Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976): I Can't Pretend and I Know I'm Alone

Some thoughtful movie fans see American personhood summed up in characters like Rocky Balboa, Atticus Finch, George Bailey, Forrest Gump, Cool Hand Luke, and even Vito Corleone or Tony Montana. But I see much of it in Travis Bickle, the wounded Vietnam vet and desperate loner of Taxi Driver (1976), slowly going psychotically mad in the (then-) ruined urban landscape of New York City. It is my contention that this film, with its noxious stew of stalker/vigilante fantasy, misguided heroism, a war-wounded mind, racism, sexism, urban decay, gun fetishism, and misplaced media attention, is the greatest American film since its release in 1976. Really. I cannot put it any other way. It's an all-too-prescient depiction of a personality disorder that would come to haunt our public life in the following decades: men broken who refuse to mend. Their name is legion and I need not mention them here. Gaze into the abyss, a man adrift and alone:

It's well-known film lore now that Paul Schrader wrote this screenplay in a matter of weeks after a bout of homelessness, drinking while walking the streets and sleeping in his car. "It leapt out of me like an animal," he would say later. His choice of a taxi cab to symbolize loneliness while in the midst of humanity was truly inspired. The primal power of the script is undeniable, even though it was restructured in the final edit.

Director Martin Scorsese and cinematographer Michael Chapman use an astonishing expressionistic style to bring Schrader's words alive. For all its American-ness, this is a movie filled with foreign influences: informed fans will sense a melange of Godard, Bresson, and Dreyer in its execution; those not so inclined will still see something of power and conviction, pain and obsession. Virtually every shot includes Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro), usually alone in the frame, as everything around him contributes to his despair. He is as responsible for his condition as he is trapped by it.

Travis scribbles in his journal with a grade-school pencil (cf. Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest) but it's not only Travis's voice-over narration that clue us in; it's snatches of dialogue, of song lyrics, the inventive camerawork, and Bernard Herrmann's glorious and final jazz-horror score which reveal the man's sickest, most feverish thoughts. "I got some bad ideas in my head," he tells fellow cabbie Wizard (Peter Boyle), and Scorsese relentlessly illustrates them on-screen. I find this strange formality one of Taxi Driver's most fascinating aspects, which I'll focus on here rather than rehashing the plot or performances.

Travis's famous "morbid self-attention" does not result in a sense of self-awareness; it shows a serious lack of one. Those journal entries serve as an ironic counterpoint to his daily life alone in his filthy room (in the screenplay, when Travis leaves his place for the final time, we see it is in a condemned building). Two moments are standouts:

"Here is a man who stood up. Here is..."

"You're only... as healthy... as... you... feel."

In other instances, dialogue by other characters function as Travis's interior monologue. While the camera focuses on Travis, characters continue talking but we are not really hearing them; it's as if we're inside Travis's head, hearing his very thoughts. First is Wizard relating another of his tall tales about taxi life, two gay men in a fight in his cab; the words are painfully accurate after his date with Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) fails spectacularly:

"They start arguing, they start yelling... you bitch, you whore..."

Fellow cabbie Charlie T's innocent comment about Travis's wad of cash (and all that money never buys Travis a ticket out of this cesspool) proves an ominous warning. He also jokingly calls Travis "Killer." Soon all will be literalized:

"My man is loaded, loaded."

The seething black man screaming as he storms down the street while Travis stalks underage hooker Iris (Jodie Foster) delves further into Travis's crumbling mind in the most simplistic terms:

"When I get my hands on that bitch I'm gonna kill her..."

And of course the porn soundtrack Travis can't seem to live without, as a voracious actress expresses her admiration for a large "weapon":

"Look at the size of that... oh yeah... it looks so good..."

Even non-essential flirty banter has its place; witness Tom (Albert Brooks) and Betsy at work in Senator Palantine's headquarters. These scenes are not in Schrader's original screenplay, but they are still integral to the film. Are we to take their words at face value, or are they a horrifying prophetic foreshadowing?

"If you had these three fingers missing on this hand, and that hand missing on that hand..."

Horrifying prophetic foreshadowing.

In perhaps the film's most revealing and discomforting sequence (prior to the climax of course), director Scorsese himself, looking like an upstanding Manson, glowers maniacally in the backseat of Travis's cab. The living, breathing embodiment of the ugliest thoughts in Bickle's head, he rattles off his intent: to kill his wife--with a .44 Magnum, of course--who's sleeping with a black man. Except he relays this in some of the most repulsively sexist and racist comments that have ever been uttered in a mainstream picture. Travis says nothing, but the glare in his eyes says everything. The passenger exists both as a manifestation of Travis's darkest fears and as an element in the outside world that Travis focuses on solely.

