Genre FilmKnight 3 May 1995

Taxi Driver as Radicalized Film Noir

In his film Taxi Driver, Martin Scorcese presents a world where characters are

subsumed in the urban landscape, vertical planes obscure the horizon, and hazy

lights reflect off streets perpetually slick with rain. Scorcese combines realistic

settings with expressionist cinematography to construct a stylized vision of

meaninglessness, in which a psychopathic protagonist moves from street to street

without direction, finding no release for the nameless anxiety he feels for the city.

Taxi Driver, with its unconventional (anti-)hero, Travis Bickle, lack of substantive

plot, and mix of documentary and abstract photography, defies traditional efforts to

place it in a specific genre. It is a sort of detective film without a detective; a

gangster film with only second-rate, rarely-seen mafia figures; a social-problem film

with society itself as the problem. The themes of Taxi Driver—corruption, urban

oppression, violence, nostalgia—are so large and encompassing, diagetically and in

the real-world, they expand beyond the barriers of a single genre. Scorcese makes

few attempts to particularize these themes to Travis’s surroundings, instead

requiring the audience to harbor the same vague sense of general filth that plagues

his protagonist. Despite its apparent rejection of generic convention, Taxi Driver is

not without stylistic and thematic precedent. Film noir, a style of film dominant

roughly from the early-forties to late-fifties, also features expressionist photography

that captures morally and psychologically unstable protagonists making their way

through dark and corrupt cities. Generally, these films’ heroes were rough, “hard-

boiled” detectives/investigators torn from the pages of dime novels. As the style of

film noir evolved, “Hollywood lighting grew darker, characters more corrupts,

themes more fatalistic, and the tone more hopeless” (Schrader 1972). Later, the

protagonists and the worlds they inhabited grew increasingly chaotic, until the

characters, settings, and themes ceased to be identifiable as film noir. Films, like

Chinatown (Polanski 1974) revived many of the themes of films noir, but stopped

short of seriously employing the stylistic trends of the earlier films. According to

John Cawelti (1979), Chinatown is a generically-transformed film noir, consciously

adapting certain elements from an preceding style or genre, and recasting them

with a degree of self-consciousness, or even parody. In much the same way that

Chinatown pastiches the plots and thematics of many films noir, Taxi Driver

borrows many of films’ stylistic features, changes their stories to fit a contemporary

society, and even turns to those artistic movements which anticipated and

influenced the initial development of film noir. Taxi Driver, then, is a radicalized

film noir, a work of noir-like cinematography which masks the lingering traces of

order, stability, or meaning left over from the noir-worlds of the late 1950s. The film

seeks out the limits of characteristically noir subjects like corruption and loss-of-

identity, and finding none, continues what 1950s-noir began, expressing the

limitlessness of these subjects through style and theme.

Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver’s screenplay, outlines his view of film

noir in his essay “Notes on Film Noir” (1972). Combining Schrader’s notes with

Cawelti’s theory of generic transformation, we see that Taxi Driver can be

understood as a film in the tradition that began with classic films noir like The

Maltese Falcon (Huston 1941) and The Big Sleep (Hawks 1946), continued through

Touch of Evil (Welles 1958), lapsed for a decade or so, and then resurfaced,

transformed, in Chinatown. Scorcese, in making Taxi Driver, not only had access to

a thirty- or forty-year-old tradition of noir, but also was immersed in the cultural

context of the 1970s, an era not entirely different from that which produced the

first-round of noir films. Schrader argues that World War II helped to generate the

kind of cynicism which figures prominently in those films. Likewise, Schrader wrote

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and Scorcese directed Taxi Driver in the period immediately following the Vietnam

War which, along with Watergate, did much to inspire a national mood of

pessimism, cynicism, or—as Carter put it—malaise. “The forties may be to the

seventies what the thirties were to the sixties,” Schrader contends (1972), indi-

cating that the same down-beat feelings present thirty years earlier were operating

again in post-Vietnam America, and that given the shared mood between the two

decades, the earlier acts as a source of artistic inspiration for the later.

