His metallic vessel pierces through an eerily thick cloud of steam. His eyes glance slowly, furtively, from left to right to left. Through his windscreen, through the night’s gentle rain, he sees the lights of the city and its traffic blurring and blending, as though all around him, each vehicle, each neon light, has congealed into indistinguishable globules of colour. His vision, our vision, sharpens slightly, enough to reveal pedestrians crossing his path. But the blue and red colours of this night obscure and deny clarity. It is as if he was on another world, in another dimension, somewhere not of this mortal coil. And so begins Taxi Driver (1976), a documentation of the thoughts and actions of Vietnam veteran, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), as he attempts to clarify his mind, to find himself, having become lost in that blur of humanity some call New York City. But perhaps it is not just New York City. Perhaps Travis could just as easily be in another place, or another time. It is widely accepted by various critics, including Famiglietti (1995), Dirks (1996), Brown (2002), Ebert (2004) and Thurman (2005), that Taxi Driver was heavily influenced by John Ford’s Western classic, The Searchers (1956). As Famiglietti (1995) states, a characteristic theme of the Western genre is “violence as a necessary corollary of individual self expression”. Travis Bickle certainly regenerates “himself”, as Lubin (2005, p. 28) claims, “through violence like an avenging angel”. As Travis himself admits, while preparing for an assassination attempt, arming himself, strengthening himself, “My whole life has been pointed in one direction. There never has been any choice for me”. Perhaps Travis’s New York City is no different to the mesa-dotted plains of John Wayne’s American West of the late 1800’s. Perhaps his yellow taxi is akin to a golden palomino or a silver-white stallion. Perhaps Travis is a modern-day Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), being a veteran of a lost war, as Ethan was; being an outcast who must himself cast out those he sees as “degenerate” in order to become accepted by his community (Thurman 2005). The tale of Travis Bickle, just as that of Ethan Edwards, is a tale of identity crisis. It is a tale of one man’s need to posit himself within a community. It is not a fairytale of sleeping beauties or ‘happily-ever-afters’. It is a tale of irrationality and violence, of impotence and confusion, of blood and politics, of self and society. The relationship between on the one hand, sexuality, violence, and irrationality, and on the other, communal and individual identity has been a common interest expressed in the texts of North American fiction and film. Coming from a decade that screened numerous films of violence and vigilantism, such as The French Connection (1971), Dirty Harry (1971), Straw Dogs (1971), Death Wish (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), The Killer Inside Me (1976) and Marathon Man (1976), Taxi Driver epitomizes that interest and delineates the anxieties and uncertainties of “a time of enormous change” (Ryan & Keliner 1988, p. 2).

It was a time of economic depression and political deception in the United States, a time when that nation, formerly considered “the sole world power”, found itself embroiled in two violent battles: one in the bamboo jungles and rubber plantations of Indochina; the other in the concrete forests and picket-fence estates within its own territory (Ryan & Keliner 1988, p. 6). ‘Big business’ had its hands in the trouser pockets of the Nixon presidency. In the eyes of ‘big business’, dropping bombs meant printing dollars. While B-52s emptied their payloads on the villages and rice paddies in Vietnam and Cambodia, the American homeland was being fiscally napalmed, its breath sucked away by decreasing employment and rising inflation (Lubin 2005). The Sixties and Seventies were decades of disruption for the United States as social unrest and uncertainty washed over the land like a corrosive acid eating away at the collective imaginary. Divisions in society appeared like cracks in an old urn, and through those cracks oozed a “collective obsession” that gave birth to what Lubin (2005, p. iv) refers to as the “Me” decade, a time when “Americans became preoccupied with themselves”. It was a time of disillusionment and disenchantment. It was a time when survival became an individual pursuit. It was a time in which Travis Bickle found himself lost.

Simmel, cited in Swensen (2001), states that our need to claim an individual identity within the community becomes more desperate, and more dangerous, as the size and complexity of that community grows. A common malaise of the modern, urbanized society is the feeling of isolation and loneliness, of being lost in a sea of humanity. Travis, like his taxi piercing through the steam that issues from under the streets of New York as though the bitumen was a hot-plate, is like a lone shark swimming through that sea that is more to him like a murky pond of depravity. But unlike a shark in the open ocean, Travis is more like a fish out of water, suffocating in his own madness, choking on the detritus of life he perceives is flooding his urban environment. Kolmer (2000, p. 227) claims Travis is an “alienated urban castoff”. He feels alone and isolated, unable to participate in a society he considers antagonistic, hostile, unseemly and intoxicated:

All the animals come out at night - whores, skunk-pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies - sick, venal. Someday a real rain’ll come and wash all the scum off the streets.

