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Loneliness and Alienation in the Big City

Taxi Driver (1976) is one of the best films ever made, and it's on many top 100 all-time lists. It's a well-made Hollywood studio movie, yet it has the feel of a European-style personal film. Robert De Niro gives a towering performance as the protagonist, and he gets strong support from a number of actors, including Cybill Shepherd, Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel, Peter Boyle and Albert Brooks.


The film has a moody musical score by Bernard Herrmann, and it was made visually arresting by cinematographer Michael Chapman and director Martin Scorsese.

The title character is the emotionally disturbed Travis Bickle (De Niro), who cruises nighttime Manhattan, which he perceives as awash in pornography, hookers and junkies. He tries dating a pretty, attractively dressed office worker (Shepherd), but this ends in debacle. He meets a 12-year-old prostitute (Foster) and begins thinking maybe he can "rescue" her. Soon Travis fixates on the notion that he must perform some meaningful act. He buys four guns, and the film proceeds inexorably to a bloody climax.

Travis Bickle is one of the greatest characters in cinema history, and he is the brainchild of Paul Schrader. In the early 1970s, Schrader was a struggling screenwriter, Scorsese was showing promise as a director and De Niro was just beginning to get good roles. The remarkable story of how these three brilliant young talents came together to create the movie Taxi Driver is well told on the two-disc Collector's Edition DVD set.

Killer Dialogue

The DVD set contains the text of the shooting script, from which we can see that most of the lines spoken by the characters in the film come from Schrader. For example, he wrote Travis's monologue where the troubled cabbie drives around in a light drizzle and expresses his feelings about the ever-present urban lowlifes: "Some day a real rain'll come and wash all this scum off the streets."

We also see that the cerebral Schrader did something unusual in his script: he prefaced it with a quote from "God's Lonely Man," a famous essay by Thomas Wolfe, about loneliness being the central fact of human existence. Wolfe's words didn't make it into the movie, but at one point Travis is driving alone, and we hear him say in voice-over, "Loneliness has followed me my whole life, everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man."

But the film's most celebrated line wasn't written by Schrader. There's a scene in the screenplay where Travis practices with his guns and stands in front of a mirror, but he is given no dialogue. However, Scorsese encouraged improvisation during rehearsals, and that's where De Niro came up with the idea of having the paranoid Travis say to an imaginary person who may be trying to intimidate him, "You talkin' to me?"

Arresting Visuals

Travis's mindset is perfectly captured by hypnotic, lyrical montages of his taxi gliding through the city at night, its meter clicking as the fare mounts, and through the windows he sees impressionistic images of red and green traffic lights and garish neon. The mood is enhanced by an alto sax on the soundtrack playing a lament of romantic yearning.

There are also small, unexpected visual moments such as the close-up of an Alka-Seltzer tablet fizzing in a glass of water, symbolizing Travis's inner turbulence. Scorsese has said that here he was influenced by a famous shot of a cup of coffee in Jean-Luc Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her.

A memorable unconventional shot occurs when a dejected Travis is on a wall payphone, talking to the pretty office worker, who has spurned him. The camera tracks away from him and fixes on a long, deserted hallway. The viewer experiences a painful feeling of aching emptiness, reminiscent of Antonioni.

"God's Lonely Man" Featurette + A Pair of Good Audio Commentaries

An excellent featurette on the DVD is the 22-minute "God's Lonely Man," which consists mainly of an interview with screenwriter Paul Schrader. He identifies certain literary works as influencing his creation of Travis Bickle, notably Dostoevsky's Notes From the Underground, Camus's The Stranger and Sartre's Nausea.

Also, the featurette contains remarks by university professor Robert Kolker, author of A Cinema of Loneliness. He says that Schrader was particularly interested in French filmmaker Robert Bresson, but Kolker claims that the major influences on Taxi Driver were Hitchcock's Psycho and John Ford's The Searchers.

The DVD provides two separate feature-length audio commentaries, one by Schrader, the other by Kolker, and each is good in its own way. The intellectual Schrader used to write film criticism, transitioned to screenwriter and went on to direct several movies, so he brings an insider's knowledge to his commentary. Kolker, on the other hand, approaches his commentary with a scholar's distance, giving clear explanations of the sort you might expect to hear from a well-organized professor in an undergraduate class.

There has long been some question as to how the final five minutes of Taxi Driver should be interpreted. Do the events depicted actually happen, or do they take place only inside Travis's head? Schrader's comments indicate he intended the former, but Kolker's imply he thinks it should have been the latter.

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