrees, and asks him about his driving record. Grinning, Travis assures him that it’s clean, like his conscience, but the man at the desk chastises him for having an attitude, for which Travis apologizes, but with a mischievous smile still on his face. He answers the personnel officer’s remaining questions, and the viewer learns that Travis Bickle is 26 years old, has a limited education (which prompts the man at the desk to pause judgmentally), and was honorably discharged from the marines during the Vietnam war. The personnel officer tells Travis that he too was in the marines, and asks him why he wants to drive taxis, if he is “moonlighting” in order to make more money. Travis responds that he just wants to work long hours, and asks what “moonlighting” means, before the officer gives him forms to be returned the following day. Travis leaves, as we see a man communicating with taxi drivers crankily over a walkie talkie in the corner of the office.
Travis walks back out into the street, watching the taxi cabs come back into the depot. It is the middle of the day, and Travis walks the streets, drinking liquor from a paper bag. The scene shifts to Travis' apartment, where he sits in a small, dingy apartment, writing in a journal. We hear what he is writing in voiceover, as he expresses his gratefulness for the rain washing away the trash of the city, and documents his new job driving cabs, for twelve-, sometimes fourteen-hour shifts in the middle of the night, sometimes seven days a week. We learn that he makes 300 to 350$ a week, sometimes more, and that he is glad that he has something to keep him busy. The shot cuts to a low-to-the-ground shot of the front of his taxi as it drives its route. The camera shows close-up shots of various parts of the cab, glistening with rainwater, and we see Travis’s taxi move through Times Square. There, we spy young girls, prostitutes and criminals standing in front of a seedy restaurant. Travis’s voiceover comes back in as he laments, “All the animals come out at night,” lamenting the presence of drug addicts, prostitutes, and homosexuals on the streets of New York. One day, he says, a big rain will come and wash away all that scum.
As Travis continues to speak in voiceover, he tells the viewer more about his job as a taxi driver. He states that he will take customers anywhere—the Bronx, Brooklyn—because it doesn’t make any difference to him. Travis also claims that while some drivers will not take “spooks”—a derogatory term for a black person—it doesn’t make a difference to him. A businessman and a black prostitute in a blonde wig get in the cab laughing, and the man directs him to drive to 48th and 6th, saying, “I can’t get afford to get stopped anywhere,” as Travis drives into a tunnel. The man and the woman flirt and laugh, the man telling her he’ll tip her if she does “the right things,” as Travis uncomfortably watches them in the rearview mirror. The cab speeds through sprinklers cleaning the streets, and Travis rolls up the windows just in time, water billowing up on the windshield like an all-encompassing wave. The scene shifts to Travis parking the taxi back at the depot and taking a pill of some kind. In voiceover, Travis describes that when he returns the taxi every night he has to clean the semen off the backseat, and sometimes even blood. He throws away a wash cloth and clocks out.
We watch Travis walking down the New York streets during the day, a pornographic movie theater behind him. He goes into a pornographic movie theater, and walks past the popcorn, the sounds of sexual moaning playing in the background. Going back to the concessions stand, Travis attempts to flirt with the girl selling popcorn, persistently asking for her name. She is visibly uncomfortable, but remains calm, threatening to call the manager, before finally bursting out for the manager when Travis won’t let up. Travis backs up and orders Chuckles and asks for jujubes, before finally getting a popcorn, Coca Cola, and a box of popcorn. Travis takes his seat in the movie theater watching the pornographic movie, as we hear him in voiceover lament that he still cannot sleep, in spite of working twelve hour days.
The scene cuts to Travis lying in his bed, with his hands behind his head, a coke by his side. In voiceover, Travis says, “all my life needed was a sense of some place to go. I don’t believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention. I believe that someone should become a person like other people.” The shot shifts to a bustling New York street scene during the day, as Travis tells us about a woman that he saw at “campaign headquarters at 63rd and Broadway.” The camera weaves through crowds of pedestrians, seemingly in Travis Bickle’s perspective as he walks through midtown on a sunny day. The woman of whom Travis speaks, and with whom he is apparently enamored, was wearing a white dress, and “appeared like an angel out of this filthy mass.” We see Betsy walking down the street, hair tidy and white dress blowing in the wind as she passes an admirer and seductive saxophone music plays. She goes into the campaign headquarters, as the shot shifts slowly to Travis’s handwriting in his journal, where he writes in all caps: “THEY CANNOT TOUCH HER.” Travis sits at his table drinking the Coca-Cola and thinking of Betsy.
We now see various campaign posters for a politician named Charles Palantine, for whom Betsy is working. A stream of taxis sits out front of the campaign headquarters, and the scene abruptly shifts to inside the building, where Tom talks on the phone about a delivered box of campaign buttons. He reveals that Palantine’s slogan on the buttons is “We Are The People,” but the “we” is underlined instead of the “are,” which is how it should be. He argues with the man on the phone about the different meanings of the two different emphases. As he tells the man that the campaign will not pay for the wrong buttons and hangs up the phone, Betsy calls him over to look at a canvas report. Tom expresses the importance of emphasizing the mandatory welfare program, to which Betsy responds that they ought to “push the man, then the issue.” When Betsy lists off the strengths and attributes of Palantine, Tom teases her for sounding like she’s selling mouthwash, which she insists they are. As Tom cracks jokes, Betsy puts on her glasses and urges him to look out the window at the taxi driver who has been leering at her from outside the office for a long time. Tom slips in an “I love you,” but Betsy remains focused on the presence of Travis’s taxi outside headquarters.
