Hell on Wheels

Rating: 10/10 (2 May 2009)

Perhaps the most formally ravishing-as well as the most morally and ideologically problematic-film ever directed by Martin Scorsese, the 1976 Taxi Driver remains a disturbing landmark for the kind of voluptuous doublethink it helped ratify and extend in American movies. Of all Scorsese's movies, Taxi Driver is for me the most seductive, though I wouldn't call it either his best film (I'd choose the underrated The King of Comedy) or his most gut-wrenching (I'd pick Raging Bull). Most of the glamorous depictions of hell on earth and odes to stoical despair about a post apocalyptic civilization found in monuments to capitalist-urban squalor, including Blade Runner and Seven, can be traced back to Taxi Driver, and if it continues to exert an enormous claim on our imagination, this is surely because we continue to live in its vengeful, puritanical fantasies-as well as with the dire consequences of those fantasies.
In short, thanks to what can only be termed the transformation of Taxi Driver's experimental and European elements into razzle-dazzle Hollywood effects, the spectator is invited to identify with a violently Calvinist, racist, sexist, and apocalyptic fantasy, complete with extended bloodbath, that's given all the allure of glittering expressionist art and involves very few moral consequences for most members of the audience. Because the whole thing takes place inside one glamorous character's head, the social ramifications are effectively rationalized to the point of nonexistence. It must be added that the gorgeous and extremely varied visual effects Scorsese and cinematographer Michael Chapman derive from a yellow cab moving through "hellish" New York traffic are as central to the film's impact as its celebration of psychosis. Indeed, the two projects become intimately intertwined, impossible to distinguish.