Dir.
Martin Scorsese, 1976, USA, 113 mins
Cast: Robert De Niro, Cybill Shepherd, Jodie Foster
Review by Mike Bartlett
It’s back – the film that has adorned many a lad’s DVD shelf, that gave us that iconic image of De Niro pounding the New York streets alone, that created its own catchphrase: “You talkin’ to me?” But here’s a thought – does this most beloved of cult movies feature the most racist shot in cinema history? We all know the storyline – a psychologically damaged Vietnam vet, Travis Bickle, gets a job with the New York cabs and is so frustrated by the “filth” on the streets that he resorts to rescuing a teenage hooker from her pimp. But the nature of that frustration is seldom touched upon in the “boy’s own” manner in which the film is usually discussed.
The moment I’m referring to takes place in a café as Bickle takes a break from his shift. He looks round furtively at his fellow diners and we cut to an extraordinary travelling shot that soaks up the exotically-dressed black clientele. Then we cut back to Travis’s face and register his intense, furious eyes - eyes full of hate. What’s disturbing about this sequence is that there is no need for any articulation of racist feeling; we understand what Travis is thinking merely through the movement of the camera and the composition of the shot. Later, Scorsese repeats this trick, when Bickle’s chat with a colleague is interrupted by a black man laughing and shouting in the street. For one brief second – caught in exquisite slow-motion – Bickle holds the man’s gaze. And once again, we get the uncomfortable feeling that we are not just seeing as Bickle sees, but as a white man looks at a black man.
It’s this alignment of the spectator’s perspective with that of a disturbed racist thug that has upset some critics and made them question Taxi Driver’s morality. But looked at another way, isn’t it incredibly brave for a filmmaker to so immerse himself in that mentality that we can ‘see’ as that character? Taxi Driver has become so much a part of popular culture that its true value has become obscured. Because, first and foremost, it is a subversive film, forcing its audience into a viewpoint it summarily dismisses but, at the same time, showing how that viewpoint lingers close to the surface of their own prejudices.
Let’s not forget the political content of the film. Betsy, the object of Travis’s desire, works for a politician campaigning on a law and order ticket. When he and Bickle meet, their attitudes toward crime seem alarmingly similar, the cab driver’s ruthless concept of vigilantism not so far removed from the senator’s pat ideas of “people’s justice”. Like that other great misunderstood movie of the 1970s, Dirty Harry, Taxi Driver puts its audience in the awkward position of questioning the delicate margin between social justice and personal revenge. The politician’s name is also significant – Palantine, in old parlance, a knight in shining armour. Bickle becomes an alternative knight, come to the rescue of Jodie Foster’s underage hooker, just as he sets himself up in competition with all the other men in the film, including her pimp, Sport. The names recall different kinds of masculine values against which Bickle’s is set as the nominal hero. So Taxi Driver is also an interrogation of male sexuality and the self-destructive violence its fantasies incur.
And finally, Travis is no dumb animal. In fact, he’s an artist, a writer charting his own downfall, in diary and in voiceover. Here, scriptwriter Paul Schrader’s voice comes swimming to the surface – he based the screenplay on his own obsessions with guns and pornography at that time – and dominates the film in the same way other authorial voices, like Herrman’s magnificent score and De Niro’s assured performance, push Scorsese’s to the margins. Ultimately, it feels like their film rather than his, but Taxi Driver stands the test of time as one of the most remarkable achievements of ‘70s US cinema and a film that can still unsettle a 21st century audience.
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