In his essay, Schrader points out the four major influences on noir, each of

which seems also to have influenced, in one form or another, his and Scorcese’s

work on Taxi Driver. The first of these forces Schrader discusses is war and

postwar disillusionment. Considering World War II, Schrader outlines the way in

which America, recognizing man’s capacity for inhumanity to man, prepared itself

to see this reality represented in art as well as in the news. The notion of

disillusionment connotes the growing lack of faith in conventional images of

American man and society as capable of doing only good; disillusionment meant an

upsurge in moral ambiguity or relativism, the sense that what a person feels is

“good” or “evil” is subject to change, depending on context. In mid- and postwar

Hollywood, the heroes began to skirt the edge of corruption, eventually rooting out

the villains, but perhaps using questionable methods to do so. But these new

protagonists did not necessarily disappoint the viewing public. Instead, audiences

were willing to take on a realist perspective in looking at America. “Audiences and

artists were now eager to take a less optimistic view of things,” Schrader suggests

(1972), a view that reflected the realities of the war, one that made allowances for

ostensibly immoral acts in times of need. Recognizing that capacity for immorality

in themselves, and seeing themselves a component part of society at large, artists

and audiences turned a cynical eye toward their own values. Schrader notices this

pessimism emerging thematically in films of the period which featured servicemen

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returning home after the war to find unfaithful lovers, cheating business partners,

or—in a mode more explicitly critical—“the whole society something less than worth

fighting for” (Schrader 1972). The disillusionment manifested stylistically after

American audiences sought a grittier, grimier reality than that featured in the

studio-based productions of the thirties. Filmmakers understood that “the public’s

desire for a more honest and harsh view of America would not be satisfied by the

same studio sets they had been watching for a dozen years” (Schrader 1972). As a

response, they turned to realistic, location settings. A film that took place in New

York would be shot, at least partially, in New York. The notion that America perhaps

was not worth the effort lurks beneath the surface of many films noir, but this

disillusionment comes to the fore in Taxi Driver, both thematically and stylistically.

The America that served as the backdrop for Taxi Driver suspected not only

that America’s struggle in Vietnam was not worth the trouble, but also that those

who fought there were not worthy of respect. The film’s protagonist returns from

Vietnam and apparently is incapable of finding steady work, until he lands at a cab

service. Travis rapidly becomes as angry with America as America is at him. He

does, after all, attempt to assassinate Senator Palantine, who comes to represent all

of America with his evocation of Whitman and his presidential campaign slogan,

“We are the people” (Scorcese 1976). In his move to kill Palantine, Travis tries to

erase everything Palantine stands for, all that the American way represents. He is

the epitome of the disillusioned soldier, the man who returns from war, angry and

looking for answers to questions he cannot even frame. When Palantine asks Travis

what he would change about America, Travis is frightening and virulent in his

response. He rambles on about the city he drives and lives in, New York,

condemning it as “an open sewer, full of filth and scum.” Somebody, he says,

“should really clean up the whole mess…flush it right down the fucking toilet.” For

Schrader, this is an instance of early noir’s postwar self-hatred. “The war continues,

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but now the antagonism turns with a new viciousness toward American society

itself” (Schrader 1972). Travis’s are the words of man who feels he needs to destroy

a city to save it, a man who wants to reinstate values that may never have existed

and are nowhere to be found. When Palantine responds that “it won’t be easy” to

make the adjustments, and that “radical changes” are necessary, Travis is just

beginning to develop his own solutions to the problem he sees. Although at first,

Palantine and Travis seem to differ only by degree in their desire for change, Travis

later reads Palantine, a populist, as part of the problem, representative of all the

problem confronting America, from the streets of New York to the White House.

Palantine’s remark that he has learned more about America “from riding in taxi

cabs than in all the limousines in the country” speaks to his understanding the

underside of the American character, at once condemned and represented by

Travis. The “radical changes” Palantine supports are necessary in this radicalized

society where the moral depravity of the early-noir city is so encompassing, it

envelops even those who purport to liberate it from corruption. The hero, whether a

figure like Travis or Palantine, is immersed in the same filth.

