âTaxi Driverâ
Really, it is not violence at all which is the âpointâ of the western movie, but a certain image of man, a style, which expresses itself most clearly in violence. Watch a child with his toy guns and you will see: what most interests him is not (as we so much fear) the fantasy of hurting others, but to work out how a man might look when he shoots or is shot. A hero is one who looks like a hero.
Robert Warshow, âThe Westernerâ
The person who made that slanderous movie about cab-drivers should be taken out and shot.
Anonymous New York City cabbie, quoted by film critic
Vincent Canby in the New York Times
I felt like I was walking into a movie.
John Hinckley III, explaining his state of mind during his attempted
assassination of US President Ronald Reagan
Perhaps the place to begin is with John Hinckley III, the man who, in 1981, tried to kill President Ronald Reagan so that, as the defence explained at his trial, âhe could effect a mystical union with Jodie Fosterâ, the actress who played a preteen prostitute in Martin Scorseseâs Taxi Driver and who, at the time of Hinckleyâs assassination attempt, was a freshman at Yale University. Hinckleyâs action assured Taxi Driver a privileged position in cultural history, making it the only film to inspire directly a presidential assassination attempt. That the assassination failed is only fitting, since Taxi Driver is a film steeped in failure â the US failure in Vietnam, the failure of the 1960s counterculture and, most unnerving, at least to forty-nine per cent of the population, the failure of masculinity as a set of behavioural codes on which to mould a life.
Or perhaps the place to begin is a decade earlier, with Arthur Bremer, who, in 1972, attempted to assassinate Alabama Governor George Wallace, but merely succeeded in paralysing him from the waist down. The front page stories about Bremer, along with Sartreâs Nausea, Dostoevskyâs Notes from the Underground and Robert Bressonâs film Pickpocket (1959), directly inspired Paul Schraderâs Taxi Driver screenplay.1
Schrader read the Bremer coverage while he was in a Los Angeles hospital, recovering from a gastric ulcer, at what he describes as the low point in his life. He was twenty-six years old, his marriage had broken up, the affair that broke up the marriage had broken up, he had quit the American Film Institute where he had been a fellow and he had been living in his car and drinking heavily. He said that when he checked in to the emergency room, he realised that he had not spoken to anyone for weeks. No wonder his imagination was captured by Bremer, who was also totally isolated and living in his car while he stalked various political heavyweights. Coming of age in the aftermath of a decade of political assassinations (JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy), Bremer had convinced himself that the surest and fastest way for him to get the attention he was starved of was by assassinating a famous politician. When he failed to penetrate Nixonâs security, he turned his attention to Wallace.
Bremer kept a diary. Parts of it were found in his car and parts in an apartment where heâd lived before taking off on the journey that would land him, at age twenty-one, in the penitentiary with a sixty-three-year sentence. The diary wasnât published until 1974,2 but passages from it made their way into the news stories. Schrader, who was already wedded to the first-person, voice-over narrative, found it fascinating that Bremer, an undereducated, lower middle-class, midwestern psychopath, would talk to himself in his diary just like a Sorbonne dropout in a Robert Bresson film.
Schrader got out of the hospital and wrote the script of Taxi Driver in about ten days.3 âThe theme,â he says, âwas loneliness, or, as I realised later, self-imposed loneliness. The metaphor was the taxi, a metal coffin on wheels, the absolute symbol of urban isolation. Iâd had this song by Harry Chapin in my head, about a cab driver who picks up a fare and it turns out to be his former girlfriend. And I put all that in the pressure cooker of New York City.â And who was Travis Bickle? Was he Arthur Bremer? âTravis Bickle,â Schrader replied, âwas just me.â
In case thereâs anyone who doesnât know, Taxi Driver describes one stiflingly hot summer in the life of Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), an alienated ex-Marine who drifted to New York shortly after the end of the Vietnam War. This background sketch may or may not be true, since we have only Travisâs word for it. With small exceptions, the film is told from Travisâs point of view and he is, to put it mildly, an unreliable narrator. Travis takes a job as a cabbie. Unable to sleep at night, he cruises in his taxi through a city that seems to him a hell. He becomes obsessed, in turn, with two women: Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a campaign worker for a presidential primary candidate, and Iris (Jodie Foster), a twelve-year-old prostitute. Betsy is the Madonna Travis wants to turn into a whore, while Iris is the whore he wants to save.
The seemingly desultory narrative is rigorously divided into three acts. In the first, Travisâs rage is diffuse; he rides around in his cab, more a witness than a man of action. In the second, he finds a mission and an object for his rage. (âOne day, indistinguishable from the next, a long, continuous chain. And then, suddenly â there is change,â he writes in his diary.) In the third, he puts his homicidal fantasies into action, taking aim at one father figure (the presidential candidate) and, when that attempt fails, turning his gun on another (Irisâs pimp Sport, played by Harvey Keitel). The carnage that ends Taxi Driver is devastating, but itâs also voluptuous â as voluptuous as anything in American movies â and all the more so because of the sense of repression that pervades the film until this moment. The entire film has been built so that this eruption of violence would seem both inevitable and more horrific than anything we might have imagined.
The slaughter is the moment Travis has been heading for all his life, and where this screenplay has been heading for more than eighty five pages. It is the release of all the cumulative pressure; it is a reality unto itself. It is the psychopathâs Second Coming.
Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver screenplay4
I like the idea of spurting blood. It reminds me ⊠God, it reminds me ⊠itâs like a purification ⊠you know, the fountains of blood ⊠like in the Van Morrison song ⊠âwash me in the fountainâ. But itâs realistic, too. The guy that puts the blood ⊠I said, give me a little more, he said thatâs going to be a lot, I said thatâs okay.
Martin Scorsese, March 1976, a month after Taxi Driver
opened in the United States5
Soon after Schrader wrote the first draft of Taxi Driver,6 he showed it to Brian De Palma, who passed it on to the producers Michael and Julia Phillips. They optioned the script for $1000 and began peddling it to the studios. There were no takers. The script was considered too dark, too violent, its protagonist too unsympathetic. Scorsese was hot to direct the film, but the Phillips shrugged him off. Mean Streets (1973) changed their minds. Still, their commitment to Scorsese hinged on his ability to convince one of his Mean Streets stars, Robert De Niro, to play Travis. Financing remained elusive for two years. It wasnât until De Niro won an Academy Award for his performance in The Godfather Part II and Scorseseâs direction of Alice Doesnât Live Here Anymore resulted in an Oscar for Ellen Burstyn that David Begelman, then president of Columbia, gave the Phillips a green light. Begelman loathed the script, but he couldnât refuse so much certified talent. Taxi Driver was financed originally for $1.3 million and wound up costing $1.9 million. Scorsese, Schrader and De Niro worked for next to nothing. Their up-front fees totalled $130,000. Scorsese and De Niro also had points in the picture, and, since the film grossed about $17 million in 1976 and ranked twelfth on Varietyâs box-office chart, they may have seen some small profit.
The violence Begelman found so disturbing in Taxi Driver had been working its way into Hollywood studio films for roughly two decades. Hitchcock raised the ante with Psycho (1960), which like Taxi Driver, crossed the psychological thriller with the horror film. In Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho,7 Steven Rebello writes that Hitchcock wanted to make a film to herald the new decade of the 1960s. He had been tracking the box-office success of the low-budget horror films produced by American-International and Hammer Films. He was also slightly envious of all the attention that had been paid to a French-language art film, Clouzotâs Diabolique (1955), with its gruesome corpse-in-the-bathtub scene. The trick, as Hitchcock saw it, was to adapt a dĂ©classĂ© piece of material (a pulp novel about a real serial killer), fill it with Hollywood stars and have it released by a major studio.
Although Psycho inspired an underbelly of slasher films, the studios were slow to follow Hitchcockâs lead. The next major studio film to scandalise the Hollywood establishment and the middlebrow critics was Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which not only glamourised the eponymous outlaws, but also eroticised gun violence. Sam Peckinpahâs The Wild Bunch followed two years later.
Schrader, Scorsese, De Niro
Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch opened against a background of the war in Vietnam and âthe war at homeâ â the civil rights and anti-war struggles. By 1968, the television networks, which had at first cooperated with the Pentagon by suppressing images of American dead or wounded, were pumping images of the escalating horror of the war â bodies that bled and burnt when assaulted by automatic weapons, bombs and napalm â into American households, where they were consumed as a regular part of the dinner hour. The imagery of the war and of the violence at home gave a moral justification to the film-makers, who now claimed it was their obligation, rather than their indulgence, to show the brutality of US culture. Also, in 1966 and again in 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) revised its rating code. More violence was allowed on screen, but age restrictions were placed on audiences.
The bloody nightmare of Vietnam surfaced not only in Hollywood movies, but also in avant-garde films and European art films. If The Wild Bunch was imprinted on Scorseseâs retina, so too was Stan Brakhageâs autopsy film, The Act of Seeing With Oneâs Own Eyes (1971), and Jean-Luc Godardâs Weekend (1967) and Pierrot le fou (1965). Indeed, itâs Taxi Driverâs extraordinary hybridity that partially accounts for its influence on two generations of film-makers and artists.
Thereâs a 1983 photograph by David Wojnarowicz (arguably the greatest and certainly the most subversive American artist of the 1980s) which appears on the cover of the catalogue for his 1999 retrospective at New Yorkâs New Museum.8 Wojnarowicz is seated in a chair, facing the camera. His right hand, with the index finger extended as if it were a gun, is pointed at his head. Itâs a mirror image of De Niroâs gesture at the end of the massacre in Taxi Driver. Wojnarowiczâs hand, however, is not covered in crimson. Instead, itâs painted blue and his face is painted yellow â an homage to the ending of Pierrot le fou, where Belmondo, having just shot the woman he loves and bent on killing himself, paints his face blue and wraps yellow and red dynamite around his head.
Wojnarowicz made the connection between the suicidal, alienated anti-heroes of the two films, both driven mad by the time in which they lived, and between the striking use of primary colours in both films to describe a nightmare narrative â a male anxiety dream of castration and death. While there are no two more film-literate raiders of the image bank than Godard and Scorsese, their aesthetics, politics and methodology have little common ground. When Scorsese borrows the jump-cut strategy of Breathless (1959), itâs not to shake up conventions of linearity or to throw a monkey wrench into habits of identification, but to reveal the gaps and disconnection in Tra...