"And I'm gonna kill her with that gun."

The previous scene showed us Travis condemning Betsy to hell for rejecting him; in the very next sequence, as Travis walks out of the Belmore Cafeteria, an all-night cabbie haunt, he stops and glares at a young black man, who glowers back. When Travis meets up with gun salesman Easy Andy, the first thing he asks is, "You got a .44 Magnum?" All the pieces are falling into place.

"Goddamn, man... Goddamn..."

Everyone focuses on the "You talkin' to me?" scene, beloved of dude-movie fans everywhere, but the really effective scenes are simply Travis alone in his room, alone with his fears, his fantasies, and his guns. Scorsese, always ready with an appropriate rock song to illustrate his characters' internal conflicts and desires, nails Travis's with Jackson Browne's "Late for the Sky." Ostensibly a plaintive, earnest tune about a broken relationship, here it becomes an elegy for a forgotten man.

"How long have I been drifting alone through the night?"

Lastly: throughout the film Scorsese intersperses dramatic overhead and high-angle shots, almost haphazardly. It's first seen in the opening when Travis is being interviewed for the cab driver job. We see it next when he futilely hits on the ticket-taker girl at the porno theater. Then, when Travis boldly confronts Betsy and asks for a date ("I see all this and it means nothing"). And lastly, ultimately, most startling of all, the long tracking shot from the ceiling in Iris's bedroom, now the scene of slaughter. These shots have predicted the film's climax and reach their apotheosis in a gory tabloid of pulp genius.

Whew. This was a tough post to write. Surely I am not the only one for whom revisiting this classic is an emotionally exhausting experience, painful but rewarding. Travis Bickle is a sort of Hamlet character, in which a myriad of interpretations of his behavior and actions seem to say much but in the end do no justice. "He seems to have wandered in from a land where it is always cold," Schrader describes him in the screenplay's opening passages, "a country where the inhabitants seldom speak." Better to watch safely, then, at a distance, comfortable in the theater or at home. But then that is something men like this would never allow us to do.

"On every street corner there's a nobody who dreams of being somebody..."

Schrader, Scorsese, & DeNiro share big laughs on location

Brian DePalma's Dressed to Kill (1980): "It's Just So Dirty"

Dressed to Kill is a lurid and self-conscious thriller, director Brian DePalma's 1980 riff on even more Hitchcock tropes, dressed up as high art. Mostly vulgarizing Hitchcock for the excessive style-over-substance cocaine '80s, you can sense the sleaze dripping off every frame, and not in an appreciatively over-the-top manner but in a let-me-rub-your-face-in-filth way. It has more in common with the Italian thrillers known as giallos, as it's more concerned with formal, stylized cinematic tricks than story, character, human insight or motivation. As for the plot, cf. Psycho.

I certainly have no problem with sleaze or exploitation, etc., but when it's made by a major director (at least he was when he made this) I expect a little more finesse, substance, and irony rather than just amping up a then-20-year-old Hitchcock movie. At times it's a fun sleazy thriller, fizzy and intriguing at first, but it goes flat fast as the cheesy Herrmann ripoff score blows on and on, the silly twists, lots of sexual violence, and at the very end, when DePalma rips off his own Carrie.

"It's just so dirty," says perky prostitute Nancy Allen to psychiatrist Michael Caine. What is Allen talking about? An unexpectedly satisfying afternoon with a john? A sexual fantasy, something she thinks will arouse Caine? A blue movie she saw in Times Square? No, she's talking about a dream she's had - although she's making it up - about being raped with a straight razor.

Dude, what? Razor rape is not something I think of as "dirty." Okay, DePalma, what the hell? You wrote the screenplay, those are your words...

Some very good scenes transcend the pulpiness, of course, which is what gives this movie at least somewhat of a reputation three decades later. What are these enjoyable, brilliantly-crafted sequences? DePalma's use of split screen, and even split/split screen, is engaging, which he stretches nearly to the point of distraction, and then switches back to a single point-of-view. Voyeurism - I get it!I'm thinking of the now-famous art museum chase/seduction, or when Caine and Allen are in their respective homes and we learn about their lives and interests. There's a nice bit when the anticipation of a telephone ringing would shatter our nerves. The murder of Angie Dickinson's character, and then Allen's discovery of it, is terrifically, terrifyingly, framed.