Travis is not a happy swimmer as he wends his way through the crowded metropolis of New York City.

Considered the wealthiest and most glamorous city of the nation, the home of high-flying financiers, media moguls and stars of stage, screen and scene, the home of Wall Street and Broadway, New York City is an icon of capitalistic success. But it is not all glitz, glamour and gold. Beneath the towering trophies of this supposed success are the roads of despair, littered with the lives of the lost and lonely. Travis drives down these roads in his taxi-cum-tortoise shell of protection against the cancer of moral decay which he sees all around him. Travis is in the “underbelly of the Dream”, as Graham (2002, p. 167) describes it, and flowing through those intestinal chambers is an “undercurrent of violence” (Graham 2002, p. 168). The newels of the staircase to success in this world are planted on the backs of a people in crisis, a people who had, given the climate of the time, accepted for themselves little hope of achieving that ‘rags-to-riches’ Gatsbian dream that forms the cornerstone of success in a capitalist society. That dream, according to Graham (2002, p. 165), is based on the belief that one must work hard and show “good will toward others” in order to prosper and live that dream. In a society obsessed with self, that dream becomes a nightmare. Director, Martin Scorsese, by giving us Travis’s vision, what he sees through his eyes, through his windscreen, welcomes us to that nightmare. Travis narrates his thoughts, reads to us his diary as he writes, pulling us into his mind as if to feel, to experience, his dilemma: “All my life needed was a sense of some place to go”. The audience is invited into Travis’s world, the camera as his eyes becoming our eyes, enabling us to empathise with his feeling of being lost and in the dark. But one day, a light, personified by Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), emerges from the gloom “like an angel out of this filthy mess”. Travis, sensing she too is alone, is immediately attracted to her. From the safety of his taxi, he watches her at work at the campaign headquarters of presidential candidate, Senator Charles Palantine (Leonard Harris). Eventually, he summons up the courage to approach her. Under the pretense of wishing to volunteer, he enters the building and goes straight to her desk:

Betsy:		And why do you feel that you have to volunteer to me?
Travis:		Because I think that you are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.

He admits that he really does not want to volunteer, but rather, wishes to spend time with her:

Travis:		I’ll tell you why. I think you’re a lonely person. I drive by this place a lot and I see you here. I see a lot of people around you. And I see all these phones and all this stuff on your desk. It means nothing. Then when I came inside and I met you, I saw in your eyes and I saw the way you carried yourself that you’re not a happy person. And I think you need something. And if you want to call it a friend, you can call it a friend.
Betsy:		Are you gonna be my friend?
Travis:		Yeah. What do ya say? It’s a little hard standing here and asking…Five minutes, that’s all, just outside. Right around here. I’m there to protect ya. Come on, just take a little break.
Betsy:		I have a break at four o’clock and if you’re here.
Travis:		Four o’clock today?
Betsy:		Yes.
Travis:		I’ll be here.

At the coffee shop, their conversation is somewhat stilted, but she finds him interesting and, as Dirks (1996) states, “eccentric and unusual … ambiguous and misunderstood by everyone” - “a walking contradiction”. She agrees to go with him on a ‘movie-date’. Unfortunately, Travis, in complete innocence and naivety, takes her to one of the ‘porn’ theatres he frequents on those nights when he is unable to sleep. She storms out of the theatre to the sidewalk, where, amid loitering sex-workers, she says, “Taking me to a place like this is about as exciting to me as saying ‘let’s fuck’”. The venue itself is a space of contradiction with its brightly-lit gold-trimmed foyer and stately glass doors separating the dark theatre of pornography from those ‘ladies-of-the-night’ outside. There would have surely been other more mainstream cinematic options for this evening out, such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), which was screening at a theatre Travis had driven passed earlier. The 1970s was a time, according to Boozer (1999), when “society showed the signs of stress in the disintegration of family and community life”. Hollywood showed violence, horror and the rebirth of the femme fatale as perhaps the most horrific threat to patriarchy, a psychotic femme castratrice Creed (1993, p. 123) describes as represented in such films as Sisters (1973), Play Misty For Me (1971) and Last House On The Left (1972). It was cinema for the male gaze.

