Nowadays, it's pretty standard for a desperate guy in a movie to shave his head or give himself a hairstyle that involves shaving at least part of his head—think Richie Tenenbaum in The Royal Tenenbaums. That's largely thanks to Taxi Driver. When Travis decides to assassinate Charles Palantine, he shows up at the rally with a Mohawk almost definitely a Mohawk he gave himself—it doesn't look like a professional job.
In Travis's mind, this new haircut probably signifies how he's been "reborn" as a cold-blooded killer. During the day, he watches television, goes to porno flicks and admires from afar Betsy Cybill Shepherd , a beautiful blond woman whom he calls his angel. Betsy works for the presidential campaign of Senator Charles Palantine.
One day, Travis finally approaches her and she accepts his offer to go out, only to be repulsed and disgusted after taking her to a porno film. Betsy rejects Travis. One night a passenger, played by Martin Scorsese himself, graphically describes to Travis his plan to kill his wife and her lover with a. This disturbing moment pushes Travis to arm himself to the teeth as if he were planning his own urban war. He starts off by killing a young black man during an attempted hold-up.
He finds his calling when twelve year old prostitute Iris Jodie Foster crosses his path. He wants to save this little fallen angel and get her out of her private hell, but she refuses his help. Iris rejects Travis. Troubled by this double rejection, repulsed by the decay that surrounds him and alienated because of his self-imposed isolation, Travis finally finds a release for his frustrations.
He attempts the assassination of Senator Palantine, whom he sees as a paternal figure for Betsy. After the failed assassination attempt, he redirects his anger and goes on to kill Sport the pimp Harvey Keitel and his entourage in what he envisions as a chance to free Iris from her degenerate milieu. He tries to kill himself but is spared by his empty gun barrel. He slumbers on a couch, sitting quietly. As the policemen arrive on the scene, he points his blood-drenched left index finger to his temple and mimes three shots: Pgghew… Pgghew… Pgghew… Travis rejects Travis.
This is where the ending takes a different and decisive turn. Looking straight down from the ceiling, the camera contemplates Travis from above and starts moving back into the hall. The camera recedes back from the entrance of the building, showing the growing number of photographers, journalists, police cars, ambulance men and the neighboring crowd. Newspaper clippings are posted on the wall revealing that Travis has survived from his wounds and is now considered a hero for having killed a New York mafioso and rescuing a teenager.
Shortly, we find ourselves back outside the Belmore Cafeteria where we find Travis talking with his fellow cabdrivers. A scar is visible on the side of his neck. A fare gets into his cab and he drives off. It is Betsy. With the fare waved, Betsy exits the cab onto the sidewalk. At this point his face disappears from the mirror, leaving a view through the windshield of the mirror in center frame; the credits start.
According to conventional wisdom, the ending of Taxi Driver presents a curious irony that makes it almost immoral. This ironic twist was not necessarily perceived by all the critics who reviewed the film at the time or since. Critics had the general inclination to reject the film because they were unable or unwilling to understand the implications of this ending.
Travis emerges a hero with his face in the front page of the Daily News, his rage exorcised, his violence purged. The story of a solitude. In taking literally the events described in the last sequence, these reviewers assume that the film adopts a traditional happy ending.
Therefore, the positive reviews of the film were more subtle in their appreciations and saw in the ending a political or social metaphor. She wrote in the New Yorker :. Rather, by drawing us into his vortex it makes us understand the psychic discharge of the quiet boys who go berserk.
Something is definitely wrong with this literal acceptance of the ending. This means that we must reread the ending according to the cinematic style consistent throughout the film. With the opening shots of Taxi Driver , Martin Scorsese already prepares the audience for a transcendental experience. We immediately share in a fragmented perception of the existing reality. The music becomes more and more threatening as we see Travis from behind coming out of a thick fog and entering an office.
He turns around and faces the personnel manager with a confused look on his face. His schizophrenia is precisely defined in the first taxi night.
The sequence starts off with exterior close-up shots of the cab: part of the left front wheel with the bumper jutting out, antenna hole on the hood, side mirror on the passenger front door. This description emphasizes how in Taxi Driver the two nouns of the title are actually synonymous : the cabbie and the cab fuse together.
It protects and isolates him from the outside world which he loathes and rejects. Travis compares New York to an open sewer. He wishes that a flood would wash away the filth. He compares Betsy to an angel. All the flowers he sends to Betsy for forgiveness are returned untouched and embalm his apartment like a funeral home. All these religious allusions reinforce his torment. In his deceptive nocturnal outings, he seeks without ever reaching a form of obsessive redemption, maybe to exorcise his war experiences in Vietnam.
