Taxi Driver

* This review contains heavy spoilers only in the fifth (last) paragraph. Read at your own discretion. * Martin Scorsese made Taxi Driver in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, during a period of economic stagnation and governmental paralysis, and the New York he presents is the direct consequence of those failures made visible on screen. The discriminatory policies of redlining and the systematic defunding of public housing, with the withdrawal of federal support from urban communities -- all of it accumulated into the city Travis Bickle drives through every night, its streets grimy and overcrowded and its people punished by the very institutions that were supposed to sustain them. The world of Taxi Driver looks apocalyptic, and Scorsese is documenting it as a nearly forensic portrait of what American cities actually became when government policy actively produced the conditions it then abandoned its citizens to survive. It is within this world, genuinely unredeemable and genuinely neglected, that Travis's downward spiral becomes legible as the logical outcome of a society that left its most vulnerable people with nothing and then looked away from what that produced. Travis is a character designed to unsettle, and the film is insistent about this in ways that its popular reputation has consistently obscured. The toxic masculinity film-bro cult that has grown around Taxi Driver, the tendency of a certain kind of viewer to see Travis as a figure of lonely masculine virtue, represents a reading Scorsese was actively diagnosing in the culture, one the film itself presents with deep discomfort. Travis is awkward, repulsive in his social interactions, his diet a form of self-punishment, and his understanding of pop culture and ordinary human connection so impoverished that every attempt he makes to enter the world around him ends in failure or humiliation. Scorsese's compositions reinforce this constantly, the camera restless and distracted, mimicking Travis's inability to settle, moving from end to end as though unable to find a stable point of view, most memorably in the opening scene where Travis applies to be a taxi driver and the camera drifts upward toward Wizard through the window as though Travis's own attention is already elsewhere. He is a man in pieces, and the film never lets the audience forget it. The conversation with Wizard is the film's most honest moment about the limits of what a community can offer someone like Travis. Wizard admits plainly that he has nothing to give, that he is just a cab driver, and that the wisdom Travis is looking for does not exist in the world Travis inhabits. The political language of Senator Palantine offers nothing either, the same crossroads-of-change rhetoric that politicians have always deployed and that has never once changed the material conditions of the people listening to it. Travis has no institutional support and no person capable of meeting the depth of what he needs, and the film understands this as a structural failure before it understands it as a personal one. The police do nothing, Travis observes, and the film validates this, presenting a city so overwhelmed by its own dysfunction that even the institutions nominally responsible for order have effectively withdrawn. Scorsese also uses Travis to diagnose something specific about how governmental neglect gets redirected into racial hatred. White Americans in cities like New York, who were punished by the same policies that punished their neighbors, were conditioned to direct their frustration at racial minorities, pinning on them the consequences of a political failure that preceded and produced the conditions all of them were living in. Travis's violence follows this pattern of thinking, and Scorsese presents this pattern as a symptom of a diseased political culture, the logical expression of a society that gave its most desperate people grievance and no legitimate outlet for it. The ending is possibly the film's most devastating and most misread sequence. Travis embarks on his moral crusade and in some ways succeeds, as Iris is returned to her family and he is celebrated in the press as a hero, but then the film simply continues. New York is still a slum: the same streets outside the windshield and the same prostitutes and drug dealers going about their night. The same grimy and unredeemable city that produced Travis is still producing everything he believed he was purging from it. His single act of violence has altered nothing about the conditions that made him, and the film makes this visible in the most starkest way it can: Travis catching his own reflection in the rearview mirror, that quick and unsettling glance, the face of a man who is beginning to understand that the world looks exactly the same as it did before he decided to save it. Society did not change, and he won’t either. Throughout the film Travis imagines a real rain coming to wash the scum away, and finally, the rain has come, but the scum still remains. 95 Story & Pacing: 17/20 Characters & Acting: 20/20 Themes: 47/50 Cinematography & Editing: 5/5 Soundtrack & Sound: 5/5 Memorability: 1/1