Taxi Driver (Film Review)

1976 Columbia Pictures
Directed by: Martin Scorsese; Written by: Paul Schrader
Starring: Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Albert Brooks, Harvey Keitel, Leonard Harris, Peter Boyle, and Cybill Shepherd
MPAA Rating: R; Running Time: 113 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 10/10

Taxi Driver completely reveals its central character, Travis Bickle, in a ten-minute stretch where Bickle takes a young political staffer out on a couple of dates. The first date is a quick impromptu visit to a coffee shop, where his romantic interest tells him he reminds her of a character from a particular Kris Kristofferson song. Between dates, Bickle's shown shopping in a music store for the Kristofferson record.
He never listens to the song.
Instead, on the second date, when Bickle takes her to an adult movie theater, he gives it to her as a present. She leaves the theater, disgusted that his idea of a second date is a public porno viewing, and tries to give the record back. She tries to give it back not because she doesn't want it...but because, of course, she already has it. It never occurred to Bickle that his date thought "a movie" meant a "non-pornographic movie," or that she recommended the song to him because she wanted him to listen to it.
Bickle isn't there.
It's not that he's crazy. It's that he, as so many psychologists have been trying to tell us about sociopaths for years, isn't a human like you or I am between-the-ears. Bickle doesn't go to the dirty movie theater to masturbate or receive any sort of sexual pleasure. He just goes there. Someone suggested it to cure his insomnia, so he goes because he's told it's a thing that humans do. Bickle never goes to a regular movie, or attempts to enjoy any form of art. He's like my sister's sociopath ex-husband, when we helped him move from yet another residence he'd lost. Outside of all the empty beer bottles, there was no artwork on the wall, no evidence of anything ever actually being enjoyed. The same guy once said, "What's the point of watching a comedy alone? I only laugh when other people can see me." At one point, Bickle is watching a soap opera on his television. He seems to possibly be relating the extremely over-the-top actions occurring on screen to actual human life for a moment. Then he kicks over the TV in disgust. Bickle can't relate to ordinary human behavior, let alone this.
Since Bickle can't sleep at night, he takes a graveyard shift driving a taxi, and for whatever reason, volunteers to drive it in the worst areas of New York City as possible. It's almost like he's...looking for trouble? The job lowers Bickle's view of humanity even more, and he thinks the streets "need to be cleaned." His bad date with the staffer raises the temperature of his hate for humanity even more. Even the man she's working for, who's running for President, has got to go. However, there is one person he'd like to save: a 12-year-old prostitute he meets, named Iris. Only one thing, though--she doesn't really seem to want saving. But after a run-in with a "traveling salesman," Bickle's got all these guns, and all this rage, and somebody's gotta get it.
Director, Martin Scorsese, and writer, Paul Schrader, don't give a definitive reason for how Bickle became this way. Bickle says that he's an ex-Marine and Vietnam War vet, so he could have incurred psychic trauma there that did irreparable damage. Of course, he could have joined the Marines in the first place to go to Vietnam to satisfy darker desires that already existed. Or he could just be extremely delusional, and have never been in the Marines or fought in Vietnam in the first place--after all, Bickle lies throughout the film, telling others he's on a secret government mission at certain points, when he's actually just stockpiling weapons for a personally-driven kamikaze assassination. What Scorsese does do with his crew is create a hypnotic, dreamlike atmosphere in Taxi Driver that's irresistible. Though the streets are believably gritty (filming coincided with a New York City garbage strike), every shot has this beautiful, saturated aesthetic that's impossible to turn away from, feeling meticulously blocked and framed.
Schrader has come up with an enigmatic figure in Bickle that, embodied incredibly by Robert De Niro, is just as magnetic as he is repulsive. Truly highlighting all of this, though, accentuating every hazy green, gold, and red dreamy streetlight, is Bernard Herrmann's final film score. The maestro, surely in the running for greatest film composer of all time, creates an incredible musical palette for Taxi Driver, with a powerful, cathartic, two-note theme for the gritty New York setting, punctuated by a wild and wandering saxophone theme for Bickle. I like to think that Herrmann saw Jaws in the theater in the months before his death, heard John Williams' theme, and knew he was leaving the film soundtrack world in good hands.