Taxi Driver
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
This interface of art and business is fundamental to the achievement of his Taxi Driver score, which helps disguise or at least rationalize the film’s ideological confusions, all of which circulate around the psychotic hero, Travis Bickle (De Niro). It assigns them an emotional purity that nothing else in the movie expresses–an emotional purity that coalesces around two contrasting themes that are endlessly reiterated and juxtaposed. For the purposes of this discussion I’ll call these the “heaven” and “hell” themes. The first is associated with Bickle’s feelings toward two supposedly angelic female characters–a professional political campaigner he’s attracted to, Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), who’s working for a presidential hopeful named Palatine, and a 12-year-old street hooker he wants to save, Iris (Jodie Foster). (Bickle fails to develop any sort of relationship with Betsy, after making the cardinal error of taking her to a porn movie on their first date, but he improbably winds up “saving” Iris by killing her pimp–played by Harvey Keitel–and a couple of his associates.) The hell theme, at once more brooding and more bombastic, smoldering with repressed rage, is associated with the contaminated vision of Manhattan that informs Bickle’s tortured, puritanical reveries from first frame to last.
The heaven theme is a lush, jazzy ballad of romantic yearning performed by alto saxophonist Ronnie Lang that suggests a much older and more upscale cultural tradition of big-city aspiration than anything else in the movie (except perhaps a few shots outside the Saint Regis Hotel)–a tradition closer to Herr-mann’s generation than to that of Scorsese, Schrader, and De Niro, who were all born in the 1940s. This lyrical “penthouse” lament suggests the dreaminess of Gershwin or Porter rather than any musical tradition directly tied to Bickle–a former marine in his mid-20s who opts for driving a taxi as an expression of his terminal loneliness, insomnia, and spiritual and social isolation. The benefits of using such a musical idiom to legitimize, sentimentalize, and romanticize–in short, to glamorize–Bickle’s madonna-and-whore notions about women are incalculable. (To be fair, the bridge midway through this 32-bar standard introduces subtle doubts by becoming oddly polytonal–the muted trumpet and muted trombone playing in a different key than the accompanying strings and piano, conveying something of Bickle’s dissociated state of mind. But the final eight bars revert to the chordal comfort of the beginning, landing the audience squarely on its feet.)
It should be stressed that Schrader’s script–a grim, confused reflection of his strict upbringing as a Dutch Calvinist in Grand Rapids, Michigan; he was forbidden to see any movies before he was 17–is a twisted self-portrait that sorely needs the realistic inflections and star power furnished by De Niro and the seductive fantasy elements conjured up by Herrmann (emotional) and Scorsese (visual). Without their contributions the story of Taxi Driver would be deficient in conviction and overall appeal, for a surprising number of details are implausible from the outset.
Wood cites “the putdown of unionization” (Blue Collar), “the putdown of feminism ‘in the Name of the Father’” (Old Boyfriends), “the denunciation of alternatives to the Family by defining them in terms of degeneracy and pornography” (Hardcore), “the implicit denigration of gays” (American Gigolo), and “the glorification of the dehumanized hero as efficient killing-machine (unambiguous in Rolling Thunder, confused–I believe by Scorsese’s presence as director–in Taxi Driver).” To this list one could add later examples, such as the exploitation of sexual disgust in Schrader’s remake of Cat People, the direct celebration of Japanese fascism in Mishima, the trashing of radical politics in Patty Hearst (which he directed but didn’t write), and, reportedly, the flip trivializing of Hollywood blacklisting in his recent made-for-cable Witch Hunt (which turns the anticommunist witch-hunts into events involving actual witches).
These are of course only a few sources of the film. I’ve already mentioned Schrader’s well-advertised indebtedness to Bresson, especially Diary of a Country Priest and Pickpocket. Schrader has also said, “Before I sat down to write Taxi Driver, I reread Sartre’s Nausea, because I saw the script as an attempt to take the European existential hero…and put him in an American context. In so doing, you find that he becomes more ignorant, ignorant of the nature of his problem.” Schrader has also described in detail how many aspects of the plot are suggested by Ford’s The Searchers, with Bickle serving as an updated version of John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards and Keitel’s pimp standing in for Scar, the Comanche warrior who kidnaps Debbie (Natalie Wood).
