In Taxi Driver, directed by Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro plays the anti-hero Travis Bickle. Travis is a New York City taxi driver working the night shift, and consequently he sees a lot of “scum” as he calls it. He hates the smell of the city and all of its inhabitants, and calls it a “Hell.” Yet, this is where he seems to be most at ease. Nevertheless he attempts to explore a more civilized side of the city by asking a well-to-do woman, Betsy, out on a date. She is charmed until she realizes that the movie he’s taken her to is a porno. Travis feels disconnected from the upper class, who typically inhabit the daylight in this film, and spiteful of the night world in which he most often finds himself existing.
At the end of the film, Travis befriends a 13-year old prostitute named Iris and, to encourage her to return to her parents, kills the men to whom she is emotionally attached. For the rest of the film he is considered a public hero and revered by all, even Betsy. Travis’s contempt for society, lack of social skills, and narration via diary beg a comparison with Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, and rightly so, since Scorsese purportedly approached writer Paul Schrader with the hopes of adapting Notes From Underground into a film prior to making Taxi Driver. Literary influences aside, this film is a masterpiece. Scorsese creates two visual symbols–mirrors and guns–and uses them as mechanisms for developing Travis’s character independently of the plot. The mirror is a visual cue for the audience of Travis’s alienation from whatever is in the reflection. The gun, meanwhile, allows Scorsese to show us what Travis hates most. Eventually, he has Travis use both in self-deprecating manners to qualify the apparent redemption at the end of the movie.
Do you need a composer for your film, animation, or media project? Tom Gurin is a professional composer for short films working closely with directors in North America and Europe. Contact him at thomas.gurin@aya.yale.edu for information on availability, current projects, and professional rates.
Scorsese uses the taxi itself to create two cities: an apparently “dark” side (prostitutes, drug addicts and soon-to-be murderers), as well as a seemingly “light” side (politicians and wealthy ladies) of New York. Travis exists in both, to an extent, because he cannot sleep and drives during both day and night. However, Scorsese consistently indicates that he has stronger ties with the dark city. When a piece of that world enters his cab in the middle of the night Scorsese puts them on the same visual plane to make them one and the same.
In the above frames, the camera angle illustrates the connection between Travis and the world of the night. However, when someone who subscribes to the day-time side of the city enters his cab Scorsese uses the vehicle itself to alienate him from them. First, we see them in the rear-view mirror.
The mirror acts as a barrier from the two people in the above frames, keeping Travis away from their world. Next, Scorsese uses the driver’s side window as the barrier:
Scorsese uses these two distinct formulas, using the taxi as a constant, to illustrate the differences between Travis relationships with the people in these scenes. Especially intriguing, though, is the use of the mirror. There are only three scenes in which Scorsese explicitly highlights a mirror: the two shown above, and the famous “You talkin’ to me?” scene. If, as is suggested by the interactions with the politician and Betsy, the mirror is a barrier between two worlds, then Travis is truly disconnected from himself when he delivers this most famous of lines. For, despite the usual truncation, the line continues: “Well I’m the only one here.”
Scorsese also uses the many guns in the film to illustrate Travis’s disgust. The first time he holds a gun in the film he points it straight out the window, as if at the city itself:
In the very next scene he is at the porno theater again, and shapes his thumb and forefinger into a gun as if to shoot the projection:
Travis points his guns at things he despises–the city of New York, the porno movies that lost him the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, etc. So when Scorsese has De Niro point the gun at his reflection he is not only highlighting the disconnect that Travis feels with himself, he is also indicating that Travis, consciously or otherwise, detests himself.
This is brought to the viewer’s attention again towards the end of the movie, after Travis has shot and killed the men to whom Iris is attached. In this famous shot, De Niro once again forms his thumb and forefinger, this time dripping with blood, into a gun and points it at his head:
Although Travis has just killed several gangsters and freed a young girl to be reunited with her parents, he still hates himself. In this film, Scorsese uses two symbols–mirrors and guns–to show how deeply distant and self-deprecating Travis Bickle really is. He clearly wants to become part of the more civilized society of New York, but that isn’t where he belongs. He is a true underground man who can only easily exist among prostitutes and killers, and he abhors himself for it.
Need a Film Composer?
Tom Gurin is an experienced composer for short films who has worked closely with directors to produce scores that elevate their projects. He studied music at Yale University and in Paris. Click to contact a professional film music composer now!