Modern Classics: ‘Taxi Driver’, Scorsese and De Niro’s Descent into Urban Hell

Emerging from the smoke, caught between shadow and neon, amid a physical chaos that feels like hell on earth, Travis Bickle’s eyes take in a New York suspended in the fascinating decay of the mid-’70s. Long before the brutal “clean-up” that would sweep much of that world away a few decades later—relocating it to less visible, less tourist-friendly corners—Broadway here is lined with porn theaters, prostitutes roaming the streets, pimps, dealers, hustlers, peep shows, furtive romances, and the proverbial million stories cities like this are made of. To Travis, the people who inhabit it are “the scum of the earth,” living proof that there is no salvation on this planet. From the solitude of a classic Manhattan yellow cab, he’s ready to become an avenging angel. Of what, exactly? He’s not entirely sure. It’s simply a self-appointed mission—something to fight off insomnia, depression, loneliness.

When Martin Scorsese made Taxi Driver, he wasn’t the Martin Scorsese who turns 80 this year—the one we know, admire, debate, and celebrate as one of the greatest filmmakers in history. Raging Bull didn’t exist yet, nor The King of Comedy, The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence, Casino, The Wolf of Wall Street nor any of the many films (25 narrative features and 16 documentaries to date) that would turn him into the living legend he is today. He hadn’t yet become the great film historian, the sharp observer of Hollywood’s transformations, or the tireless champion of neglected classics from around the world. Back then he was a young New Yorker just getting started, with four films under his belt, only two of which—Mean Streets and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore—had made any real impact. He was a promise among many that emerged in American cinema in the late ’60s and early ’70s, a director who could easily have faded into obscurity, as some of his peers eventually did. With Taxi Driver, that promise became a reality—and from that point on, Martin Scorsese became a name any self-respecting cinephile had to know.

Some of the visual ideas, images, even pieces of the universe that would shape this now-canonical 1976 film were already present in his earlier work. But here, thanks to the overwhelming screenplay by Paul Schrader—who would go on, as a director, to build an entire career out of variations on characters and stories like those in Taxi Driver—and the definitive, career-making performance by Robert De Niro, Scorsese found a vantage point from which to look at the world differently: more incisively, nervously, confusedly, charged with the anxiety that would come to define his work. The eyes that open the film—Travis’s—are also the eyes through which Scorsese seems to observe the city, and by extension the world. What Travis ultimately does with what he sees—with what he lives through, with what that urban chaos stirs inside him—is another matter entirely.

Taxi Driver is a neon nightmare, more impressionistic than realist, soaked in the atmosphere of a heavy era marked by political, military, and economic disillusionment—Nixon, Vietnam, its aftermath—when the future felt remote, almost unimaginable. It’s no coincidence that punk would emerge around the same time (the film was shot in 1975 and premiered in February 1976), nor that it would later adopt the mohawk haircut Bickle ends up wearing when he can no longer contain the violence inside him. Taxi Driver is the portrait of a man’s existential anguish—someone who cannot find a way out of the hole he’s dug for himself (indeed, every decision he makes only buries him deeper), who roams New York’s neighborhoods at hours when few dare venture out, constantly inhaling the violence that surrounds him, inside and outside his yellow cab.

In Taxi Driver, Travis keeps a diary—passages of which De Niro reads in voiceover—where he expresses his emotional rupture in blunt terms, not without occasional flashes of strange lucidity. “I am God’s lonely man,” he says at one point, quoting Thomas Wolfe. In a film clearly divided into two mirrored halves, Travis tries—at least in the first—to escape that condition. He’s a 26-year-old Vietnam veteran: insomniac, paranoid, socially inept. An idealized vision of a beautiful, blonde, seemingly angelic young woman named Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), who works for a presidential candidate, leads him to attempt a breach. Nervously, awkwardly, he approaches her; after some hesitation, she agrees to go out with him, as if curious to explore a world far removed from her own. It doesn’t work. A date at the wrong kind of movie theater makes it painfully clear that they belong to different worlds—and whatever fragile contact the cabbie has with reality disappears, underscored by a camera that abandons him at a crucial moment, showing us the future as a corridor leading to a deeper level of hell.

Taxi Driver is the portrait of a psychological fracture told through a film that, like its protagonist, gradually comes apart. Michael Chapman’s camera and Bernard Herrmann’s score revolve around classic cinematic oppositions: light and shadow, calm and intensity, tenderness and violence. There’s little of the former by the time the film begins, yet Scorsese still manages to create a universe where not everything seems entirely lost. There is beauty in the garbage, images of possible redemption, a romantic sax melody slipping through the ominous chords written by the composer of Vertigo. But even that eventually fades. Bickle detaches from reality, spiraling into an abyss he knows there’s no way out of—or so he believes.

