Summary
Travis walks outside Palantine headquarters as romantic saxophone music once again plays. He smokes a cigarette and waits for Betsy as a voiceover of Travis’s journal narration details their date. The two go to a nearby coffee shop, where Travis gets pie and a coffee, and Betsy gets a fruit salad and a coffee. As they sip their coffee, Betsy confides about the difficulties of being a campaign worker in New York City. Travis talks about the difficulties of remaining organized, and unsuccessfully attempts to make a joke, about getting “organizized.” When Betsy doesn’t get the joke, and compares his sense of humor to a cheesy sign in an office, Travis seems slightly offended, before asking her if she likes her work. When she tells him that she likes who she works with and that she thinks Palantine has a good chance, Travis simply responds that she has beautiful eyes, and asks her if she likes Tom. Travis takes Betsy’s mild ambivalence about Tom as an opportunity to analyze his flaws, and insist that there is “no connection” between her and Tom. Contrastingly, Travis tells Betsy that when he walked in, there was immediate chemistry between them, which “gave him the right” to come in and talk to her, which Betsy agrees with. The viewer learns that Betsy is from upstate New York, as Travis attempts more small talk, but is pulled back in discussing his dislike of Tom, calling Tom “silly” and insisting that he does not respect Betsy.
As they finish their date, Travis asks Betsy to go to a movie with him another time, to which she agrees. Betsy then tells Travis that he reminds her of a Kris Kristofferson lyric, “He’s a prophet and a pusher, partly truth and partly fiction, a walking contradiction.” Travis becomes defensive, insisting that he is not a pusher, and Betsy laughs and tells him that she only means that he is a contradiction. Travis is then shown buying the Kris Kristofferson record from a record store and getting into his cab. In voiceover, Travis narrates his asking Betsy out on their second date to see a movie, as the windshield and fare meter of Travis’s cab are shown on the screen. Even though Betsy hesitated at first about going on a second date with Travis, he tells us that he called again, and his persistence paid off, because she agreed.
We see Travis picking up a man in a cab, who is soon revealed to be Charles Palantine. As Palantine and an aide speak in hushed voices in the back of the cab, Travis delightedly looks in his rearview and asks the man whether he is indeed Charles Palantine. Travis brags that he is one of Senator Palantine’s biggest supporters, and that he tells everyone who rides with him to vote for him. Palatine hesitantly thanks Travis by name, seeing his identification, and Travis continues to flatter the senator. Remaining true to his reputation as the workers’ candidate, Palantine tells Travis that he has learned more about America from riding in taxi cabs than “all the limos in the country,” before asking Travis, “what’s the one thing about this country that bugs you the most?” Travis tells Palantine that he thinks New York City is full of scum and needs to be cleaned up. As he becomes more impassioned, insisting that the president should “flush it [New York City] down the fucking toilet!” Palatine’s aide looks at Palantine skeptically. Palatine remains silent for a moment before responding soberly to Travis’s qualms with the city, saying that politicians will have to make some radical changes. As they get out of the cab, Palantine shakes Travis’s hand and Travis reiterates that he thinks Palantine will win. Palantine and his aides enter a large fancy building as Travis watches from his cab, finally nodding and driving away.
After dropping a man off in midtown, Travis picks up a young girl in a hat, who seems to be in a hurry to get out of the vicinity. Looking back skeptically, Travis sees a man approaching the car as the girl nags him to move it. The man approaches the car and pleads with the girl not to make him upset, reaching through the window to touch her. It becomes clear that the girl is a child prostitute as she dodges the touch of the man. The man gets into the cab and pulls the girl out, threatening that she will get busted if she does not come with him. As she gets out, she tries to escape the clutches of the pimp to no avail, as he throws a rumpled $20 bill into the passenger seat and tells Travis to keep quiet. The pimp drags the young prostitute away and Travis leaves. We again see midtown from the window of Travis’s taxi, filled with prostitutes and criminals. Travis drives through the white smoke of a manhole, before running into a gang of black youths who throw eggs and other objects at his car.