Whereas in earlier noir, “only the individual of integrity who exists on the

margins of society can solve the crime and bring about true justice” (Cawelti 1979),

later incarnations of the noir protagonist lack integrity, in both the moral and

psychological senses of the term, and as figures on the edge of society, are equally

trapped in the corruption which makes no distinctions between inner- and outer-

society. Like those real-life would-be assassins who preceded and succeeded him,

Travis is a textbook paranoid schizophrenic, a man whose sense of self is falling

apart and who tries endlessly to thwart a conspiracy that either does not exist or is

too large to defeat. Travis’s schizophrenia is the extreme manifestation of a

phenomenon Schrader sees in the late, or third phase, of film noir, the one to which

Taxi Driver is most closely related: “the forces of personal disintegration are

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reflected in these films” (Schrader 1972). Cawelti notes that as Chinatown ends,

“instead of bringing justice to a corrupt society, the detective’s actions leave the

basic source of the corruption untouched…the detective is overwhelmed” (Cawelti

1979). Taxi Driver takes this notion to an even further extreme. Travis, unlike Jake

Gittes, is already overwhelmed by corruption. For Schrader, in the chaotic noir city,

“there is nothing the protagonists can do; the city will outlast and negate even their

best efforts” (Schrader 1972). The massacre which ends the film succeeds only in

wiping out three small-time low-lifes, who are only tangentially involved in the film’s

plot. In Travis’s mind, however, the pimp he kills is blown-up into a virtual devil.

Sport, the pimp, is the surrogate Palantine, who represents the moral hell of

America after Palantine proves too hard to vanquish. His language to Iris regarding

Sport echoes his earlier words to Palantine about the city: “Somebody’s got to do

something to him. He’s the scum of the earth. He’s the worst sucking scum I’ve

ever seen.” By killing Sport and the other men, not only does Travis leave “the basic

source” untouched, he deludes himself into thinking he has been successful. If, with

Pauline Kael (1976) we understand Travis’s story as a progression from mounting

tension to catharsis in the form of violence, we see that for Travis, the catharsis

worked. After waking up from his coma, he goes back to work, smiling and polite,

apparently content with life in the Big City. Furthermore, the corrupt society buys

into Travis’s catharsis, making him a “Taxi Driver Hero” in the media. The media in

the film, voicebox for society in general, accepts Travis’s skewed morality as its

own. Taxi Driver’s society, from its cab drivers to its senators, from its runaway

girls to its senators and media elite, is corrupt.

Stylistically, the postwar disillusionment in the 1940s translated into realism

across many artistic disciplines. This realism meant heightened emphasis in

Hollywood on realistic settings. “Realistic exteriors,” says Schrader, “remained a

permanent fixture of film noir” (Schrader, 1972). This holds true for Taxi Driver,

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and for many of the same reasons. The televised coverage of the Vietnam War, it

has been said, brought the war into our living rooms. America was able to witness

war as it happened, where it happened. Audiences soldiers squatting in the jungle,

walking through city streets, flying overhead in jets and helicopters. The media’s

treatment of Vietnam set a standard in the average viewer’s mind about what some-

thing had to look like to be convincing. The near-cliché that “TV is more real than

reality” is born of this era when events had to be broadcast on television to seem

real. The viewers’ thirst for reality on the screen continued after the war and

carried into movie theaters. Scorcese’s work often—though not always—attempts to

satisfy that thirst. In the forties, realism worked to distinguish film noir from

conventional melodrama. It tried to take film noir out of the studio and place it

“where it belonged: in the streets with everyday people” (Schrader 1972). Scorcese

also plays on Schrader’s theme of populism and takes his camera into the streets. It

is appropriate, therefore, that Travis, who is almost always in effect our narrator, is

a taxi driver, cruising New York’s glitziest and seediest sections at all hours.