The film’s second half finds him entangled in two parallel causes. The first: to take revenge on Betsy in an indirect way, drawing her attention—and the world’s—through an act of disproportionate violence. The second: a cause he believes to be noble, even quixotic, but one that only deepens his alienation from everyone else—“saving” a 12-year-old prostitute (Jodie Foster) working under the control of an eccentric pimp (Harvey Keitel), whom he hopes to free. But beyond the events that do or don’t occur, what Scorsese paints from this point forward is a trajectory that would recur throughout his work: the fall from grace of characters trapped in endless downward spirals as they vainly attempt to solve their problems.

Controversial in its time, Taxi Driver would be even more so today—not only because of the dark world it portrays, the raw violence that ultimately erupts, or the presence of a 12-year-old actress in a role that would now be unfilmable in certain respects, but because of how it anticipated—or at least registered the growth of—a social phenomenon that continues to expand in the United States and beyond: people who feel marginalized by the system, frustrated by social change, and willing to “take matters into their own hands,” whether by voting for candidates who give voice to those grievances or, literally, by picking up weapons, regardless of the target.

The difficult intellectual exercise Scorsese proposes in Taxi Driver—one that runs throughout his career—is to generate both identification with and distance from his protagonist. The film burrows so deeply into Travis Bickle’s mind that it’s hard to let go of him once it becomes clear he’s lost his way for good. Identification is intrinsic to cinematic storytelling: audiences are accustomed to wanting their protagonists—no matter how terrible their actions—to succeed, to be saved, to find the way out they’re seeking. Here, Scorsese pushes that dynamic to the limit, generating some ideologically confused readings along the way. Placing the viewer inside the mind of a lonely, anxious, disturbed man is one thing; accompanying him on his increasingly savage, racist, homophobic, violent path is another. As in Goodfellas, Casino, The Wolf of Wall Street—or, in one way or another, almost all his films—Scorsese never tells the viewer when to take that step back. That faith in the audience’s intelligence makes him an extraordinary filmmaker, but also one perpetually open to controversy, especially in times when subtlety—ambiguity, irony, shades of gray—often goes unnoticed.

Because of its brutality, its violence, and the unexpected moment in which it seems to offer an ironic wink at the very story it’s just told, Taxi Driver became a deeply debated film. At the time, of course, Scorsese wasn’t yet Scorsese, and no one knew that would become one of his defining traits. His gaze is humanist, but never complacent. On the contrary, his proximity to otherness, to madness, to sin—let’s not forget that this film was conceived by a Calvinist and a Catholic, both deeply religious—always puts the notion of “choosing the right path” at risk. As has often been noted, the coexistence in Scorsese’s imagination—and in the Italian-American neighborhood where he grew up—of priests and gangsters, saints and prostitutes, would inform his entire body of work. Taxi Driver may well be the sublimation of all those contradictions and anxieties.

What has never been in dispute is the film’s formal mastery—and, in a sense, that of the director of The Irishman’s entire oeuvre. His stories are what they are thanks to an endless stream of audiovisual ideas and his extraordinary ability to translate them to the screen. That goes beyond encyclopedic film knowledge; many filmmakers are just as cinephilic, but lack the command of form and invention that, in Scorsese’s case, seem to emerge almost instinctively. One can trace in Taxi Driver the influence of Jean-Luc Godard, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Francesco Rosi, or the film noir of the ’40s and ’50s—but that only goes so far. Ultimately, it would be his film that became the unavoidable influence for generations of directors, whether they saw it upon release or later, during its long afterlife as a cult object in video stores, retrospectives, and streaming platforms. From Joker to Fight Club, from Falling Down to American Psycho, and dozens of others in which its shadow freely roams, Taxi Driver remains the definitive experience in urban alienation, inner torment, and cathartic violence.

For better or worse—imitation often borders on betrayal—it’s an inescapable cinematic landmark, a rite of passage not only for understanding Scorsese’s later work but for entering a different stage of the cinematic experience itself. One that invites and repels, seduces and disgusts. One that demands the viewer abandon a more comforting, childlike view of the world—perfectly respectable in its own right, but far removed from the universes that interest this filmmaker—in order to assume a perspective that is confused, nightmarish, and anything but reassuring. Taxi Driver is a cinematic coming-of-age for the viewer: a film you can’t come back from, a one-way trip down an ever-darkening avenue with no end in sight.