This Is The Way I See It: Subjective Filmmaking in Taxi Driver
“All the animals come out at night – whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.”
Such is the world according to Travis Bickle, and in Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), it’s the de facto interpretation. Bickles malicious outlook of 1970’s New York is the only viewpoint given to the audience, and director Martin Scorsese portrays this twisted ideology through his masterful use of subjective filmmaking.
Beginning with the opening title sequence, the audience is immediately plunged into Travis’s nocturnal world of neon signs, rainy streets, traffic lights and street walkers. Close up shots depict the taxi cab in loving detail; it is Travis’s safe transport, a vessel that simultaneously keeps him safe from the filth of the city and isolates him from society. The shots of New York’s after hours inhabitants are from inside the cab and are interspersed with extreme close ups of Travis’s eyes, slowly sliding to and fro, carefully surveying and criticizing the immoral masses before him. While he has a negative attitude about the city as a whole, Travis is particularly contemptuous of African Americans. This is illustrated solely through images; we never once hear Travis single out blacks in his vehement rants, but the camera always maintains a distance between them and the camera, visually illustrating his bigotry. Much like Travis, the camera is nervous of getting too close to these especially vile inhabitants of the city.
Slow motion is also implemented to further illuminate Travis’s internal emotions. When we first see Betsy, a campaign worker for whom Travis obsesses over, she is wearing a beautiful pristine white dress. She makes her way through the lowly masses and ascends the stairs into the campaign office, seemingly floating above the crowd. All that is needed are a halo and a pair of wings, and the angelic association would be complete. When Travis puts on his best suit to meet up with Betsy to see a movie, he walks down the street in a slow motion medium shot. Travis surely feels quite confident in himself due to both his extravagant attire and the fact that he is going on a date with this woman he adores. The slowing down of the shot captures this emotion perfectly.
The films narration is also extensively employed to immerse the audience further into the recesses of Travis’s mind. All of his bitter rants, as we come to learn, are lifted verbatim from his own diary, so the narration could not possibly be more directly connected with Travis’s personal thoughts. Under the scrutiny of Travis’s narration, New York becomes a detestable necropolis, a dingy and seedy underworld where murder, drugs, and prostitution are the norm. All of this is presented as undeniable fact; no other dissenting viewpoints are brought to the table for the entire film. As the plot progresses and Travis increasingly loses his sanity, the narration becomes more erratic. Words are stuttered and slurred, and whole sentences are repeated after being flubbed the first time.
All of these techniques and stylistic choices are a monumental build-up towards the films explosive finale where Travis bursts into a building, shooting and stabbing his way through several criminals in order to save a twelve year old prostitute named Iris. When the bloody massacre is over several cops enter the building and see Travis collapsed on the couch, exhausted and delirious in equal measure. He puts his blood-stained finger to his temple and pretends to fire. The shots that follow are the culmination of all the films thematic building blocks. A slow overhead tracking shot, panning over the havoc that Travis has wrought. With the exception of Iris, everyone and everything is frozen in statuesque poses. This is followed by a montage showing the blood splattered walls and the other people that Travis has murdered. We have now fully entered Travis’s mind. We are completely submerged in his madness as the camera moves ever so slowly through every detail of the destruction Travis has caused. As the writer Paul Schrader notes in the screenplay, “It is the psychopath’s Second Coming.”
Taxi Driver is not a perfect film however, and one of my points of contention lies with the films ending. Travis is shown talking to his fellow cabbie buddies when one remarks that he has a fare. It turns out it is Betsy. She remarks how she read about how he saved the young prostitute from her captors, and asks how he is doing. Travis is calm and collected as he converses with Betsy, decidedly unlike his previous behavior in the film. After he drops Betsy off and drives away, he casually glances in the rear view mirror. Suddenly a strange sound rings out from the soundtrack and Travis frantically adjusts the mirror upon seeing his reflection, indicating that he is still very much insane, and as Scorsese himself explains, like a “ticking time bomb” that is waiting to go off again.
Many viewers and critics have debated over whether this coda to the film is real or if it is all conjured by Travis’s imagination. I think that the latter would be a much stronger and thematically relevant way to end the picture, and would adhere to the subjective style of filmmaking that has been used throughout. However, Scorsese seems to give the ending away as being real with a couple of shots. The entire time Travis rides and talks with Betsy, we only see her face in the rear view mirror, and it is unclear as to whether she is truly there or not. Once she gets out of the cab and speaks to Travis though, we clearly see Betsy in the flesh as it were, thus shattering the ambiguous circumstances of her appearance beforehand and seemingly cementing the fact that the ending is in fact real.
The other contention I have with the picture is a scene in which Iris’s pimp, Sport, comforts her so that she does not run away from him. It is well directed and acted, but is virtually the only scene that Travis is not directly involved in. It is the only purely objective scene in the entire film, with the events not directly being filtered through Travis’s mind. Scorsese attempts to solve this problem by showing a shot of Travis staring up at the building in which Sport and Iris reside before cutting to the scene itself, but it is a poor substitute for his absence. The scene, which was added during production, was not in the original script and Schrader was adamantly opposed to its inclusion. Inversely, Scorsese felt that Sport needed some more screen time, so he requested for this scene to be written and subsequently put it in the film.
Despite this, Taxi Driver is still a classic example of subjective filmmaking, immersing the audience completely into Travis’s deranged perception of the world that he lives in through its writing and direction. By using various stylistic techniques such as slow motion and unreliable narration, the audience is given unmitigated access to the mind of mad man.