But despite Travis’s ability to see the violence, drug abuse and prostitution around him, he is unable to realise his own complicity in that which disgusts him. As Graham (2002, p. 73) claims:

Always both part of it and alien to it, Travis cannot escape the urban decay that seems to pick away at his psyche and gradually ostracize him.

Further attempts to appease Betsy fail, including a return visit to her workplace from which he is forcibly ejected while he shouts at her, “You’re in a hell. You’re going to die in hell like the rest of them. You’re like the rest of them”. Travis decides he must fight against this hell he perceives is swallowing all those around him. He sets his sights on Betsy’s boss, Palantine, perhaps because he feels the Senator has duped his angel luring her into damnation. But his attempt to assassinate Palantine fails - Travis is becoming a success at failure, just as the United States had failed in Vietnam; just as the politicians had failed in maintaining honest and accountable government; just as the liberalism of the 1960s and early 1970s had failed (Taubin 1999). But Travis is not to be deterred by failure. There are many more fish in these waters for him to hunt down. Another man he considers is also a devil, an evil controller of angels, is the ‘pimp’, Sport (Harvey Keitel). Travis had previously met Sport after one of his ‘girls’, ‘Easy’, real name Iris (Jodie Foster), jumps into his taxi wanting to escape, go anywhere but where she is now. But Sport pulls her back out of the car. Travis has found another ‘angel’ in need of help. Later, he sees her again and approaches her. She assumes he is just another customer and directs him to Sport, who, as her pimp, must vet the clientele. Sport’s initial reading of Travis is that he is an officer of the law, a sheriff in his cowboy boots. Interestingly, Sport, with long hair and olive complexion, has the appearance of an American Indian (Thurman 2005). Travis, himself, will adopt such an appearance later, when he shaves his hair into a Mohawk for his mission to assassinate Palantine. Sport tells Travis he can go with his girl - “Go ahead, have yourself a good time.” - though Travis is not after sexual satisfaction. His intention is that of a saviour - a rescuer, telling Iris when they get to her room later, “No, I don’t want to make it. I want to help you”. When Travis, having been granted Sport’s permission to go ahead and “make it’, moves off tentatively toward Iris, Sport does a pretend ‘six-gun’ draw, his hands as guns the way children might do when playing ‘Cowboys and Indians’. This hand gesture is a repeated motif throughout the film, being used by Travis on one of his cinematic excursions, and also by one of his co-workers as he leaves a diner the taxi-drivers frequent. It is one of Travis’s co-workers, Doughboy (Harry Northup), who introduces him to Andy (Steven Chester Prince), the man who will equip Travis with real guns. When Travis enters Andy’s hotel room to purchase his weaponry, his first question is: “Ya’got a 44 Magnum?”, the weapon of choice of that modern-day, ‘Man-without-a-name’ cowboy, Harry Callahan, played by the ‘spaghetti’ Western hero, Clint Eastwood, in Dirty Harry. His weapons acquired and attached to his body as though natural extensions of himself, Travis becomes ‘Dirty Travis’ - the righter of wrongs. He rehearses his new-found confidence in front of the mirror:

You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? Well then who the hell you talkin’ to? You talkin’ to me? Well, I’m the only one here. Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to? Oh yeah? Hunh? Ok. (He flicks his wrist and a gun appears in his hand.) Hunh?