I believe someone should become a person like other people. Travis devotes himself to his own isolation. Travis inflicts constant mental torture on himself. Scorsese directs the scene of Travis going to the porno theater in the same way he will later direct the scene in The Last Temptation of Christ where Jesus watches men fornicating with Mary Magdalene. She is of course the prostitute, the sinful woman, the fallen angel, very much like Iris in Taxi Driver. Should we be surprised to discover a parallel between these two female characters?
When Travis follows Iris into her room, the parallel with a similar scene where Jesus comes to Magdalene is even more obvious: same beaded curtains, same candlelight, same hesitation before entering. It is a true sanctuary, as if a sacrifice were about to take place at the altar. One of the most disturbing moments of Taxi Driver occurs when Travis takes Betsy to see the porno film.
He tries to drag her into his schizophrenic vision of the world. He wishes she would approve of his behavior. For example, Scorsese betrays the rule of point of view three times. We could say that the camera becomes in these three shots the schizophrenic vision of Travis, a phenomenon we could call displaced subjectivity.
The shot that best embodies this vision is the one showing a glass of water into which Travis drops an Alka-Seltzer while lunching with his buddies at a diner. He gazes hypnotically into the bubbling water. From his point of view, we see the bubbles as the camera zooms in. The sound of the effervescent water becomes more intense while all other sounds disappear.
Travis has effectively cut himself from the outside. He is completely immersed in his own bubble. This vision is also fed by the strange relationships Travis entertains with many characters in the film, starting with Senator Palantine. In the days that follows, Travis still listens to the Senator. He seems to think that Palantine addresses him directly.
Travis covers his walls with the slogan. Disturbed by the vista of Lynette Fromme, the former Charles Manson associate, who attempted to assassinate President Ford, making it onto the cover of Newsweek , Schrader conceived a denouement in which Bickle, after shooting up half of New York, would himself gain undeserved celebrity.
Times have changed. In the era of Big Brother, you don't even need to buy a gun to gain renown. In the original script, Sport, Foster's pimp, was an African-American. But, after consideration, Schrader and Scorsese decided that allowing the suggestion of a racial motivation for Bickle's eventual annihilation of Sport might be dangerously provocative.
Harvey Keitel duly got the role. It is well known that Travis Bickle's terrifying speech before his mirror was entirely improvised by De Niro. What is mentioned less often is that the monologue's most famous sequence echoes snatches of dialogue from George Steven's western Shane. Astral Weeks is a wistful, strummy LP by Van Morrison which trades in images of leafy suburbs and pastoral paradises. Taxi Driver is an angry, angst-ridden film set in a crumbling, violent New York.
Yet Greil Marcus, the perennially elliptical American music critic, recently claimed that Scorsese told him that the first half of the film was based on Morrison's LP. Go figure. In honour of Irish Times Food Month, a query into all manner of musical victuals. See a sample. Exclusive competitions and restaurant offers, plus reviews, the latest food and drink news, recipes and lots more.
Please update your payment details to keep enjoying your Irish Times subscription. You still talkin' about me? Fri, Aug 4, , We though we had lost her, and now our lives are full again. Needless to say, you are something of a hero around this household.
I'm sure you want to know about Iris. She's back in school and working hard. The transition has been very hard for her, as you can well imagine, but we have taken steps to see she never has cause to run away again. In conclusion, Mrs Steamsma and I would like to again thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
Unfortunately, we cannot afford to come to New York again to thank you in person, or we surely would, but if you should ever come to Pittsburgh, you would find yourself a most welcome guest in our home. Our deepest thanks, Burt and Ivy Steamsma. It's Betsy. After a strained silence, they make small talk, Betsy revealing that Palantine got the nomination and that she read about Travis in the paper, and Travis replying that it was nothing.
Betsy gets out of the cab and asks how much she owes him. Travis smiles and drives off wordlessly, not charging her anything. No, in order to secure the film an R rating, Martin Scorsese had to desaturate the colour of the film for the shootout scene so the blood does not look as graphic. Scorsese has admitted he actually liked the desaturated result better than the original, but the film's cinematographer, Michael Chapman, did not.
The original negatives for the scene no longer exist, as they deteriorated over the years. Scorsese himself has commented that it was meant to signal to the audience that Travis could have a fit of rage again at any point in the future and that he is not the glorious hero the newspapers make him out to be.
The sound itself was originally a cymbal clash. Viewers are mixed in their answer to this question. Other viewers see Travis as a sociopath alienated from society, a villain whose actions being interpreted as heroism was simply a lucky break. Scorsese is the master of presenting anti-hero characters, people who do wrong things for right reasons, at least as they see it! Travis likely was under the assumption that all couples went to the porno theater.
When Betsy is hesitant about going in Travis says "It's ok, I see couples go here all the time". This scene also illustrates how hard it is for Travis to fit in with society because he has absolutely no idea how normal people interact and had to go off of his experience seeing couples as the theater.
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