But it's nearly indescribable how poorly this movie has aged. Misogyny, racism, gender identity politics: how could DePalma have gotten everything so wrong? Even insane asylum inmates come off poorly! It's not so much that he deals with these things - Taxi Driver certainly does - it's that you can't tell if he's serious or just smirky. The movie is smooth and assured but it's (mostly) a polished turd. So much of the movie is couched in dream and fantasy so DePalma can have his cake and eat it too, like those biblical epics of decades that past that promised the walls of Jericho would come down, but not before lots of Israelite ladies showed some skin. Every woman must pay in this uptown slasher flick.

I think DePalma was just clueless about his lack of taste and just going through stylistic motions, and inadvertently created a noxious stew of outrageous and ugly prejudices. Rape fantasies have particularly disappeared from pop art because they're just so... wrong. There's practically no way they can be presented as artistic or insightful before you gross out most of your audience. Tastes have obviously changed, so this could be a tough movie to revisit unless you're a fan of the incongruity of what was once considered acceptable entertainment but which now tastes like, well, a polished turd.

Brian DePalma's Obsession (1976): Overwrought and Obvious

I am usually underwhelmed by Brian DePalma's movies. He's a stylist who wears his influences - his influence, as in Hitchcock and Hitchcock only - on his sleeve. I've enjoyed Sisters, Carrie, The Untouchables, and Carlito's Way, but schlock like Scarface, Raising Cain, and The Black Dahlia are some of the worst movies I've ever seen by a major director. Too often they rely simply on their relationship to another picture; in this case, Obsession's is Vertigo (1958). But in 1976, long before Hitchcock's film had achieved its status as perhaps his greatest film (or just about the greatest film), not everyone pored over films at home like they can do today. You could get away with this kind of thing back then. I watched Vertigo last year and quite often watch moments of it when it's on cable; people seeing Obsession in '76 probably hadn't seen it in over 15 years. I felt like I was watching a watered-down version of Hitch's movie, not a film that existed independently.

This probably contributes to why it is one of DePalma's least-seen works. The DVD is out of print and it's not available from Netflix. Turner Classic Movies showed Obsession recently, as part of their celebration of composer Bernard Herrmann. Good timing, too, because I'd been rereading Schrader on Schrader and learned Paul Schrader and DePalma had watched Vertigo together and decided to an homage/remake of it. This was before Schrader gained Hollywood ascendancy with Taxi Driver. However the script was rewritten and changed so much that Paul Schrader dropped out of the project.

After his wife and daughter are killed in a kidnapping and ransom attempt that goes horribly wrong, Michael Courtland (Cliff Robertson) remains a grieving widower, although a successful New Orleans businessman. Fifteen years after the event that gutted his life, he finds himself in Italy near the church in which he and his wife had met. He is drawn to it and wanders inside, only to find the his long-dead wife's doppelganger, Italian art student Sandra Portinari (Genevieve Bujold). They begin a tentative romance and Courtland brings Sandra back to the States. Now he sets out to remake her in the image of his dead wife. John Lithgow, a smarmy Southerner, is Robertson's business partner and views this newfound fascination as alarming...

The Oscar-nominated score by Herrmann (someone Hitch used, of course, numerous times), is busy and intrusive; it plays for virtually the entire movie and rather than accentuating scenes, it overpowers them. Herrmann is one of cinema's greatest composers and it's always a delight to hear his work but in Obsession it only makes you think of Vertigo. DePalma's skills are used to good effect in an inventive sequence near the end in which Bujold relives a childhood trauma that brings the movie full circle. The less said about the climactic fight scene between Lithgow and Robertson the better.

"Should we preserve the original or destroy it?" Genevieve Bujold says when Cliff Robertson meets her restoring a painting in the old Italian cathedral. Behind this painting lies another; the artist deemed it unworthy and painted over it. That's the heart of the movie, of course, both for Robertson's character and for DePalma's work in general. A fine question it is, but I never connected with Obsession, never felt Robertson was in the grip of mania like Jimmy Stewart's Scottie conveyed in Vertigo. All of Herrmann's lush, manic, swirling strings, DePalma's feverish camera work, and editor Paul Hirsch's rippling dream effects (to lessen the ultimate implications of the plot twist) can't make this movie rise above a mildly interesting, decidedly minor '70s thriller. This one is for completists of any of the filmmakers or actors mentioned, for fans of Herrmann, or that wonderful '70s era. I'll take Sisters or Carrie any day over Obsession.