Early the next morning,Travis pulls his taxi into the depot. He notices the rumpled bill that the pimp threw through his window and stares at it before putting it in his jacket pocket. Walking on the street outside, Travis zips up his jacket and the scene abruptly shifts to a straight-on shot of Travis walking towards Palantine’s headquarters in the red jacket he wore when he first asked Betsy out. Betsy joins him outside, and the two embark on their second date, Travis giving her the Kris Kristofferson record that she mentioned on their first date. The scene cuts to a man with thick side burns and slicked back hair playing the snare drum in midtown, as Betsy and Travis walk down the street nearby. Betsy tells Travis she wishes he would listen to the Kris Kristofferson record, and he tells her he does not have a record player and doesn’t follow music very closely. When Travis says he hopes to listen to it on Betsy’s record player, the camera jumps back to the drummer, who announces he will “go back forty years” and play in the style of Chick Webb, a famous jazz bandleader.
We see the marquis of a pornographic movie theater, and the camera pans down to the sign for current movie, entitled Sometime Sweet Susan, and Betsy and Travis entering the movie theater. Walking up to the box office, Betsy is visibly dubious, but Travis insists that all kinds of couples come to this movie theater. Betsy seems unconvinced, but follows him into the theater and they take their seats. The movie depicts a smutty foreign film, with flashes of pornographic imagery, which seem to make Betsy upset. The screen shows a woman being penetrated and ravished by a multi-racial array of naked men, as the subtitles describe Swedish innovations in sexual research. Betsy has had enough, and gets up and leaves the theater. Travis follows Betsy out of the theater and tells her he didn’t know she wouldn’t like it and that he doesn’t know much about movies. Betsy responds, “Taking me to a place like this is about as exciting to me as saying, ‘let’s fuck,’” as she looks over her shoulder at a nearby prostitute. When Travis asks if he can take her somewhere else, Betsy excuses herself and he grabs her arm to prevent her from leaving. She pulls away from him, insisting that she has to go, and gets in a taxi, as Travis insists that she take the Kris Kristofferson record, even though she says she already has it. The taxi speeds away and Travis walks past a group of prostitutes.
The scene shifts to Travis on another day using a payphone to call Betsy. He apologizes for the other night and asks if she is okay, and she tells him she has had a 24-hour virus and that she has been working hard. When he asks her to have a cup of coffee, she tells him she cannot, and he asks if she received the flowers he sent. The camera moves sideways to the starkly lit hallway next to the payphone, as we hear Travis wrap up the phone call. In voiceover, Travis reveals that he kept calling Betsy, but that she refused to pick up after the first call, and we see Travis walk down the hall towards the street. The shot shifts to reveal, lined up in Travis' apartment, the returned, dying flowers that Travis had sent to Betsy’s office. Travis says that the flowers made him sick and gave him headaches, and maybe even stomach cancer. Travis concludes his journal entry by saying that he shouldn’t complain, and that “you’re only as healthy as you feel.”
Travis, now pale and with large circles under his eyes, enters Palantine’s office, and approaches Betsy. Tom tries to hold him back, and Travis questions Betsy about her abrupt disappearance and refusal to answer his calls. As Tom ushers Travis out of the office, Travis snaps and raises his fists threateningly. Before being pushed out of the office, Travis yells at Tom, “You’re in a hell, and you’re gonna die in a hell, just like the rest of ‘em!” Insisting that there is a cop across the street, Tom removes Travis from the office, calling to the cop across the street. Travis walks away, and we here him in voiceover again, saying: “I realize now how much she's just like the others, cold and distant, and many people are like that, women for sure, they're like a union.”
Travis picks up a customer at a bar at night, and drives him to an apartment building. When Travis stops the meter, the customer becomes upset and tells him to keep it running, that he is not getting out of the cab. At the customer’s belligerent request, Travis once again puts the meter down, and begins to write something down. The customer is visibly anxious and bossily tells Travis not to write and to simply sit at the curb and wait. When the man tells Travis to look up at a light in the second story, Travis sees the silhouette of a woman smoking in the window, whom the man reveals to be his wife, in another man’s apartment. Travis remains silent, but the man continues to talk, ruefully telling him that “a nigger lives there.” When the man tells Travis that he is going to kill his wife, Travis doesn’t answer, and the man goes into more detail, telling Travis he is going to kill her with a pistol. The man laughs uncomfortably, talking about what a pistol can do to a woman’s face, before saying that Travis “should see what it does to a woman’s pussy.” Travis remains silent, but moves the rearview mirror, his eyes glassy, presumably from insomnia and despair. As the man laughs and presses Travis about whether he thinks he is “sick,” Travis grows more and more stone-faced, looking up at the woman’s silhouette in the window.
