Notes from Above Ground.

Rating: 10/10 (1 October 2005)

Somewhere in the shadows of the night, hidden within the restraints of his taxicab, a lonely man watches with disgust. His eyes survey the streets with all the malice and passion of a burning fire, his large pupils an open doorway leading into his soul. The demons haunt him; voices in his head convince him that the world is closing in and the only way out is through some form of moral redemption; a physical and emotional catharsis.
The stranger's name is Travis Bickle and he is God's Lonely Man: a discharged Vietnam veteran who wanders the streets at night in a permanent state of confusion and self-loathing.
Travis takes a job as a cab driver to keep out of the porn theaters that have been occupying his time  deciding he might as well get paid for roaming since he does it anyway.
But Travis' filtered input and odd output seems to suggest something is dreadfully wrong. The mild insanity of our protagonist begins to escalate. He approaches an attractive political campaign adviser, Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), and asks her out to dinner. She agrees, but the date is cut short when Travis takes her to an X-rated film.
Travis soon meets a young underage prostitute named Iris (a fourteen-year-old Jodie Foster), whom he feels a desire  nay, a need -- to rescue from slavery. Iris' pimp, Sport (Harvey Keitel), becomes another of Travis' demons.
Taxi Driver was released in 1976 to split praise. Some critics hailed it as a masterpiece, whilst others were a great deal more reserved in their accolade. In Newsweek, Jack Kroll wrote "() in their eagerness to establish rich and moral ambiguities, the Catholic Scorsese and the Calvinist Schrader have flubbed their ending. It's meant to slay you with irony, but it's simply incredible." Some critics just hated the film in general and felt the entire runtime was a mess of pretentious storytelling and depressing, gritty themes.
Depressing? Yes. Gritty? Yes. Brilliant? Most definitely. Scorsese does not merely address Travis as a character; he puts us inside his head. And even so, there are instances of abnormality in Scorsese's camera work that suggest paranoia and schizophrenia; moments of displaced subjectivity in which we are neither looking quite through the eyes of Travis nor through those around him, but more at length to his sideyet it seems that his body (primarily his hands) are below us, at the side of the frame, indicating an altered version of the traditional P.O.V.
Scorsese's movie is structured using diverse narrative elements  one of the most prominent being dramatic irony rooted in Greek tragedy (in this case, many set-up and pay-off moments). When Travis exits the brothel for the first time, a Mafioso figure says, "Come back any time." Travis responds, "I will." We know he will, too, and when he does, that's the pay-off.
Above all else the film is rooted in the basic existentialism philosophies of Berdyaev, Heidegger and Nietzsche. Scorsese later admitted this his toying of genres and philosophy was entirely incidental ("It just felt right") but one can't help but imagine Schrader may have been influenced by Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, in which our narrator begins, "I am a sick manI am a spiteful man." This brings to mind the scene in which Bickle dictates his journal entries to us and delivers an ultimatum to the "filth" on the streets, preceded by senseless introspective rambling.
Moving on, the ultimate puzzle of the film: Does our hero live or die? After Travis is shot in the climactic battle, he lies on a sofa, presumably dying, and makes a gesture with his fingers, pretending to shoot himself in the head. The camera pulls up, overhead, and exits the brothel. It then pulls back across the street and up into the heavens, surveying the crowd below.
In the next scene, Travis is alive and well, presented to the world as a hero through the media. Yet as Travis pulls away from the curb at the end of the film, Herrman's familiar four notes (the same ones as used for the final shot of Psycho, implemented when Norman Bates' lack of absolute sanity is finally revealed) come into play. A bell rings. Travis looks in his rearview mirror, as if maybe something caught his eye And then, suddenly, the movie ends.
Taxi Driver's ending cannot be resolved further more than conjecture and opinion. Scorsese himself says on the DVD making-of documentary that he believes the ending is open for analysis. Did Travis live? Did he die? Are the demons on the street still haunting him? Are we meant to sympathize with him and believe he is a hero, or are we meant to refuse him as one? (Or is this our natural reaction against Scorsese's own wishes -- which would explain the negative reviews in '76?)
But it is ultimately the haunting image of Bickle drifting through the endless hordes of nameless people on the streets of Manhattan that lingers with us after the film has ended, and remains the most prescient today. How effortlessly this man can disappear into the multitudes  God's Lonely Man once again alone, alienated and betrayed by the world he has come to loathe. That, above all else, is the most poignant aspect of Taxi Driver.