Tightly-woven psychological classic

Rating: Null/10 (18 November 2000)

One of the greatest works of modern fiction is Martin Scorsese's film `Taxi Driver'. The film is less a realistic drama than a nightmare of the unconscious. The events depicted in the film could not, for all intents and purposes, take place in our modern world of repression and cynicism. By taking us out of that world Scorsese can tell a cautionary tale of the human mind, and its limits.
The reason I respect this film and its director so much is the exquisite development of the Bickle character. This man represents every man in his loneliness and potential for violence. It must be remembered in analyzing his character that the story is not in any sense real, it is a nightmare. By constantly reinforcing the dreamlike nature of the story, the director makes it seem that we are floating in Bickle's mind, and everything we see we realize is not the way it really is, but the way he sees it. When we look at the movie from this perspective, we can see that the Bickle character is very much like us. He is frightened by what he does not understand. He is alienated by a seemingly cold society that rejects his attempts at intimacy. Perhaps we have all not been alienated in this way, but surely all of us have felt alone and sometimes afraid.
This film is a brutally honest portrait of the creature called man, in all his glory and shame. The climax of the movie has Bickle going on a violent rampage, acting out his dark thoughts and deeds. Since this is a nightmare, not reality, this rampage represents the impulse in all of us for an outlet to our dark thoughts of violence and revenge. After his shooting spree, Bickle is seen as a hero, if only in his own mind. This redemption of Bickle's soul suggests that there is a possibility of redemption for all of us. It also reflects the director's strongly Catholic upbringing.

Taxi Driver is a cautionary tale, a film awakening in us a recognization of our own inner fears and desires, and our darker capabilities. The film expresses deeply felt emotions quietly, compassionately with Bickle, and we identify with him. Because they appeal to our own sense of moral responsibility, Bickle's fears of himself and the outside world work to gain compassion from the audience at large. Though we all perhaps have not been as convicted as Travis, nor lived our nightmares, one must at the least acknowledge and in some ways respect Bickle's lone honesty as he grapples for a sense of someplace to go, all he ever wanted - a sense of belonging. Travis's bloody rampage is the last climactic psychological attempt to express his rage toward the filth of society for a man who has been failed by all other forms of expression in society, and by society - attempts at simple conversation, to focus not on the macabre but the wholesome, or to make a true friend. In the end we see a man, disgusted by the utter trash around him, the garbage, the degradation of life, and through this unhealthy realization has he lost the appreciation of life he once had. He wishes to do one good thing for society - to make his contribution, which just happens to be the ridding of others whose lifestyles he loathes.

When Travis's mind has crossed the Rubicon, we see there was never any other way for him but force - true force. Thus the whole film has led us to the doorstep of a few final scenes, which are really the film's primary subject as much as Bickle is. It is the concern with morality, the respect for life and the heightened awareness of morality's absence by solitude that lead us to a bloodbath that seems to be a paradoxical argument for life, told through a violent crime. And so we see a man who could not take it anymore. We see a man who stood up. With some irony we can take it, if the ending can be accepted as real (and it's not a given that it can be), the very society which Travis hated becomes his saviour in the aftermath of his coup de grâce. Knowing that he has at last accomplished something in his mind worthwhile and honourable, Bickle is at peace with himself, and what under normal conditions society might have interpreted as heinous is deemed heroic.