Analysis
In the beginning of this section of the film, Travis, spurred on by his desire for Betsy, seems to become motivated to make something of himself and do the right thing. While in the first part of the movie, we see Travis as frustrated and aimless in his own righteousness, the chance to go on a date with Betsy and confide in her gives Travis a new impetus. In the beginning of the film, Travis is glassy-eyed and distractible, lost in thought. After snagging a date with Betsy, he is focused and present, attentive to her responses to him and dogged in his pursuit. While the two do not seem to have a terribly strong connection, his belief in their compatibility carries him through the interaction and charms Betsy into agreeing to another date, clearly intrigued by his contradictions. The Kris Kristofferson lyric that she compares him to only further situates the viewer in the 1970s era of the film, and confirms Travis’s characterization as a “walking contradiction.”
Iris, the child prostitute, is yet another female character that makes Travis feel possessive and protective, and Iris and Betsy represent two poles on the spectrum of femininity in Travis’s eyes. Betsy is an independent and professional woman working for an idealistic political cause, while Iris is a pre-teen who is already working as a prostitute. Betsy represents a quintessential second-wave feminist, working on behalf of a progressive political campaign and fighting for greater equality. Contrastingly, Iris is a young victim of a grossly misogynistic world, forced into sexual slavery before she has even come of age. Travis extols the purity and angelic aura of Betsy without any actual evidence of her purity. Meanwhile, he is grossly offended by Iris’s compromised purity. The two women are counterpoints to one another on an erotic spectrum, as well as a political spectrum. Running from her demanding and forceful pimp, Iris represents how the idealistic official world—the world of Palantine and Betsy's domain of representational politics—fails its most vulnerable citizens. This realization sows the seeds of Travis’s motivation to take matters into his own hands.
In spite of all his talk about her purity, however, Travis remains true to Betsy’s characterization of him as a “walking contradiction” when he takes her to see a pornographic movie. Travis’s sexual politics are confused and confusing. While he wants to preserve Betsy’s purity and protect her from the seedy world of New York, he takes her to the epicenter of that exact seediness. Their second date reveals just how strained their chemistry actually is. Not only do we learn from Travis’s narration that Betsy hesitated about going on a second date, and it was his sheer boldness and persistence that got her to agree, but the venue of the date itself, a porno house, has a predictably negative effect on their already tenuous connection. While he may mean well, Travis’s notions about the desires of his female companion are completely misguided, and we begin to see Travis as deeply hypocritical and shockingly un-self-aware: one minute bemoaning the trashiness of New York, the next bringing a date to a smutty movie for a romantic evening.
His failed date with Betsy confirms Travis as a man of surprising contradictions. Obsessed with the purity of the woman he admires, Travis is shockingly un-sacred when it comes to choosing a date spot. While he bemoans the dirtiness of the New York streets, he thinks a classy outing is a trip to an X-rated movie. While he seems to look prejudicially at black people, most of the viewers in attendance at the movie are black, and the film depicts interracial sexual activity. While he believes he is treating Betsy to a special and thoughtful evening, his choice of a movie that objectifies female sexuality is unimaginative and thoughtless at best. The viewer can very easily understand why the movie is an inappropriate choice for a second date, and predicts the date’s failure before the couple even goes to their seats.
Betsy’s rejection of Travis is a devastating and game-changing event for him. In the face of rejection and resistance, Travis becomes almost delusional, and rather than accepting his mistakes and moving on, he becomes aggressively resentful of the world. He feels disrespected and wronged by the rejection, rather than vulnerable and self-reflective. As he leaves the Palantine office after telling Betsy off, he suggests that women are “like a union,” and that they are “cold and distant.” Instead of dealing with Betsy's rejection, Travis lashes out in misogynistic ways and insists that the problem is a universal problem of the world—and specifically women—being “cold and distant.” Betsy’s rejection becomes aligned in his mind with the ways that Travis feels rejected and misused by the world at large, and it is the event that sets his radicalization and turn towards vigilantism in motion.
