Taxi Driver (film)
"Taxi Driver" is a 1976 film directed by Martin Scorsese, featuring Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle, a troubled New York City cab driver and Vietnam War veteran. The film explores themes of alienation and the struggle against urban decay, presenting a gritty portrayal of 1970s New York, depicted as a hellish landscape filled with crime and moral corruption. Bickle is drawn into a world of darkness, fixated on rescuing Iris Steensma, a young prostitute played by Jodie Foster, which leads him to confront her pimp.
The film is notable for its complex character study of Bickle, who embodies the antihero archetype, grappling with his repressed desires and violent impulses. Scorsese's work transcends typical vigilante narratives, intertwining sex and violence, while also touching on religious motifs. "Taxi Driver" received critical acclaim, earning four Academy Award nominations, and Foster won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Its cultural impact was profound, influencing discussions about mental health, vigilantism, and societal disillusionment, and it remains a seminal work in American cinema.
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Subject Terms
Taxi Driver (film)
Identification Motion picture
Date Released in 1976
Director Martin Scorsese
Scorsese’s critically acclaimed Taxi Driver captured the seamy underside of New York City and probed the psyche of an alienated taxi driver whose frustration leads him to apocalyptic violence.
Key Figures
Martin Scorsese (1942- ), film director
Taxi Driver is the story of Travis Bickle (played by Robert De Niro), a New York City cab driver who rescues Iris Steensma, a child prostitute played by Jodie Foster, and returns her to her midwestern parents by taking the law into his own hands. Charles Bronson in Death Wish (1974) and Clint Eastwood both in Dirty Harry (1971) and in Magnum Force (1973) had earlier tapped into an American frustration with law enforcement and an endorsement of vigilante action, but Taxi Driver transcends the vigilante genre. Throughout the film, New York is seen as a kind of hell, with dark shadows, steaming manholes, and neon lights; it is a classic film noir setting. The denizens of New York—prostitutes, pimps, bums, and criminals—appall Travis, a Vietnam vet who wishes that the city could be cleansed of its scum by a redeeming rain. Travis is the typical filmnoir antihero: an alienated outsider working on the margins. His repressed sexuality finds outlet only in his visits to pornographic film houses and his idealized image of an angel in white, Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), who works for a presidential candidate. He fails to pick up the cashier at the pornographic film house, and when he cons Betsy into a date, he foolishly takes her to a pornographic film.
Travis may divide women into the categories of whores and angels, but he cannot treat the two differently. After he sees twelve-year-old Iris working as a prostitute, he attempts to take her away from “Sport” Matthews, her pimp, but she does not want to leave Sport. This failure, coupled with his thwarted attempt to kill a presidential candidate, results in a bloodbath in which he kills Sport and some of his minions and is himself wounded.
In Taxi Driver, sex and violence are inextricably linked. Travis wants to use violence to achieve the cleansing he only dreamed about. The cleansing is itself linked to religion, a common theme in the work of Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader, the scriptwriter. Travis’s act, however, is not redemptive, and despite the media adulation that he receives, he remains an outsider, much like the John Wayne character of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), a Western film with which Taxi Driver is often compared.
Impact
Martin Scorsese’s portrait of the New York that Americans love to despise and his creation of an individual lost in the post-Watergate and post-Vietnam United States earned the film four Academy Award nominations, and Foster won Best Supporting Actress. Ironically, in 1981, John Hinckley, citing his love for the Foster he saw in Taxi Driver, attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan.
Bibliography
Friedman, Lawrence S. The Cinema of Martin Scorsese. New York: Continuum, 1998.
Hill, Anne E. Ten American Movie Directors. Berkeley Heights, N.J.: Enslow, 2003.
Keyser, Les. Martin Scorsese. New York: Twayne, 1992.