Through him, we are mixed in with everyday people. Travis does not, until he

shaves his hair into a Mohawk, stand out in a crowd. In several slow motion crowd

scenes, it is difficult to spot Travis in his conservative maroon coat and tie strolling

among a hundred other New Yorkers. He blends into street corners, brick walls, his

own taxi cab. People disappear into building exteriors; sleazy hotel managers are

indistinguishable from their sleazy hotels. Even Scorcese melts into the concrete as

Betsy, the angel in white, walks by him outside Palantine’s campaign headquarters.

For Schrader, this is characteristic of noir, in which “actors and setting are given

equal lighting emphasis. An actor is often hidden in the realistic tableau of the city

at night.” In Taxi Driver, actors are hidden in the daytime. Schrader maintains that

such lighting creates “a fatalistic, hopeless mood.” (Schrader 1972)

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Scorcese’s evocative New-York-at-night montages, from the point-of-view of

Travis behind the wheel, are merely expressive shots of real-world places in New

York. They do nothing to build character, further plot, or even (after a while)

establish setting. If anything, they serve to establish only the realism of the setting,

without providing information relevant to understanding the story of the film. They

do, however, add to our comprehension of the film’s style. The montages screen like

raw footage, often seemingly edited together without tension or rhythm in mind.

The tension in the shots is usually between their realist and expressionist

components, a tension reminiscent of earlier noir. We see classy hotels, porno

theaters, sometimes nothing but unremarkable stretches of road glistening, maybe

sweating, in the evening rain. Eventually, through the sheer volume of shots of New

York, we become, like Travis, unable to distinguish between the glamorous and

shady sites. One is as corrupt as the other. While some critics contend that in

response to all these scenes “our nerves our meant to jangle in response to the

recreation on screen of the urban Angst we are assumed to know so well” (Phillips

1976), it seems more likely that Scorcese is appealing to our inability to divide be-

tween the two faces of the city. With the montages, Scorcese does not try to jangle

our nerves; he wants to lull them. In early noir, location shooting carried a

subtextual message of “This is real. This could really happen here. To think

otherwise in an illusion.” Scorcese, on the other hand, does not need to convince

anyone that psychopaths live in New York. The illusion he dissipates with his

location shooting is that there is a real distinction between New York’s high and low

cultures.

The third influence Schrader cites as important to the development of film

noir is the high number of German expatriates working in Hollywood who brought

with them their German expressionist styles. At first glance, it would appear that

German expressionism would collide with the new attention to realism but, as

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Schrader points out, “it is the unique quality of film noir that it was able to weld

seemingly contradictory elements into a uniform style” (Schrader 1972). Scorcese,

while not influenced by a host of German émigrés in the 1970s, does seem to have

adopted expressionist techniques in Taxi Driver. The opening montage, for exam-

ple, establishes the dark, uncertain mood that pervades the remainder of the film.

As the Bernard Herrmann’s percussion-and-horn music begins, a cloud of white

steam/smoke fills the frame and seconds later the front end of a yellow cab breaks

through. An extreme close-up of Travis’s spying eyes follows, his face alternately lit

bright red or stark white, which gives way to a POV shot through a cab’s

windshield, of blurred city lights. Slow-motion scenes of walking crowds are

intercut with more extreme close-ups of Travis’s eyes shifting back and forth. The

white steam reappears, then gives way to a graphic match of white smoke that

Travis himself walks through on his way to the taxi company’s manager. These

opening shots express building pressure, paranoia, urban anonymity, and uncertain

perception, all of which emerge as stylistic motifs and narrative themes. Later

driving montages suggest Travis’s isolation from the rest of the city: he just cannot

connect. Views of the city shot from various points on the taxi’s exterior divide the

frame between an unchanging, bright-yellow car part (fender, sideview mirror, gas

tank lid) and a hazy, dark portion of the city with eerie red passing by, out of focus.

