Black elements in Taxi Driver

Rating: 9/10 (17 July 2006)

Film noir has its own primary characteristics and conventions. For instance, most film noirs are shot in gloomy grays, blacks and whites. And the peak of production of film noir is from about 1945 to 1950. Taxi Driver, which was produced in the period of American Film Renaissance (1967-1976), was also one of film noirs because of the black elements in it. The film showed the dark and inhumane side of human nature cynicism and doomed love like all the traditional film noir. Travis fell in love with Betsy, who firstly appeared as an angel according to Travis. She found Travis attractive at first and was willing to go out some times with him, which was concluded as strange finally. There were all kinds of women in the society. But he could not have one, only because he was contradictive as Betsy described, though he had a clear-conscience. On the contrary, those who had not clear-conscience could have those women, such as dirty politicians and even pimps. It's the unfair and dark side of not only the human experience, but also the society. It's a world filled with entrapment, menace and squalid in which people were tend to go wrong and crazy. Usually, the protagonists in film noir were driven by their past or by human weakness to do something very wrong. In Taxi Driver, Travis came back from the army with no work, no friends, nothing, but a clear conscience, a sensitive heart and ability of action. The story was of urban night scenes and mostly took place in murky streets and dimly-lit buildings or hotel rooms. The director often took Travis's sight as the camera angle. When he observed the world from the front window of his taxi, the director of Taxi Driver used expressionistic lighting in making lots of disorienting and colorful sights to allude to the distorted world. And he also skillfully edited a succession of jarring scenes, like prostitutes, queens and fairies walking on the street, together as all kinds of epitomes of the dark society. Sometimes, narratives of a film noir would be made by the male protagonist as self-confession or backward look. Taxi Driver just changed the narratives into self-talk, diaries and letters, which, I think, also marked the movie as black. "I go all over. I take people to the Bronx, Brooklyn, to Harlem. I don't care. Don't make no difference to me." pointed out that Travis was lonely and alienated to the society by others or maybe by himself. Without any intention to join the sick and venal world, Travis wished that someday a real rain would come and wash all the scum off the street. It was the murky world and the failure of approaching other people that disappointed and despaired Travis and got him out of the belief for God. Travis bought four guns and decided to clear up the dirt of the world himself as he cleaned up the blood on the backseats of his taxi, which had been his expectation to the president candidate. When Travis used the gun at the first time to kill a robber in a convenient store, he was at loss about what to do now. The store keeper was very calm and told Travis that he could just leave and he would handle it himself. This detail revealed us a fact that this kind of robbery and killing was not fresh but happening all the time and all around in the city.
He wanted to be the never-coming God and tried his best to rescue and change the doomed destiny of the innocent prostitute, Iris, who was a comparison to Betsy. He did it, but still failed to be God. The red lights, showing all the time, symbolized that he would be stopped and dragged slow from time to time. After he killed Matthew and other baddies, everything went back to facial peace again very soon, as if nothing had really happened. He was and would never be a tragic hero. He was only a general taxi driver or even merely a pair of common eyes watching and witnessing what was happening in the world.