This one-sided dialogue is reminiscent of a scene from Shane (1953) in which Shane (Alan Ladd), confronted by Chris Calloway (Ben Johnson) intent on a brawl in the saloon of a small town in Wyoming circa 1880, says, “You speaking to me?” Callaway’s response: “I don’t see nobody else standing there” (IMDb n.d.). Travis’s re-invention of that exchange provides what Ebert (2004) considers “the truest line in the film”: “Well I’m the only one here”. Travis is so isolated, so alone in this world that, in a case of what Kolmer (2000, p. 238) suggests is “almost total solipsism”, nothing exists but himself. Everything else, every other “identity…(is merely a)…distorted reflection”, an aberration that must be purged for the health and well-being of all (Kolmer 2000, p.238). Travis’s narration continues:

Listen you fuckers, you screw-heads, here is a man who would not take it anymore, a man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is someone who stood up. Here is…

Here is Travis Bickle, the ‘lone ranger’ who has come to rescue us all from the ‘bad guys’. The first scene of actual bloodshed in the film occurs in a general store. Travis is at the back of the shop, behind shelves of groceries. A robber enters and holds a gun on the store-keeper. Travis slips around the shelving to confront the robber, shooting him down in a ‘quick-draw’ style scene that would not be out of place in the main street of Hadleyville or Tombstone, Arizona.

After his failed attempt to assassinate Palantine, Travis seeks out his secondary target, Sport, who he finds in his usual ‘pimp-ular’ doorway. He confronts him in a style that was quite likely rehearsed in front of his mirror:

Sport:		Do I know you?
Travis:		No, do I know you?
Sport:		Get out of here. Come on, get lost.
Travis:		Do I know you? How’s Iris? You know Iris.
Sport:		No, I don’t know nobody named Iris. Iris? Come on. Get out of here man
Travis:		You don’t know anybody by the name Iris?
Sport:		I don’t know nobody named Iris.
Travis:		No?
Sport:		Hey, get back to your fuckin’ tribe before you get hurt, hey man. Do me a favour, I don’t want no trouble, Ok?
Travis:		You got a gun?
(Sport throws his cigarette at Travis and kicks him.)
Sport:		Get the fuck out of here man! Get out of here.
(Travis pulls out his gun and shoots Sport in the stomach.)
Travis:		Suck on this.

As though stunned by this apparently successful assassination, Travis pauses on another doorstep before proceeding on to complete his mission, to rescue Iris who is upstairs with a client. The scene that follows, as climactic and deadly as the Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), is an orgy of violence that Field (2003, p.2) contends “incorporates blood as an extension of masculine phallic embodiment”. Travis single-handedly ‘blasts away the baddies’ he believes hold Iris captive, like Ethan’s rescue of Debbie from the Comanches in The Searchers. Kael, cited in Field (2003, p.56), considers this scene to be the “blood-splattering release” of Travis’s “bottled up energy and emotion”, a cathartic ejaculation of blood impersonating semen, the essence of male sexuality. There is certainly a lot of blood, and it is all male. The violence of this scene is, perhaps, as Eadie (2001) proposes, a consequence of Travis’s “manifest failure to perform a correct heterosexual manhood” having been rejected by Betsy and uninterested in ‘making it’ with Iris. Certainly, it is valid to argue that Scorsese and scriptwriter, Paul Schrader, have adhered to a Hollywood hegemony by depicting, as Mortimer (1997) states, “the problematics of identity in a postmodern age…linked to…women as characters who both prompt and block the protagonist’s agency”. But the violence is also, as Lubin (2005, p. 20) claims, “a variation of alienation and loneliness”. By venting his frustration, by firing his Magnum, Travis becomes a hero, rather than a traumatised veteran of a lost war. Travis now is lauded by the press and admired as a saviour by Iris’s parents, Burt and Ivy Steensma, who represent parents everywhere in this troubled land. Rather than ride off into a setting sun, as would his Western counterparts, Travis now stands more confidently and more at ease among his peers. No longer does he sit at the edge of the group. The other taxi drivers face him as though he is now the centre of attention, a man to be respected. He has affirmed his masculinity and discovered his identity. In the closing scene, Betsy hops into his taxi. He is only barely polite and nonchalantly shrugs off her concern over what she had read about him in the press. Betsy has lost her ‘angel’ status, becoming just another passenger in Travis’s travels. It would seem he no longer needs an angel. After he drops her off, paying at least some respect to their relationship by refusing to take any money from her for the fare, he drives off, like Ethan on his stallion, into the night. But then suddenly, he readjusts his rear-vision mirror, revealing once again that blur of city lights that signifies the confusion and distortion that has dwelt, and perhaps continues to exist, behind the eyes and in the mind of this lonesome cowboy.

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