In such shots, it is impossible to find one’s bearings independent of the cab. One

street is indistinguishable from the next. The cab, for Travis, is an rowboat; the city

is an ocean. When Travis goes to a pornographic film, we see what he sees, hear

what he hears: a splotchy red screen that shows only poorly-defined red and black

blobs moving up and down, back and forth, with indiscriminate female moaning on

the soundtrack. The shot expresses that the movie is devoid of sexual value for

Travis. He sees the same film every tie he watches anything. Red and black forms,

no matter whether he sees them on the screen or through his windshield.

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The expressionist photography conveys theme through style, just as it had

with earlier noir. Oblique and vertical lines, able to disorientate any viewer and

confine any character, “adhere to the choreography of the city” according to

Schrader. Scorcese uses his realistic settings towards expressionist ends, perhaps

the perfect synthesis of tension inherent in noir photography. Vertical and diagonal

lines dominate the landscape in Taxi Driver. They dwarf characters, isolate them,

frame their perspective, and trap them. When Travis first meets Betsy in Palantine’s

campaign office, they chat in the foreground while Betsy’s co-worker, Tom, twice

comes between them in the background, at first centered beneath an enormous

banner that reads “PALANTINE,” the second time peering out from behind a thick

orange pillar framed between the two. The shots speak to Tom’s trying to separate

Betsy and Travis on an emotional level, but also to Travis’s inability to connect with

other people. In the immediately following scene, Travis and Betsy sit in a coffee

shop, at opposite corners of a square table. A vertical steel divider on the window

behind them falls exactly between them, and dissects the table, corner to corner.

When Travis drives around in his cab at night, and we see New York through his

eyes, our vision is inevitably bordered by the stark diagonal and vertical lines that

comprise the car’s window frames. Frequently, the structure of the car fills more of

the frame than whatever it is Travis is looking at. The first look at Sport and second

at Iris are heavily obscured by the car’s frame. If the lines of his car do not obscure

what he looks at, the water on the windshield does. The water, whether from

rainfall or hydrant, obfuscates all planes of vision, leaving only a malleable lens

through which Travis watches the filth. Although Travis drives around all night,

staring through his windows, he cannot see anything clearly.

Both times Palantine addresses assembled New Yorkers, Scorcese films on

location, but chooses very carefully his camera angles and lens lengths, so as to add

an skewed perspective on the transpiring events. One particularly evocative shot is

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of a bull-horn type loudspeaker suspended on a pole, between two high-rise

buildings. The buildings seem to shoot endlessly straight into the sky, but the

loudspeaker, blaring some political aphorism, dominates the frame, its wide mouth

obscuring the lower portions of the sky-scrapers. Later, for Palantine’s second

address, Scorcese places Palantine beneath a statue of an angel with outspread

arms, standing atop an enormous pedestal. Shots from behind the angel portray the

widespread stone arms of the figure matching a barely visible Palantine, whose

arms extend in precisely the same manner. This shot is intercut with tracking shots

of the audience’s midriffs, arms, and legs. The camera tracks onto the dais from

which Palantine speaks, and moves right past his waist, as though he were an

inconsequential entity in the scene. Shortly after, the camera tracks past the lower

part of his face, but neglects to center him in the frame, or even capture his entire

head at once. When the camera reaches Travis, standing in the rear of the crowd,

alone, it begins at his midlevel, then tracks up famously to reveal his warrior

haircut. The soundspace also is altered to emphasize Travis’s presence. When the

audience applauds, we hear a somewhat muted patting of hands, but when Travis

claps, the sound rings out in the aural foreground, tinny, piercing, loud, and hollow.

The fourth and final influence Schrader notes is that of the hard-boiled

tradition in fiction writing in the 1920s to 1940s. Writers like Mickey Spillane,

Dashiel Hammett, Ross MacDonald, and Raymond Chandler introduced a new

character, perhaps derived from earlier heroes of dime westerns. This new hero,

the “tough” was a kind of urban cowboy, who had the same outside-the-law sense of

justice, and the power to bring his justice to bear, but in moving to the city, the

cowboy traded in some of his absolute righteousness for a touch a moral ambiguity.