Travis sits in his taxi drinking a soda, with the windows rolled halfway down, staring at Betsy in the office. As we see Betsy and Tom looking back at him outside, Tom asks Betsy how long he has been there. The camera zooms out from a close shot of Travis to reveal the cab sitting directly in front of the window as Betsy answers, “I don’t know, but it feels like a long time.” When Tom asks if it is bothering her, Betsy sarcastically answers “No,” and the two co-workers continue to flirt. Tom offers to chivalrously go and ask Travis to move and stop staring, which causes Betsy to tease him and wish him luck in his confrontation with Travis. Tom comes outside, opening an umbrella and telling Travis that he is blocking the doorway, but before they can have a conversation, Travis speeds off, jolted awake from his glaze-eyed obsessive daydreams about Betsy. Travis speeds away as we see Tom holding a black umbrella through the rear windshield.
Travis drives around at night, as a moody and romantic saxophone plays. He has become obsessed with Betsy, and he drives through midtown looking for someone to drive. As he passes a woman who looks vaguely like Betsy, he jots down something in his journal. He sees a couple flirting on the hood of a car as he picks up a passenger. Travis looks vaguely anxious as he drives around the city at night, and we see his fare going up, and traffic lights turn green in close up. The taxi pulls up in front of Hotel Olcott, and we see Travis collect his fare and drive away. In the next scene, we see Travis approach a group of friends at a diner at night, discussing women. Travis orders a cup of coffee as his friend, Wizard, continues to discuss the perfume wearing habits of a woman he is seeing. Wizard details how a woman he was seeing changed her pantyhose in the middle of the Triboro Bridge. As he continues to detail how he had sex with the woman, Travis looks at him slack-jawed, with a slight smirk. Wizard introduces Travis to his friends, Doughboy and Charlie T. When he asks Travis how he’s doing, Travis tells them about a taxi driver who got cut up and had “half his ear” cut off by a crazy passenger in his vehicle. Travis looks around him at a number of black pimps sitting at a nearby table, one of whom taps the table ominously. As Doughboy asks him a questions, Travis is lost in thought staring at the pimp. Doughboy asks him about his “rough customers” and if he carries a “piece,” meaning a gun. Travis puts an Alka-Seltzer in his water, as Doughboy tells him he knows someone who can get him a gun if he needs it. The camera closes in on Travis Bickle’s face as he watches the Alka-Seltzer dissolve in the water, sizzling and popping, Doughboy continuing to extol the benefits of owning a gun. The camera zooms in to the Alka-Seltzer water until the frame is nothing but a wash of bubbles. Doughboy interrupts Travis and shows him an envelope of drugs, which he tries to get Travis to sell. When Travis says he doesn’t want it, Doughboy shrugs and exits.
The following scene returns the viewer to the headquarters of the Palantine campaign. We find Betsy pretending to spill a cup of coffee on Tom, before revealing that it was a prank and there was no liquid in the cup at all. Betsy shows Tom a way to light a match with only two fingers, which he resists at first before trying to light it with the match in his teeth. When Betsy teases him with the fact that a man at the newsstand can do it, Tom says the man is probably an Italian and probably a thief, but Betsy assures him that the newsman is black. Tom goes into a rant about how members of the mob kill incompetents, saying they often blow off their fingers (apropos of the match trick) and leaving canaries on the bodies of “stool pigeons” (police informers) as a symbolic gesture. When Betsy asks why they use a canary rather than a pigeon, Tom deduces that it is because pigeons are not available in pet stores, which seems to delight Betsy.
Travis, in a red blazer and white pants, enters the campaign office, and walks towards Betsy and Tom. He tells them he wants to volunteer, and when Tom offers to get him set up, he insists that he wants to speak to Betsy. As Tom walks away, Betsy asks why he has to volunteer with her, to which he responds that she is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. She averts her gaze, thanking him, and asks him what he thinks of Palantine. Travis balks at the question, unable to name anything about the candidate, before vaguely saying, “Well I’m sure he’ll make a good president. I’m not exactly sure what his policies are, but I’m sure he’ll make a good one.” Betsy asks him if he wants to canvas and how he feels about Senator Palantine’s stance on welfare, and he responds that he does not know the stance but is sure that it is a good one. As Betsy directs Travis over to Tom’s desk, he insists that he cannot work during the day because he drives a taxi at night and asks Betsy to have some coffee and pie with him. Coyly, Betsy asks him, “why?” to which Travis responds that he sees her at the office when he drives by and that she seems like a lonely person, surrounded by people and phones and meaningless documents. Spinning an elaborate back-handed seduction, Travis tells her that she seems like an unhappy person in need of some company. Betsy wiggles her pencil and smirks at him coyly, as he asks for “five minutes,” and promises to protect her, which makes her laugh. After looking at her watch, Betsy tells Travis she has a break at 4 PM, and that she will go with him then. They introduce themselves to one another, and Travis leaves.
