“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.” This is Travis Bickle’s monologue on the decaying state of New York in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Gone is the post-war progress of the 50’s and the flower power idealism of the 60’s- The 1970’s was one of the grimmest period in New York’s history. The city was essentially bankrupt; traditional industrial jobs like shipping and manufacturing had disappeared, ageing tenements were falling apart and being burnt down by landlords. America’s greatest city was even neglected by then president Gerald Ford in 1975 when he refused to bail out the city.
Amongst this ruin, what could ultimately be seen as a failure of the ‘American Dream’, came a film from the then emerging director Martin Scorsese. It was filmed during the summer of ’75 and coincided with a garbage strike in the city, adding to the grimy aesthetic of the finished product.Taxi Driver came out of the Hollywood New Wave, which set out to critique the traditional film tropes of Hollywood that had been established in the 40’s and 50’s. The film has sustained its lasting legacy due to the excellence of its director, writer and lead actor. Most overlooked has been scriptwriter Paul Schrader, whose monologues for Robert DeNiro perfectly capture the insanity of Travis Bickle. Schrader himself has claimed that he set out to write an existential screenplay and sought the writings of Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre for inspiration.
It is this recurring theme of existentialism that encapsulates the atmosphere of New York at the time. Martin Scorsese and the generation of New Hollywood were influenced by the French New Wave directors of the early 60’s, particularly Jean-Luc Goddard, who perfected the techniques of documentary style and street-level direction which are emulated in Taxi Driver. The film takes outside influences in order to criticise traditional American cinema and furthermore, American society itself. Travis Bickle is the quintessential existential figure, lonely, wandering and striving for purpose (for him, that is ‘cleaning up the city’). He is an anonymous figure in an anonymous metropolis; we never know where Bickle came from, only that he served in Vietnam. He simply takes up his job as a taxi driver in order to occupy himself with his restless insomnia. Such an occupation allows for endless drifting throughout the crumbling labyrinth of a city. Bickle expresses an indifference to the impending chaos, claiming “I go all over. I take people to the Bronx, Brooklyn, I take ‘em to Harlem. I don’t care. Don’t make no difference to me. It does to some. Some won’t even take spooks. Don’t make no difference to me.”
At the time of filming in 1975, the murder rate for that year had reached 1,645, a nearly threefold increase on the 634 murders recorded 10 years previously. The mindless violence that made New York ‘fear city’ is conveyed in the eschewed morality of Bickle and the other characters. This amoral atmosphere is exemplified by an exchange Bickle has with one of his passengers (interestingly, played by Scorsese), who claims he is going to kill his wife for having an affair with a black man. In a sadistic manner, the passenger explains the way in which he will go about murdering his wife, telling Travis; “Have you ever seen what a .44 Magnum will do to a woman’s pussy? Now that you should see.” Taxi Driver is a morally challenging film that displays the nefarious and dark underbelly of a city that is better known as an embodiment of the American Dream. One of the most controversial characters in the film is Iris, the 12 year old prostitute, whom Bickle goes on a bloody rampage in order to save. Paul Schrader claims to have encountered a prostitute of a similar age on a drunken night out in New York, however there was huge controversy over whether Scorsese could get away with having the inclusion of such a character. Despite the controversy, Iris is crucial in Scorsese’s film. Central to Bickle’s deranged goal of ‘cleaning up the streets’, his attempts at saving her result in him wiping out the owners of the brothel that she works in.
It can be argued that not only is Taxi Driver an encapsulation of 1970’s New York, but that Travis Bickle himself is the embodiment of his city. He can never get to sleep in the city that never sleeps, he is a nobody in a city of nobodies, rejects and outsiders. He represents the spirit of an older New York, a white male, working class war veteran. This would have been seen as the quintessential New Yorker in the Post-war progressive period of the 50’s, a period where the city was at its most productive. There are some startling moral undertones suggested in Bickle becoming a symbol of New York City. As film critic Matthew J. Iannucci claims; “what distinguishes Taxi Driver from other noir films are the distinct elements of a demoralized New York in the middle of a fiscal crisis and a culture that blindly accepts a disingenuous form of heroism where the city’s agents (the police) are noticeably absent.” This ‘disingenuous form of heroism’ is evident in the closing scene of the film as Bickle is lauded as a hero in various newspaper articles for his murderous rampage in the brothel. His descent into insanity, which culminates in a mass shooting, is perversely rewarded by the city. We can see then that the city of New York is unable to adhere to the traditional notion of a ‘hero’ in both Hollywood and American culture, producing a classic example of an ‘anti-hero’. New York in the 1970’s was no longer the purveyor of the American Dream, rather a twisted American Nightmare. It is this nightmare world that Bickle lives through, and ultimately lives out, as Scorsese’s twisted tale chronicles one of the darkest periods in the city’s history.