According to Schrader, hard-boiled protagonists embodied “a cynical way of acting

and thinking that separated one from the world of everyday emotions” (Schrader

173). If Sam Spade was emotionally separated just enough to resist Brigid

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O’Shaugnessy in The Maltese Falcon, then Travis Bickle is Spade taken to an almost

sociopathic extreme. Bickle falls for Betsy and Iris not because he admires their

character traits, but because he thinks they might conform to some plot of his to

liberate them from urban squalor. Travis is so detached from his emotions, he con-

fuses love of self with love of other. As he moves from obsession with Betsy to

obsession with Iris, Travis adopts a deterministic sense of direction. Like

Chinatown’s Gittes, He fits into Cawelti’s form of the traditional hard-boiled

detective “who begins as a marginal individual, but gradually finds himself

becoming a moral agent with a mission” (Cawelti 1979). The major difference is

that Travis remains a marginal figure, and his moral mission is of questionable

moral worth. Like Gittes, Spade, and many of the noir protagonists between them,

Travis “lives out narcissistic, defeatist code” (Schrader 1972), a narcissism so

extreme, the only reality that matters to him is the hybrid of paranoia and nostalgia

that hides behind his voyeuristic eyes. “Now I see it clearly,” Travis tells himself as

he prepares to assassinate Palantine. “My whole life is pointed in one direction.

There never has been any choice for me” (Scorcese 1976).

In his efforts to trace J. J. Gittes’s spiritual predecessors, Cawelti explores

the parameters of the hard-boiled detective a little more deeply than Schrader. He

argues that the hard-boiled detective of earlier film noir, as a figure on the “margins

of society,” shares certain characteristics with Gittes. Travis also shares certain

features, but he alters them to such a degree, they are barely recognizable as

influences from past noir protagonists. Perhaps the defining trait of the noir

detective/hero is his usual position not only on the edge of society, but on the edge

of the law. He might be a former employee of the police force or district attorney’s

office, for example, and has since taken up private practice. Travis once worked for

one of the nation’s largest police forces: the Marines. The image of honor, courage,

and integrity that the Marines tries to present of itself is totally broken down in

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Travis, who is mentally unstable and given to political assassination. Cawelti

maintains that the noir hero’s “position on the edge of the law is very important,

because one of the central themes of the hard-boiled myth is the ambiguity between

institutionalized law enforcement and true justice” (Cawelti 1979). Like his

predecessors, Travis is fed up with waiting for the usual means of law enforcement

to do their job, and he is ready to take actions for himself, particularly since the

usual means (as embodied in Palantine) are part of the corruption in the system. In

their efforts to achieve justice, the detectives go a little to far: they hurt an innocent

person, they employ questionable methods, so their strict integrity, in the

audience’s minds, is open to debate. Other times, as for the generically-transformed

Gittes, they are strong men who also fail. Cawelti presents the late noir hero as “the

paradoxical combination of a man of character who is also a failure” (Cawelti,

1979), a failure insofar as he has been unable to totally root out the evil in a given

society. Travis’s paradoxical identity is made explicit in his first conversation with

Betsy who, a little taken in, is perhaps too complimentary at first. Telling him that

he reminds her of “That song by…Kris Kristofferson” she recalls the lyrics: “He’s a

prophet and a pusher, partly truth partly fiction. A walking contradiction” (Scorcese

1976).

Travis is indeed a walking contradiction, a polite, gentlemanly cab driver

whose bright smile wins the initial affection of Betsy, and whose twisty smile

crosses his face after murdering three men. He is a prophet in the sense that he

advocates a new age of moral cleanliness, a return to older, vaguely-defined values;

but he’s a pusher because he reveals himself to be little more than the common

street-scum he puts to death. The part-fiction of Travis’s character affects him in

the same way it does Jake Gittes. Both try to live up to the mythical standard of

their predecessors, but the generic/thematic worlds in which they struggle have

changed so radically, victory in unattainable. Cawelti argues that this struggle is

