"You lookin at me"

01.12.10
Taxi Driver
(1976)
Starring: Robert DeNiro, Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel


Taxi Driver is an early Scorcese film about the transparently interesting character of Travis Bickle. Travis Bickle is a Vietnam war veteran, the essence of a "rebel without a cause." His character fixates on one specific person or idea and then maintains a violent tunnel vision concerning that idea. Bickle's character wants to do the right thing, he just doesn't know how to go about doing it. Throughout the film he is constantly attempting to do right by people and save himself from lonliness, but perpetually does something to negate any headway made with his fellow human beings. The whole film is slowly building to the last scene, the viewer isn't shocked by the violence, because it's been in anticipation for the entire film. I think Taxi Driver is mentally disturbing, not because of the violence, but because the violence seemed only a natural progression, an expected finale. I, as a viewer, had come to terms with the violence before it was ever transferred from film into my brain. This anticipation was built up through so many different stylistic qualities, but most influentially by color. The color scheme of this film is punctuated by the color red; starting out with small flecks (like the popcorn in the dirty movie concession stand) and building to the blood bath crescendo of one of the final scenes. It's as if the Scorcese planned the visual composition of the red to play like a stumbling, wounded man dripping a road map of red flecks and finally ending in the man collapsed in a puddle of sticky red blood. The scene where Travis goes to save the poor little misguided prostitute, is as if Scorcese is playing at the screen like Moses dipping his staff into the nile and turning it thick with blood. The end of the movie plays Travis off as a hero, but the viewer knows his mental state is about as stable as a grand piano balanced on the edge of a skyscraper in midst of an earthquake aftershock. Taxi Driver left me with a strangely unsatisfied feeling in the pit of my stomach.

PS: I think Robert DeNiro is a brilliant visual punctuation to Scorcese's invisible-off screen direction.