These notes on Taxi Driver were written by Nick Sansone, PhD Student, and Lance St. Laurent, the Cinematheque’s Project Assistant and PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A restored 4K DCP of Taxi Driver will screen at the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue, at 7 p.m. on Saturday, November 4. Admission is free!
By Nick Sansone & Lance St. Laurent
There is a moment early in Martin Scorsese’s newest film Killers of the Flower Moon where Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) is reading a children’s picture book telling the history of the Osage Nation and comes across an image of predators on the prowl with a caption that reads “Can you find the wolves in this picture?” For the most of his creative life, Martin Scorsese has dedicated himself to spotlighting the wolves that move among us, men who perceive themselves as prosperous providers or righteous protectors, but in reality, prey on the weak and vulnerable in our midst. In a similar vein, writer (and director) Paul Schrader has made such a prolific career out of dramatizing the lives of alienated, emotionally damaged men that they have become an archetype unto themselves, “God’s lonely man”.
Surely the most iconic troubled man of either Scorsese or Schrader’s career is Travis Bickle, the antihero protagonist of their 1976 film Taxi Driver, indelibly performed by Robert De Niro in one of his most famous roles. In some ways, Bickle has become bigger than the film itself within contemporary American popular culture, inspiring countless imitators—2019’s Joker springs to mind—and becoming a cultural shorthand for an archetypical disaffected and violent white male. The specter of Travis Bickle haunts contemporary life, evoked explicitly or implicitly by urban vigilantes like Bernard Goetz, by the seemingly endless cycle of school shooters, and even by the misogynistic online “incel” community. Most infamously, Bickle and Taxi Driver were cited as the primary inspiration for attempted Ronald Reagan assassin John Hinkley Jr., who was harboring delusions that such a violent act could attract the attention of Jodie Foster, the actress who portrays the 12-year-old sex worker Iris, who Travis violently “rescues” at the end of the film.
Travis Bickle may feel like a prescient peek into a future of disaffected American masculinity, but his primary inspiration actually came from a contemporary source. In 1972, Arthur Bremer attempted to assassinate right-wing Alabama Governor George Wallace, later publishing the diaries he kept in the months leading up to the shooting. In an interview with Film Comment, screenwriter Paul Schrader described hearing about Bremer’s assassination attempt on Wallace while in the hospital recovering from an ulcer. Schrader then used this event as a springboard, fusing it with his own disaffection as a miserable insomniac wandering the streets of New York and bringing in a mélange of cultural reference points—Robert Bresson, Sartre, and Harry Chapin’s “Taxi”, among others—to create a vivid portrait of a man teetering on the edge.
According to Schrader, To Kill a Mockingbird director Robert Mulligan was initially in talks to direct the film with Jeff Bridges as Travis Bickle. After Schrader’s script was optioned by producers Michael and Julia Phillips, several fortuitous developments helped get the project the backing of a studio, despite its pitch-black subject matter. First, the Phillips-produced film The Sting won the Oscar for Best Picture at the 1974 awards, granting the producing pair enough cachet to back more challenging projects. The next year, up-and-coming actor Robert De Niro won Best Supporting Actor portraying the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather, Part II and Ellen Burstyn won Best Actress for her performance in the Martin Scorsese film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Schrader himself was also becoming a hot commodity, having recently sold his screenplay The Yakuza to Warner Brothers for $300,000. After director Brian De Palma introduced Martin Scorsese to Paul Schrader, Scorsese became interested in directing his script for Taxi Driver, bringing along his Mean Streets collaborator De Niro, whom Scorsese had first met in 1959, as Bickle. The stars had aligned to make the project feasible, and in Schrader’s telling, “No studio wanted to make the film, but we were simply offering them too good a deal.” Columbia Pictures came on board and soon they had a budget of $1.9 million (roughly $10 million in 2023 dollars) for filming.
After a long summer shoot on location in New York City during a sanitation strike—imagine the smell if you dare—Taxi Driver was released in theaters in February 1976, and three months later screened at the Cannes Film Festival, winning the Palme D’Or. The next year, it would go on to earn four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and a posthumous nomination for Bernard Herrmann’s haunting, saxophone-heavy score. However, prior to these plaudits, the film was booed by audiences at Cannes and condemned during a press conference by the president of that year’s jury, legendary playwright Tennessee Williams. Williams, no stranger to the darker side of humanity in his own work, called watching the film’s violent climax “a brutalizing experience for the spectator” and stated that “films should not take a voluptuous pleasure in spilling blood and in lingering on terrible cruelties as though one were at a Roman circus.” Outside of Cannes, some contemporary critics also took issue with the film’s ending, with the Monthly Film Bulletin’s Richard Combs characterizing it as “the macho movie cliché of the heroine who returns to the hero once his capacity for purgative violence has been revealed.”
Despite what the histrionic outrage from some critics may claim, Scorsese and Schrader themselves have repeatedly refuted the notion that the ending of the film makes Travis Bickle a hero, with Schrader going as far as to say that “Travis cannot be tolerated. The film tries to make a hard distinction for many people to perceive: the difference between understanding someone and tolerating him. He is to be understood, but not tolerated.” Decades later, Roger Ebert offered his own reasoning for why Travis Bickle remains a compelling, even empathetic figure despite his alienating nature and capacity for brutal violence. “We have all felt as alone as Travis. Most of us are better at dealing with it.” Almost 50 years after its release, Taxi Driver remains as relevant today as it was in 1976, if not more so. Thankfully, we still have both Scorsese and Schrader, who just this year continued their lifelong obsessions with men of violence, first with Schrader’s A Master Gardener, then with Scorsese’s aforementioned Killers of the Flower Moon. However, the impact and influence of Taxi Driver goes far beyond the careers of its two major creators, as the decades since have seen an explosion of media that asks us to understand, even sympathize, with those that commit violence against their fellow man. Long before there was Patrick Bateman or Walter White, there was Travis Bickle. And as long as society continues to breed isolation and loneliness, there will always be Travis Bickle, haunting the darkest corners of the American consciousness and giving voice to the worst impulses of God’s lonely men.