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represented by the “Chinatown” motif in that film: “Gittes’s confrontation with a

depth of depravity beyond the capacity of individualistic justice is…the essential

significance of…Chinatown” (Cawelti 1979). Travis faces an even deeper depravity,

one that (as in Chinatown) touches people from the highest to lowest social strata,

but also one that touches everyone in those strata, not just a select few power-

brokers and henchmen. Chinatown hints at this in its use of water, once a symbol of

purity, as a source of corruption, but it stops short of the all-encompassing

depravity we find in Taxi Driver’s New York. By Cawelti’s standard, Travis seems

very much to be essentially the generically-evolved version of the older

noir/detective hero. “The true thrust of the [hard-boiled] myth…is…essentially

toward the marginal hero becoming righteous judge and executioner, culture hero

for a society that has profoundly ambiguous conflicts in choosing between its

commitment to legality and its belief that only individual actions are ultimately

moral and trust” (Cawelti 1979). Travis’s actions—judging and executing a selection

of small-time criminals—are indeed construed as heroic by the media, as the scene

immediately following the massacre reveals. In his treatment of Travis, Scorcese

captures the essence of the myth” but removes the ambiguity that Cawelti

maintains society should feel. In Taxi Driver’s world, Travis is resolutely a hero, as

though his actions were heroic on some existential level, just because he, unlike

everyone else in the city, actually appeared to do something, to take some action.

“Here is,” he tells himself, “a man who stood up” (Scorcese 1976).

Elements of Schrader’s cursory inventory of noir stylistics, which follows his

discussion of the four major influences, is also manifest in Taxi Driver. As we have

seen, Expressionist influences deeply affected both the early phases of noir and

later films, like Taxi Driver. With such styles, “compositional tension is preferred to

physical action. A typical film noir would rather move the scene

cinematographically around the actor than have the actor control the scene by

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physical action” (Schrader 1972). Scorcese takes this technique to heart with his

editing in general and montages in particular, both of which occasionally create

tension through the juxtaposition of images. When Travis first meets Betsy, for

example, the camera cuts on dialogue, each time tracking closer to whichever one

is speaking. The tracking in from “both sides” closes the space between the two

without their having to move. As the conversation closes, the camera tracks back

with each shot, expanding the space before Travis has moved. A more complicated

sequence of montage editing occurs when Travis and Betsy have their first date at

the porno theater. The frame is filled with a shot from the movie they are watching:

a woman talking to a man who appears to be her therapist. An immediate cut to a

shot of an ovary’s microscopic workings seems outrageously juxtaposed to its

predecessor. The next shot is of Betsy reacted with distaste, followed by one of an

orgy on screen. We see Betsy get up to leave. It seems that Swedish Sex Manual

and Taxi Driver conflate their editing for a few moments to create a scene of

impersonal sex and revulsion. In the porn film’s formulation, “talking about sex”

plus “sexual biology” loosely equals “orgy.” At the same time, the combination of

pornography and Betsy’s disgust results in Betsy’s leaving. The compositional

tension established in this scene is heightened near its end after Betsy leaves the

theater, and as she argues with Travis, stands next to a tall, blond prostitute, a

figure apparently meant as a moral and graphic counterbalance for Betsy.

Throughout the film, Travis drives down streets wet with rain, a rain he

hopes “someday…will wash away the filth.” He is sprayed by open fire hydrants,

hacks through rain storms on a seemingly nightly basis, clears his windshield of

great sheets of water that obscure his vision. All these elements are part of what

Schrader sees in noir as “an almost Freudian attachment to water” (Schrader 176).

Although Schrader seems to refer to noir directors who make sure all their

exteriors glisten with rainfall, Travis himself seems to be carry a peculiar

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attachment to water. His repeated insistence that a “real rain” will come and clean

up the corruption, his constant driving through the rain at night, suggest that water

is something he cannot escape, and that its cleansing powers, its ability to wash

away the filth, like his own, is impotent. The water, as in Chinatown, is no longer a

means of purification, but rather part of the dirt, a home for rankness and disease.