Analysis
The beginning of the movie establishes Travis Bickle as our protagonist, with all of his flaws, contradictions, and outright bigotry. Travis is the definition of an antihero, and he is difficult to root for, but because we share his perspective and follow his story, we are, in a sense, aligned with him from the start. Travis is a street-smart voyeur, tough in his independence, yet dangerously removed from the rest of the world, a lone wolf who takes the world around him very personally, in spite of feeling cut off from it. He is, from the start, a man of contradictions, one who takes in pornography and drinks booze out of a paper bag in the light of day, then writes in a journal about the cleansing power of the rain and declares himself morally superior to almost everyone around him. He is both reflective and yet unhinged, completely unable to be self aware. Seconds after speaking dismissively and hatefully about homosexuals, drug addicts and black people, he states that he is willing to drive black people in his cab, even though other taxi drivers will not. He says, “Don’t make no difference to me,” but of course, we know that race and identity make all the difference to Travis Bickle. One suspects that Travis would not be able to see the ethical contradiction in his own thinking, and his lack of self-awareness is one of his defining traits. As a discharged marine, Travis is still on the lookout for a war to fight, even when driving a New York City taxi.
The way the start of the movie is shot places the viewer in a gritty and oppressive world: a grimy and crime-ridden New York. This is hardly a dreamscape; in Scorsese’s New York, reality is always looming large. The start of the film opens with thick fog from a manhole, and a taxi driving through it, showing that we are in a polluted and smoky place, with dangerous corners and obscured views. Additionally, the view of the pedestrians on the crosswalks, the lights of the cars, and the building facades at the start of the film are seen in a blurred view. Crowds shuffle across the street, and lights are bright and stark, reds and whites without warmth. As the camera rides alongside the tire-level of Travis’s taxi, one feels low to the ground, as though being pressed down into the street by the city itself. The shots show us that in Travis’s city, it is best to keep your head down; elevation is not an option. When Travis writes in his journal about his thankfulness for the rain that washed away the dirt of the city, we can sympathize. The taxi depot is a dirty and inefficiently run establishment. His apartment, while tidy, is grimy and abject.
Indeed, the New York City of Taxi Driver is anything but glamorous and tourist-y. The streets are crime-addled, Times Square is a sleazy and gritty neighborhood rather than a tourist mecca, and prostitutes are almost ubiquitous. While another filmmaker who rose to prominence in the 1970s, Woody Allen, was famous for depicting New York as a romantic playground for urbane artists and intellectuals, Scorsese contrastingly presents an unforgiving and dirty island, overrun with criminals, hoods, and prostitutes. The “cleansing” that Travis writes about in his journal is not only a matter of cleaning the expected dirt that manifests in a big city, but a desire for infrastructural change. Travis calls for a political and moral cleansing of New York, but on whose terms?
The beginning of the movie also introduces us to a character who serves as a perfect surface for Travis’s obsessive projections, Betsy. Betsy is described as an angel, and Travis highlights the fact that she was wearing white when he first saw her, a symbol of purity and innocence in an otherwise filthy city. From the moment he sees her, Travis is obsessed with and possessive of Betsy, scrawling “THEY CANNOT TOUCH HER” in his journal. When he watches her from outside Palantine’s campaign offices, the camera zooms out quickly to reveal the menacing way he is watching her from the window. Travis’s obsession with Betsy is a perfect example of how his moral righteousness and desire to fix the world is more about imposing his own will on a world that he has difficulty relating to at all, let alone understanding. While Travis thinks he is being protective of Betsy, keeping an eye on her out of a sense of possessiveness and love, he is in fact alienating and concerning her by keeping such a "watchful" eye on her. Travis insists that he wants to avoid in “morbid self-attention,” yet his lack of self-awareness leads him, ironically, to miss that he in fact can see the whole world only as a reflection of his own views about it.
The fact that New York City, and midtown specifically, are dangerous places as depicted by the film is not helped by the fact that Travis is an essentially paranoid and a phobic person. Robert De Niro’s face is often smirking cockily, but one suspects that beneath the smirk is a real fear of the world around him, and a suspiciousness about the motives of others. When Tom comes to confront him about parking in front of Palantine’s office, Travis speeds away fearfully, without waiting to hear what Tom has to say. When Tom meets Wizard, Doughboy, and Charlie T at the diner, he is distracted by the sight of the black men sitting at a nearby table, which appears to make him nervous. When asked how things are going, he references a recent act of violence committed against a taxi driver and crushes up an Alka-Seltzer in his water. As menacing as Travis Bickle seems, the movie shows that his menace and resentment of the world comes from his fear of it; his darkness is a misguided reflection of the darkness of the world itself.
