Taxi Driver

Taxi Driver

Opening Shot

A yellow cab emerges from steam. Literally from below the street, as if the city is exhaling it. Bernard Herrmann's saxophone theme slides in, jazzy and wrong, and Michael Chapman shoots Manhattan at night through a rain-smeared windshield. Travis Bickle's eyes fill the rearview mirror. He's watching. The city is a red-light blur. Scorsese gives you the entire character in the first image: a man trapped behind glass, looking at a world he can't touch and can't stop seeing.

What It Does

Chapman's New York is the most visceral urban cinematography of the '70s. The city is shot from cab height, through windows, in neon and sodium vapor that turns everything amber and pink. The famous overhead shot of Travis's apartment, gun laid out on the table, is Chapman's way of showing you a man's life from the perspective of God or a surveillance camera, which in Travis's paranoid framework are the same thing.

Herrmann's score was his last (he died the day after completing the recording sessions). The main theme is split: a romantic, yearning saxophone line and a military-style drum cadence that never quite sync. The music is Travis's interior life made audible. He wants love and he wants war and he doesn't know they're different impulses. Herrmann's genius was scoring the character rather than the scene.

De Niro's performance is built on a physical discomfort that never leaves. He sits wrong. He stands at angles. The "You talkin' to me?" mirror scene is improvised and it works because De Niro plays it as a man rehearsing an identity he can't quite land. Travis doesn't know how to be a person. He's performing a version of masculine authority assembled from movies and television, and the performance keeps glitching.

Why It's on the List

Taxi Driver predicted the modern American lone wolf with a specificity that remains unsettling fifty years later. Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader understood that Travis isn't an anomaly. He's a product: of war, of urban alienation, of a culture that tells men violence is purpose. The film's final act, where the media reframes Travis's massacre as heroism, is the most prescient ending in '70s cinema. Scorsese knew the machine would call the broken man a hero. He was right.

The Argument Against

The treatment of Iris (Jodie Foster) reduces a child trafficking victim to a prop for Travis's salvation arc. The film is more interested in Travis's psychology than in the reality of the world he claims to be saving. There's also a reading that the ending is Travis's dying fantasy, but Scorsese has never confirmed it, which means the film either endorses the media's rehabilitation of a mass shooter or fails to adequately critique it. The ambiguity here is less productive than Scorsese might intend.

Closing Image

Travis drives. The rearview mirror catches his eyes again. Herrmann's theme returns. The city streams past. A fare sits in the back. Everything is normal. Travis adjusts the mirror, and for a fraction of a second, something crosses his face. Then it's gone. The cab disappears into traffic. The city swallows him whole.