Travis also shares with his noir predecessors “a love of romantic narration”

(Schrader 176). But Travis the diarist seems more in line with Arthur Bremer

(Hatch 1976) than with the protagonists of Double Indemnity or even Lady from

Shanghai (Welles 1949). In his monologues, Travis is nervous, paranoid, rambling.

He makes up stories about himself, imagines himself as a grand figure in a giant

plot. He frames himself as a character in his own story: “The days move on and on

with regularity…each one as same as the next” and “Loneliness has followed me my

whole life…There’s no escape. I’m God’s lonely man” (Scorcese 1976). At least two

critics compare him to Dostoevski, a character writing from the underground (Kael

1976; Kroll 1976). Through his voice-overs, Travis evokes some of the film themes

(loneliness, sense-of-self) and connects himself to a value system that seems to have

no place in a world gone awry. Schrader contends that in noir, “narration creates a

mood of…an irretrievable past, a predetermined fate, and an all enveloping

hopelessness” (Schrader 1972). Travis attempts to retrieve that past through Iris,

telling her that “a girl should be at home, going to school,” trying to impose values

either enforced or absent from his own youth. He indicates his predetermined fate

in a voice-over that expresses his lack of choice or free-will and his need to fulfill a

“mission.” Travis’s narration does not explicitly explain his actions, as in Double

Indemnity, or serve as a form of introspective critique as in Lady from Shanghai.

Travis’s voice-over merely outlines his hazy, dissolute identity, as we see Travis

move through a plan that makes sense only to him.

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The final stylistic element Schrader points out in film noir is a complicated

treatment of time. Film noir, in a technique perhaps related to its preoccupation

with voice-overs and story-telling, employs “a complex chronological order…to

reinforce feelings of hopelessness and lost time” (Schrader 1972). This is achieved

particularly through the use of flashbacks, a device that does not appear in Taxi

Driver. Consistent with Travis’s paranoid plotting and journal-writing, Travis

reveals the time and dates of many events through his voice-over, but the dates

seem to lack meaning, to us and to him. The days, as he says, move on with

regularity, “a long, unbroken chain” of time, in which dates lose their relevance to

one another and their reference to reality. Chronological order in Taxi Driver has

become so complex, it breaks down. Travis’s days and nights are transposed, but he

still never seems to sleep, driving all night and plotting all day. The only time-frame-

of-reference that matters is Travis’s, and it matters only to him as he moves closer

to the completion of his mission.

Taxi Driver’s treatment of chronology is paradigmatic of its use of other noir

stylistic elements and influences, including Expressionism, the hard-boiled

tradition, and voice-over narration. With Taxi Driver, Scorcese presents a

radicalized view of film noir, one which exaggerates the corruption of a culture and

society’s willingness to tolerate it. Travis, like so many other noir heroes struggles

against that corruption, but is powerless to eradicate it. His impotence builds on

that of his predecessors who grew increasingly unable to root out the filth in their

noir worlds, and through an inversion of values, becomes a hero through his

meaningless act. This is the ultimate transformation of film noir, since the society in

which the protagonist operates is entirely corrupt, any action is useless, and any

hero must be an anti-hero.

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5981 words

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Sources

Primary

Scorcese, Martin (dir.). Taxi Driver. Columbia Pictures, 1976.

Secondary

Cawelti, John. “Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American

Films,” from Film Theory and Criticism, 2d ed., edited by Gerald Mast and Marshall

Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 559–579.

Hatch, Robert. From The Nation 222. (February 28, 1976): 253–4.

Kael, Pauline. “The Current Cinema: Underground Man,” from The New

Yorker 51. (February 9, 1976): 82–4.

Kroll, Jack. “Hackie in Hell,” from Newsweek 87. (March 1, 1976): 82–3.

Phillips, Harvey. “Mythical New York,” from National Review 28 (May 14,

1976): 511–2.

Schrader, Paul. “Notes on Film Noir,” from Film Comment 8, no. 1 (Spring

1972): 8–13.

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